HN Office Hours | Hacker News Reader

HN Office Hours

hnofficehours.com

340 pointssahillavingia74 comments

Oh poop. I'm the ezl from the github repo where that source lives. Was hoping we'd have more time to fix it before being embarassed.

HNOH was intended to be a quick weekend project (famous last words). We didn't quite make it in the weekend, so we just let it hang out in his half complete state.

rguzman, smalter, and I have been meaning to put some love into it, but we've been slammed working on what we think will be our real startup, http://www.leasely.com, so we've not really carved out the time.

Its broken and buggy, the calendar features don't work right, and there are issues with creating/canceling recurring office hours. We'd LOVE for this to be used in real life, but its not in a state we can really say we're super proud of yet. We want anyone who wants to be involved to get involved, so if you have hours to donate, please get in touch.

The heavy lifting was done by HN users: rguzman, deuterium, C Allen from NYC (github.com/bitemyapp/, http://bitemyapp.com), and a few others.

So we f-ed up, there are still bugs, and its been on the backburner since we're trying to work on leasely but now we've been embarassed into fixing the bugs so we will.

[edit: linked to C Allen's github and personal page]

Oops, my bad. I saw it in your profile and thought it would be useful to others (I hadn't heard about it before). My apologies!

I don't care so much about the bugs: the big problem with these HN+ sites seems to be that they get an initial boost and then sort of fade away because people forget about them and new people don't find them.

Maybe we can start weekly office hour threads here and we'll all upvote the thread so the newcomers eventually see the service.

For something like this it's not a maybe. I hear about services like this all the time and never hear about them again. If you want this thing to become a part of the hn community someone's going to have to put work into seeing that it hits the front page from time to time.

Otherwise it's often just a flash in the pan. Good luck!

You may also want to set DEBUG=False on the production machine. With DEBUG=True I can see the application's internals.

Just wondering, why'd you opt to only allow those with hn accounts to use the site? I've been lurking here for a long time and had no intent of creating an account (mostly because I blame antics like mine for the decline of reddit so I vowed never to create a hn account, but I digress) but was forced to now to be a part of hnofficehours.

We wanted people who were serious about being involved in the community. Lurkers and trolls weren't exactly a high priority user target for us.

It's an interesting idea technically, though socially people, in the main, find it difficult to pick up the phone and talk to someone they know nothing about (beyond a few tags and a name).

Even showing a Gravatar and making it mandatory to provide a homepage URL or Twitter link would allow users to do a quick bit of "research" on someone they want to call in order to feel more comfortable and to build up a little virtual rapport ahead of time.

Seconded. I'd feel a lot more comfortable chatting people up with questions if I had a peek into the projects they've done before.

And, knowing I'd like to have people call me up with their projects, it's to everyone's advantage to bring the barrier to entry down as much as reasonably possible.

"myusername has not listed his skills."

should be:

"myusername has not listed her skills."

or, more neutrally:

"myusername has not listed their skills."

Edit: I wrote this comment because I'm a woman and it can be a bit jarring to see myusername referred to as 'he'. I wasn't commenting on grammar; just trying to express my thought that if a website is going to refer to someone by gender, then it should be done neutrally unless the option to select a gender is provided.

or, more neutrally: "myusername has not listed their skills."

This is incorrect grammar (the subject and pronoun should agree)! Something like "myusername's skills have not been listed" would be ok.

That's awkward passive voice. How about "myusername has not listed skills"?

What about "myusername has not listed any skills."?

Or "myusername has no skills". That way you encourage people to add their skills.

Shorter: "myusername has no listed skills."

"myusername has listed no skills" sounds better to my ear.

"Their" is totally a gender-neutral 3nd person singular now.

Now? It's been a gender-neutral 3rd person singular for hundreds of years.