14 ms·

Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds

635 points by libovness 12y ago

neilellis 12y ago
If I could upvote this a 1,000 times I would. Here's to nostalgia! Anyone doing a vetted version of this, now that I would (not literally I might add NSA) kill for.
- otakucode 12y ago
  Vetted?
  - neilellis 12y ago
    To prevent it ever being spammy, which is my first concern with any anonymous group of people. Just a place where you know everyone is a hacker (in the coding sense) and you know who they are in real-life. Vetting is the opposite of Twitter/Reddit et al.
    - lelandbatey 12y ago
      I have half a mind to just start giving away shell access to my servers I liked the person. But it's quite a time commitment, so I don't know.
danso 12y ago
If tilde club someday dies, either by crushing-traffic, hackers, negligence, commercialization, or acquihire, I'm hoping we get a post-mortem that was as fun to read as this origin story. I would love to even just see more machine configuration details for the "one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet" that is hosting it. Reading this post about someone building a community just out of a whim, and then seeing how quickly and quirkily a community can arise from such minimal environment, reminded me of what's still probably my favorite submission I've ever read on HN: http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-society/ http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-ris...
- beaugunderson 12y ago
  There's more configuration/management information here: https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club
- bespoke_engnr 12y ago
  Thanks for this link; it's a really great read. I immediately thought, "I've had that idea!" (but then realized that I first had the idea to make per-website chat rooms after this guy had already done it). Fascinating.
Mizza 12y ago
I'm going to use this opportunity to shamelessly plug my tildeclub page: http://tilde.club/~rich http://tilde.club/~rich edit: Please also go to my girlfriend's page! She's jealous of my hit counter: http://tilde.club/~arch http://tilde.club/~arch
- billmalarky 12y ago
  I loved it.
- shaunxcode 12y ago
  that is incredible. I wish I still had my old "pixelclique" ns4+ codebase. Or if I could recall my geocities name maybe I could find earlier work on wayback.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  You absolutely must find a way to make the page take 3 minutes to load.
  - 2xlbuds 12y ago
    This might help! http://theonion.github.io/comcastifyjs/ http://theonion.github.io/comcastifyjs/
- th0ma5 12y ago
  heheheh any ideas what I should do? http://tilde.club/~thomas http://tilde.club/~thomas
  - foota 12y ago
    I love that background color! (I posses no design skills what so ever)
- function_seven 12y ago
  The best part, better than all the other really good parts, is the "no cops" legalese at the bottom. I remember seeing that everywhere in the pre-Napster days (i.e. downloading loose MP3s from sites that looked just like yours)
edavis 12y ago
I love this. I absolutely love this. This project hits that sweet spot where "old timers" who remember the lo-fi social web have a place to call their own while also being appealing to the "young guns" who have only ever known the social web in the age of Facebook/Twitter and are looking for an alternative where not everything is easy and beautiful.
- NovaS1X 12y ago
  I was born in 1990, but I was also introduced to computers at a very young age. I've been using the internet before the Facebook/Myspace boom, but I never had the chance to really experience the "old-web" or usenet. This "project" gives me a chance to see a part of internet history that I missed or was too young to remember delivered from people who were there. It's a really unique project for people like myself, and I find it comforting to see culture of the internet that I saw a glimpse of in my childhood.
  - edavis 12y ago
    I was born in 1989 and my experience is very similar. As I came of age on the internet in the early 2000s, there were enough vestiges of stuff like Usenet that I was familiar with it but it was clear it was in terminal decline. And I always felt bummed that I missed that era. Another thing that I really like about this project is how it combines new and old technologies. Like how it's a "standard UNIX computer on the internet" but runs on Amazon's cloud. Collaboration is done via Github. You sign-up via a Google Form. We have these amazing infrastructure tools now which didn't exist 10 years ago. It's really something to see.
lucb1e 12y ago
Might be just me, but it took a few seconds after clicking away I realized that I probably should scroll down on that page. Indeed I should.
codva 12y ago
Neocities did something similar a couple of years ago - with more of a Geocities focus (obviously!) My Neocities page - https://chrisod.neocities.org/ https://chrisod.neocities.org/
harryjo 12y ago
difference from NeoCities?
- stephancoral 12y ago
  Invite-only. Also NeoCities doesn't give you a full shell account
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    NeoCities is a web host isn't it, they don't give out shell at all?
    - stephancoral 12y ago
      They sandbox it by only allowing you to drag and drop files. Make a domain for yourself and you'll see.
cyanbane 12y ago
I remember being 14 and creating ANSI art was my favorite pastime other than gaming and browsing ACiD and other creator groups art over 14.4. This taps so into that nostalgia, hope I can get a folder.
jonathanyc 12y ago
“That’s a west coast thing,” said Mo, who grew up in California. “You use tildes instead of colons or dashes, it’s more like handwriting.” Interesting. I also grew up in California but never saw the tilde used as a colon or dash. I thought it was more used as a replacement for periods when the author wanted to come off as light/flirty/caring/sing-song.
- pyrocat 12y ago
  Yeah I heard it originated in Korea, as a way of signifying a light hearted teasing / sarcasm (e.g. "see you at the finish line~")
  - minikomi 12y ago
    In Japan a ー is used to extend a sound. Characters like ne or yo are used to casually finish sentences and it gives them a hightened sense of friendliness to extend them with 〜 instead of ー. It also can be used to make effeminate or suggestive sounds like あーん would be ahhn like sticking out your tongue to check your throat but あ〜ん is ahnn but in a seductive/sexy way
    - arm 12y ago
      Please correct me if I’m wrong (still learning Japanese), but isn’t「ー」only used to extend sounds written in katakana? In the case of the「あーん」that you wrote, I would think that it would be written as「ああん」instead since that’s the way sounds are extended in hiragana. I agree with your usage of「あ〜ん」though.
      - Zarel 12y ago
        To be precise, 「ー」 is mostly only used to extend vowels when it wouldn't change what Japanese/Chinese word it's referring to. For instance, 「お」 can mean "honorable", but 「おう」 means "king" and 「おお」 means "large". If you wanted to convey that you're saying "honorable" but dragging it out, you'd write it like 「おー」 such as in 「おーにいーさん」 ("Brooooother"), so it wouldn't be confused with 「おう」 or 「おお」 even though it'd be pronounced the same way. You could think of it this way: if you wanted to convey that you were saying the word "god" but stretching it out, the Japanese solution would be to write it as "go–d" (since "good" would have it be confused with a different word). (This isn't the only way to convey that a long vowel in hiragana isn't semantic, though. It's also common to write the vowel in small font, such as 「あぁぁ」 or 「ねぇ」) You can also write things that are usually written in katakana in hiragana instead. This makes it look softer, and is similar to the idea of writing English without capitalizing words (such as at the beginning of sentences). In these cases, you'd still use ー as if you were using katakana, such as in the song title 「とらぶるめーかー」 ("Troublemaker", the opening theme song from the anime Himegoto).
cosarara97 12y ago
> People logged in and started live-chatting all-text pictures of dragons to everyone on the computer. "wall" command? (I've never used a Unix system at the same time as another person, I think)
- phkahler 12y ago
  At uni I used to keep a text file with huge ascii art one word messages (redundant but large) and I'd "write myfriend lunch.txt" or whatever and they'd get a huge "lunch?" on their terminal. It was even more disruptive than texting is today ;-)
- cosarara97 12y ago
  Oh, IRC https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/blob/master/docs/ircserver.md https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/blob/master/docs/irc...
- kjell 12y ago
  Largely `wall`. As of a few days ago there's an IRC server running on localhost.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mattdotc 12y ago
  In addition to 'wall' you can write to another user's tty if you're logged into the same machine with 'write' https://blogs.oracle.com/pranav/entry/how_to_send_message_to_users_l https://blogs.oracle.com/pranav/entry/how_to_send_message_to...
  - salgernon 12y ago
    And if their perms permissions are wrong on their tty, you can /usr/games/rain > /dev/tty24 or whatever. That was great fun back when.
  - ook 12y ago
    Try c-hey! It's skinnable write :) http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/ http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/
sanchayan 12y ago
Can we get it hosted on ARM Servers like X-Gene .. [ disclosure : work for APM which makes X-Gene ARM 64b processors]
- wtracy 12y ago
  Letting the rest of us know where we could buy one would be a good start. :-)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pja 12y ago
Who am I? I am the system administrator, Paul Ford. Like any system administrator, I will be slow to respond, will get everything wrong, and will act imperiously while never acknowledging wrongdoing. Consider this part of your authentic tilde.club experience! That is just perfect.
bespoke_engnr 12y ago
Oh man, this reminds me of my first shell account, and SDF, and the actual reason I got into computers. So excited. Maybe I could write a little communication API-type thing that these kinds of shell servers could implement, so communities could be linked together in some way? Hmm. That would be cool. I think I just found a good reason to mess around with Rust.
- kazenix 12y ago
  That would be incredible. I wish I knew enough to help with that sort of thing.
  - bespoke_engnr 12y ago
    Ha, trust me, I have no idea either. But I'm at least starting to ponder the problem.
- steauengeglase 12y ago
  Yep. Same here. For you young 'uns itching for the headaches of yesteryear SDF has been kicking, in one form or another, since 1987. Yep, you can also setup a vanity (~) page(s). http://sdf.org/index.cgi?faq%3FBASICS%3F11 http://sdf.org/index.cgi?faq%3FBASICS%3F11 or dive into the wonders of Gopher space http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher
  - gergles 12y ago
    I highly recommend that if you support experimentation you join and donate -- I have a MetaARPA account that I don't think I've logged into in 3 years, but I just send them a $36 check every year because I think it's important people be able to have a safe, free place to tinker. (Also, if you want to sign up, I can validate your account. Email me a link to your HN profile and if you have enough contributions to convince me you're an okay person, I'll take care of it.)
- hobs 12y ago
  Yeah, I used lonestar back in the day, and had a great time. I wonder how much he is ready for when people get malicious though, getting a shell often meant something like presenting personal identifying information so they could come find you if you messed it up.
freshflowers 12y ago
This reminds me I need to make work of starting the quest for my very first homepage (with ~). It's still online, I just have no idea where it physically located and I've lost access to it in late 1996. The page is under the domain of an ISP that no longer exists, having been bought by another ISP... that no longer exists either.
Globz 12y ago
Wow this project is amazing, brings back a lot of good memories. I will find a way to help out for sure!
mescalito 12y ago
http://tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/ http://tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/ - extremely hard to play!
- sejje 12y ago
  I got 8. I never played the original so I'm a n00b.
joshmillard 12y ago
It's been a wonderful weird little thing so far, with folks having a mix of nostalgia for and first exposure to shell account stuff, playing around with oldschool webbery, hacking little things together across user accounts, and just generally being great people in a nice place. I got inspired yesterday and wrote us up our own custom low-rent version of Flappy Bird: http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/ http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/
- pja 12y ago
  That is one brutal Flappy Bird remix Josh - it's even worse than the original!
  - joshmillard 12y ago
    No point in making an easy one, I reckon!
    - joshmillard 12y ago
      Though I did spend about fifteen minutes working on a pure command-line turn-based version called Roguey Bird a few months ago before realizing I didn't actually feel like spending more than fifteen minutes on it at the time.
- ErikRogneby 12y ago
  I love that very quickly my goal was to score a single point. And then I did and it showed my high score! Sweet, I got high score I can quit now...
  - sejje 12y ago
    Sorry to tell you that, at least as far as I can tell, that's a personal high score.
- joshmillard 12y ago
  Decided we needed an arcade page for all the sweet games: http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/games.html http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/games.html
keithpeter 12y ago
"There is no need to get in on the ground floor, because the ground floor has been there for decades." I (still)edit the smaller pages on my personal site from an ssh session using nano. The big productions get done in markdown with a couple of bash scripts on the laptop. All good fun, and nice to see how little bandwidth/processor resources a bunch of static pages can live in. I don't think I'll go on the wait list as I have a perfectly good slice of web server already but I hope this gets popular.
mr_brown 12y ago
/me also misses IRC from the times where you could type --<--{@ and you could be sure it looked just the same on the other end. Monospace was the norm, not the exception and all the IRC clients displayed all lines aligned (to the left, however unbelievable that sounds) regardless of the length of the users name. Today I have to pay attention not to write (b) or (c) because it might turn into a beer or coffee. We often forget to appreciate the simplicity of things.
- 33W 12y ago
  I have Lync at work and have accidentally sent some kisses when talking about retirement... 401(k)
  - tomsthumb 12y ago
    Last year you could crash lync by dragging a link from the conversation box into the text input box. Instead of fixing the problem they disallowed that behavior.
- technomancy 12y ago
  So... that still works fine on freenode?
  - Maken 12y ago
    It depends on which IRC client you use.
- arm 12y ago
  That behaviour sounds great, although I’m curious which old IRC clients you are referring to. I actually make use of an old Power Mac G3 (B&W) running Mac OS 9 for connecting to some IRC servers (using ircle) and in its case, at least, nicks are assumed to be 10 characters or less. This is quite annoying since there are active users on the channels who have nicks longer than that, so the client simply displays their messages with the extra characters of their nick cut off (to keep the messages left aligned). While I suppose ircle could dynamically resize the area for nicks based on the length of the longest nick that has posted a message, that could be pretty inefficient… not to mention if the channel messages are being logged in a text file with messages left-aligned in there as well (which is what ircle does); the whole file would have to be recreated.
peterjmag 12y ago
This made me giggle pretty much uncontrollably: http://tilde.club/~david/imgs/top5big.gif http://tilde.club/~david/imgs/top5big.gif Via http://tilde.club/~jeffbonhag/index.shtml http://tilde.club/~jeffbonhag/index.shtml
ErikRogneby 12y ago
I was hoping to look at some plan files remotely and tried finger. It connected but hung.
- droob 12y ago
  Yeah, finger only works locally.
  - jethro_tell 12y ago
    No, if you ask it: finger jethro_tell it will work locally, if you ask it: finger jethro_tell@example.com, it will check to see if example.com is running a finger server on tcp/79 and will return the reply if example.com answers. Otherwise it will just time out.
- phillc73 12y ago
  I do remember spending a long time making my .plan file just right, in about 1995. Nice recall.
peterwwillis 12y ago
So, there's a lot of good reasons why nobody runs shell servers anymore. One reason is that the FBI may one day knock on your door with a letter that says they're going to need access to all your user's accounts, and that you can't tell them or anyone else, and if you do you're going to jail for a felony. If you're lucky you'll be able to tell your users about 6 months later. Other things that happen is you become a spam, DDoS and CnC host, and you end up spending the great majority of your time preventing 1% of your users from ruining the internet. And of course the inevitable takedown notices for pirated or illegal material. Good luck...
- TrevorJ 12y ago
  How is this any different than the situation for anyone running any kind of web service anymore?
  - peterwwillis 12y ago
    Almost everyone running a 'real' web service puts in place limits to prevent this kind of abuse or isolate their customers from it. Gone are the days of running eggdrops from $1/month php hosters and hosting warez on Geocities. And most of the time these providers have an abuse reporting system with forms that allows for efficient review and process of complaints. The combination of 'unlimited' access of a shell along with the shared nature of the host causes shells to be targets of more nefarious activity. Due to the personal nature of the account, people often host more personal information on a shell. So when it comes time to fork over account access, people are at more risk than just a web site host. I understand the nostalgia of having a place for shared accounts. I have friends who host shells for their friends; a throwback to the days where it cost real money to colo a dual pentium machine with a SCSI RAID array on a 10mbit connection. But the world isn't a safe place anymore, and the feds don't just ignore cybercrime like they used to. They could probably trump up a charge of 'accomplice' just for having an account on a box that had some crime associated with it. I feel much better paying a few bucks a year for my own VPS.
rev_bird 12y ago
This is probably the most endearingly fascinating project I've ever read about on the internet. Just a guy saying, "Hey, let's do something simple and fun, maybe people will like it." I can't pinpoint why it seems like so much fun, but I'm glad it's around.
linguafranca 12y ago
Ahh, now I remember why these kinds of websites died out. It's exciting a lot like Minecraft, in that we can make our own little worlds. We exercised both sides of the brain by learning how to write HTML and maybe some Perl, all while writing actual content. But just like Minecraft, that world is isolated and lonely. Nobody visited our sites, that's why we stopped updating them. They were inherently isolated from the beginning. So we built social networks to replace them. We have new places to go to share our random thoughts. Places where it's slightly more likely they'll be seen by someone.
- hvs 12y ago
  And much less interesting than Minecraft.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    I'm not sure. Some of the most informative pages were available under Tripod, written by people into obscure subjects. They were typically ugly (the pages, not the people), but were informative. They were a source of more interesting information than today's social network's "here's a picture of me eating something". You could actually learn something from reading the pages instead of just observing someone else's behaviour / possessions.
    - kaybe 12y ago
      These seem to be still around. Sometimes I'm looking for specialized info on non-technical software and there is usually a really ugly but highly informative page from an enthusiast around (who only got into basic html). (See bonsai care for example)
    - vertex-four 12y ago
      The home education community in the UK had a huge amount of information up on Tripod and similar sites, pointing to all sorts of useful resources for those who wanted to teach their kids at home. I'm not sure where they post information these days. Probably in Facebook groups.
lawl 12y ago
I might be too young. But I like writing webpages on my own isolated vps :) I can move around my own domain and even install packages! While still having the shell experience. And these days you can go as low as $10 per YEAR on a vps.
- coryfklein 12y ago
  Where can you get a vps for $10 a year?
  - chameco 12y ago
    Ramnode goes pretty low if you have coupon codes (like, $14 per year low), and I believe Digital Ocean is similar.
  - jpgleeson 12y ago
    You'll often find them coming up on http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/
  - spindritf 12y ago
    You can get one for €3/yr http://lowendspirit.com/ http://lowendspirit.com/
ilamont 12y ago
Brings back memories of learning HTML and creating my first page, a shout-out to friends on a grey background. And webrings. Forgot about those ... I believed they died out by 2000 or so, maybe when people realized they were detrimental to PageRank and SEO.
ForHackernews 12y ago
There are lots of places online that will give free UNIX shell accounts: http://shells.red-pill.eu/ http://shells.red-pill.eu/ I used to have one on rootshell.be many years ago.
- chippy 12y ago
  What's the difference between those and tilde.club?
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    None as far as I can tell. Tilde club is new/momentarily popular and active.
0898 12y ago
Massively off-topic – but in American English is "a couple drinks" correct? British English would be "a couple of drinks". Just curious – I notice this a lot of US tech blogs.
- dav- 12y ago
  I can't comment on it being correct or incorrect, but I believe that it is acceptable in informal speech, at least in American English.
- GavinB 12y ago
  This is common usage. I couldn't begin to tell you if it's "correct" or not.
  - Tomte 12y ago
    If it's common usage, it's correct.
- jere 12y ago
  There's a little bit of discussion about that usage being an "Americanism" here: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/couple http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/couple
- Crito 12y ago
  Both sound natural to my American ears.
- Gracana 12y ago
  I never thought of that as being strange. I think it's used this way because it fits with "a few," you know? "I had a few drinks," "I had a couple drinks." But fwiw, "I had a couple of drinks" doesn't sound wrong to me.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  It sounds wrong to me, and I see a lot of commenters here using "couple <insert item here>". To me in the UK, I would shove an "of" in there. "A couple of drinks". Perhaps those across the pond miss this important "of" word out.
kamikazi 12y ago
Upvoted with a thousand clicks!! Probably the most gleeful project I've come across in years. On to the waiting list. I'm of the generation where Windows 3.0 was just coming up and there was DOS and as fresh highschool kids we just didn't know what we were tinkering with. A prof used to came and blabber about internal commands and external commands without really explaining the difference because most likely she herself was a n00b. And we used to get excited if we ever got a 30-min lab session to poke around with Lotus-123, Wordpro, Foxbase or Turbo Pascal. Then in grad college we got Novell Netware and some of us figured out how to crack into classmate's home directories and play pranks. I'm missing a few pieces but there was a kind of a LAN manager and it was possible to 'poke' other users. Like a Unixish Yoapp of that time. That was my first experience of cross-computer realtime chat. Anyway longstory short this project brings back all the nostalgia of pre y2k and early college days for me. Can't wait to get in. So so happy. ps: Anyone from India in yet?
clairity 12y ago
the screenshot of alpine was a nice bit of nostalgia for me. also gopher, before the newfangled "world wide web", awkward name and all, took over.
epaladin 12y ago
Maybe we can make a simple gateway page that lists all the pages that would actually render properly in Mosaic?
tomphoolery 12y ago
This is awesome. I remember those days fondly!
arjie 12y ago
Ha ha, this is great. Amusing and nostalgia-inducing.
blhack 12y ago
This article makes it seem like writing code over a shell is some ancient mystery. Am I really the only person that still codes everyday all day like this?
- corobo 12y ago
  You're not :) I am a scumlord though cause I do it in nano
Crito 12y ago
Here is a weird quirky thing that I have been noticing a lot recently: People taking screenshots that have a tooltip window visible. Is this accidental? An attempt to make the screenshot seem more spontaneous? Did Windows or OSX recently change something in such a way that this is now easy to accidentally do? Are people simply not proofreading their screenshots anymore? Is it a "west coast thing"? I'm being serious. I was writing it off as user-error but I'm starting to doubt that now with how frequently I see it.
- Intermernet 12y ago
  I've done this in documentation in order to show a visual indicator of what the user should be clicking on, or filling in next. This is especially important in programs with confusing or ambiguous UIs (Find the "Settings" option in a Lotus Notes email database? <shiver>). Ideally, it wouldn't be necessary, but it can help as an extra guide in docs.
bdm 12y ago
This is the Burning Man of the Internet.
- mortenjorck 12y ago
  I had exactly the same thought. The fact that you aren't running Rails and you can't clone a bunch of open-source libraries from Github, but rather must start from scratch with your own handmade HTML, is absolutely Burning Man's "radical self-reliance."
salgernon 12y ago
Someone should mention telehack.com here - not quite shell, but a brilliant simulation and set of emulations. It attempts to replicate life as we knew it in 1986 or so.
- kordless 12y ago
  Or http://terminal.com http://terminal.com - $1 a month shells.
- bespoke_engnr 12y ago
  Thanks, I just checked this out -- pretty awesome.
awakened 12y ago
Shell accounts are like short wave radios, wrist watches, cameras and landline telephones. Not many people have them anymore but they are oh so useful.
prawn 12y ago
I got into web design around when it first became a thing. Browsers allowed images, tables permitted layout, etc. I can remember when you'd be working for a client who had a tilde account (ISPname.com/~client), but then get particularly enthused when working on a job that had its own domain! Those looked so much better in a portfolio! All pretty tragic to consider now when it's so cheap and fast to set up any old domain and a lot of the charm and wonder is gone.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  I would agree that a lot of the charm and wonder is gone, as the Internet is commonplace and many of the technical marvels are taken for granted, sadly.
nwatson 12y ago
com aplicação dos dons intelectuais e sociais duma companhia grande do internet eu seria chefão entre a mulherada eu teria muitos fãs e eu as levava pelo mundo inteiro num roteiro no meu avião mais a compulsão de estudar computação so resultou em eu ser cidadão do Nerdistão
xtat 12y ago
I never stopped using a tilde + mod_userdir You hipsters know how to make a guy feel old :F http://rapidpacket.com/~xtat/ http://rapidpacket.com/~xtat/
bmh100 12y ago
My concern for this project is that it is so dependent on the culture of its users that is has to be strictly controlled. It cannot scale up, because a strong culture like this does not scale. There might be more Tilde Clubs over time, but such a machine is too easily disrupted by even a single bad actor, like peterwwillis says. Even if that did not happen, cultural erosion would happen, like a mini Eternal September or take your pick of communities: Reddit, Slashdot, HN, etc.
- b2themax 12y ago
  So the only usefulness of this product is that it provides a feeling of nostalgia, and smug belonging? (Like you're cool now if you have a tilde.club page?) Thus we cannot invite lots of people to the tilde.club because... we're just too cool for them. I predict #Fail.
  - bmh100 12y ago
    I think that it is useful for nostalgia, yes, and also as a small community. But its structure makes it inherently fragile and dependent upon a strong culture. As a result, as long as it is successful, I could see members taking pride in being members of a special, unusually great community.
- rektide 12y ago
  Tao begot one. One begot two. Two begot three. And three begot the Ten Thousand Things. Poking holes at ways it can fail is analytic thinking. First you must accept the premise, and work to design ways it could work, will work, is working. Take a thing far before cutting it down. It's possible this project creates the culture that satisfies your existability concerns. It's possible that culture might grow and spread.
moeamaya 12y ago
This reminded me MIT still uses ~<email> for public www space. Must be an artifact of this UNIX paradigm. Brian Chan as an example: http://www.mit.edu/~chosetec/ http://www.mit.edu/~chosetec/.
- rhizome 12y ago
  It's Apache's default UserDir module that does that. It's only the request-controller model of dynamic web application development that has made it look unusual compared to something like /user?id=moemaya or /users/moemaya or whatever.
ook 12y ago
Please tell me someone has setup c-hey? http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/ http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/
urschrei 12y ago
I'm accepting pull requests for my tilde.club page (http://tilde.club/~urschrei http://tilde.club/~urschrei) at https://github.com/urschrei/edit_my_tilde https://github.com/urschrei/edit_my_tilde, if anyone wants to put some of their own content / JS /CSS / images up. A merged request triggers a web hook that pings a heroku app that performs a git pull on tilde.club using Fabric
- sroerick 12y ago
  > A merged request triggers a web hook that pings a heroku app that performs a git pull on tilde.club using Fabric Can I ask you to explain this in a little more detail? I've tried to host pages with Git and run into weird errors cropping into my HTML and webdev people telling me "GIT IS NOT A DEPLOYMENT TOOL".
d23 12y ago
What if we made an image of the server and anyone could download and operate a box and somehow they would be like, distributed and talk to one another? I don't know what else would happen, but it would be cool.
Tepix 12y ago
But do you have nethack and bsdgames (with the cool game "hunt") installed?
72deluxe 12y ago
This is clearly the best one: http://tilde.club/~cat/ http://tilde.club/~cat/
oggy 12y ago
Sweet! I am a bit disappointed to see that you don't get your own e-mail subdomain, to which mail is routed using UUCP...
nysv 12y ago
But ~ doesn't mean person. It means 'home'. Hence, 'ls ~' lists the contents of your home directory and 'cd ~root' takes you to home directory of root. In web context ~user translated to 'home of user' which was fitting in most cases.
- timdev2 12y ago
  Also: "home page".
Mimu 12y ago
Am I missing something here or did the guy just used "~" to make it look like he was singing? I feel like the guy that didn't get the joke.
nickstinemates 12y ago
This is definitely going to become a thing. I want one!
jh3 12y ago
This kind of stuff is part of the reason I started loving the Internet. It's also why I wanted to learn what Unix meant :) http://silenceisdefeat.com/ http://silenceisdefeat.com/ was where I had my last free shell account.

635 points by libovness 12y ago

If I could upvote this a 1,000 times I would. Here's to nostalgia! Anyone doing a vetted version of this, now that I would (not literally I might add NSA) kill for.

otakucode 12y ago
Vetted?
- neilellis 12y ago
  To prevent it ever being spammy, which is my first concern with any anonymous group of people. Just a place where you know everyone is a hacker (in the coding sense) and you know who they are in real-life. Vetting is the opposite of Twitter/Reddit et al.
  - lelandbatey 12y ago
    I have half a mind to just start giving away shell access to my servers I liked the person. But it's quite a time commitment, so I don't know.

danso 12y ago

If tilde club someday dies, either by crushing-traffic, hackers, negligence, commercialization, or acquihire, I'm hoping we get a post-mortem that was as fun to read as this origin story. I would love to even just see more machine configuration details for the "one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet" that is hosting it. Reading this post about someone building a community just out of a whim, and then seeing how quickly and quirkily a community can arise from such minimal environment, reminded me of what's still probably my favorite submission I've ever read on HN: http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-society/ http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-ris...

beaugunderson 12y ago
There's more configuration/management information here: https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club
bespoke_engnr 12y ago
Thanks for this link; it's a really great read. I immediately thought, "I've had that idea!" (but then realized that I first had the idea to make per-website chat rooms after this guy had already done it). Fascinating.

Mizza 12y ago

I'm going to use this opportunity to shamelessly plug my tildeclub page: http://tilde.club/~rich http://tilde.club/~rich edit: Please also go to my girlfriend's page! She's jealous of my hit counter: http://tilde.club/~arch http://tilde.club/~arch

billmalarky 12y ago
I loved it.
shaunxcode 12y ago
that is incredible. I wish I still had my old "pixelclique" ns4+ codebase. Or if I could recall my geocities name maybe I could find earlier work on wayback.
tomjen3 12y ago
You absolutely must find a way to make the page take 3 minutes to load.
- 2xlbuds 12y ago
  This might help! http://theonion.github.io/comcastifyjs/ http://theonion.github.io/comcastifyjs/
th0ma5 12y ago
heheheh any ideas what I should do? http://tilde.club/~thomas http://tilde.club/~thomas
- foota 12y ago
  I love that background color! (I posses no design skills what so ever)
function_seven 12y ago
The best part, better than all the other really good parts, is the "no cops" legalese at the bottom. I remember seeing that everywhere in the pre-Napster days (i.e. downloading loose MP3s from sites that looked just like yours)

edavis 12y ago

I love this. I absolutely love this. This project hits that sweet spot where "old timers" who remember the lo-fi social web have a place to call their own while also being appealing to the "young guns" who have only ever known the social web in the age of Facebook/Twitter and are looking for an alternative where not everything is easy and beautiful.

NovaS1X 12y ago
I was born in 1990, but I was also introduced to computers at a very young age. I've been using the internet before the Facebook/Myspace boom, but I never had the chance to really experience the "old-web" or usenet. This "project" gives me a chance to see a part of internet history that I missed or was too young to remember delivered from people who were there. It's a really unique project for people like myself, and I find it comforting to see culture of the internet that I saw a glimpse of in my childhood.
- edavis 12y ago
  I was born in 1989 and my experience is very similar. As I came of age on the internet in the early 2000s, there were enough vestiges of stuff like Usenet that I was familiar with it but it was clear it was in terminal decline. And I always felt bummed that I missed that era. Another thing that I really like about this project is how it combines new and old technologies. Like how it's a "standard UNIX computer on the internet" but runs on Amazon's cloud. Collaboration is done via Github. You sign-up via a Google Form. We have these amazing infrastructure tools now which didn't exist 10 years ago. It's really something to see.

lucb1e 12y ago

Might be just me, but it took a few seconds after clicking away I realized that I probably should scroll down on that page. Indeed I should.

codva 12y ago

Neocities did something similar a couple of years ago - with more of a Geocities focus (obviously!) My Neocities page - https://chrisod.neocities.org/ https://chrisod.neocities.org/

harryjo 12y ago

difference from NeoCities?

stephancoral 12y ago
Invite-only. Also NeoCities doesn't give you a full shell account
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  NeoCities is a web host isn't it, they don't give out shell at all?
  - stephancoral 12y ago
    They sandbox it by only allowing you to drag and drop files. Make a domain for yourself and you'll see.

cyanbane 12y ago

I remember being 14 and creating ANSI art was my favorite pastime other than gaming and browsing ACiD and other creator groups art over 14.4. This taps so into that nostalgia, hope I can get a folder.

jonathanyc 12y ago

“That’s a west coast thing,” said Mo, who grew up in California. “You use tildes instead of colons or dashes, it’s more like handwriting.” Interesting. I also grew up in California but never saw the tilde used as a colon or dash. I thought it was more used as a replacement for periods when the author wanted to come off as light/flirty/caring/sing-song.

pyrocat 12y ago
Yeah I heard it originated in Korea, as a way of signifying a light hearted teasing / sarcasm (e.g. "see you at the finish line~")
- minikomi 12y ago
  In Japan a ー is used to extend a sound. Characters like ne or yo are used to casually finish sentences and it gives them a hightened sense of friendliness to extend them with 〜 instead of ー. It also can be used to make effeminate or suggestive sounds like あーん would be ahhn like sticking out your tongue to check your throat but あ〜ん is ahnn but in a seductive/sexy way
  - arm 12y ago
    Please correct me if I’m wrong (still learning Japanese), but isn’t「ー」only used to extend sounds written in katakana? In the case of the「あーん」that you wrote, I would think that it would be written as「ああん」instead since that’s the way sounds are extended in hiragana. I agree with your usage of「あ〜ん」though.
    - Zarel 12y ago
      To be precise, 「ー」 is mostly only used to extend vowels when it wouldn't change what Japanese/Chinese word it's referring to. For instance, 「お」 can mean "honorable", but 「おう」 means "king" and 「おお」 means "large". If you wanted to convey that you're saying "honorable" but dragging it out, you'd write it like 「おー」 such as in 「おーにいーさん」 ("Brooooother"), so it wouldn't be confused with 「おう」 or 「おお」 even though it'd be pronounced the same way. You could think of it this way: if you wanted to convey that you were saying the word "god" but stretching it out, the Japanese solution would be to write it as "go–d" (since "good" would have it be confused with a different word). (This isn't the only way to convey that a long vowel in hiragana isn't semantic, though. It's also common to write the vowel in small font, such as 「あぁぁ」 or 「ねぇ」) You can also write things that are usually written in katakana in hiragana instead. This makes it look softer, and is similar to the idea of writing English without capitalizing words (such as at the beginning of sentences). In these cases, you'd still use ー as if you were using katakana, such as in the song title 「とらぶるめーかー」 ("Troublemaker", the opening theme song from the anime Himegoto).

cosarara97 12y ago

> People logged in and started live-chatting all-text pictures of dragons to everyone on the computer. "wall" command? (I've never used a Unix system at the same time as another person, I think)

phkahler 12y ago
At uni I used to keep a text file with huge ascii art one word messages (redundant but large) and I'd "write myfriend lunch.txt" or whatever and they'd get a huge "lunch?" on their terminal. It was even more disruptive than texting is today ;-)
cosarara97 12y ago
Oh, IRC https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/blob/master/docs/ircserver.md https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/blob/master/docs/irc...
kjell 12y ago
Largely `wall`. As of a few days ago there's an IRC server running on localhost.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mattdotc 12y ago
In addition to 'wall' you can write to another user's tty if you're logged into the same machine with 'write' https://blogs.oracle.com/pranav/entry/how_to_send_message_to_users_l https://blogs.oracle.com/pranav/entry/how_to_send_message_to...
- salgernon 12y ago
  And if their perms permissions are wrong on their tty, you can /usr/games/rain > /dev/tty24 or whatever. That was great fun back when.
- ook 12y ago
  Try c-hey! It's skinnable write :) http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/ http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/

sanchayan 12y ago

Can we get it hosted on ARM Servers like X-Gene .. [ disclosure : work for APM which makes X-Gene ARM 64b processors]

wtracy 12y ago
Letting the rest of us know where we could buy one would be a good start. :-)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pja 12y ago

Who am I? I am the system administrator, Paul Ford. Like any system administrator, I will be slow to respond, will get everything wrong, and will act imperiously while never acknowledging wrongdoing. Consider this part of your authentic tilde.club experience! That is just perfect.

bespoke_engnr 12y ago

Oh man, this reminds me of my first shell account, and SDF, and the actual reason I got into computers. So excited. Maybe I could write a little communication API-type thing that these kinds of shell servers could implement, so communities could be linked together in some way? Hmm. That would be cool. I think I just found a good reason to mess around with Rust.

kazenix 12y ago
That would be incredible. I wish I knew enough to help with that sort of thing.
- bespoke_engnr 12y ago
  Ha, trust me, I have no idea either. But I'm at least starting to ponder the problem.
steauengeglase 12y ago
Yep. Same here. For you young 'uns itching for the headaches of yesteryear SDF has been kicking, in one form or another, since 1987. Yep, you can also setup a vanity (~) page(s). http://sdf.org/index.cgi?faq%3FBASICS%3F11 http://sdf.org/index.cgi?faq%3FBASICS%3F11 or dive into the wonders of Gopher space http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher
- gergles 12y ago
  I highly recommend that if you support experimentation you join and donate -- I have a MetaARPA account that I don't think I've logged into in 3 years, but I just send them a $36 check every year because I think it's important people be able to have a safe, free place to tinker. (Also, if you want to sign up, I can validate your account. Email me a link to your HN profile and if you have enough contributions to convince me you're an okay person, I'll take care of it.)
hobs 12y ago
Yeah, I used lonestar back in the day, and had a great time. I wonder how much he is ready for when people get malicious though, getting a shell often meant something like presenting personal identifying information so they could come find you if you messed it up.

freshflowers 12y ago

This reminds me I need to make work of starting the quest for my very first homepage (with ~). It's still online, I just have no idea where it physically located and I've lost access to it in late 1996. The page is under the domain of an ISP that no longer exists, having been bought by another ISP... that no longer exists either.

Globz 12y ago

Wow this project is amazing, brings back a lot of good memories. I will find a way to help out for sure!

mescalito 12y ago

http://tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/ http://tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/ - extremely hard to play!

sejje 12y ago
I got 8. I never played the original so I'm a n00b.

joshmillard 12y ago

It's been a wonderful weird little thing so far, with folks having a mix of nostalgia for and first exposure to shell account stuff, playing around with oldschool webbery, hacking little things together across user accounts, and just generally being great people in a nice place. I got inspired yesterday and wrote us up our own custom low-rent version of Flappy Bird: http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/ http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/

pja 12y ago
That is one brutal Flappy Bird remix Josh - it's even worse than the original!
- joshmillard 12y ago
  No point in making an easy one, I reckon!
  - joshmillard 12y ago
    Though I did spend about fifteen minutes working on a pure command-line turn-based version called Roguey Bird a few months ago before realizing I didn't actually feel like spending more than fifteen minutes on it at the time.
ErikRogneby 12y ago
I love that very quickly my goal was to score a single point. And then I did and it showed my high score! Sweet, I got high score I can quit now...
- sejje 12y ago
  Sorry to tell you that, at least as far as I can tell, that's a personal high score.
joshmillard 12y ago
Decided we needed an arcade page for all the sweet games: http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/games.html http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/games.html

keithpeter 12y ago

"There is no need to get in on the ground floor, because the ground floor has been there for decades." I (still)edit the smaller pages on my personal site from an ssh session using nano. The big productions get done in markdown with a couple of bash scripts on the laptop. All good fun, and nice to see how little bandwidth/processor resources a bunch of static pages can live in. I don't think I'll go on the wait list as I have a perfectly good slice of web server already but I hope this gets popular.

mr_brown 12y ago

/me also misses IRC from the times where you could type --<--{@ and you could be sure it looked just the same on the other end. Monospace was the norm, not the exception and all the IRC clients displayed all lines aligned (to the left, however unbelievable that sounds) regardless of the length of the users name. Today I have to pay attention not to write (b) or (c) because it might turn into a beer or coffee. We often forget to appreciate the simplicity of things.

33W 12y ago
I have Lync at work and have accidentally sent some kisses when talking about retirement... 401(k)
- tomsthumb 12y ago
  Last year you could crash lync by dragging a link from the conversation box into the text input box. Instead of fixing the problem they disallowed that behavior.
technomancy 12y ago
So... that still works fine on freenode?
- Maken 12y ago
  It depends on which IRC client you use.
arm 12y ago
That behaviour sounds great, although I’m curious which old IRC clients you are referring to. I actually make use of an old Power Mac G3 (B&W) running Mac OS 9 for connecting to some IRC servers (using ircle) and in its case, at least, nicks are assumed to be 10 characters or less. This is quite annoying since there are active users on the channels who have nicks longer than that, so the client simply displays their messages with the extra characters of their nick cut off (to keep the messages left aligned). While I suppose ircle could dynamically resize the area for nicks based on the length of the longest nick that has posted a message, that could be pretty inefficient… not to mention if the channel messages are being logged in a text file with messages left-aligned in there as well (which is what ircle does); the whole file would have to be recreated.

peterjmag 12y ago

This made me giggle pretty much uncontrollably: http://tilde.club/~david/imgs/top5big.gif http://tilde.club/~david/imgs/top5big.gif Via http://tilde.club/~jeffbonhag/index.shtml http://tilde.club/~jeffbonhag/index.shtml

ErikRogneby 12y ago

I was hoping to look at some plan files remotely and tried finger. It connected but hung.

droob 12y ago
Yeah, finger only works locally.
- jethro_tell 12y ago
  No, if you ask it: finger jethro_tell it will work locally, if you ask it: finger jethro_tell@example.com, it will check to see if example.com is running a finger server on tcp/79 and will return the reply if example.com answers. Otherwise it will just time out.
phillc73 12y ago
I do remember spending a long time making my .plan file just right, in about 1995. Nice recall.

peterwwillis 12y ago

So, there's a lot of good reasons why nobody runs shell servers anymore. One reason is that the FBI may one day knock on your door with a letter that says they're going to need access to all your user's accounts, and that you can't tell them or anyone else, and if you do you're going to jail for a felony. If you're lucky you'll be able to tell your users about 6 months later. Other things that happen is you become a spam, DDoS and CnC host, and you end up spending the great majority of your time preventing 1% of your users from ruining the internet. And of course the inevitable takedown notices for pirated or illegal material. Good luck...

TrevorJ 12y ago
How is this any different than the situation for anyone running any kind of web service anymore?
- peterwwillis 12y ago
  Almost everyone running a 'real' web service puts in place limits to prevent this kind of abuse or isolate their customers from it. Gone are the days of running eggdrops from $1/month php hosters and hosting warez on Geocities. And most of the time these providers have an abuse reporting system with forms that allows for efficient review and process of complaints. The combination of 'unlimited' access of a shell along with the shared nature of the host causes shells to be targets of more nefarious activity. Due to the personal nature of the account, people often host more personal information on a shell. So when it comes time to fork over account access, people are at more risk than just a web site host. I understand the nostalgia of having a place for shared accounts. I have friends who host shells for their friends; a throwback to the days where it cost real money to colo a dual pentium machine with a SCSI RAID array on a 10mbit connection. But the world isn't a safe place anymore, and the feds don't just ignore cybercrime like they used to. They could probably trump up a charge of 'accomplice' just for having an account on a box that had some crime associated with it. I feel much better paying a few bucks a year for my own VPS.

rev_bird 12y ago

This is probably the most endearingly fascinating project I've ever read about on the internet. Just a guy saying, "Hey, let's do something simple and fun, maybe people will like it." I can't pinpoint why it seems like so much fun, but I'm glad it's around.

linguafranca 12y ago

Ahh, now I remember why these kinds of websites died out. It's exciting a lot like Minecraft, in that we can make our own little worlds. We exercised both sides of the brain by learning how to write HTML and maybe some Perl, all while writing actual content. But just like Minecraft, that world is isolated and lonely. Nobody visited our sites, that's why we stopped updating them. They were inherently isolated from the beginning. So we built social networks to replace them. We have new places to go to share our random thoughts. Places where it's slightly more likely they'll be seen by someone.

hvs 12y ago
And much less interesting than Minecraft.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  I'm not sure. Some of the most informative pages were available under Tripod, written by people into obscure subjects. They were typically ugly (the pages, not the people), but were informative. They were a source of more interesting information than today's social network's "here's a picture of me eating something". You could actually learn something from reading the pages instead of just observing someone else's behaviour / possessions.
  - kaybe 12y ago
    These seem to be still around. Sometimes I'm looking for specialized info on non-technical software and there is usually a really ugly but highly informative page from an enthusiast around (who only got into basic html). (See bonsai care for example)
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    The home education community in the UK had a huge amount of information up on Tripod and similar sites, pointing to all sorts of useful resources for those who wanted to teach their kids at home. I'm not sure where they post information these days. Probably in Facebook groups.

lawl 12y ago

I might be too young. But I like writing webpages on my own isolated vps :) I can move around my own domain and even install packages! While still having the shell experience. And these days you can go as low as $10 per YEAR on a vps.

coryfklein 12y ago
Where can you get a vps for $10 a year?
- chameco 12y ago
  Ramnode goes pretty low if you have coupon codes (like, $14 per year low), and I believe Digital Ocean is similar.
- jpgleeson 12y ago
  You'll often find them coming up on http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/
- spindritf 12y ago
  You can get one for €3/yr http://lowendspirit.com/ http://lowendspirit.com/

ilamont 12y ago

Brings back memories of learning HTML and creating my first page, a shout-out to friends on a grey background. And webrings. Forgot about those ... I believed they died out by 2000 or so, maybe when people realized they were detrimental to PageRank and SEO.

ForHackernews 12y ago

There are lots of places online that will give free UNIX shell accounts: http://shells.red-pill.eu/ http://shells.red-pill.eu/ I used to have one on rootshell.be many years ago.

chippy 12y ago
What's the difference between those and tilde.club?
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  None as far as I can tell. Tilde club is new/momentarily popular and active.

0898 12y ago

Massively off-topic – but in American English is "a couple drinks" correct? British English would be "a couple of drinks". Just curious – I notice this a lot of US tech blogs.

dav- 12y ago
I can't comment on it being correct or incorrect, but I believe that it is acceptable in informal speech, at least in American English.
GavinB 12y ago
This is common usage. I couldn't begin to tell you if it's "correct" or not.
- Tomte 12y ago
  If it's common usage, it's correct.
jere 12y ago
There's a little bit of discussion about that usage being an "Americanism" here: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/couple http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/couple
Crito 12y ago
Both sound natural to my American ears.
Gracana 12y ago
I never thought of that as being strange. I think it's used this way because it fits with "a few," you know? "I had a few drinks," "I had a couple drinks." But fwiw, "I had a couple of drinks" doesn't sound wrong to me.
72deluxe 12y ago
It sounds wrong to me, and I see a lot of commenters here using "couple <insert item here>". To me in the UK, I would shove an "of" in there. "A couple of drinks". Perhaps those across the pond miss this important "of" word out.

kamikazi 12y ago

Upvoted with a thousand clicks!! Probably the most gleeful project I've come across in years. On to the waiting list. I'm of the generation where Windows 3.0 was just coming up and there was DOS and as fresh highschool kids we just didn't know what we were tinkering with. A prof used to came and blabber about internal commands and external commands without really explaining the difference because most likely she herself was a n00b. And we used to get excited if we ever got a 30-min lab session to poke around with Lotus-123, Wordpro, Foxbase or Turbo Pascal. Then in grad college we got Novell Netware and some of us figured out how to crack into classmate's home directories and play pranks. I'm missing a few pieces but there was a kind of a LAN manager and it was possible to 'poke' other users. Like a Unixish Yoapp of that time. That was my first experience of cross-computer realtime chat. Anyway longstory short this project brings back all the nostalgia of pre y2k and early college days for me. Can't wait to get in. So so happy. ps: Anyone from India in yet?

clairity 12y ago

the screenshot of alpine was a nice bit of nostalgia for me. also gopher, before the newfangled "world wide web", awkward name and all, took over.

epaladin 12y ago

Maybe we can make a simple gateway page that lists all the pages that would actually render properly in Mosaic?

tomphoolery 12y ago

This is awesome. I remember those days fondly!

arjie 12y ago

Ha ha, this is great. Amusing and nostalgia-inducing.

blhack 12y ago

This article makes it seem like writing code over a shell is some ancient mystery. Am I really the only person that still codes everyday all day like this?

corobo 12y ago
You're not :) I am a scumlord though cause I do it in nano

Crito 12y ago

Here is a weird quirky thing that I have been noticing a lot recently: People taking screenshots that have a tooltip window visible. Is this accidental? An attempt to make the screenshot seem more spontaneous? Did Windows or OSX recently change something in such a way that this is now easy to accidentally do? Are people simply not proofreading their screenshots anymore? Is it a "west coast thing"? I'm being serious. I was writing it off as user-error but I'm starting to doubt that now with how frequently I see it.

Intermernet 12y ago
I've done this in documentation in order to show a visual indicator of what the user should be clicking on, or filling in next. This is especially important in programs with confusing or ambiguous UIs (Find the "Settings" option in a Lotus Notes email database? <shiver>). Ideally, it wouldn't be necessary, but it can help as an extra guide in docs.

bdm 12y ago

This is the Burning Man of the Internet.

mortenjorck 12y ago
I had exactly the same thought. The fact that you aren't running Rails and you can't clone a bunch of open-source libraries from Github, but rather must start from scratch with your own handmade HTML, is absolutely Burning Man's "radical self-reliance."

salgernon 12y ago

Someone should mention telehack.com here - not quite shell, but a brilliant simulation and set of emulations. It attempts to replicate life as we knew it in 1986 or so.

kordless 12y ago
Or http://terminal.com http://terminal.com - $1 a month shells.
bespoke_engnr 12y ago
Thanks, I just checked this out -- pretty awesome.

awakened 12y ago

Shell accounts are like short wave radios, wrist watches, cameras and landline telephones. Not many people have them anymore but they are oh so useful.

prawn 12y ago

I got into web design around when it first became a thing. Browsers allowed images, tables permitted layout, etc. I can remember when you'd be working for a client who had a tilde account (ISPname.com/~client), but then get particularly enthused when working on a job that had its own domain! Those looked so much better in a portfolio! All pretty tragic to consider now when it's so cheap and fast to set up any old domain and a lot of the charm and wonder is gone.

72deluxe 12y ago
I would agree that a lot of the charm and wonder is gone, as the Internet is commonplace and many of the technical marvels are taken for granted, sadly.

nwatson 12y ago

com aplicação dos dons intelectuais e sociais duma companhia grande do internet eu seria chefão entre a mulherada eu teria muitos fãs e eu as levava pelo mundo inteiro num roteiro no meu avião mais a compulsão de estudar computação so resultou em eu ser cidadão do Nerdistão

xtat 12y ago

I never stopped using a tilde + mod_userdir You hipsters know how to make a guy feel old :F http://rapidpacket.com/~xtat/ http://rapidpacket.com/~xtat/

bmh100 12y ago

My concern for this project is that it is so dependent on the culture of its users that is has to be strictly controlled. It cannot scale up, because a strong culture like this does not scale. There might be more Tilde Clubs over time, but such a machine is too easily disrupted by even a single bad actor, like peterwwillis says. Even if that did not happen, cultural erosion would happen, like a mini Eternal September or take your pick of communities: Reddit, Slashdot, HN, etc.

b2themax 12y ago
So the only usefulness of this product is that it provides a feeling of nostalgia, and smug belonging? (Like you're cool now if you have a tilde.club page?) Thus we cannot invite lots of people to the tilde.club because... we're just too cool for them. I predict #Fail.
- bmh100 12y ago
  I think that it is useful for nostalgia, yes, and also as a small community. But its structure makes it inherently fragile and dependent upon a strong culture. As a result, as long as it is successful, I could see members taking pride in being members of a special, unusually great community.
rektide 12y ago
Tao begot one. One begot two. Two begot three. And three begot the Ten Thousand Things. Poking holes at ways it can fail is analytic thinking. First you must accept the premise, and work to design ways it could work, will work, is working. Take a thing far before cutting it down. It's possible this project creates the culture that satisfies your existability concerns. It's possible that culture might grow and spread.

moeamaya 12y ago

This reminded me MIT still uses ~<email> for public www space. Must be an artifact of this UNIX paradigm. Brian Chan as an example: http://www.mit.edu/~chosetec/ http://www.mit.edu/~chosetec/.

rhizome 12y ago
It's Apache's default UserDir module that does that. It's only the request-controller model of dynamic web application development that has made it look unusual compared to something like /user?id=moemaya or /users/moemaya or whatever.

ook 12y ago

Please tell me someone has setup c-hey? http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/ http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/

urschrei 12y ago

I'm accepting pull requests for my tilde.club page (http://tilde.club/~urschrei http://tilde.club/~urschrei) at https://github.com/urschrei/edit_my_tilde https://github.com/urschrei/edit_my_tilde, if anyone wants to put some of their own content / JS /CSS / images up. A merged request triggers a web hook that pings a heroku app that performs a git pull on tilde.club using Fabric

sroerick 12y ago
> A merged request triggers a web hook that pings a heroku app that performs a git pull on tilde.club using Fabric Can I ask you to explain this in a little more detail? I've tried to host pages with Git and run into weird errors cropping into my HTML and webdev people telling me "GIT IS NOT A DEPLOYMENT TOOL".

d23 12y ago

What if we made an image of the server and anyone could download and operate a box and somehow they would be like, distributed and talk to one another? I don't know what else would happen, but it would be cool.

Tepix 12y ago

But do you have nethack and bsdgames (with the cool game "hunt") installed?

72deluxe 12y ago

This is clearly the best one: http://tilde.club/~cat/ http://tilde.club/~cat/

oggy 12y ago

Sweet! I am a bit disappointed to see that you don't get your own e-mail subdomain, to which mail is routed using UUCP...

nysv 12y ago

But ~ doesn't mean person. It means 'home'. Hence, 'ls ~' lists the contents of your home directory and 'cd ~root' takes you to home directory of root. In web context ~user translated to 'home of user' which was fitting in most cases.

timdev2 12y ago
Also: "home page".

Mimu 12y ago

Am I missing something here or did the guy just used "~" to make it look like he was singing? I feel like the guy that didn't get the joke.

nickstinemates 12y ago

This is definitely going to become a thing. I want one!

jh3 12y ago

This kind of stuff is part of the reason I started loving the Internet. It's also why I wanted to learn what Unix meant :) http://silenceisdefeat.com/ http://silenceisdefeat.com/ was where I had my last free shell account.