[mattwright]

I read the site (via hckrnews.com, prefer chronological ordering) nearly every day, and have for a long time.

You may not be surprised at what being known for some of the worst code on the internet does for one's willingness to post things under one's own name. ;) That said, I have a different, older account that I have occasionally posted under when I can't resist temptation.

[kragen]

I want to thank you for Matt's Script Archive. I never actually used it, and I often had to help novice Perl programmers who'd gotten bad ideas from it and were writing terrible code, but in my book that's far better than if they had found the world of programming too forbidding to approach. You're responsible for opening the world of programming to many people, and I appreciate that.

[mattwright]

heh, thanks! :) To be fair, the feedback has always been more positive than negative.

[jart]

Thank you for keeping your site up all these years.

Looking at your website brings me back to my childhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xwY5ciOOC0&t=144s

[kragen]

Although you can't see them, there are four upvotes on my comment, and it seems more reasonable to interpret them as agreement than as praise for my rather pedestrian prose or surprise at the rather quotidian ideas it expresses.

[acuozzo]

> some of the worst code on the internet

After enough time elapses (and it has!) it transitions from being "bad code" to just nostalgia-inducing.

Take a gander at the code over at TUHS. The original vi from UCB, for instance, wouldn't be considered "good code" by anyone's standards in the past 40+ years, but nobody is thinking poorly of Bill Joy, Mary Ann Horton, or anyone else involved.

What amazes me most is: How the hell did you maintain interest in keeping the site alive after so much time had elapsed? 1995 was so different from e.g. 2009 and I imagine the same was true of you.

[mattwright]

It doesn't take much to keep the site alive -- I've just had to transition it across hosts a few times, but otherwise it just continues to sit there. There is a tiny amount of revenue that still comes through it, but mostly I just like the idea that it still exists, and I think others do too. I suppose I also don't want to let go of my fifteen minutes of fame. :)

These days, the thing that most impresses my nephews is that I posted the second ever video to YouTube (college roommate was a cofounder). I have long since lost control of the channel (it was taken during a transition from old YouTube accounts to Google accounts when someone guessed the simple password). Since hacker news can sometimes be the support site of the internet I'll throw it out there -- if anyone has a contact at YouTube that can return the channel to me, that would be awesome. I imagine it is long-since gone.

[McGlockenshire]

Despite the imperfections in your work, you still contributed something amazing to the internet. Even the imperfections ended up helping people. Thank you.