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At work? Try this Hacker News homepage inspired by Node [SFW]

nowjs.com

581 pointsericz97 comments

I would imagine that a fairly large percentage of the Hacker News community probably works for themselves or as freelance contractors. The main problem is not that of hiding your browsing from an employer, but having the self control to work rather than browsing.

With 100 upvotes in the first hour, I would imagine a fairly large percentage of the Hacker News community thinks this is useful. Or (more likely) funny.

It's not just amusing -- it's a clever, unique and interesting solution to a common problem, however pyrrhic[1] the victory might be.

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

That's actually a question I've had for a while.. Someone should start a poll ( I don't know how )

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

This is probably for the sector of HN that hasn't quite gotten their yet.

This is probably aimed at the subset of HN readers that haven't quite made it yet.

Thanks. A much better choice of words.

Reading back over old comments like this reminds me why I don't comment.

> ... having the self control to work rather than browsing.

Yes. I use Google Chrome and I use the StayFocusd App thingy as a bit of a crutch ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfm... ).

It keeps a timer of flagged sites you browse (HN) and when your time is up, you can't browse ANY flagged sites.

For me, it makes taking 5 to 10 minute breaks fun and valuable. Trying to spread an hour of browsing time across 8-10 hours is a great challenge.

Let's find out with this poll... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2393374

First person to go there will see my answer :)

If I worked at a place where I felt that reading HN would get me fired, there would be lots of other problems.

It's not really about reading HN getting you fired, it's just about perception management. People walk behind my desk. I'm salaried and so free to manage my time, but some people like the CTO are kind of peep-ey. I'd rather minimize the number of times someone who might care walks by and I'm doing something non-worky.

Once a bad perception happens, it's hard to counteract it, so it's better to just work a little to manage it. If I have something I can use to kill time while I'm blocked on something, while not worrying about how it looks, I kind of appreciate it.

This is great. But why isn't it async?

The only way I can see to do it is constantly scraping HN's pages(unless there's an API?). On another note, having source code on your screen randomly shift and change large blocks of itself might be suspicious, defeating the purpose of this.

He was joking about the comment "//why isn't this async?" which appears in every entry.

Oh, I seem to have missed that.

There is not an official API. However, there is a partially complete API available from the guy who made iHackerNews at http://api.ihackernews.com/ -- it works well, but stuff like voting is disabled.

I'd like some code that writes itself ;-)

At work? Try working!

Or try getting a new work...

or (better) a new job

(I hope I understand the difference between these words)

'Work' is sometimes used to mean 'office' or 'job'. For example, someone might say 'Why don't you drop by my work after lunch?'

I think that's the usage the parent meant; possibly, it was an intentionally awkward but colloquially valid variation on the grandparent's post.

At work?

Yup, and that means I have a pretty restrictive firewall.

Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to ec2-50-18-7-165.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8081 <----

Same here.

Screenshot, pretty please?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8607628/hn.PNG

Also blocked at work.

http://bricestacey.com/hn.PNG

Dropbox image url blocked? :(

You must work at the same company I do! Imgur isn't blocked for some reason.

Speaking of which, what is the legality of your corporation injecting fake SSL certificates for sites served over HTTPS?

It's 100% legal and quite common. It's their network, (usually) their computers, their time. Mostly organizations doing that are looking for threats to the business and not employee behavior though, of course YMMV.

Get yourself a proxy.

One way to proxy is through ssh. Create an ssh tunnel to a trusted machine and setup your browser to use localhost:<ssh tunnel port>:

http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/weblogs/azul/firefox-ssh-tunne...

This is a decent example. I've seen others that have more options and presumably more functionality.

A few notes from past experiences. Your IT department will completely freak out. Hopefully they'll also be impressed. HR will freak out worse because they won't understand. A good IT employee will come see what the heck is up with your ssh throughput to a weird vps or home box - befriend this person if you haven't already. Average code-monkeys will be impressed, especially if you don't do web development. Finally, it's almost certainly a violation of that 20 page agreement you signed on the first day of work.

Yes, ssh works fine. For your browser: I use tsocks, so I don't have to muck around with browser settings.

I have such a setup for accessing Pandora at work. We are in the UK, so we have to trick Pandora into thinking I'm from the US. Nobody at work cares.

Where I work, we have to ssh tunnel. Our cvs, bug tracker, internal websites and other servers are all located on the other side of the world, and only accessible through a tunnel.

This is what I do to get around blocks on some IM services. I work for a large, well-known and presumably IT-savvy organization. Nobody has confronted me about it yet, which in itself is actually kind of worrying. I half expected an IT SWAT team to rappel through the window after starting the tunnel.

I laughed out loud when I clicked on that link. (Un)fortunately for me, I work from home so I don't have anyone checking over my shoulder.

Good idea. Better idea - YC news from the console:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/follow-hacker-news-from-the-con...

And, for old timers, there's always lynx.

My version in HTML/JS (click the license to toggle HN)

http://autoreverse.s3.amazonaws.com/mit_yc_plain_text.html

I really enjoyed this, its an excellent UX pun. If you could use enough javascript to make it look like an emacs buffer some pointy haired types would be hard pressed to discern between this and actual work.

That being said, if you are truly into employee surveillance (and I know of at least one company that is) then what the screen shows is irrelevant since the http{s} traffic between your work station and the world is just as clear without having to 'walk around and look into your cube.'

Total kudos to the skinning though, I really enjoyed it.

Here's the Github: https://github.com/ericz/CodeHN

There was a similar one for Reddit in C# style. Nice.

That was http://codereddit.com/

Funny, but my boss is also a hacker and now recognizes this =(

Nice! But it doesn't beat the Jabber client embedded as an Excel macro I used while working for a bank.

This reminds me of the "boss key" in video games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key)

Nicely done!

I wonder if someone could learn Node simply by browsing HN in this format for a few weeks.

This is exactly the same way I think, too. I mean, you don't learn everything when not putting effort in but familiarising yourself with a new technology is half the battle.

Ordinary folk (non-programmer's) already have this http://myprogressbar.com/

To read in vim:

  curl http://ec2-50-18-7-165.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8081/ | vim -

Oh, sad. (That people need this). Clever, though.

Thought the same thing. At work I'm encouraged to be active online in places like HN and to read relevant articles and so on.

That's awesome. Does it make you a better coder?

Me too.. I'm sort of the HN-rep for our group.. and yeah, it's good for me as a coder and for us as a group to keep in touch with what's happening in the tech world.

Absolutely. I'm not sure how following the industry and contributing to open source projects could not make you better programmer.

It's awesome. It would be great to be able to read the HN comments like that too.

I spend most of my day talking with customers and reviewing contracts etc.. As much as I would love to, I think if my boss caught me looking at code like this he would fire me !

So we need to come up with one that looks like a contract, maybe?

If I weren't trying to get away and do WBC differentials...

Why would you get fired over browsing websites that fall within the set guidelines by your employer? If a website like HN doesn't fit in there, you got screwed over and time to find a new job.

An employee should have the freedom to browse the web with limited restrictions. If that is not the case then it is a violation of the employees creativity and could hurt the employer in the long run since his/her employees are bound to limited creativity on the job sight.

OMG, this is amazing. Very funny! And you can actually say " there must be a bug here, i just cant find", and read everthing.

"This code is really bad, I need to refactor it because there's so much repetition."

The require('http') has an extra ; after it.

Fixed =]

Someone came up with a very similar solution for Reddit a short while ago: http://codereddit.com. Not to say that this is plagiarism; great minds often think alike.

Yea, managing by treating people as dumb automatons is fundementally flawed.

Especially the "thinking" type of people they desperately try to hire.

Finally something useful hacker news. I have been reading way to much hacker news lately, and my colleagues have started to take notice.

Next month I hope someone could make a html source code theme for hacker news.

Right-click -> View Page Source in Firefox

Cool site. :)

You've got a bug on Ask HN posts, though, where you get a relative URL from HN (/comments/blah) which ends up relative to your site rather than news.yc.

Reminds me of the Ghostzilla project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostzilla

Ha! I see what you did there, eric.

http://i.imgur.com/WAwRx.jpg

This is awesome. Someone port it to my circa 1994 cobol compiler and I'll be set.

This is hilarious. Not sure about useful, but hilarious - yes.

I really wanted to be able to upvote from that interface.

I'd be concerned about getting fired for using node.js..

How about one that looks like a spreadsheet?

TBS did something like that with a 'panic button' http://hiplipblog.com/2010/11/09/hit-the-tbs-panic-button/

Well, they have ads (http://i.imgur.com/JD69B.png) so I don't know if that "panic button" actually works ...

Now I just need a reddit version!

Bravo, this is extremely clever.

node.js looks really sexy, can't wait to become stable enough for a productive system.

Very cool. Helpful too. Thanks!

Freakin' funny. Love it!

this is great! is there a 'next' button? Did I just not see it?

honestly we need a mobile app for hn. somebody?

There are quite a few on the Android market and there is at least one on the iTunes market.

http://ihackernews.com

Thanks a lot. Do you know the IRC channel for hn by any chance? I saw somebody mentioning it but never got to write it down.

Used to be some discussion in #startups @ irc.freenode.net, not sure if it's still active

Awesome. Gonna check it out once i get home. thnx

More active than it ever has been before. Currently 335 people in the channel, and there's been effectively constant conversation for months (a year?) now.

I've only been on HN for a few weeks but I also was hoping for a good mobile app. I was using Flipboard on the iPad at first but I felt cut off without the comments.

Very cool :)

Dude, nice!

Alt-B!

now working for me!

for some reason it's pushing to http://ec2-50-18-7-165.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8081/ and not nowjs.com

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