Absolutely. All day, every day.

There is no better way to coordinate. Clients for every platform are available. You can have new tickets, bugs, announcements piped into the channel. Discuss everything instantly and in real time, while leaving a log for those who are offline, highlighting them when necessary.

Running your own server is perfectly feasible. And if you connect to a known ircd with SSL forced, it's reasonably secure. There are even OTR plugins for many popular clients (♥irssi♥). There's also FiSH but that's on the inconvenient end of the paranoid spectrum.

It is perfect if people you're going to communicate with are proficient computer users.

How do you handle travelling between devices though? I find it virtually impossible to function on IRC with the gaps in between from when I'm offline, but still haven't found a workable way to keep a persistent session going across devices (work, home, mobile.)

Could you write (or reference) blog posts of that general set up? Sounds interesting.

For years and years on different networks. For the past 7 or 8 years on Freenode.

Most, if not all, of the big open source projects have channels on Freenode. They are excellent places to connect with other developers (people). Not only are they just great places to get involved with other developers, they're also great places to talk to professionals using the technologies every day. You can learn best practices and industry standards by idling in the channels and watching questions get answered.

In terms of a "representative YC channel," there's not an official Hacker News or YC channel I'm aware of. However, there is #startups on Freenode that some have considered a sort of unofficial Hacker News IRC channel. We're a pretty active and lively bunch and the topics range from startups, funding, and entrepreneurship to programming, good beer, and current events. Just like all decent IRC channels, and you're welcome to come hang out any time.

I use IRC all day every day. And with bitlbee [0] you can even use all your Jabber/AIM/Twitter... accounts via IRC.

[0] http://bitlbee.org/

I've been on IRC non-stop since 1997; it's where the majority of my closest friends and I keep in touch. I also run an IRC channel for the class I teach, and it's the primary communication means for most students.

As for YC, there's the ##startups channel on Freenode, unofficially.

I think the only time I haven't been on IRC since I discovered it in 1991 is the 5 years I spent in prison :)

For an IRC-related crime?

I believe he's MinorThreat aka Chris Lamprecht, which means his sentence wasn't for his computer related crimes oddly enough.

Hans Reiser still wins this competition though :)

I've been on irc channels for the past 16 years, basically right from my first year online.

I've found my closest friends through irc and we are partnering regularly on business related subjects. Best medium to stay connected. The WhatsApp Groups are what kids these days use from what i hear.

At our company we use Slack [1] all the time for chatting and keeping in touch. It's basically just an IRC front end. (Slack is co-founded by Stewart Butterfield of Flickr)

For me the big advantage is that it "just works" (web interface + mobile app) for everyone in the company whereas there is overhead to getting IRC setup. We had tried IRC previously and it didn't take. It also doesn't hurt that Slack looks sexy.

I think that IRC has really stuck around because it somehow really captures asynchronous group discussion, but also simultaneously keeps the barrier to participation really low. It makes total sense to me that the IRC community is still so strong.

[1] https://slack.com/

Same here, the ui is definitely a huge selling point for slack. IRC just looks terrible, every client I have tried looks bad and connections are unreliable. Slack is a great solution for that.

I have messaged with on IRC with at least 4 people from sibling comments in this very thread, and learned most about technologies I'm using (and much more) exactly there - in IRC.

IRC is awesome.

I use it in a very limited capacity of keeping in touch with people I knew in the 90s on IRC. But I drop out of doing even that every now and then when I need to focus on other things, because IRC tends to be a drag on my productivity sometimes.

I also try to sit in freenode channels that intersect my interests, but I'm not anywhere near as active in them as I was back in the day. But that's where all the good developer-related channels are now.

I do use IRC at work daily. I had to learn Qt/QML for my new job and since school I've always thought that IRC was the best place/platform to learn a new technology. And once again in this case it has proven clearly invaluable. A lot of the QT devs are on IRC daily and help newcomers. Also just hearing about bugs, new patches, ideas and discussion help greatly to increase my knowledge of the platform. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me a lot more time without IRC to be up and ready at the start of this job.

I idle in a few rooms on Freenode and am active in a few more. Some open source projects have excellent rooms, others have useless ones. Depending on your interests, your mileage will vary greatly.

I use IRC daily at work and also at home (these days I only frequent 1-2 channels at home). IRC is still pretty popular here in Finland among certain people.

Freenode is still heavily used and is worth frequenting to both meet people with similar interests and get help on a specific project.

I'm on IRC, but most of the idling-intensive IRC channel content is not something I'd want in a purely professional setting. Per-project IRC seems mainly on freenode. EFnet is mainly for hate and trolling and lulz.

Hello,

I have a client, spend some hours per week on IRC. Yes, there's great support, extremely skilled developers in various areas can be reached online.

I use weechat (text-based) or Textual (OSX GUI).

All the time - I'm part of a community that has been on IRC for almost 15 years, and IRC is also great for various developer tools/topics of interest

It's been invaluable to me in keeping up with the cryptocurrency scene the last year or two.

I do.

Yes.