Show HN: Findr, an omegle like chat made with Node.js, socket.io and angularJS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Findr, an omegle like chat made with Node.js, socket.io and angularJS

findr.mybluemix.net

52 pointskickling52 comments

My partner made their name '<script>alert("xss");</script>'

Good effort but didn't work.

Short story: I gave this a try not expecting much. I got matched with a person named "Lenny". The conversation started off fairly straight forward:

>Lenny: hello there

>hnperson: whats up

>Lenny: How are you doing today?

>hnperson: Not bad, yourself?

>Lenny: I'm doing beautifully

Having tried all the features I wanted to try, I was ready to end the conversation and get on with my work when Lenny asked:

>Lenny: I'm a recruiter for Facebook.

>Lenny: Are you happy with your current work?

This was a bit of a pleasant surprise, as I just entered the interview process with a few companies including Google and was planning to reach out to FB sometime today.

Unfortunately, before we were able to exchange contact info, Lenny left the chat in the middle of typing (presumably an accident?). I just wanted to share my Tuesday morning experience, and if Lenny is out there, I'd love to continue the conversation! If not, thanks for sharing this Show HN :)

Just had three disconnects in 5 minutes in different chats while people were typing.

Weird and sorry to hear. Could be due to them being on mobile and leaving their internet app. Have not experienced this otherwise.

Chatted with a few. Everything was going well until I said "Are you here from HN?". I was greeted with "Your chat partner has left".

I was on with Cloudy who wanted to know if it was open source. I said not sure and then s/he disconnected !

Chatted with Jesus. Short conversation, guess he's a busy guy. Nice tool though, well done.

Fun chat app, Joakim. Tried it out for a bit and chatted with a nice person for a few minutes.

As others have said, some minor scrolling things. Two other tiny bits:

* Words wrap around in the middle of the word rather than getting moved to the next line, so it's not very 'pretty'.

* When your chat partner is typing, it fluctuates too easily from 'x is typing...' and 'you are chatting with x' in the middle of their conversation. Maybe set the timeout for that message to be a little higher?

Thank you for your input, appreciate it. The word wrapping is a problem that is now fixed. Maybe a longer timeout is a good idea, but I think a too long timeout would be confusing? Maybe the user only writes something and then deletes it and it will look like as if he/she is typing for 3 seconds?

The nice thing about seeing 'x is typing...' is that you know they have read your message and have begun to respond. I think a lot of movement from 'typing' to not is more distracting than anything. When I'm in a conversation, I really just want to know that my chat partner has read my message and is trying to respond.

Cool chat! Fast!

Somethings that I saw:

1. Horizontal scrolling is a bit boring (when you text a long message)

2. Automatic Vertical scrolling is not always working

But it still awesome :-) congrats!

I have noticed. Really annoying to not be able to make these changes without disconnecting all current users..

Humm why they get disconnected?

Because you do a node refresh on the server on every Git Push?

You could make 2 repos to avoid that: frondend + backend

Then you could update frontend without disconecting users... On backend update you'll still get this issue of disconecting on Git pushs, there is no fast-and-easy solution, I think.

Besides the chat stopped working, chatting with a random HN member / developer was a very nice experience.

Does HN have a IRC channel ?

I had a very nice chat with a fellow developer from NL, which was fun.

Chatted with a fellow HN user from Germany! It was nice chat to make my day :) Peace!

It is worth noting that this kind of chat is fundamentally vulnerable to MitM attack: anyone can just open two chat windows and copy all messages from one to the other and vice versa, even by hands or using browser automation.

How would I tackle this?

Just had a good chat with "myself". I learned a lot about myself.

That's the first time i've got to know some people from HN. Awesome.I hope it stays popular and becomes self-fueling. Is there some place else where HN people chat(other than HN itself)?

I look forward to seeing the answer to this on the FP tomorrow :D

fingers crossed! :)

HTTPS?

HTTPS should just work. Just add s to http in the URL. You can expect a cert issued to IBM. Background on my blue mix:

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2014/06/introducing-myblue...

Mods, can someone please change the submission URL to HTTPS?

'word-break: normal;' would be a good backup to 'break-word' which is not actually working. Also, why do I need to reenter my name every time?

You are right, it is a bit weird. The only point is that it makes you less willing to end a conversation.. But really i was just lazy/not thinking about it. Putting it on The list!

Looks great! Simple and just works. How long did it took to get this done? I've been thinking to just make something like this to learn node and socket.

I started making it maybe.. thursday? I had previous knowledge in node.js and a bit of knowledge in socket.io (did the tutorial) but this project was a perfect way to learn some more socket.io and also angularJS for me:)

Cool and smooth app, got nice chat with Dan. Good luck.

Will restart the server in 5 minutes.. i hope you finish chatting. I am introducing a way to broadcast messages as ADMIN so that I can prepare you!

Thank you for all the comments! I've had a great time chatting with some of you. New features will be added:)

This is really cool. I might use this sort of stack for building my ideal, 2-player, deep collaboration app.

Is this open source? or are you planning to make it a business?

I am not plannning to make it a business. And even if so, I wouldn't forbid anyone to use my code.

Looks good, any github?

It's on github now:

https://github.com/mrkickling/findrchat

Looks like this is your first project on Github; impressive stuff!

Thank you!

A one page (server!) app. Congratulations on getting it going !

Organizing it in different files wouldn't be a bad idea maybe:p THANKS!

Awesome job, met people from all over the world inside the HN community, thanks a lot for this!

Not bad at all.. a few problems with the scrolling though :)

I'm aware. Will make changes when there is less people on:)

Found some people to chat, mostly from here which is cool.

Hi, Jason

Restarting the server now..

Are you running the app on the free plan of bluemix?

I have an internship at IBM atm so I get to use 2gb of space for 200 days or something. I don't know what's included in the free plan.

I Made a chat in 2 hours for communicating with GPRS devices. It's not hard anymore

Great job :) care to share? No reason to be snarky towards others.

It currently contains proprietary code. But there will be a later version open sourced.

I didn't mean to be snarky though, in my eyes, it was just a fact

If it supported video and used github logins, it could be a site where you can bounce ideas off other users. maybe stop github users without repos to use it to prevent nudity.

It's trivial to fork or create some random thing using just web UI, and since you are already registering at GitHub, this wouldn't be that effective,I think.

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