81–90 of 95 posts
I have always found a bunch of nice people with a lot of knowledge in the various programming and tech channels on Freenode, like #twisted and #pocoo #debian on EFNet also has a great bunch of people.
The official #debian is on OFTC, not EFNet.
Is there a #hn or #hackernews?
Personally, I never found IRC to be a helpful tool for learning new things from unfamiliar people. To me, IRC has always been a "grapevine" tool, where etiquette, social pecking orders and gossip are shared amongst a smallish close-knit social circle. IRC always feels more like a social scene, and a distraction. If anything, perhaps an IRC channel is useful for managing fluid, rapidly changing situations, where you m…
> To me, IRC has always been a "grapevine" tool, where etiquette, social pecking orders and gossip are shared amongst a smallish close-knit social circle. IRC always feels more like a social scene, and a distraction.
This is certainly a problem is many IRC channels, but I have no idea what to do about it. One thing that is annoying is watching interesting conversation get disintegrated by the regulars taking over to talk about banal everyday topics like what they're currently eating or just ate, etc. If you hang out in any room for long enough you're likely to experience the "I've been here since..." pissing contest.
IRC is still massively useful though. Don't sell it so short.
Edit: I forgot to mention that IRC is also a base for lots of open source project collaboration. Look at the mozilla irc network for an example. Getting rapid responses to check your assumptions is really helpful if you have to touch an unfamiliar section of the code base for a patch.
This is going to be borderline off-topic as it's not general for developers. I have to mention #clojure on freenode for being an incredibly welcoming IRC channel. The discussions you will see can be very interesting, and the community is more than often willing to help. Living in Japan, I was worried about the timezones being an issue, but there seems to be people from different parts of the world on the channel, mak…
#wizardchan on irc.rizon.net
Freenode #emacs, ##linux, #nimrod, #julia and #d. Nimrod's gang (including Araq) are very friendly and welcoming. #julia and #d are very quiet though (except for the bots). And #emacs -- well, that one channel which is lenient towards off-topic chats!
There is one particular use of IRC channels that is insanely useful, that I'd like to share. On various programming language channels, there are ad-hoc expression evaluation bots that experienced people use to guide newcomers through the intricacies of the language. If you're new to Haskell, for example, what you can do is grab the logs for the past 3 years, grep for "> " (used to invoke the evaluator) and you have i…
#web on freenode for web development
Is there a #hn or #hackernews?
#hackernews on freenode.