Hn-Gopher: Hacker News Over the Gopher Protocol | Hacker News Reader

Hn-Gopher: Hacker News Over the Gopher Protocol

github.com

53 pointschrissnell19 comments

This is fabulous, of course, but it's a quasidupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310291, and we definitely don't want more than one meta submission on the front page at the same time.

I suggest reposting it in a month or so. Gopher is immortal, after all.

Hmmm, I didn’t really see this one as “meta”, since is a singular GH project. It wasn’t listed in the other story, either. Seems kind of harsh to kill it but okay...

It isn't only the meta aspect but also that it's a piggyback submission, i.e. a spinoff of another. Those tend to get upvotes and diminish variety on the front page. Since front page slots are HN's scarcest resource and the hivemind thrives on variety, we usually moderate follow-up submissions pretty firmly. A better place for correlated links is within the primary thread, where indeed this one is happily situated.

Once everyone's mental caches have turned over a few times, this will make a nice submission in its own right.

I miss gopher, probably somewhat like folks a little older than me might say they miss dial-in BBS’s. All sorts of interesting and arcane content you could find, from a myriad of sources.

Nowadays the most varied content seems to come from only a handful of sources.

Looking at how simple the protocol actually is, I find it hard to believe this protocol actually died because of copyright claims. The structured menu system is certainly something the modern web could use, especially now more and more people are relying on mobile devices. But I could do without the 3270 support :)

Also funny to note we can find discussions dating back to pre-2000 where people rant over how “bloated” the web has become and how we should go back to gopher.

I think the thing is that it was damn "easy" to spin up a half-assed BBS, gopher, or even a early HTML site.

Finally something that has "gopher" in the name and is actually about the gopher protocol.

I've seen a dozen or so submission here in the last year that had "gopher" in the name but where actually about golang.

This is actually a really nice way to read HN. I just tried it in Emacs with https://github.com/ardekantur/gopher.el and it seems to work well!

Something happened to me recently when I was attempting to browse a Gopher site via Firefox...I opened the site, and that site opened another tab to the same site, and so on recursively every ~200mS or so until my computer's RAM was saturated. I had to force terminate Firefox. It was funny because it reminded me of the type of malicious WaReZ that you would see in the 90s.

I also had this happen trying to open a PDF in Firefox recently.

It will happen if:

  about:preferences#applications ->
    Portable Document Format (PDF) ->
      Use firefox

is set. A fix is to set

  about:preferences#applications ->
    Portable Document Format (PDF) ->
      Preview in firefox

The problem can be caused (in Ubuntu 16.04) by selecting Firefox as the system default for PDF viewing.

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313113

> NuSkooler: Don't forget HN over Gopher: gopher://hngopher.com:70/

on "Different ways to read Hacker News" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310291

works like a charm, though the last update was too old for me to get to read this discussion via Gopher.

Ah, the irony...

gopher://hngopher.com/1/live/items/15313838

Don't see the reason why it's not a live proxy

Could be something with how Gopher is effective a file transfer protocol.

Meaning that each entry shown is either a file or a directory.

Thus i am guessing the scarper takes each discussion and convert that into individual text files to be delivered over Gopher, rather than have a custom Gopher server that generates the files on access.

There's no reason why it coudn't be a live site. A live version would require a custom gopher server though, and it looks like they're using Gophernicus. So what they're doing would be analogous to serving static files with NGINX but having the files updated periodically.

There's no technical reason gopher cannot act as a proxy to the web.

Some years ago I started writing a gopher server in Java that did dynamic file serving. This would have been a possible use case.

Ski U Mah!

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