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Show HN: I built a fake VS Code to browse live cricket score in office
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sAbakumoff 5y agoyeah, but why do you want to hide that you browser this cricket stuff in the first place? Does someone constantly watch what's going on on your screen?
- skinkestek 5y agoBecause, seriously, cricket? ;-)
- sswam 5y agoVSCode has an auto-load feature, it will refresh any unmodified buffer where the file has changed on disk. Why not just use that and save yourself the bother of making a whole fake VSCode. You can even do some work at the same time! I guess people who use VSCode aren't necessarily familiar with the UNIX way.
- pjmlp 5y agoGreat! Next step, create a VBA macro that drops the results into Excel worksheet, for those more tasked with Office activities.
- Lapsa 5y agoused to play some Nethack when didn't felt much like working. quite indistinguishable
- wastedhours 5y agoVery good! About 7/8 years ago I did the same to make HN look like some PHP code - did a looot of "code reviews" back then.
- dotancohen 5y agoJust read the page source! For browsing HN, it is actually feasible.
- francisduvivier 5y agoSooo, do we already have something like this for Hacker News?
- pi7h3n 5y agothere are some CLIs to read hacker news in the terminal, if that's enough :)
- kirualex 5y agoMade me laugh, but also made me think of all those bad experiences I had working with teams from Indian / Pakistan... I can definitely imagine those guys watching cricket instead of pushing new code.
- navidkhn1 5y agoWhat was your experience like?
- codingdave 5y agoMy experience with a team from India who liked to watch cricket was completely positive. They got their work done. And watched cricket. They were completely responsive to me when needed, and would watch cricket when the work wasn't urgent. I don't think that is any different than any other remote worker. You both work at home and live your life. As long as the work gets done, who cares how the rest of their time is spent, or even when they do it?
- piyush_soni 5y agoGreat work, but the fact that you had to build it means you need to change the company you work with ;).
- zeepzeep 5y agoDepends on perspective. > the fact that you had time to build it means you need to keep the job at the company you work with ;)
- kioleanu 5y agoI was always fascinated by these kind of things and I always wondered why they are necessary, as I had never had a job in the past 15 years where you couldn’t open a sports page once in a while. Or better said, where someone would expect you sit 6-8-10 hours in front of the computer and churn code without interruption. Or go outside and check the scores on your phone
- perryizgr8 5y agoWhen we actually used to go to office, we always replaced the CI/CD screens with live cricket feeds all over the office. It was much less distracting than opening a tab on your machine, and you could still stay updated with just a glance. As an exciting match would draw close to the end though, people would pay much more attention to the screens than their work.
- hnlmorg 5y agoYou have to bare in mind this appears to be an Indian site and a lot of companies in India have a very different culture to that of the Silicon Valley (or even London).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrweasel 5y agoA few years back I worked for a company who had a UK branch. The boss at the UK office was generally nice enough, but very strict about what was allowed at the office. We managed all IT from the Danish office, and would notice that a certain hours in-bound traffic would increase a lot. When we look into why we figured out that it was a few guys, working insane hours, who where streaming Champions League while working. Technically not allowed at the UK office, but the decision from the Danish IT Manager: "Fuck it! If they're still at work they should at least be allowed to watch a game".
- harsh3195 5y agoWisel*!
- mnd999 5y agoHope you didn’t regret it after yesterday’s match.
- stefanvdw1 5y agoClever! Next step would be to build a VSCode extension so you can actually work in VSCode and keep track of live cricket scores
- darcien 5y agoLooks like some one else already built one[0] [0] - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=KavinDesiValli.cricket https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=KavinDes...
- brainwipe 5y agoModern problems require modern solutions. I hope your boss isn't on HN. If my team wanted to check the scores it wouldn't bother me - I hired people not robots.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoWithin reason, of course, since at the end of the day you do pay them to run your business. But I've had plenty of workplaces that would have football matches on a TV if need be. And I've spent plenty of time playing mario kart on the clock as well.
- ratww 5y agoI wouldn't assume ill-intent, or even that the company sucks. This might be just a fun joke. At my previous job we had a company-wide shared folder with some stealth Excel games [1], my boss loved them. [1] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-iconic-games-recreated-microsoft-excel/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-iconic-games-recreated-micro...
- qwerty456127 5y agoI switched VS Code theme to light to avoid attracting attention (as most of our screens are mostly white normally) when using it occasionally while my job had nothing to do with VS Code (or any code at all). Everyone procrastinates. I wrote some code for sake of procrastination, instead of using social networks like normal people do. Some may probably call this "ill-intent".
- skocznymroczny 5y agoSounds like a bad idea. While I don't agree with the job agreements that claim any work you do on your personal computer outside of work hours belongs to the company, it would be hard to claim such code should not belong to the company if you do it during work hours.
- qwerty456127 5y agoYou don't have to claim the code if nobody knows it exists in the first place. It was not anything I ever meant to show anybody. Just small utilities for myself, meant to actually improve my productivity.
- chockablock 5y agoLong ago I had a college job doing data entry for a tiny long-distance carrier. We had hourly quotas, etc. and had to retype the information into several different backend systems. One day I dug up a manual and discovered that there were a copy/paste commands available on the terminal we were using. I could get through my quota in 40 minutes. I showed this to my supervisor who told me “we’re paying you to type not to play around on computers”. For the rest of the summer I took a nice long coffee break every hour.
- cyberferret 5y agoNice work! Reminds me of the old days of the 'Boss Key' in most games of the 80's. +1 on the suggestion to actually make this a VSCode extension so you can have it running in a tab in your actual workspace and check it from time to time.
- cube00 5y agoGrowing up I had a game which had a "Boss Key" in that showed a spreadsheet and some pie charts, I remember wondering why you'd want a fake business looking screen in a game that disappears if you press any key. So many mysteries that remained unanswered before you could ask the internet.
- parksy 5y agoI remember dad's computer at work had Leisure Suit Larry on it with a boss screen. Must have been mid 80's. Also that golf game that spoke to you (I think the Simpsons riffed on it). Probably most PCs were in offices at the time so it makes sense I guess.
- JBiserkov 5y agoTinder has this too
- jabl 5y agoExcellent! Reminds me of those old MS-DOS games that often had a "boss key" which switched the game display to some fake spreadsheet.
- iamgopal 5y agoYears ago ( 15+ ) I created not to automatically send cricket updates to office chats.
- varispeed 5y agoIf your job prevents your from taking your mind off temporarily off of a task, then this is nothing short of abuse. I cannot focus on the task for more than 10-20 minutes, then I take few minutes break, sometimes more. If I couldn't do that, I wouldn't get any work done because quickly my brain would sort of shut down. I've been through this many times - manager would get me to a meeting room and say "people complain that you are browsing the internet rather than working". I'd say "do I deliver on time?" the answer would be "yes". That would be the end of it. I would also say he or she should talk with those who reported this, whether snooping on other workers is a good use of their time. Nonetheless nice project! I remember doing similar thing to browse Reddit ages ago ;-)
- MaurizioPz 5y agoLike this http://www.codereddit.com/index.html http://www.codereddit.com/index.html
- zamadatix 5y agoAnyone remember Ghostzilla?
- srmarm 5y agoI loved that prog, I used to use it all the time - I was often on site as the IT person in non-IT companies and would have downtime etc but didn't want to look like I was lazing around and seeing as I just wanted to read forum threads etc it worked brilliantly in keeping me looking respectable.
- Trex_Egg 5y agobro thank you very much I was looking for this my whole career.
- nirui 5y agoA file named "index.js", when you open it, the tab says "index.php", and the file contains HTML code. A comedy at it's finest.
- libertine 5y agoActually, there's other layer to that joke. For context, the original fake VSCode was made by Pieter Levels ( https://remoteok.io/vscode https://remoteok.io/vscode ) - which isn't mentioned in this project. The joke is that his main product, remoteok, was a single index.php file for a long time. In a world where people spend too much time thinking of tech stacks, the dude was banking on a single php file.
- wesleywt 5y agoMy work is already pain. I don't need to know how bad South Africa is doing while at work.
- stared 5y agoReminds me of the PhD Comics "Emergency button" (http://phdcomics.com/ http://phdcomics.com/, bottom right) redirecting to a fake journal article and a similar tool for Tinder redirecting to a spreadsheet. In the case of PhD Comics is clearly an inside joke (I guess). For other tools I find it a clearly desired yet not the most honest feature.
- Amorymeltzer 5y agoThere was a computer game I played a bit at a kid that had a "boss coming" mode. It'd cover the screen with fake progress bars and messages like "updating spreadsheets" and "compiling estimates" or something. Clearly meant as a jokey easter egg, but fun.
- partomniscient 5y agoThe original Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987) had a 'boss coming' key. It showed a spreadsheet bar graph thing, that looked like 'work' although if you looked at the labels it had columns for different condom types like "plain", "ribbed" and a couple of others.
- Amorymeltzer 5y agoInspired me to look up the game I was thinking about. It was Enigma, a MasterMind clone: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/20064-enigma-freeverse- https://www.macintoshrepository.org/20064-enigma-freeverse-
- DonHopkins 5y agoI was hoping the cricket score was a pleasant musical soundtrack of live crickets chirping, to listen to while you code. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKmRkS1os7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKmRkS1os7k
- skinkestek 5y agoBack in the days I remember the manual (or help file or something) for some submarine simulator game containing an "emergency key" that brought up a spreadsheet screenshot. Can't remember the name though, but it was on a Mac in the 90ies sometime so before Mac OS X.
- Clepsydra 5y agoIt was quite common for pc games (like Sierra's adventure games) to have a boss key in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key
- _joel 5y agoJust goes to show the difference in work cultures. Here in the UK I could quite happily have the match up on another monitor, nobody would bat (pun unintended) and eyelash. I'm not sure I could do that with a game that requires more oversight though, test cricket, especially, is slow to watch. Fun though!
- sbarre 5y agoI'm not sure that's "UK" specific but probably more office/company/leadership specific.. I don't live in the UK.. For the 2018 World Cup my department repurposed several meeting room TVs to stream matches and folks could gather in those rooms to work while watching the games. Work still got done on time. At the same time, a friend who worked down the street forwarded me an all-team memo from his boss that warned employee sick day requests would be "extra scrutinized" during the World Cup. So yeah.. Leadership.
- crate_barre 5y agoWorked at a place where the boss made everyone uninstall iTunes when it first came out because he considered it distracting to listen to music all day.
- agustif 5y agoWas it also an open-plan office? Lol
- crate_barre 5y agoYou know it.
- ratww 5y agoAt almost all of my previous jobs we were allowed to either watch World Cup games at the workplace, or go home during the game if we weren't interested. It felt fair to everyone, and work still got done. It helps that the countries where this happened were Germany, Brazil and Argentina.
- baybal2 5y agohttps://cric-code.pankajtanwar.in/match/38051~ind-vs-pak-icc-mens-t20-world-cup-2021 https://cric-code.pankajtanwar.in/match/38051~ind-vs-pak-icc... 10 wickets...
- zodiakzz 5y agoKind of poetic justice after they sabotaged our hosted series lineup by harrassing NZ team's family members with fake bomb threats.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y agoI had a video camera and a motion detection algorithm running to alert me if someone was approaching my cubicle, where I was napping.
- ratww 5y agoSounds like a modern day George Costanza [1], I mean it as a compliment. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw9sQmmfqWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw9sQmmfqWg
- t0astbread 5y agoReminds me of a script I wrote a few weeks ago. Basically it listens to Google Chat notifications via D-Bus and plays my phone's alarm clock sound when someone DMs or mentions me. In my case it was meant for when I wanted to take a break without blocking people who needed me though (not high-tech sleeping on the job ^^).
- fsnowdin 5y agosomeone make the HN version of this plz
- jonnycomputer 5y agoI think this is hilarious. And let's be honest here. Getting a score feed like this is much less distracting that launching a browser and visiting some site and somehow ending up on Facehook.
- nathias 5y agodoing the needful
- someothherguyy 5y agoI think it would it be easier to make a repository with a file that just auto updates with the scores? You could use it in any editor, and you wouldn't need a facade.
- rafaelturk 5y agoFake VS Code everywhere!
- kkcorps 5y agoBro, It is amazing but I would suggest you to look for another job. In my office in Bangalore, we watch on TV and screen in cafeteria leaving the work aside although some meetings have to be attended.
- efitz 5y agoIf you use VS Code, why not just build that as a plug-in?
- kevmo314 5y agoThat's a lot of work for a joke
- nkozyra 5y agoCan't imagine going this far without taking the next step of bundling it into an electron app with matching icon, etc.
- eb0la 5y agoThis used to be a fake excel :-D Thank you for make me smile today.
- bluedino 5y agoI always seemed to have a putty window with a colorscheme similar to my editor. Then I ssh into a VPS, browse whatever over lynx, have IRC open...
- aquir 5y agoGreat! Can we have one for HN as well, please? :)
- pieterhg 5y agoSo cool to see this on top of HN. Pankaj took my VSCode for Remote OK and modded it for cricket scores. Great work and it even still says index.php, hah. If you'd like to see the original from a few weeks ago: https://remoteok.io/vscode https://remoteok.io/vscode
- arlm 5y agoDp you have it open-sourced?
- tailspin2019 5y agoTop marks for your politeness in calling this out!
- arcticfox 5y agoThese are all in good fun so it's kinda whatever, but I'm surprised OP didn't bother to mention the source even in the blog post https://pankajtanwar.substack.com/p/i-built-a-fake-vs-code-to-browse https://pankajtanwar.substack.com/p/i-built-a-fake-vs-code-t...
- pvtmert 5y agosuprisingly, I have met some guy at the bar last Saturday, he quoted: "Good designers copy, best designers steal" I don' know the source though. But this immediately strike me as soon as I see your comment. :)
- 5y ago
- klelatti 5y agoFor those not too familiar with cricket - matches can go on for days and a summary of the score can be a couple of numbers. Browsing the score might mean a glance at those numbers every fifteen minutes or so - probably about the same impact on productivity as checking the time.
- zomglings 5y agoI think the OP was using this to keep up-to-date on the Twenty20 world cup. This is a much shorter format of the game, and a match can take as little as 2 - 3 hours to complete from start to finish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty20
- jimnotgym 5y agoI was hoping for a flame-war about T20 not being real cricket... that would be very un-HN!
- zomglings 5y agoHahaha, I also think that ship has sailed.
- klelatti 5y agoThis made me think of the last timeless test! > The last timeless Test was the Fifth Test between England and South Africa at Durban in 1939,[13] which was abandoned as a draw after nine days of play spread over twelve days, otherwise the England team would have missed the boat for home. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeless_Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeless_Test
- cambaceres 5y agoSome posts I upvote just by reading the headline.
- irrational 5y agoIf it’s just the scores, I would think using curl/wget in a terminal window might be simpler.
- katzgrau 5y agoWas thinking the same - sounds like someone was really bored. And if you have to be in VS Code, why not a plugin or curl script which outputs to a file, which is then in a VS Code tab.
- abledon 5y agoI can't imagine working at a company that micro-manages like this. I have a style where i Code at like 500% effort for short bursts, then relax/browse web stuff for up to an hour.
- shoulderfake 5y agoWho's getting in trouble for looking at sports scores in the office? What archaic organization do you work at this pt ?
- ibejoeb 5y agoWorkers in India, China... many, many places.
- pelasaco 5y agoit would be nice to have it to read HN newest topics. Open source for sure :)
- mihaaly 5y agoIt's so sad if one has to resort to these kind of tricks. Mostly for the management, I guess (assuming no abuse level of diversion).
- katzgrau 5y agoSeparately, I used to keep an ssh session to one of my servers open with lynx running, so I could browse HN and have it still look like work to a non-dev
- m_st 5y agoReminds me of the Boss Screen in the famous German PC game 'Moorhuhnjagd' where pressing [B] would pause the game and show a fake Word document.
- wingi 5y agoLeisure Luit Larry had this!
- looping67 5y agothe website hang up
- analog31 5y agoI learned alt-space-n for minimizing a window, which can be done discreetly without any obvious mouse motion. That and a rear view mirror on my monitor.
- faridelnasire 5y agoYou could just change jobs to a company that allows you to have a window like that open on the side.
- harha 5y agoThis adds an item on my long list of fun little projects I unfortunately never start: a general purpose information consumption tool disguised as VS Code (with an extra feature to look like the IDE used at the firm in question) From tennis or football games to text adventures, there would be so many great options to give the mind a quick break from work.
- frankfury 5y agoNow, I'm interested in an NBA score like this. I wonder how it will look like on code.
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoThis made me laugh, nice one. Reminds of all the old apps/games that had boss key/buttons -- I wonder if there's a gallery of a bunch of them somewhere? Creative 'fake' docs and spreadsheets etc kinda funny
- ChrisArchitect 5y agofun to look around at some of the old ones, DOS games mostly, mock-spreadsheets etc Even found that ESPN Australia had one built into their CricInfo page back in 2015 that went to a fake spreadsheet screen with live scores embedded in the cells! https://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/11/remember-the-boss-key-from-pc-games-cricket-australia-just-brought-it-back/ https://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/11/remember-the-boss-key-from...
- artificial 5y agoGood times! Also the Laffer Utilities from Sierra circa 1990 which was a play on Norton. https://leisuresuitlarry.fandom.com/wiki/The_Laffer_Utilities https://leisuresuitlarry.fandom.com/wiki/The_Laffer_Utilitie...
- vzaliva 5y agoI had written TSR (Terminated and Stay Residendt) MS DOS "Boss key" program which when activated shows TurboC screen with compilation going on and compiled lines number counter changing. Used it when I played games during my internship in early nienties.
- seanhunter 5y agoThat is spectacular
- tarkin2 5y agoIs there a vim plugin for it?
- throw1234651234 5y agoTitle should be appended with "...and could have gotten away with a .sh/.ps instead"
- tailspin2019 5y ago@dang seeing as this is a derivative of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472170 but the credit isn't very clear, could you give the original Show HN another repost perhaps? Seems a shame that the author of the majority of this work (pieterhg) didn't get a lot of credit here or the same level of interest in their original Show HN.
- NilsIRL 5y agoThis one even supports a HN, Microsoft Word and Google docs theme.
- tailspin2019 5y agoWow! I hadn't even spotted that. Very cool. EDIT: For others, here are quick links to the Hacker News, MS Word, Google Docs and VS Code themes for pieterhg's original: https://remoteok.io/hn https://remoteok.io/hn https://remoteok.io/docx https://remoteok.io/docx https://remoteok.io/docs https://remoteok.io/docs https://remoteok.io/vscode https://remoteok.io/vscode This was first posted 45 days ago by pieterhg: Show HN: I made a fake VS Code so you can browse remote jobs in your office (remoteok.io) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472170
- libria 5y ago> https://remoteok.io/hn https://remoteok.io/hn Might also need the reverse of this, HN dressed up as a job search site. For when your parents keep nagging you to look for a job, but you just want to browse HN.
- throwawayswede 5y agoA bit dickish of you to try to divert attention (and call for moderation) just because you think some post got to the top of HN while (in your opinion) another one should’ve. Just wanted to let you know. You don’t have to be that person. I’d be very interested in hearing your rationalization for this (especially the call for moderation)
- pknerd 5y agoWhich APIs are you using?
- darepublic 5y agofile has extension .php but is html
- bonyt 5y agoWhen I was in high school, I wrote an IRC client that looked like microsoft word. In visual basic. Simpler times...
- jpindar 5y agoYou all might like CyberCoderOnline, a multiplayer game which runs in a browser and looks like vscode (though it also has another mode that is slightly more graphical). It would be cooler if was an actual vscode extention, though. https://cybercodeonline.com/ https://cybercodeonline.com/
- xtat 5y agoA+