Show HN: I built a fake VS Code to browse live cricket score in office
cric-code.pankajtanwar.in
cric-code.pankajtanwar.in
Pankaj took my VSCode for Remote OK and modded it for cricket scores. Great work and it even still says index.php, hah.
If you'd like to see the original from a few weeks ago: https://remoteok.io/vscode
And it's not 'inspired by' the other project. Lots of the HTML seems to have been copied verbatim into a React project, with very specific long CSS strings from the original site.
Hilariously, even the tiny 'Inspired by' section at the end is itself stolen from the original site, which credits another site as inspiration (that site is genuinely different, emulating MS Word rather than VS Code).
It was very courteous of u/pieterhg to respond the way he did, put it that way. ("Even still says index.php!")
> Inspiriation and some of the images from this HN post.
Which points to the Show HN by RemoteOK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472170
Not sure whether it's enough to show attribution.
<!-- Checkout live matches, recent matches and upcoming matches at one place. Built by Pankaj Tanwar. -->
to this:
<!-- Checkout live matches, recent matches and upcoming matches at one place. CricCode is a port made by Pankaj Tanwar, based on RemoteOK's VS Code site, which was built by Pieterhg. -->
where "Remote OK's VS Code Site" links directly to their VS Code site (not their "Show HN"): https://remoteok.io/vscode
I'm sorry to the OP, but you just can't plagiarise someone else's work like this and then write a fake diary about how you built it yourself (https://pankajtanwar.substack.com/p/i-built-a-fake-vs-code-t...).
By way of contrast, the 'Inspired by' on the original acknowledges its debt to Geektyper (https://geektyper.com/word/), an MS Word clone so different that no one would guess at the inspiration. That is an appropriate level of inspiration for such a small acknowledgement hidden right at the bottom.
Neither one is trying to make money directly off of this, what's the big deal?
It's staggeringly brazen. The only true sentence in his post is "It makes me look like I'm doing real work".
But I also clarified things in a sibling comment.
"Good designers copy, best designers steal"
I don' know the source though. But this immediately strike me as soon as I see your comment. :)
Seems a shame that the author of the majority of this work (pieterhg) didn't get a lot of credit here or the same level of interest in their original Show HN.
EDIT: For others, here are quick links to the Hacker News, MS Word, Google Docs and VS Code themes for pieterhg's original:
This was first posted 45 days ago by pieterhg:
Show HN: I made a fake VS Code so you can browse remote jobs in your office (remoteok.io)
Might also need the reverse of this, HN dressed up as a job search site. For when your parents keep nagging you to look for a job, but you just want to browse HN.
This might be just a fun joke. At my previous job we had a company-wide shared folder with some stealth Excel games [1], my boss loved them.
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-iconic-games-recreated-micro...
I practiced highlighting all the fields, switching apps, and pasting the data. You could only play back at maybe 3x original speed. Then I started my macro running. I had estimated that I could have done it manually in about three days; the macro would do it in about 30 hours and not screw up any of the data along the way. Told the supervisor what I'd done and asked to be paid for two. She said yes and offered me a job on the spot; too bad I was starting med school in a month.
I wrote a program from scratch on my TI-82 to calculate the answers and my math teacher said "You wrote the program yourself, so you can use it during the exams. You still have to show your work manually, but it sounds great to check your work."
This was a pivotal moment in my path to becoming a software engineer. :)
OCD: The idea of having some apps dark and some light (some apps, let alone websites don't support dark themes) feels horrible.
Sun: shining bright from the back, straight into my monitor, good luck reading anything with a dark theme.
Probably most PCs were in offices at the time so it makes sense I guess.
When we look into why we figured out that it was a few guys, working insane hours, who where streaming Champions League while working. Technically not allowed at the UK office, but the decision from the Danish IT Manager: "Fuck it! If they're still at work they should at least be allowed to watch a game".
On the other hand, new age product companies/startups are similar to Silicon Valley.
I used to work for a startup and that culture was a lot of fun at first but the "blow investor money on catered lunches every day but you can't hire more engineers" mentality seemed very childish to me. I learned that I like the middle ground.
Good for you!
But do you really not realise that other people work under less favourable conditions than yourself?
It's weird for me that someone with technical skills to build a proper web application would have to be subject themselves to the latter one.
This is good because you can have the window open all day on one of your screens without it obviously being not work. Cricket.com.au has a similar option which emulates a spreadsheet https://live.cricket.com.au/bossmode/2836/51513/western-aust...
Let's talk about males in the workplace, and web filters.
Isn't it funny how web filters almost never block sports sites?
I worked with a woman who raged about this and was convinced that "People magazine is blocked, but ESPN isn't? It's because men built web filters!"
Interesting perspective.
In the case of PhD Comics is clearly an inside joke (I guess). For other tools I find it a clearly desired yet not the most honest feature.
Reminds of all the old apps/games that had boss key/buttons -- I wonder if there's a gallery of a bunch of them somewhere? Creative 'fake' docs and spreadsheets etc kinda funny
Even found that ESPN Australia had one built into their CricInfo page back in 2015 that went to a fake spreadsheet screen with live scores embedded in the cells! https://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/11/remember-the-boss-key-from...
A comedy at it's finest.
For context, the original fake VSCode was made by Pieter Levels ( https://remoteok.io/vscode ) - which isn't mentioned in this project.
The joke is that his main product, remoteok, was a single index.php file for a long time.
In a world where people spend too much time thinking of tech stacks, the dude was banking on a single php file.
I don't think that is any different than any other remote worker. You both work at home and live your life. As long as the work gets done, who cares how the rest of their time is spent, or even when they do it?
I don't live in the UK..
For the 2018 World Cup my department repurposed several meeting room TVs to stream matches and folks could gather in those rooms to work while watching the games.
Work still got done on time.
At the same time, a friend who worked down the street forwarded me an all-team memo from his boss that warned employee sick day requests would be "extra scrutinized" during the World Cup. So yeah.. Leadership.
All leave applications were cancelled :)
They had to pay a pretty hefty license for the whole headcount of the office, and they whole thing started because one team leader wanted to watch EPL. It was a pretty great place to work tbh.
After the first day, the rest of the company complained enough about the speed of the internet that we had to block it on the firewall.
That’s why you stream it to only one conference room (or a small number). By making it explicitly approved for those rooms, you can limit the people who are doing it more clandestinely. Then you only take the bandwidth hit for a smaller number of streams.
Even if you don’t want to encourage it, the better managers would accept that it’s going to happen and then try to minimize the impact.
The CBS online stream even has a “boss mode” with a fake spreadsheet.
On a whole I think it was probably neutral or even a positive for productivity. If my project manager wanted to talk through something he'd usually appear over my shoulder and just say "pool?". Similarly other people on the team when struggling with something would do the same and use the time to loosely discuss the issue (often in rubber duck fashion) or just take a few minutes to think about something else which was often enough to get things moving again.
At previous employers me and my team would sometimes do a few rounds in a team pve videogame at lunch, without anyone ever having an issue.
These things, if done in moderation, builds good team cohesion and spirit.
We used to have a table at Oracle, inherited from the SUN acquisition. Managers never used it, maybe because they were mostly women. We had some furious tournaments though, where I discovered that French people play it with balls made of cork - for a slower and more technical game.
There is little to no coherent speech that happens during those intense 5-8 minutes
Ofcourse the lunch break was ours to do with as we pleased. That wasn't the point.
Rather the point was that no one ever raised any issue with a group of the professional developers playing video games inside the office. And sometimes for longer times than just lunch.
That does speak to the type of people who were managers there. They realized that this was a close group of friends who were honing social and coordination skills that would feed back positively into the team's work.
I advice leaving the snarky tone at the door next time. It can usually only backfire on you.
And if someone doesn't get that, just replace that with "Here in Germany" or "Here in the USA" and you instinctively understand the notion of nationalism this transpires.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=86181
https://www.dlineradio.co.uk/articles/building-an-am-transmi...
In high trust environment nobody cares what you are doing -- you are trusted to manage your time to produce results best you can. You are given a challenge and you figure your way to deliver results. We are all adults and we understand different people work differently but most people are unable to keep focus uninterrupted for 8h straight, day after day.
In a low trust environment management thinks they can improve productivity by banning activities that have nothing to do with work.
The reality is that banning everything else than work is not causing people to do more work. It just causes them to work longer but slower. Or be more inventive about avoiding work. Or just staring at the screen with your mind blank (I have been there). Also not care to manage your time better, look out for risks, improvements, etc. And then if they are any good quit after 2 years so they don't get bored to death.
Do you really want to pay your developer by the hour? This is just as stupid as paying by LoC.
You would never expect this level of micromanagement for sales because it's clear when salespeople are or are not performing. Who cares if a salesperson is only working 10 hours a day if they're bringing in more revenue than any of their peers? Everyone in leadership can see that.
However when an engineer is a top performer that's not necessarily clear. What people see are the bugs that get created, deadlines met vs not met, how quickly inquiries are responded to, etc...
I thought a lot about entire topic. I think excuse comes from our internal necessity to think as being better than others. I mean, if I was promoted to manager it must necessarily mean I am better than others?
And so a lot of managers persist telling that excuse to themselves (even if not consciously) that they are better and so can be trusted to do things but other people that are "under" them aren't.
Some other thoughts:
* Trusting somebody necessarily means becoming vulnerable to them. Yes, if you trust an employee it is possible they are going to cause damage. The solution is not to stop trusting employees but rather fire employees who can't be trusted.
* Trust does not mean blind trust. You can still trust people to make good decisions but then expect them to be able to explain it and to verify these decisions. An example of low trust: require lengthy process to approve software license for developer tools. High trust: allow developers to get any piece of software they need, automatically. As them to write down rationale when they request the license. If you request software honestly and can explain what it is needed for you don't have to worry and you can get it immediately.
* I believe most people want to do good. But when they are not being trusted they rationalize doing bad work (and sometimes they are really prevented from doing good work altogether).
* I have worked for a lot of companies, most with very low trust environments by some with high trust. Observing new employees joining taught me that people change when they join the company to fit the culture. People who join high trust environment mostly try to be have responsibly (within their abilities). People who join low trust environment mostly become automatons who feel they can't change anything (because they are not trusted/expected to do so).
* If you are a senior leader of a non-trivial organization, you have no other way than to put trust in your employees because there is no way you can enforce/verify everything. In low trust environments leadership puts trust in their management. In high trust environments senior leaders put trust in all their employees and use managers to detect and remedy faults in the process.
I cannot focus on the task for more than 10-20 minutes, then I take few minutes break, sometimes more. If I couldn't do that, I wouldn't get any work done because quickly my brain would sort of shut down.
I've been through this many times - manager would get me to a meeting room and say "people complain that you are browsing the internet rather than working". I'd say "do I deliver on time?" the answer would be "yes". That would be the end of it. I would also say he or she should talk with those who reported this, whether snooping on other workers is a good use of their time.
Nonetheless nice project! I remember doing similar thing to browse Reddit ages ago ;-)
Reminds me of those old MS-DOS games that often had a "boss key" which switched the game display to some fake spreadsheet.
> the fact that you had time to build it means you need to keep the job at the company you work with ;)
Browsing the score might mean a glance at those numbers every fifteen minutes or so - probably about the same impact on productivity as checking the time.
> The last timeless Test was the Fifth Test between England and South Africa at Durban in 1939,[13] which was abandoned as a draw after nine days of play spread over twelve days, otherwise the England team would have missed the boat for home. [1]
[0] - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=KavinDes...
From tennis or football games to text adventures, there would be so many great options to give the mind a quick break from work.
And if you have to be in VS Code, why not a plugin or curl script which outputs to a file, which is then in a VS Code tab.
Can't remember the name though, but it was on a Mac in the 90ies sometime so before Mac OS X.
Next step, create a VBA macro that drops the results into Excel worksheet, for those more tasked with Office activities.