Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users

coffeehouse.chat

229 pointsamadeuspagel150 comments

Love this. I do think there should be more opportunities to connect people across the world. I think if more people connected directly there be less faith in the filtered messages we get from our media and politicians.

To the creator of this: - Thanks for creating!

- A small recommendation: maybe a little text paragraph on the landing page explaining it might warm people up a bit as to what to expect. Doesn’t need to be much and doesn’t need to be paragraphs of marketing babble. Actually, please def no to marketing babble… lol. But I think we’re conditioned to get a little explanation before jumping in.

Not a critique at all! I love this. And its just my 2 cents.

Agreed! I ended up talking with someone halfway around the world for an hour.

We discussed what we did, some interesting differences... and it also turned out that everyone everywhere has at least a few gripes about their project management system (whatever it is).

We're all more alike than we are different. :) Thanks to author for making this!

PS: If HNers are uncomfortable talking to strangers via voice, maybe write out a script with some discussion prompts. It's a learnable skill, and something you can absolutely get better at! (Said as someone who started with crippling fear of talking to strangers, into my 20s)

Agreed.

If voice chat isn’t your thing: talkkshopp.com

If the thought of voice chats with randomly selected strangers didn't terrify me slightly, I think this would be an awesome idea. For the more out-going among us, can imagine some cool conversations and ideas coming out of this

... really dare not use this service, might stumble upon some guy who just burned 5-10mil of VC money, which would feel very awkward.

I honestly have no idea what I'd talk to someone who burnt more money than I'd ever have in my life about

The weather?

could ask about their ketamine hookup

I'd ask if they now feel it would've been better spent on public services

Public services will eat millions and barely do anything with the money except line people's pockets. For some reason it's just more expensive when the government does it.

maybe "barely doing anything" is better than doing nothing, though?

Below a certain threshold, throwing money at public services is just going to get it diluted. This may not necessarily be a bad thing on its own, but when even the smallest public project seems to cost way more, you're never going to know if your $10M investment helped, or if it just went into someone's paycheck.

Are private projects better? I've never heard of a private alternative to SNAP or Medicare or Section 8, nor any interest in creating such programs.

True - the UK's NHS was a product of people realising there would never be universal health care if it was left to the market.

Opex is a valid form of public spending. Paying people properly ensures they remain as public servants.

The VC is never going to spend the money on services for the public good. They will always gamble 1x money on a handful of startups, hoping that 1 hits and returns 10x, rinse and repeat. So one can choose to take the money for a chance at success, or not, but public services was never the opportunity cost.

Why would that feel awkward?

What about if they're converting it into success?

Failure is fine

This, too. It's part of the state space exploration algorithm.

Slightly? I opened the page before completely processing the title and panicked like a boy forgetting to close his porn before bringing his laptop to school. Don't just invade my personal space like that.

Hahahah same exact experience here. Clicked the tab and it was like touching a stove as my brain caught up with the title - noped out immediately. Now reading through comments while trying to work up the guts to try it.

Edit: I did it. I spoke with three people and it was really cool actually; thanks for sharing this.

I'm in the same boat.

I'm also very interested in talking to random HN users, but my hesitation comes from the fact that if I start a chat I'll really commit because I want to make it meaningful.

I guess now I'm doing a cost-benefit analysis whether I should try this out while it's gaining popularity, or I should continue what I was working on.

Omegle for ultra-introverts

I'll just put it out there that if you start talking with a random stranger, "... okay, I've got to go now. It's been nice talking with you!" is a perfectly acceptable kernel panic. :)

lol

>a perfectly acceptable kernel panic

I love this and I can't wait to use it.

I just see a "start" button when I open the page. What made you panic?

Yeah that's what I got

It'd be cool if it randomly threw 10% of the users directly into the chat.

I saw the start button and got spooked, I'm glad it immediately didn't put me in a chat as soon as I opened the page though...

Are you afraid they might hurt your feelings? Or show you up in some way? Or sexually harass you?

Or have to deal with this attitude

As someone who grew up with OG Xbox live, I find this comment pretty funny. HN crowd’s got nothing on early COD

I went to the site, and backed out too. But after reading all these comments took it as a challenge. :)

I’ll admit that I’m prob more extroverted than the norm on here but it was great. I meant to just jump on, say hi, and jump off. But ended up chatting for a while. It was great!

Hahaha, the comments on this really make me feel right at home, in this family/subculture.

We all long for such kind of close interaction with like-minded and bright people, but are a bit of the socially awkward kind :))) luv u guys

Matching was fast (almost instant). I just had a brief chat with a HN'er from China who is currently in Japan. I am in Australia. That was fun. Well done to the author of this project!

Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36179883 - June 2023 (4 comments)

Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31957389 - July 2022 (20 comments)

Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31376125 - May 2022 (6 comments)

Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179355 - Feb 2022 (123 comments)

It’s times like these I’m so glad we allow resubmissions. This is such cool piece of work and the HN-specificity of the audience means that the only real path to success is via a submission that makes the front page

Interesting. I think text chats would be a nice addition as they allow asynchronous conversations which would be beneficial.

Fully agree. If this was a text first, voice if you want thing that would be much nicer and accessible too.

Isn't that... what we have here at Hacker News already?

Honestly I wouldn't mind a good ol' fashioned global group chat. I know there are moderation issues there, but I miss IRC and want more of that feeling elsewhere.

I should just go reinstall my IRC setup...

Actually, that's a good point - why is there no HN IRC?

There is a #hackernews on Libera.chat, and I believe I've seen a #ycombinator (or something similar) somewhere. No idea how official they are. But every HN-based community I've seen was a ghost town outside HN itself.

Um no? Not one on one, not instantaneous, nobody expects an answer to any reply.

Surprise!!!

╲(｡◕‿◕｡)╱

Well-played, sir/madam.

I agree partially but I think a lot of people - myself included - don’t necessarily check back to their own comments. And there’s no notification- which I’m sure is a feature more than a bug.

But I do think a chat would be a nice addition.

Sooo you could check back?

I guess your texts being public is a matter that affects the nature of conversation. But I'm sure we could hack this together with a "post your phone numbers" post

There is https://hnreplies.com/

there used to be a site like hnchat

Very cool - I chatted with someone in NYC, another in Switzerland, and a third in Mumbai, and a few others I didn't ask where they were - there are fascinating people everywhere!

How'd you guys end the conversations & after how much time?

I find it difficult to break off conversations because if I meet a new human being I'm interested in I'll want to meaningfully connect and perhaps form a light friendship.

“Well it was great meeting you, going to try and chat with some other folks now!”

I talked with someone over an hour. It was great!

Instead of thinking about the speed bump, you could also just climb over the speed bump. it's not a mountain as it might seem :)

Definitely skeptical at first but I can attest that I've had some interesting conversations already. Have to say I prefer this over to text chats by a mile. Very fun start to my morning

Daniel from "mid-western Germany", very nice to have virtually met you. I'm "the guy from southern Sweden".

Pretty darn cool service, this. Thx so much to the creator for showing this to HN.

Never thought I'd do a Omegle-like encounter with anyone. But here I am having done it and feeling quite enriched by the experience :D

I also met Daniel!!! Unfortunately my phone/mic/whatever crapped out right we started talking about genealogy

This is really neat! I thought I'd try it out before bed (in Japan) and I was talking to someone from Dallas (hi, if you see this!), but it disconnected us. :(

In the age of replicated AI voices and security it seems like this would be a bad idea. How much voice sample is needed to decently replicate someone's voice?

See whisper-speech posted yesterday.

WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system built by inverting Whisper https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39036796

Anyone could record you for this purpose at any time.

But first they'd have to sneak into my house and somehow trick my into talking.

Or, you know, find your LinkedIn or phone number and offer you an incredible work opportunity.

Or have you visit a convenient website that streams your voice to the internet?

No one could be that dastardly.

and do what with this exactly?

technically the author could record all audio here, and use it for model training or snoop into the conversation

Impersonate your voice.

Think of the old scam where someone texts you and says they're your granddaughter and they're stuck somewhere and need an urgent money transfer. In the old days the advice would be: call your granddaughter and have get confirm the story. But now with AI tech your granddaughter could call you up and deliver the scam in her own voice.

Well tuned zero shot models can use 5 seconds of audio, but the results aren't perfect. You won't capture prosody information, for example.

The human voice isn't as unique as you might think, though. You can encode a lot of information about a voice in about 100Kb.

I wish I had a decent way to calibrate my paranoia about stuff like this.

I don't want to miss life's nice opportunities just because I was too worried about this kind of thing. But I don't want to be too lax either.

So you also don’t go to the shopping centre because they could have a mic recording you?

as it pertains to this discussion, No i don't think people are reliably snooping my voices in a shopping centre. But I do go to shopping centers.

I'd rather not sit down with a stranger without knowing them and in a format where I can be recorded. so Omegle would've been out.

That said if this site had less anonymity and maybe a registration I would be more comfortable with it.

I am absolutely terrified of informal "coffee chats"... One company I worked for had a policy to do it "few hours every week" with some random person.. completely hated that.

Some people would be happy if they're paid just to talk to somebody _few hours_ during worktime about non work-related stuff.

The kind of people who work in HR (which is why these schemes get set up)

I get the impression that many extroverts see introversion as a flaw / limitation that should be corrected, rather than an equally valid personality type that they should accommodate.

Apologies if I'm painting with an unfair or inaccurately broad brush. I may be vastly overestimating the prevalence of that attitude.

Whoah! Thanks for this. Was fun to connect with another hacker over morning coffee.

I just shared a nice chat with a gentleman from Detroit working on some interesting LLM stuff. If you see this, great to meet you!

hey was me! Nice to meet you too.

Hey, cool! Would love to stay connected. Feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn (but no worries if not!): https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuamcginnis/

This worked great, it would be cool if HN added a button for it in the header!

What audio system does this use?

Is it E2EE directly between you and the other person?

The website doesn't say much before you click the Start button. Everything has tradeoffs, and implementation details matter.

I have no means to check this page on my mobile now, but if it was me making it I would have used WebRTC, plus some backend to pair random peers. I think E2EE can be implemented on the stream.

Spoke with folks in Brazil, Switzerland and Minnesota. So much fun.

This is an awesome idea.I just had a brief chat with a HN'er from Ontario (hi, if you see this) and I am from India. Kudos, to the author of this project.

I talked with the one who build it over it, it’s great. He’s a very nice guy and we had a great conversation.

I if an hacker news inspired discord server would be a good idea.

Tangent: anyone else remember the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33217395 post? A handful of HN people were on the CB radio on https://4m3ric4.com and were voice chatting and musing about what if something like that were added to HN.

It'd be nice to add some bell notification when someone gets connected. I just can't stare the screen all the time.

can we have a version for the ones with "phone call phobia"?

What would that look like?

The same, but without matching

@dang you should add it on top bar, pls?

Why only voice chat?

I assume because video is hard and/or expensive

Shouldn’t be with WebRTC, right?

I haven’t used it a lot but the scalability issues I’ve heard of with are due to the fact that p2p _group_ video is an n^2 problem by its nature.

It is quite simple with p2p WebRTC, like Jitsi did that, and perhaps still do.

No pics of a problematic nature, more anonymous (thus more approachable) I'd wager..?

yeah, what about people who cannot talk?

What would you propose? Video? What about people who are invisible? Just because you haven't seen anyone as such doesn't mean they don't exist.

He probably meant text. Which is what I had in mind when I asked the question too. Text is way cheaper than audio and you can opt in audio after an text ice breaker.

Wow. Mute or deaf people are real, invisible people are not.

Maybe an IRC channel would be good. Libera (nee freenode) would seem like a natural home.

Yes. Text to a random person, and, maybe ask for optional keywords to match on, for slightly less random.

Great chats. Privacy policy? Lol. Also, this is probably a good source of LLM training data.

How does it know we are HN users?

Neat stuff, this really throws me back to just chatting with random people on TeamSpeak/Mumble which is a thing I haven't done in a while. I'd of course appreciate being able to read the app's source code, though.

Is it surprising or unsurprising to see such amount of social anxiety in the comments?

For me it's surprising. Based on the regular discussions I read on here, I assume that most are accomplished and confident.

You'd probably call me accomplished and maybe even confident (I learned to muster enough confidence to give a public talk) but I still have phone phobia.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

For me, commenting on HN is a low-risk activity:

- Nobody knows who I am

- If I'm attacked, I can usually write it off as random Internet people being jerks or having bad days.

- I don't accidentally say stupid stuff because the clock is running out for a timely response.

- If I say something rash or nasty, I can often delete it before many people read it.

> I don't accidentally say stupid stuff because the clock is running out for a timely response.

For me this is the biggest reason.

Worrying about reputation rather than character then? Do you give other people such considerations when they're speaking but not yourself, or do you judge other people (like you judge yourself) if you don't get everything 100% clear to someone even when there's inadequate time to do so?

Perhaps needing to learn to forgive yourself for "looking stupid," when there's a reasonable reason that you realize if having enough time you could correct or clarify it; part of the extreme difficulty and hard work to grow when being a conscious individual who feels things strongly-cares a lot.

I am pretty sure I view both myself and others critically, especially when an assertion is made.

In general, I just do not like a lot of situations which are time-limited. I have been this way for many years.

Also, when I have nothing interesting to say, I would prefer to not say anything and listen instead.

In real-life situations, I much prefer one-on-one conversations to groups. Not sure if that is a consequence of any of the above.

I want a feature where I can see any comments of mine that I deleted in the last 24 hrs. Just in case.

start button recaptcha not working on iphone chrome.

I feel like there should be a more interactive visual space rather tha n just an expresso. What if I'm on tea?

espresso

While it’s almost never useful to correct irregularities in spellings and pronunciations, this is a particularly poor correction.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/espresso-vs-expresso...

Muphry's Law [0] strikes again!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Both versions find their origins in Latin: exprimere. Both have the same meaning. More importantly, the purpose of language is communicate. If the sender and recipient achieve mutual understanding then language has been used effectively.

Spelling and grammar are meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive.

I started to think about this. I feel like I lean toward pronouncing this as expresso more often.

I think it's a slightly southern expression in language that I hear when people say Axe

Ask Axe Ess Ex

Thanks

Went from a autocorrection of expression and lazily went back to edit into expresso.

Because it’s not a button. Afaict Apple attests iPhones so captcha is skipped. You can start chatting right away.

Just had a talk with some people. Very cool concept :)

Seems it's down now. But I was able to talk another karachiite in Toronto

I feel old. I remember when this used to be called "Ham radio."

Be nice if we could page people to text-chat with, here on HN.

Agreed. A CW random-chat client would also be amusing.

A mobile app for this would be awesome, even if a browser control

reminds me of Dialup, which I used a ton during the pandemic: https://dialup.com/

Amazing site :))

Had a great conversation here. Thanks!

Can't hear any voice

Really enjoyed my chat.

iOS Firefox drops connection when phone locks itself

Brilliant, thanks!

Bummer I got cut off. We were talking about Legos. Still no solution.

In days of voice cloning, this seems less wise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com