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HN Office Hours
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jackowayed 16y agoIt might also be interesting to setup something where you just post tagged questions and then people can look at the tags that they know about and answer them. I guess that would basically be an HN Opzi. (http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/opzi-a-quora-for-the-enterprise/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/opzi-a-quora-for-the-enterp...)
- docgnome 16y agoI'd suggest adding IRC handle to the ways of contact.
- ElliotH 16y agoA link to the original discussion thread and/or an explanation of what this is actually for would be great! (The about page is no help).
- jjcm 16y agoA "other methods of communication" field would be a nice thing to have as well. IRC handles/servers would be something I'd like to add, and I'm sure other people have their own unique forms of communication they'd like to make themselves available by.
- initself 16y agoIRC handles are pretty much a requirement for me to engage. #hnofficehours on Freenode and ops.
- davidandgoliath 16y agoAll kinds of empty in there :) //Op'd!
- chime 16y agoAwesome project and very cleanly executed. Minor bugs: 1) I shouldn't be able to add "web design" skill twice. 2) When entering skills, I get the ajax list but I can't click on it to select it (Chrome 9dev). 3) Timezones should be sorted by time, not location.
- pero 16y agoAwesome; a web-based chat interface would be a killer feature however.
- alnayyir 16y agoI'll keep that in mind if I can swing a weekend for ezl and the rest of us to work on it.
- pyre 16y agoWhy does "Upcoming Office Hours" include "From Aug. 4, 2010, 2 a.m. to Aug. 19, 2010, 5 a.m."?
- pavel_lishin 16y agoI, too, am very confused by this. Maybe it's only matching on time, and not date?
- cool-RR 16y agoInteresting. But what reason is there to use this over one of the StackExchange websites?
- pero 16y agoImmediate response to your inquiries?
- snow_mac 16y agoThat too. But also able to discuss your issue or what you're trying to learn rather then just here's how to fix x y z... :-)
- snow_mac 16y agoMaybe that you can Skype and talk directly with one person who maybe an expert in a given field.
- jasonmcalacanis 16y agoI think interacting with folks over skype/chat might build a deeper relationship--gasp! even friendship--than a message board. There is spontaneity to chat that the highly transactional Q&A format doesn't allow. I love this idea... we're actually been thinking about taking some of the experts at Mahalo (i.e. our guitar teacher), and doing streaming lessons/chat/office hours.
- JonathanBouman 16y agoGreat job! Found a small bug over here: http://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/ http://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/
- JonathanBouman 16y agoEnlarge the field size of 'google chat', my email won't fit now :)
- die_sekte 16y agoYou also might not want to have stacktraces on a public web site.
- apenwarr 16y agoI just used said stacktrace to find the problem. So... it has its advantages and disadvantages :)
- rodion_89 16y agohttp://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/ http://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/ This throws an error. Also, DEBUG = False
- ezl 16y agoah yes, we suck. We were hoping it wouldn't get discovered until we had a second weekend to really deploy it.
- Groxx 16y agoNeeds availability views based on tags. Really needs that.
- brendoncrawford 16y agoThe "AIM" field needs to allow more characters. Keep in mind that AIM allows email addresses as usernames.
- jackowayed 16y agoSame with gtalk. My gtalk username is pretty long (because it's @danieljackoway.com) and doesn't fit
- swanson 16y agoHere is the original HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579015 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579015 And the source code: https://github.com/ezl/hnofficehours https://github.com/ezl/hnofficehours
- ezl 16y agoOh poop. I'm the ezl from the github repo where that source lives. Was hoping we'd have more time to fix it before being embarassed. HNOH was intended to be a quick weekend project (famous last words). We didn't quite make it in the weekend, so we just let it hang out in his half complete state. rguzman, smalter, and I have been meaning to put some love into it, but we've been slammed working on what we think will be our real startup, http://www.leasely.com http://www.leasely.com, so we've not really carved out the time. Its broken and buggy, the calendar features don't work right, and there are issues with creating/canceling recurring office hours. We'd LOVE for this to be used in real life, but its not in a state we can really say we're super proud of yet. We want anyone who wants to be involved to get involved, so if you have hours to donate, please get in touch. The heavy lifting was done by HN users: rguzman, deuterium, C Allen from NYC (github.com/bitemyapp/, http://bitemyapp.com http://bitemyapp.com), and a few others. So we f-ed up, there are still bugs, and its been on the backburner since we're trying to work on leasely but now we've been embarassed into fixing the bugs so we will. [edit: linked to C Allen's github and personal page]
- sahillavingia 16y agoOops, my bad. I saw it in your profile and thought it would be useful to others (I hadn't heard about it before). My apologies!
- davidw 16y agoI don't care so much about the bugs: the big problem with these HN+ sites seems to be that they get an initial boost and then sort of fade away because people forget about them and new people don't find them.
- znt 16y agoMaybe we can start weekly office hour threads here and we'll all upvote the thread so the newcomers eventually see the service.
- ghotli 16y agoFor something like this it's not a maybe. I hear about services like this all the time and never hear about them again. If you want this thing to become a part of the hn community someone's going to have to put work into seeing that it hits the front page from time to time. Otherwise it's often just a flash in the pan. Good luck!
- snow_mac 16y agoSo, we can go here and ask people for help basically?
- PedroCandeias 16y agoEven though there are already sites like StackExchange, I think this project has (potentially) a character of its own. Sadly, it doesn't seem to want anything to do with me. I get the following error when trying to signup: "The url does not appear to be in your hn profile. Please paste http://hnofficehours.com/profile/PedroCandeias/ http://hnofficehours.com/profile/PedroCandeias/ into your hn profile. Note the trailing slash." Even though I did include the url in my profile. ## Edit It finally acknowledged my existence, but I had to add linebreaks before and after the url in my profile.
- aridiculous 16y agoThis is a great idea. It's much more personal than the stack sites and feels more like a mentorship set-up (a la big brother, big sister). I also think that the 1-to-1 connection is encouraging for askers: I oftentimes don't post to stackoverflow because I don't know if the question will ever be answered. At least there is a better chance of some form of life responding from the other end. Well done. I hope to see it take off.
- snow_mac 16y agoMe too. I think if we, as the community, offer up our skills when we can this will succeed.
- multiplegeorges 16y agoBuggy as you say it is, I think this is a great idea and I intend to donate time and use it. Great idea!
- jasonmcalacanis 16y agoThis is a very neat idea.
- adrianwaj 16y agoSamurai, are you going to reach out to others, let others reach out to you, both, neither, and/or copy the idea?
- Tichy 16y agoGreat idea. Unfortunately it made me realize that I don't feel like I am much of an expert in anything atm. Time to learn some new skills.
- pierrefar 16y agoI think a lot of techies feel that way and IMHO they're wrong. Ironically it's because they always respond to this feeling of inadequacy with "time to learn new skills" is why they're wrong.
- underdown 16y agodunning kruger effect? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
- lisper 16y agoIs there a reason that profiles don't have email as a contact mode?
- petercooper 16y agoIt's an interesting idea technically, though socially people, in the main, find it difficult to pick up the phone and talk to someone they know nothing about (beyond a few tags and a name). Even showing a Gravatar and making it mandatory to provide a homepage URL or Twitter link would allow users to do a quick bit of "research" on someone they want to call in order to feel more comfortable and to build up a little virtual rapport ahead of time.
- Gianteye 16y agoSeconded. I'd feel a lot more comfortable chatting people up with questions if I had a peek into the projects they've done before. And, knowing I'd like to have people call me up with their projects, it's to everyone's advantage to bring the barrier to entry down as much as reasonably possible.
- initself 16y agoI just tried to contact ezl on both AOL and Gtalk. Showing online on HN Office Hours, he was offline on both networks, at least by way of Meebo.
- tansey 16y agoGreat! Love it! Found one small bug: when you view a user's profile, your own profile name at the top becomes a link to the viewed user's profile rather than your own.
- davidandgoliath 16y agoGreat idea, nasty error here though: http://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/ http://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/
- sayemm 16y agoGreat idea, well done - this could be the start of something pretty interesting
- JoeCortopassi 16y agoAnyone else think it's weird to use your Hacker News username to login? I know you're supposed to use different passwords for different locations, but this seems like an easy opportunity to do some social engineering to come up with a username/password list.
- olalonde 16y agoI get "olalonde does not appear to be a registered HN username".
- trouble 16y ago"myusername has not listed his skills." should be: "myusername has not listed her skills." or, more neutrally: "myusername has not listed their skills." Edit: I wrote this comment because I'm a woman and it can be a bit jarring to see myusername referred to as 'he'. I wasn't commenting on grammar; just trying to express my thought that if a website is going to refer to someone by gender, then it should be done neutrally unless the option to select a gender is provided.
- presto8 16y agoor, more neutrally: "myusername has not listed their skills." This is incorrect grammar (the subject and pronoun should agree)! Something like "myusername's skills have not been listed" would be ok.
- jackowayed 16y agoThat's awkward passive voice. How about "myusername has not listed skills"?
- trouble 16y agoWhat about "myusername has not listed any skills."?
- kaerast 16y agoOr "myusername has no skills". That way you encourage people to add their skills.
- chrisaycock 16y agoShorter: "myusername has no listed skills."
- WingForward 16y ago"myusername has listed no skills" sounds better to my ear.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- laxj11 16y agoJust used this and Dragon Silicon was incredibly helpful. This site just helps add to the fact that the internet is full of kind strangers. not to sound like a creep or anything. yeah.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jlees 16y agoWould be interesting to also add IRC handles as a contact method.
- notmyname 16y agoHow do I change my password? Also, I clicked a link before entering a password, and now I can't log in. Can't reregister; can't have login with an empty password.
- devin 16y agoI've added the link to my profile, but no dice -- I cannot sign up.