1
Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server
Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk.
Mike Hoye
"He's occasionally useful, in the way an occasional table is a table." - A former colleague.
- Popular posts
- 9
- Total points
- 1,588
- HN comments
- 1,076
- Rank
- #1,141 personal
Visit exple.tive.org → On Hacker News Dec 2013 – Aug 2025
Software Engineering 6Society, Policy & Culture 3History & Retro Computing 3Systems & Performance 2Networking & Internet 2Life, Learning & Writing 1
2
The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
“The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” –Douglas Adams
3
80x25
Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I…
4
Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
These candidates were assessed on a variety of axes, most importantly Community Participation Guideline enforcement and accessibility, but also including team requirements from engineering, organizational-values alignment, usability, utility and cost. To close out, I’ll talk about the options we haven’t chosen and…
5
Magic Numbers
1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here?
6
Durable Design (2017)
It seems like small thing, but it’s an engineering detail I’ve always had a lot of respect for.
7
Fifty Years of Diff
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the principle of”You touched it last; it’s yours,” authorship was attributed only in the segregated chapter of unofficial…
8
The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
9
Thrashing
I’ve invested in a new odometer to help my car go faster. Accountability is important, and as a driver I believe the most important thing I can do is set measurable, achievable and inspiring goals for the people pushing my car down the road.