
Bash IRC Quote Database - adnanh
http://bash.org
======
forgotmypw17
I neither own nor operate bash.org. I wrote the scripts, collected the seed
content, initially in quotes.txt, and operated at geekissues.org/quotes/ until
its move to bash.org. AMA

~~~
bArray
How are the quotes collected? Are they collated by users or by some algorithm?
They seem too good to not have some user input in their filtering?

~~~
forgotmypw23
yes, the quotes are individually approved by moderators, and on bash.org,
rejected quotes never see the light of day.

the submissions themselves are also put together individually.

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anamexis
My quote being #11 in the Top 100 is the closest I have ever been to fame.

[http://bash.org/?207373](http://bash.org/?207373)

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
It's very funny because an exchange on Person of Interest is rumored to have
derived from this one

[http://bash.org/?23396](http://bash.org/?23396)

~~~
e12e
That would seem like an homage indeed....:

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4128194/characters/nm0009918](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4128194/characters/nm0009918)

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chx
I got close to [http://bash.org/?5273](http://bash.org/?5273) recently.

My work at one point had an OS X specific piece. So I got a wreck of a Macbook
Air 2011 around 2013 or 2014, can't quite remember, the original owner tried
to replace the LCD and failed spectacularly (I think replacing the screen now
would require replacing the motherboard) and sold it screenless for cheap,
perfect for my purposes. I added a Thunderbolt-Ethernet dongle to it, chucked
it in the parts cupboard (it has slats so it airs well) and forgot about it
when I changed primary clients in 2015 and I no longer needed it. A couple
weeks ago I needed a Mac again and thought hey, I have a wreck. I checked LuCI
and hey, there is wreck in the DHCP leases, that thing is still alive, I ran
VNC against it, but what's my password? I haven't logged in for more than four
years, let's reset the password. So I go to the cabinet, pull it out and
[https://i.imgur.com/SQbISmB.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/SQbISmB.jpg) URGH

~~~
im3w1l
What is going on in that picture?

~~~
klodolph
Batteries are damaged. This can happen through normal use. There is some risk
of fire or the release of toxic gasses. Check out /r/spicypillows:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/](https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/)

~~~
chx
Posted.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/comments/grxje3/my_old...](https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/comments/grxje3/my_old_macbook_air_powered_on_and_abandoned_in_an/)

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aeturnum
Ah Bash! My friends and I found this at its heyday in the early 2000s right
when we were becoming computer literate ourselves. We we not IRC people, but
had a communal skype chat going[1] and recognized the conventions.

The hunter2 password joke is so iconic that I still see it referenced
regularly. I always think about the "moral combat" top quote where someone is
kicked with the input sequence for a fatality as a great example of internet
wit[2]. In general, I think many of the top quotes succinctly capture the
realities of membership in internet communities (the double-edged nature of
having moderators, the daily trials of our fellow users, the delight of
linguistic playfulness).

There were other quote sites out there. qdb.us comes to mind, though it seems
to have lost all its content, you can still see it on the wayback machine:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120131065558/http://qdb.us/top](https://web.archive.org/web/20120131065558/http://qdb.us/top)

[1] Skype, in its early days (and maybe still?), allowed group chats where
other clients would send you the messages you missed automatically. We had no
desire to run a server and this was in the era when Skype was nearly entirely
peer-to-peer. I think of it as our own personal internet golden age.

[2] [http://www.bash.org/?205195](http://www.bash.org/?205195)

~~~
krallja
Just today I muttered 'hunter2' while typing my password in on a screen share.
At least two other people got the joke.

~~~
qmarchi
Being honest, the guest password for my NAS is hunter2. Better than 0, and yet
still common enough to be funny.

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supersandra
(I can't believe I'm logging into HN to post this, but hey)

I read many of these quotes back in middle and early high school, pretty early
in the DB's existence as I can remember when it moved to bash.org. I promptly
forgot about its existence, but a bunch of the material remained wedged in my
brain.

Fast forward 10+ years. I had recently started dating someone whose name is
[redacted], and I was starting to meet a bunch of his friends and hang out
with them more regularly. I made a reference to part of a quote, and one of
his friends replied with the next line. Then said friend added, "you know
that's [redacted] in that quote, right?" I very much thought that he was
trolling me, so I looked at the quote, and... well, it certainly says
[redacted] in the username, but more importantly, it matched the pattern how
he liked to format/modify his usernames to indicate certain contexts.

And now we have been married for almost 6 years.

Internet???

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
adnanh
Posted this for sentimental reasons, it hits all the right spots when reading
these quotes.

~~~
neotek
When I think back over my childhood, there's nothing I miss more than the way
being on the "old" internet felt. The Geocities sites, the webrings, ICQ,
Trillian, mIRC scripting, stileproject, the birth and death of E/N sites,
image macros, and a million other things that no longer exist and don't have
any meaning to the vast majority of internet users today. It was a special
club, almost nobody I knew in the real world had any idea that this stuff
existed and wouldn't have cared if they did.

And then DALnet was attacked. Days of downtime extended into weeks and
eventually months, and by the time it ended DALnet was a shadow of its former
self. So many tens of thousands of people just moved on and it was never the
same again. I tried moving to efnet as so many did but it didn't have the same
vibe. I didn't realise at the time just how much I'd actually lost and how
much things were going to change. Man I'd give anything to go back.

Edit: Speaking of netstalgia, here are a few random files from the archives
that some might recognise:

[https://n1ckn4m3.com/?page_id=976](https://n1ckn4m3.com/?page_id=976)

[https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/romjul](https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/romjul)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ljsPqIfPD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ljsPqIfPD0)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3sexvJM5Go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3sexvJM5Go)

~~~
adnanh
Oh yeah, I feel you! I was also on DALnet, and saw the exodus to other
networks, EFnet, IRCnet, Undernet, QuakeNet... But as you said, they just
didn't feel "right". I.e. some of them had "weird-looking" services as opposed
to the DALnet's ChanServ, NickServ etc... :-)

Do you remember "PHP-Nuke" craze, everyone was creating community portals
where members were able to post news, polls, etc...

Good old times :)

~~~
neotek
Haha yeah, PHP-Nuke sites and vBulletin forums, what a duo!

------
phoe-krk
This has already been around when I was a kid. Which was like fifteen years
ago.

Oh, timelessness.

~~~
Diederich
Did somebody say 'timeless' in the context of tech humor?

[https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.en.html)

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
That's utterly beautiful. I really lost it at:

alias vi 'rm \\!*;unalias vi;grep -v BoZo ~/.cshrc > ~/.z; mv -f ~/.z
~/.cshrc'

...which is of course utterly evil:)

~~~
CobrastanJorji
Lessee, this:

1\. Creates an alias named "vi", so that next time the user runs the text
editor vi, it will run this script instead. 2\. Deletes whatever files the
user was planning to edit in vi. 3\. Removes this "vi" alias, reverting the
behavior to just running vi in the future. 4\. Removes every line from the
.cshrc which contains the string "BoZo".

If you put this in someone's .cshrc file, the next file they attempted to edit
with vi would be deleted along with the evidence that anything malicious had
been done to you.

------
aleksi
I'm somewhat surprised that no-one mentioned
[https://bash.im](https://bash.im) (formerly bash.org.ru) yet. It started as a
Russian equivalent of bash.org (the very first "quote"
[https://bash.im/quote/1](https://bash.im/quote/1) is infamously a translation
of [http://bash.org/?74629;](http://bash.org/?74629;) and is still know as
"bash org" even after the domain name change), but become a phenomenon of the
Russian internet segment over the years.

~~~
Havoc
>no-one mentioned yet

I don't think the bulk of the audience here can read russian

~~~
yellowapple
Говори за себя.

~~~
exikyut
_[машет вам из гугл переводчик]_

~~~
cvs268
Miaow?...

------
every
The nethack equivalent:
[https://nhqdb.alt.org/?latest](https://nhqdb.alt.org/?latest)

~~~
MaxBarraclough
There's an Eve Online equivalent too:
[http://www.omgrawr.net/quote/top](http://www.omgrawr.net/quote/top)

------
epx
[http://bash.org/?330261](http://bash.org/?330261)

<i8b4uUnderground> d-_-b <BonyNoMore> how u make that inverted b?

~~~
ship_it
Ah, a classic.

------
penetrarthur
I feel like early IRC was when people were much more involved in communicating
over the not so popular internet. Sitting and chatting was a way of spending
time by itself. Brings back warm feelings.

------
yash1th
my favorite so far

[http://bash.org/?835030](http://bash.org/?835030)

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hprotagonist
ah, yes, trove of witty banter that i read obsessively in 1999 or so.

To this day, if you ask me "hey do you know what sucks?" my reflexive answer
is gonna be "vacuums!"

~~~
dylan604
Back in the 80s, Radio DJs were not allowed to say "suck" on the air, so they
switched to "vacuums". As a kid, I just remember how dumb the government must
be to implement such a lame rule. As an adult, my opinion overall of
government hasn't really improved.

------
meritt
hunter2 is one of the best: [http://bash.org/?244321](http://bash.org/?244321)

~~~
sickmartian
yeah, and 'I put on my robe and wizard hat' is right there as well.

[http://bash.org/?104383](http://bash.org/?104383)

~~~
phoe-krk
_< DmncAtrny> I will write on a huge cement block "BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK
THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY,
DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE
INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING."

<DmncAtrny> And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer

<DmncAtrny> and run like hell_

~~~
Havoc
10/10 social commentary on the legal system

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sabas123
[http://bash.org/?362137](http://bash.org/?362137) karma?

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osamagirl69
Man this brings back memories. Oh how I miss the '90s

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bpicolo
When the original iPhone came out, bandwidth on Edge was so slow that Bash was
just about the only site I could load with a good ratio of load time to
enjoyment. I read a lot of bash, then.

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andrew_
Always fun to see this pop up now and then. My old handle and young wisdom
[http://bash.org/?7717](http://bash.org/?7717)

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Havoc
Impressed by the amount of hn crew claiming they have quotes on there. Maybe
not all of it is fake after all

------
Minor49er
A couple of mine are still around:
[http://bash.org/?105643](http://bash.org/?105643)
[http://bash.org/?105259](http://bash.org/?105259)

The MegaZeux community was awesome

~~~
endgame
Dunno if you know, but the ZZT community had a revival of sorts with the
release of the reconstructed source code. Unfortunately it's on discord, but a
few mzx people hang around too.

~~~
Minor49er
I've heard about the ZZT reconstruction project. It's pretty exiting to see.
Both communities have always been somewhat related.

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kiddico
Well, this may totally destroy my productivity today...

Also, just a note: you may want to make it more apparent that the "Top
100-200" is 2 different links. Took me a while to figure out why I ended up in
two different places on my desktop and laptop.

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ericzawo
A quote of mine, from an eternity ago, is still floating around on the top
100-200 section after over ~15 years. It's amazing (and weird?) that a 10 year
old's funny IRC chatlog is going to be immortalized on this site foreermore.

------
tams
Also, there was qdb.us:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190802095853/http://www.qdb.us...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190802095853/http://www.qdb.us/)

~~~
DCoder
Mozilla runs a DB of their own: [0]. Although their IRC network closed down
recently, so this might not last long either.

And there's also XKCDB [1].

[0]:
[http://quotes.burntelectrons.org/browse](http://quotes.burntelectrons.org/browse)

[1]: [http://www.xkcdb.com/](http://www.xkcdb.com/)

------
adnanh
Fork of the Rash QDB: [https://github.com/paxed/rash-qdb-
fork](https://github.com/paxed/rash-qdb-fork)

------
ceejayoz
One of my first full web apps was a clone of Bash.org with AJAX for the
upvote/downvotes for a web forum I helped moderate. Must've been early 2000s?

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k2xl
heh mine is still there too [http://bash.org/?605501](http://bash.org/?605501)

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HereticLocke
This is by far my favorite: [http://bash.org/?23396](http://bash.org/?23396)

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dusted
I though it went down.. Hmm, it didn't so I'll start reading that again ^_^
Thanks!

------
thejynxed
I have a few comments listed on there, haven't visited that site or used IRC
in ages.

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rosstex
AMA request: the hunter2 guy

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math0ne
This used to be on my daily read list, def some quotes from me on there.

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archagon
Anyone remember the bash.org equivalent for the xkcd IRC channel, where you
were only allowed to send messages that had never been sent before? I can't
seem to find it anymore — there were some gems that riffed on popular bash.org
quotes.

EDIT: Found it! [http://www.xkcdb.com](http://www.xkcdb.com)

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jtmcmc
ah sigh, I too have some quotes in bash.org qdb.

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nayuki
The current link to [https://bash.org/](https://bash.org/) is broken. Only
[http://bash.org/](http://bash.org/) works right now.

~~~
dang
Changed now. Thanks!

------
neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200525212839/https://bash.org/](https://web.archive.org/web/20200525212839/https://bash.org/)

------
sitzkrieg
the 'bottom' quotes are still accessible at ?bottom if anyone misses all the
racist ones

------
LittlePeter
A quick win for readability is to align the first character of each chat
message. Perhaps some colors would be useful too. I noticed I had to expend
quite some mental power just to follow the chats linked here.

