HackerChat – A private chat for the HN community | Hacker News Reader

HackerChat – A private chat for the HN community

hackerchat.co

53 pointsgianluka30 comments

The hacker(news)? community did not need to wait for such a lousy webapp technology to have chat working. IRC is good enough, though a bit old. SILC is another improved version of IRC. XMPP+MUC is yet another good alternative and can serve as backend for stupid webapps.

All of them are using protocols designed for chatting and none of them use web technologies, even though you can write a JS client for each of them.

In the end, please use the right tool for the right job. If there was downvotes here, I'd definitely downvote that post.

Can we agree on some channel on Freenode? It would be great for things that are too small for their own post.

#startups currently has >480 people, and iirc it's a kind of (totally) unofficial HN channel. At the very least the intersection of crowds is very high.

#hackernews makes sense.. currently a whopping total of 10 people there. :)

I say we permanently join #hackernews and idle there if we want to gain any kind of momentum.

Not trying to be negative, but I have to ask: was there something wrong with the IRC channel?

Exactly what I thought. The technical "difficulty" of joining an IRC Channel through the ancient incantations of actually using a text-based interface instead of some fancy Webapp is enough of a deterrent to serve as basic divider between the people you want to have in a channel and the rest.

The barrier of entry to this thing seems to be the goodwill of "someone".

Not sure how I feel about this. This is 'HackerNews'. joining an IRC channel is definitely something this crowd knows how to do.

Or at least, it's supposed to :)

In my experience, there's an abundance of people just barely able to fire up their favorite IDE and hack something together in some kind of rapid prototyping web 2.7 thingamajig they don't even understand fully, preferrably using the latest JS(-based) framework and a (seemingly) random combination of currently hip "stack" technologies and packing all this on about 5 to 10 'cloud' instances without any knowledge of anything beyond the web.

So, while I agree with your 'Or at least, it's supposed to :)', there's an awful lot of people whose claim to 'Hackerdom' is going to some kind of 'Hacker School' or '-Weekend'.

    > This is 'HackerNews'

Which is exactly the intended user base of this app. The "crowd" in this case is community non-members.

I'm clearly showing my ignorance - but what IRC channel?

freenode.net #startups

Also see the old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85191

Also worth noting, there have been at least three "let's chat" apps written specifically for the HN community.

I'm not saying we don't need another one, but when you have a free channel, then several other apps, you gotta wonder what the compelling reason for this one is.

I fail to see a good reason to request an invite to this service.

Sell it to me.

Didn't accept my email aaskdljfhadjksfh@mailinator.com too

To all the people saying that #startups already exists for this reason, have you guys been there lately? That chat room is vitriolic. People are just flat out mean.

right, but are you expecting a different chat community by using a different chat interface?

After you click the "subscribe me" button in the email it bring me to a designerchat website that just demands for my email again, what am I doing wrong?

I'm having the same issue. Anyone figure out how to actually hop on it yet?

I have an abandoned similar project at http://friendsincognito.com and you don't need an invitation. If anyone is interested, I'll open source it too.

MailChimp redirects to Designer Chat instead of The Hacker News Chat.

Same thing happens to me. Once I received the confirmation e-mail and click on the link, the url on that page "continue to our website" brings to Designer Chat nor Hacker Chat

I don't actually see a chat here, even after requesting and following the link in the invite confirmation. Am I doing something wrong? If not, and this is not actually live right now, could 'gianluka put "Coming Soon" or similar text on the landing page? Less confusing all around.

yet another "launch" website? when all you have is a landing page to collect email addresses, you don't get to say you have a product.

Would be nice if someone set up a relay bot between this thing and freenode's irc (e.g. #startups, or whatever.) Fragmentation is kind of stupid.

e.g. i2p dev channels work in a similar fashion: you can join OFTC, freenode, i2p-internal irc service, whatever - everything is relayed back and forth.

and this should be trusted why? because it made the homepage with 4 votes? fuck HN.

After the success of www.designerchat.co, I decided to do a similar thing for the hackers.

Cheers.

Why does it need an email address given up front?

My guess is to be invited into the slack chatroom. I remember slack needing that to invite.

You must mean it was deemed successful for its graphic design because the UX is horrible. So far the only thing I've succeeded in proving is that MailChimp works flawlessly ... I already knew that.

Here is a public chat room for Hacker News community.

https://www.svyft.com/public-room/1401111637278432404

You will need to register on www.svyft.com though.

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