Wikimedia telnet interface • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#21

Post by jxy » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:08 PM UTC

I almost skipped it, but I tried anyway. Wonderful! I like the wiktionary:

    use en.wiktionary.org

Feels dictd on steroids.

Somehow I got disconnected frequently. Is it intentional? Or is it just my company's network hate telnet?

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#22

Post by organsnyder » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:15 PM UTC

_toastie wrote: post #4

Yeah, kind of sad that this is an April Fool's joke and not a serious interface. I would love to be able to quickly look stuff up from the terminal.

It may be a joke, but it actually works:

$ telnet telnet.wmflabs.org Trying 208.80.155.160... Connected to telnet.wmflabs.org. Escape character is '^]'.

(I had some more text pasted here, but it didn't format well on HN)

I've tried a few queries, and it seems to work. Though I did just get an article in French for some reason...

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#23

Post by SilasX » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:17 PM UTC

wjoe wrote: post #13

lucb1e wrote: post #5

The revision history of this page indicates this is an April fool's thing. Besides images, I might actually totally love using Wikipedia from the command line. It would fit in well with my general command line usage. The Tor feature is particularly cool. (Just to be clear, this post is not a joke. I actually use a terminal all day for various tasks so it might fit in well.)

It might have been set up as an April Fool's joke, but it is also a real thing that works.

A lot of viable products came out that way. Gmail, I think.

Edit: Looks like it wasn't intended as a joke, but was initially received that way because of the timing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Public_releas...

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#24

Post by SilasX » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:18 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #5

The revision history of this page indicates this is an April fool's thing. Besides images, I might actually totally love using Wikipedia from the command line. It would fit in well with my general command line usage. The Tor feature is particularly cool. (Just to be clear, this post is not a joke. I actually use a terminal all day for various tasks so it might fit in well.)

Why not for images too? There are lots of good image-to-ascii art converters.

"We don't just support thin clients; we support anorexic ones!"

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#25

Post by tangue » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:20 PM UTC

halotrope wrote: post #15

Joke or not, this is awesome! I could imagine using quite a few apps in the terminal like time tracking or chat. It feels so much quicker and quite frankly when browsing the web a lot of pages are visually heavy and chaotic that I fall back to the Safari reader mode very often anyway.

Well, what you're looking for is Emacs

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#26

Post by zeveb » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:28 PM UTC

What's funny to me is how incredibly much faster the joke telnet interface is than using a web browser. Well, 'funny': it's actually pretty sad that we slow down our network usage so badly.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#27

Post by arca_vorago » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:30 PM UTC

mtdewcmu wrote: post #20

_toastie wrote: post #4

Yeah, kind of sad that this is an April Fool's joke and not a serious interface. I would love to be able to quickly look stuff up from the terminal.

I was hoping that telnet was making a comeback. It feels like an old friend.

Its called ssh. Telnet is pretty much dead to me.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#28

Post by vog » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:32 PM UTC

Wow! This even has auto-completion and other shell goodies.

However, there seems to be a bug in the auto-completion:

When pressing TAB immediately after the prompt appears, the whole telnet session hangs and does not respond anymore.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#29

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:38 PM UTC

No money but lots of time and ideas I see.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#30

Post by halotrope » Fri, Apr 01, 2016, 4:40 PM UTC

tangue wrote: post #25

halotrope wrote: post #15

Joke or not, this is awesome! I could imagine using quite a few apps in the terminal like time tracking or chat. It feels so much quicker and quite frankly when browsing the web a lot of pages are visually heavy and chaotic that I fall back to the Safari reader mode very often anyway.

Well, what you're looking for is Emacs

Never got along with emacs. More of a vim person. I might misjudge of ignorance but emacs seems too heavy and complicated and this do it all attitude hits my as not very unixy.