Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

hnchat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 82 posts

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#41

Post by sotojuan »

chrismorgan wrote: post #40
danneu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC isn't everywhere. Even a large channel like freenode's #node.js has maybe 15 regulars, myself included. Meanwhile, Elm's Slack channel has more regulars than #node.js. IRC is kept alive by a small holdout. I'm one of those people, but it's no mystery to me why nobody else uses it when I'm paying irccloud.com or running weechat-ncurses on a VPS just for basic features everyone expects from a communication tool.

“Large” means #rust on moznet, which normally has around a thousand people in it, and has scores of regulars actively chatting.

From the reply to my sibling post and yours, I stand corrected. It seems IRC is big with older languages like C and related (as in, a similar domain) ones like Rust[1]. JavaScript and new, web related languages like Elm are more likely to use Slack.

[1] I'm curious as to whether that IRC channel is the only "blessed" Rust chat out there. The problem with other languages is that the community makes a Slack for them even though there's an IRC channel for them already and most new users start only going to the Slack.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#42

Post by sotojuan »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #39
sotojuan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere as in...? IRC isn't going anywhere for sure, I use it (prefer it to Slack), but its usage has diminished greatly to very niche groups such as anime subtitling communities and programming languages/techs. Of the latter, many are either moving to Slack or also have a Slack with more people on it. I also hear less and less developers using or talking about IRC in general. Elixir (language), Ember (JavaScript…

shrugs Then again, look at the stacks you're looking at: they're all relatively new, and most of them are frontend, and thus more likely to jump on the new shiny. ##c on freenode has >1k users as I write this. Although that's probably also an outlier. Personally, I'm hoping that Matrix becomes the new standard, if we ever get one beyond IRC. IRC is showing its age, and Matrix seems to be the most practical and levelh…

I stand corrected! See my reply to the sibling comment.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#43

Post by chrismorgan »

sotojuan wrote: post #41
chrismorgan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Large” means #rust on moznet, which normally has around a thousand people in it, and has scores of regulars actively chatting.

From the reply to my sibling post and yours, I stand corrected. It seems IRC is big with older languages like C and related (as in, a similar domain) ones like Rust[1]. JavaScript and new, web related languages like Elm are more likely to use Slack. [1] I'm curious as to whether that IRC channel is the only "blessed" Rust chat out there. The problem with other languages is that the community makes a Slack for them ev…

There are a bunch of substantially less trafficked, though definitely regularly active, channels for Rust: #rust-offtopic, #rust-internals, #rust-beginners (this one is recommended in the official documentation and is well-traficked), #rust-osdev, several others too.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#44

Post by giancarlostoro »

danneu wrote: post #34
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen Slack used much outside of organizations. However, IRC is everywhere.

IRC isn't everywhere. Even a large channel like freenode's #node.js has maybe 15 regulars, myself included. Meanwhile, Elm's Slack channel has more regulars than #node.js. IRC is kept alive by a small holdout. I'm one of those people, but it's no mystery to me why nobody else uses it when I'm paying irccloud.com or running weechat-ncurses on a VPS just for basic features everyone expects from a communication tool.

#python and #ubuntu are heavily filled on freenode with over a thousand users though? As well as #debian and #go-nuts (for Go) I think IRC is plenty popular, now if the vast majority idle is another story, people are from all around the globe.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#46

Post by baddox »

danneu wrote: post #26

Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username. '#' + username.md5().take(6).join('') I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/xf17fn... (not the best example since everyone happened to be shades of…

I like the idea, although I'd probably choose a palette of, say, 30 colors, and hash the username mod 30 to determine the color. That way all the colors should be sufficiently contrasty.

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#47

Post by danneu »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #44
danneu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC isn't everywhere. Even a large channel like freenode's #node.js has maybe 15 regulars, myself included. Meanwhile, Elm's Slack channel has more regulars than #node.js. IRC is kept alive by a small holdout. I'm one of those people, but it's no mystery to me why nobody else uses it when I'm paying irccloud.com or running weechat-ncurses on a VPS just for basic features everyone expects from a communication tool.

#python and #ubuntu are heavily filled on freenode with over a thousand users though? As well as #debian and #go-nuts (for Go) I think IRC is plenty popular, now if the vast majority idle is another story, people are from all around the globe.

Like #node.js, they have 1000-2000 users connected with probably the same level of engagement, so probably 98% idle which means it's effectively a chat room for about 15 people.

And each person needs to care enough about IRC (e.g. run a VPS) to receive pings or messages while they are away and to see the message history when they return.

Maybe IRC is "plenty popular" which apparently means popular enough to find someone willing to shoot the shit with you if you're in one of its largest channels. But that's a far cry from "IRC is everywhere".

I use IRC every day. I'm just not left scratching my head when I find out that yet another ecosystem chose Slack/Discord over IRC. It blew me away when I saw how active Elm's Slack was while #elm is dead. But that's pretty much how it is with every community I'm part of with a Slack channel.

Sometimes people here suggest "maybe IRC is just for developers", but you can't even format a code block on IRC. :)

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#48

Post by killwhitey »

danneu wrote: post #26

Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username. '#' + username.md5().take(6).join('') I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/xf17fn... (not the best example since everyone happened to be shades of…

I wrote about my own implementation for something like this for a web irc client, which may be helpful.

https://gist.github.com/0x263b/2bdd90886c2036a1ad5bcf06d6e6f...

Re: Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

#50

Post by danneu »

baddox wrote: post #46
danneu wrote: post #26

Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username. '#' + username.md5().take(6).join('') I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/xf17fn... (not the best example since everyone happened to be shades of…

I like the idea, although I'd probably choose a palette of, say, 30 colors, and hash the username mod 30 to determine the color. That way all the colors should be sufficiently contrasty.

My IRC client does this, but I find it too jarring when multiple people are talking and they have the same color.

Sometimes it rolls a yahtzee and the three people talking all have the same color and the same length of chars in their name.

I figure that even if the people talking luck out and have a shade of green like in my screenshot, it's still better than if they all fell into the identical green bucket.

Post reply on HN