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Bash IRC Quote Database

by adnanh on 5/27/20, 4:55 PM with 160 comments

  • by forgotmypw17 on 5/27/20, 9:38 PM

    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

  • by anamexis on 5/27/20, 5:33 PM

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

    http://bash.org/?207373

  • by chx on 5/27/20, 7:01 PM

    I got close to 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 URGH

  • by aeturnum on 5/27/20, 7:09 PM

    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

    [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

  • by supersandra on 5/28/20, 2:17 PM

    (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)_/¯

  • by adnanh on 5/27/20, 5:19 PM

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

  • by phoe-krk on 5/27/20, 5:02 PM

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

    Oh, timelessness.

  • by aleksi on 5/27/20, 9:48 PM

    I'm somewhat surprised that no-one mentioned 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 is infamously a translation of 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.

  • by every on 5/27/20, 7:17 PM

    The nethack equivalent: https://nhqdb.alt.org/?latest

  • by epx on 5/27/20, 7:49 PM

    http://bash.org/?330261

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

  • by penetrarthur on 5/27/20, 10:32 PM

    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.

  • by yash1th on 5/27/20, 7:37 PM

    my favorite so far

    http://bash.org/?835030

  • by hprotagonist on 5/27/20, 5:20 PM

    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!"

  • by sabas123 on 5/27/20, 6:17 PM

  • by osamagirl69 on 5/27/20, 6:23 PM

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

  • by bpicolo on 5/27/20, 10:16 PM

    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.

  • by andrew_ on 5/27/20, 5:20 PM

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

  • by Havoc on 5/27/20, 10:10 PM

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

  • by Minor49er on 5/27/20, 5:55 PM

    A couple of mine are still around: http://bash.org/?105643 http://bash.org/?105259

    The MegaZeux community was awesome

  • by kiddico on 5/28/20, 11:06 AM

    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.

  • by ericzawo on 5/28/20, 1:25 AM

    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.

  • by tams on 5/27/20, 6:04 PM

  • by adnanh on 5/28/20, 9:06 AM

  • by ceejayoz on 5/27/20, 5:38 PM

    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?

  • by k2xl on 5/27/20, 11:27 PM

    heh mine is still there too http://bash.org/?605501

  • by HereticLocke on 5/27/20, 7:00 PM

    This is by far my favorite: http://bash.org/?23396

  • by dusted on 5/27/20, 10:12 PM

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

  • by thejynxed on 5/27/20, 5:47 PM

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

  • by rosstex on 5/28/20, 2:57 AM

    AMA request: the hunter2 guy

  • by math0ne on 5/27/20, 6:31 PM

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

  • by archagon on 5/27/20, 11:46 PM

    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

  • by jtmcmc on 5/27/20, 8:55 PM

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

  • by meritt on 5/27/20, 5:01 PM

    hunter2 is one of the best: http://bash.org/?244321

  • by nayuki on 5/27/20, 7:35 PM

    The current link to https://bash.org/ is broken. Only http://bash.org/ works right now.

  • by neonate on 5/27/20, 8:01 PM

  • by sitzkrieg on 5/27/20, 6:02 PM

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

  • by LittlePeter on 5/27/20, 6:03 PM

    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.