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davidw

Wow, some famous people on that thread:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Vogels

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer

Jump out immediately, maybe there are others.

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To save anyone else the lookup, djb was not quite 19 yet :)

> 76 lines, with comments and better error checking than the original.

lol, I see he was Like That from the beginning!

Like What

arrogant and obnoxious

How so?

By unilaterally declaring that other works Suck and that one's work Is Better.

There's a lot of nuance to why a particular (computer) system is popular and dominant, beyond a narrow definition of Programming Goodness, and IMHO he was never willing to recognize that.

djb, while being excellent in some technical domains, doesn't particularly care for how human group dynamics work.

Interesting. I did not read the Usenet thread as "other works Suck". Although there did appear to be some problems people were having; maybe the work did "suck". I read it as a 17-year-old trying, and not in a particularly offensive way, to market what he had written. Not for commercial gain but for public benefit. As I recall many folks uploading their work to Usenet groups like comp.sources.unix tried to market what they submitted. I just cannot see how the thread really tells much of anything about such people. Outside of their comments about software on the internet, we do not know these people. And even we did, who cares. This is about software.

If this "nuanced" notion of "Programming Goodness" is to be taken seriously, then how is Curve5519, not to mention other cryptography by the author, in so much software today. It is probably in the browser or other software we are using to submit our comments to HN. How has it become so "popular and dominant" when its author allegedly "doesn't particularly care for how group dynamics work". That's a present tense statement. He's been running conferences for years now. He's devoted significant portion of his life to being a teacher. Some, maybe not HN commenters, consider this one of life's highest callings.

I have another theory. Maybe some members of groups do not like someone who is smarter than they are, and who can easily spot their shortcomings. They do not like alternatives or competititon. NB. I'm not suggesting this Usenet group was such a group. no one is attcking him here. He definitely had a following by the early 90's and today he arguably has an even more substantial and diverse following. IMHO, that other people attacked and still attack djb for being djb tell us more about themselves than they do about djb. Spiteful, jealous, misguided, incompetent, whatever. I'm definitely not using their software if I can help it, assuming they even have any.^1

I'm grateful that this author has been so generous. It's not only his programming ability but also his sense of ethics that exceeds most folks who have devoted themselves to writing software for the internet. AFAIK, he has never worked for a so-called "tech" company. He's not working for an advertising company whose interests are to convert the internet from a public resource into a 100% commercial medium, to be exploited for commercial surveillance and advertising. Unfortunately, such companies are certainly using his work.

1. Because instead of competing on the technical merits they apparently ignore and seek to have others ignore what is clearly high quality, meticulous work. That's concerning.

That was the fun thing about Usenet back then - lots of open exchange between key people and anyone could join in (which eventually was its undoing).

Massive sharing of illegal binaries and consequently ISPs dropping Usenet support was the "undoing".

Usenet started as a relatively low-volume medium connecting ivory towers. It became huge with the opening of the Internet to the public, with ISPs everywhere hosting NNTP servers.

Usenet ended up being used for massive file sharing, which was probably a big reason for ISPs, in turn, dropping NNTP servers. They didn't want the administrative overhead of providing all that storage, and plus most of the content was copyright infringing.

So, Usenet is just back to the way it was in some ways. You will find some people that qualify as key people in the comp newsgroups.

The original key people from the 1980's or 1990's aren't coming back; they are deceased or retired.

By the way, the same person, John Levine, has been moderating comp.compilers for well over thirty years, since January 1986. Someone will have to pick that up sooner or later.

> Massive sharing of illegal binaries and consequently ISPs dropping Usenet support was the "undoing".

No. It wasn't a problem to run an NNTP server with no binaries, and many ISPs did so. (Source: I ran a large NNTP server for a number of years)

The undoing of USENET was people, quite simply. The deluge of stupidity and spam was what chased away the smarter people, which in turn made the whole thing less valuable.

I think that is a great pity. These days it's much more difficult to find niche forums and talk to other people that are interested in the same thing that you are into. And then you have to "sign up" and deal with the catastrophically bad forum software. It's a big step back and I wonder if we'll ever be able to recover.

>> These days it's much more difficult to find niche forums and talk to other people that are interested in the same thing that you are into

Technically Reddit fills up those shoes pretty nicely

> Massive sharing of illegal binaries and consequently ISPs dropping Usenet support was the "undoing".

Binary groups were a separate thing. What killed USENET were spammers and trolls; the protocol was conceived in an era of gentlemanship and collaboration and had no antibodies against the wave of bozos that would come later.

> the wave of bozos

Eternal September.

NNTP was always a firehose. In 1988 it was more traffic than the large company I worked for at the time could afford to carry on their upstream connection. The design where all content was replicated everywhere was just wrong for an always connected network. It dated back to UUCP days and intermittent p2p networking.

Weren't those binaries only in the alt.* hierarchy though? There were plenty of servers that decided not to carry alt.*.

Yeah, the infamous September was really a thing, more than sharing.

Another factor was that maintaining a news server was a PITA for the ISPs.

Eternal September for those curious to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I know it isn't actually, but I like to pretend the Green Day song "Wake me up when September ends" is a reference to that.

Heh. I thought I was the only one who did this!

I was not aware of this phenomenon and I was there... lol. (My first email address was in 1990, from my college)

My freshman September was the Eternal September.

Honestly, the quality (and nerdiness) of discourse at Reddit was the same as the Internet pre-Eternal September until the Gonewild subreddit happened.

Me too!

> There were plenty of servers that decided not to carry alt.*.

"which eventually was it's undoing"

Eternal September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

IRC is still like that.

I’ve wanted to get back on IRC for a while but don’t really know where people live in it these days. Are there any specific channels/servers that are still popular where I can start?

I also tried to "get back" on IRC a couple of times but even on Libera pretty much everyone is idling and nobody seems to actually use it aside from having a client sit there "just in case".

In practice Discord seems to be where everyone is nowadays and while Discord is little more than a proprietary IRC with built-in history and images, people are active there. It basically feels the same as when i used mIRC back in the 90s and early 2000s - including the part where some channels/servers were so full of people i could barely keep up. If anything it is more than i ever saw on IRC as i am in 25 "servers"[0] with various channels in each (though like with IRC i only participate in a handful of them and i only occasionally browse the rest).

Fortunately Discord works via the web and i have the web interface pinned on Firefox all the time so i don't have to use their client.

[0] i really dislike the name as they aren't really servers, just groups of channels - everything is on Discord's proprietary server

I prefer the name for them that they use in the API, which is "guild".

Libera is the biggest server (inheriting from Freenode), join any channel that looks interesting.

It's been three years for me. Last time it was in Freenode, but there was some drama more recently and if I'm not mistaken, people migrated to a new net called libera.chat.

Chanels, depending on what you're looking for, but there used to be a lot of them, just look number of users.

some saudi dude apparently bought freenode and immediately tried to monetize it (not 100% sure of these details) and that was that apparently

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-bee...

The Zig team seems to use IRC. I was in there a few times and was able to discuss things with the key team members directly. The fact not a lot of people are on IRC these days probably allows them to let anyone join in :D.

IRCnet and EFnet still have some activity. Especially #worldchat on IRCnet for generic chat still has fair amount of activity.

https://lobste.rs still at it. If you want to become a member you are asked to join their irc bot and ask to be invited. https://lobste.rs/chat

There was an interesting thread on Usenet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987679#:~:text=The%20r....

djb's auth here is an implementation of rfc931.

https://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume22/

I saw this email: obe...@amazon.llnl.gov and was curious about it, then later saw Werner and I was like is that a coincidence?

Huh. I remember Henry Spencer from *.space on Usenet back in the early-mid 90's. Had no idea he wrote regex.

Turns out helping invent the internet makes you famous

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