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Posted by andros 1 day ago

Finger: the 1971 social network that never died(en.andros.dev)
230 points | 70 commentspage 2
bketelsen 19 hours ago|
When GitHub released their status update feature I re-imagined finger for the modern world: https://github.com/bketelsen/finger I didn't advertise it, nobody cared. But it was fun.
mdwelsh 19 hours ago||
Man! I’m disappointed this article didn’t mention the coolest .plan hack of all time: you could link your .plan file to a named socket so whenever someone fingered you, an arbitrary program would run that spat out whatever output it wanted back to the client. Made for some very fun hacks, like randomly generated text every time you were fingered, or showing things like the current load on the server, etc…
OhMeadhbh 23 hours ago||
I used to work at Convex w/ Jay Finger, whose username was "finger". I thought it was funny I could `finger finger` and it would actually do something. This was back when we had multiple users per machine and in the old days if you didn't provide a domain name, the finger command would default to hitting `localhost`.

Also... I seem to remember more than one security issue with stock `fingerd` at the time. After the second or third flaw in fingerd, I think it was banned (as much as it could be) from machines at Convex. By the time I made it to IBM/AIX, it was a serious no-no to have running on your machines.

crmd 1 day ago||
Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).

Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.

We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!

bananaboy 31 minutes ago||
Haha that was the case at my uni too. I met my (ex) girlfriend on the unix system at uni through `talk` and `to` [1]. A lot of the CS students (me included) had .plans that we would update regularly as sort of proto-blogs. Definitely a lot of finger stalking (and `flon` [1] stalking as well).

[1] https://mewburn.net/luke/software.html

bcraven 1 hour ago|||
This whole thread has me a little puzzled, in the UK 'fingering' is the de-facto term for a sexual act. Is that not the case elsewhere?

"Fingering was huge at my university" is, in the UK, very true, but I feel that's not the context you're using it in!

mnw21cam 1 day ago|||
There was a fellow student at university who put the entire Hunting Of The Snark in their .plan file. It scrolled for a while.
andros 1 day ago|||
I'm dying! Using Telnet to flirt. The father of Tinder XD
xprnio 1 day ago|||
No, that I think would be Match.com or something along those lines. This is like the grandfather or grand-grandfather of Tinder, but not even intentionally.

What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.

mwigdahl 1 day ago|||
In the late 80s, a friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend via email while they were both sitting in the same computer lab.
brcmthrowaway 20 hours ago||
Sounds like Berkeley.
egorfine 4 hours ago||
Impossible to run practically if your site is on CDN. Finger connects to the A record IP directly. Unfortunately.
smalltorch 1 day ago||
I like it.

Just one cell.

Heck, you could probably make a little program for HN to use the about box as the service and achieve the same thing.

andros 1 day ago|
the bare minimum!
zaik 1 day ago||
> No encryption, no headers, no sessions. Pure simplicity.

AI smell?

bargainbin 1 day ago||
Those commas do appear to be a load-bearing seam for the sentence — that’s not guaranteed proof, it’s just strong indication.
computerfriend 5 hours ago||
You mean "smoking gun".
NoDodgeQuestion 23 hours ago|||
disclose: "AI is one more tool. I use it for mechanical tasks: polishing the wording, catching typos, suggesting synonyms, improving or adapting code blocks and translating the article between Spanish and English."
maeln 23 hours ago|||
This is also a very common way to write (hence why LLM tend to regurgitate it so much).
bshimmin 20 hours ago||
It always reminds me of how how Apple write the copy for their landing pages. (A couple of examples from the current MacBook Neo page include "Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo. Four stunning colors. One durable design" and "macOS. Easy to use. Runs all your go-to apps. Puts the fun in functional".) It's quite similar to a rhetorical device called the ascending tricolon, and it's definitely not normally how people speak or write unless they're making a deliberate effort to achieve this effect.
ColinWright 23 hours ago|||
I write like this sometimes, and I've come to deeply resent the fact that AI slop-machines mimic things that make some writers' style "suspect" or "AI smells".

The slop-machines write the way they do because they have been fed material, and they then spew that back out. So any writer whose style looks a little different, eccentric, or unique may find that the slop-machine's stochastic processes lead them into a state where the pool of possible continuations is small enough that the mimicry is strong.

My wife's writings have recently been labelled as "probably AI" ... and we are livid.

But there's nothing we can do except write in a style that is not truly our own, just to avoid the inaccurate "slop identification" algorithms from smearing us.

Vile machines.

/rant

rhplus 6 hours ago|||
The first half of the article seemed fine, but then it appeared padded with AI filler.
jibal 19 hours ago|||
Human smell.
layer8 23 hours ago||
AI was definitely used in the writing; it’s a pity.
dramm 3 hours ago||
I occasionally find myself longing for talk(1) to actually work on Macs.
Multiplayer 1 day ago||
Ahhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.
andros 1 day ago|
Fantastic! How lovely to read these stories. And what influences Id has had on Finger.
ChaseRensberger 19 hours ago|
I started working on a "modern finger alternative" called winger: https://github.com/ChaseRensberger/winger, and was planning to write an article just like this! Glad to see other people interested in this stuff.
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