7 ms·
Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by
- wewewedxfgdf 2y agoOf course its written in Rust.
- knighthack 2y agoRustaceans, the over-engineers. I haven't read the code, and I wonder if there's excessive focus on performance, safety, and modern programming paradigms for a fake productivity app such as this.
- chrsig 2y ago[flagged]
- yas_hmaheshwari 2y agoAnother way to look at it: Maybe this is the way to prevent those layoffs hitting you :-)
- Duanemclemore 2y agoClearly not enough people using this to look busy;)
- walrus01 2y agoBecause of lack of a sense of humor?
- kaveh_h 2y agoWhen +10-15% of work force is laid off it’s not due to boss key, but idiot bosses who don’t think ahead. But on the other side Boss key do happen due to demoralized workers realize they are working for idiot bosses making bad decisions or being shitty leaders.
- Liftyee 2y agoThis is a cool project! Reminds me of `hollywood`[1], but specifically geared towards programming. It'll be a useful tool in my arsenal of "things to run to impress non-terminal-users". [1] https://a.hollywood.computer/ https://a.hollywood.computer/
- chihuahua 2y agoHackerTyper is a worthy addition to that arsenal: https://hackertyper.com https://hackertyper.com
- kevdoran 2y agothe true king of productivity tools, glad someone mentioned this
- noufalibrahim 2y agoThanks for this. It's really trippy.
- brikym 2y agoBe sure to use a mouse jiggler if you walk away.
- vzaliva 2y agoThat reminded me: Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.) My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.
- incanus77 2y agoI recall playing an 80s-ish submarine (WW2?) game with a "spreadsheet mode".
- netsharc 2y agoLots of old games have this, I played many MicroProse flight simulators and they all had it.
- stevekemp 2y agoThese days even Tinder (website version) has a boss-key. But yeah I remember a lot of games had boss-keys that would let you pretend to be working.
- relwin 2y agoThat's probably Gato (1984): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato_(video_game)
- nwellnhof 2y agoBetter known as "boss key": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key
- csprimer-in 2y ago[dead]
- hannasm 2y agoSo is this one on-par with DeepSeek or no? I didn't see those metrics in the ReadMe
- noufalibrahim 2y agoAh yes.. The good old "boss key". I first discovered this in a sierra quest game and as a kid didn't know what it meant. I found out only years later.
- vunderba 2y agoI think I first encountered the boss key concept in Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris where hitting the ESC key would bring up an officious looking spreadsheet.
- walrus01 2y agoOne could also do a "make world" on an entire FreeBSD system, if you want a lot of stuff scrolling past the screen.
- wruza 2y agoOr build ports/ruby, it usually takes longer than the whole system. I remember one popular but non-DE-requiring package that required perl, ruby and(?) python among others. Building it could take a half a day mostly spent in ./configure scripts. I wondered why didn’t ports or autotools guys just pre-configure everything once for a specific machine and skip this annoying step. My strdup(3) won’t go away right after they finish yet another iteration of it.
- ellis0n 2y agoAmazing! Finally, the design of Rust is being used not only for interviews but also for bureaucratic reports, which is what it was designed for. Now, the bureaucracy within the team has improved and the bosses will be very pleased. A very useful tool. I had an experience where a team of Rust juniors did whatever they wanted in a separate chat and the CTO, PM and I (Lead) had no idea what was going on. This tool would have helped. Now, I’ll focus on the code review to see how Rust's safety helped solve this issue. I think this will be a topic for a great new article about the power of Rust.
- mirekrusin 2y agoAin't perfect it's only 99.9% rust according to github.
- ChadNauseam 2y agowon’t be perfect until issue #1 is resolved
- _fzslm 2y agoWould be fun to plug this up to an LLM and see how absolutely unhinged it lets itself go over long runs.
- kdamica 2y ago"Fork the repo (whatever that means)" I lol'd
- anta40 2y agoJust installed this. Very amusing. I think on a glance it looks more realistic than those so-called "hacker terminal/screen/whatever" :D
- Tepix 2y agoI'm so glad it's written in Rust! You know, for performance and safety and discussions at the coffee machine.
- robomartin 2y agoMy rule has always been very simple: If you are goofing off, don't hide it. The worst thing you can do if you work for me is think I am stupid and pretend you are working. I'd rather someone say "My head just isn't in it right now", which is honest and something that happens to all of us. I understand the need to unplug every so often as much as anyone. There are days when my brain just isn't in sync with what I have to do. Pretending you are doing work is insulting. BTW, I didn't come up with this idea. This rule was given to me by a former boss when he hired me. The idea stayed with me as I launched and ran my own businesses.
- harvey9 2y agoI once had a boss who told me to buy some games on the company dime for those times.
- otherme123 2y agoNot bullet proof. I have coworkers that are very specialized in looking busy, like sending mails at late hours, always in meetings, micromanaging and bike shedding other people work, and so on. They get lauded by the bosses for working so much.
- robomartin 2y ago> Not bullet proof Nothing is, of course. For me it is a simple statement of what should be obvious consequences for an action. I usually present it like this: If you are going to goof off, goof off. Don't pretend you are working. We all need mental breaks. Don't think people are stupid. If you choose to insult them by pretending to be working, you are going to lose you will be fired. I had to institute this when I realized a salesperson was spending time on eBay and dating sites rather than, well, selling. He would do the thing where he'd click over to Excel or whatever when I approached. Again, how stupid do they think people are? He would wait for sales to come in by phone or through the website, rather than actively networking and prospecting. The lack of engagement was obvious from the numbers he was (or, more accurately, was not) producing. So, I installed software to remotely monitor his company-provided computer (and record it for evidence). While I was doing this I thought "How stupid are you that you think you can fuck with an engineer?". It didn't take long to amass a week's worth of data showing he was spending over 50% of his time (Even up to 75% on some days) during work hours on eBay, dating sites and more. The following week he was gone. What sucks is that we spent time and money training this idiot and bringing him up to speed with products, technology, etc. What a waste of time and human potential. I love the line from Phantom Menace: Your focus determines your reality.
- teleforce 2y ago> Implemented non-euclidean topology optimization for multi-dimensional data representation Based on Google Scholar the best match is this article by researchers from Imperial College, London: Tensor Networks for Multi-Modal Non-Euclidean Data: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14998 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14998 Looks like a very legit game changing and ground breaking work.
- stigi 2y agoThe work is mysterious and important
- jama211 2y agoIsn’t it just smarter to clear your actual build folder and then rebuild it with a script? Bonus points if you limit resources to it so it takes ages? That way if they ever actually look closely, they’ll see it’s the REAL work you’re supposed to be doing that’s building, and you’ll never get in trouble
- huijzer 2y agoIf I was a boss and saw someone being busy building Rust all day I would offer a faster computer.
- loxs 2y agoWin-win I guess :D
- jama211 2y agoIf you were a boss and you were staring at my screen all day, I’d find another job ;). In all seriousness though, we’re assuming in this case that you’re taking a break, and a stakeholder happens to walk past - hopefully not a constant occurrence.
- freehorse 2y agoIs this the way to get your boss buy you a faster computer?
- dancccskooma 2y agoI hope this was vibe-coded
- philipdavis 2y agoThe badges are hilarious lol career|saved stakeholders|impressed
- uwagar 2y agorun it during a DOGE audit.
- BitBangBling 2y ago[dead]
- keyle 2y agoSomeone please make one that makes your computer looks like it's locked up for ransomeware, and see your stakeholder's face. Priceless.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoIt already exists as a scam on the web. A web page that pretends to be your locked desktop, and goes into fullscreen automatically. On top of it you have a scary warning telling you to call a phone number to fix that. Old people fall for it easily, and don't know that you can hit F12 or something to go into window mode and close it. I had to "fix" that virus a few times recently.
- andrewstuart 2y agoA friend of mine who was in charge of finance said to his boss “the bank keeps sending me emails to confirm transactions and change my passwords and even after I click the links and re-enter my password they keep on asking, it’s very annoying.”.
- wruza 2y agoOn that one he should have called police to process cardiac arrest.
- __rito__ 2y agoQuick question: do people who do production design for movies use something like this for coder/hacker screen? Should they?
- Svenstaro 2y agoThis is cool! I once made a project very much like this: https://github.com/svenstaro/genact https://github.com/svenstaro/genact Check it out if you like this kind of thing.
- bellboy_tech 2y agoLove Genact!! Fantastic job
- odysseus 2y agoIn my twenties I played nethack (with the ascii tileset) in a terminal window while working. It only took my boss a couple weeks to catch on. He was not happy.
- astrobe_ 2y agoBack in the days, I figured that Nethack would be too obvious so I went for MUDs (online multiplayer text adventure) instead. Except you need to connect somewhere in order to play. Hopefully, I had a device on which I could randomize the MAC address and IP, so if someone was monitoring outgoing connections they could have a harder time to figure out who it was. I didn't do that long enough to really put it to the test, though. Eventually I switched to working on side projects instead, which look similar to what I was normally doing. And worst case scenario, I could argue that it is for training or something, which wouldn't entirely be a lie.
- padolsey 2y agoI remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers, and the time spent wasted sitting in office chairs whiling away hours to meet some pointless proxy of worth: time and physical presence. A worse experience I had previously was a manager who could remote-log-in to my machine at random times to spot-monitor my work. I'd see a little icon pop up in the menubar which would tell me he was there, so I'd make haste to busy myself with the appearance of grokking hard code. May he find a never-peace in purgatory.
- _cenw 2y agoThey just don't get that some people can't spread their time into perfectly equal slices of productivity. Remote work and flexible time has allowed me to work a big productive burst in the morning and in the late evening, spaced way more than 8 hours apart, with busywork somewhere in the middle. Probably wouldn't work this well if I had to do that in an office, in a single 8 hour (or 4+1+4) segment.
- jimmydddd 2y agoThis is my issue. For whatever reason, i used to get most of my work done between 4PM and 10PM. Unfortunately, I had to be at my desk at 9AM.
- mystified5016 2y agoThat's why I'm so happy to have a salaried job with lax office hours. For whatever reason, I'm also really productive before noon and after 6. The middle of the day is mostly a waste. At current job, I work when I'm most productive and more or less goof off the rest of the time. I'm one of the most (if not the most) productive members of the company so boss can't complain. But also I can't tolerate WFH for more than a few days at a time. I need external structure to tell my brain that it's work time.
- 2y ago
- cheema33 2y agoWouldn't work on my boss. She would get very curious and ask me to explain to her what it was.
- mirekrusin 2y agoJust say it's in rust, it usually wades off nosy people. If not, you have virtually unlimited feed of things to talk about how cool it is etc. - they'll quickly learn when they hear it, they should move along.
- 9dev 2y agoSeriously, they should use something like this in movies when showing hacker screens. Those are so ridiculous, sometimes I think it’s a deliberate inside gag to display an HTML page on a terminal when someone purportedly „hacks“ into a government computer.
- genezeta 2y agoSomeone already mentioned hollywood [0]. From its homepage: Hollywood was created in 2014 and has been used by NBC News, CNBC, on Saturday Night Live, the Netflix series Unit 42, Yahoo Finance, and in TV commercials for Experian and SentinelOne, the DEFCON music channel, Full Frontal by Samantha Bee, an episode of Map Men, a parody music video by SUSE, the Spy Ninjas series on Youtube, and magazine articles such as this one from Texas A&M University. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43377030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43377030
- jama211 2y agoThey do this on purpose… it’s pointless to try and appease realism pedants, so they just make an aesthetic instead. It’s the computer equivalent of every phone number implausibly starting with 555.
- bitmasher9 2y agoIn all satire there is some truth. The coder running nix, neovim, and a terminal heavy workflow will stand out compared to gui and ide heavy workflows. The thing is both sets of tools create essentially the same output with very similar time consumption.
- ycuser2 2y agoNotepad++ has a "sticky note" mode (F12 key): it removes all borders from the window, only the text box itself being left. Some years ago I used to copy reddit threads in Notepd++ and move the window on top of Visual Studios output window tonread reddit half on the day.
- andra_nl 2y agoI run i3wm (poorly :P). Does anyone know whether it would it be possible to trick i3lock (or something similar) into showing the output of this "tool" instead of a static image? Would be a fun look, with the added bonus of some colleagues potentially being tricked into thinking they have an opportunity to mess with my machine. :D
- meribold 2y agoThere are screen-locking programs that don't hide what's on the screen (for example `alock` and `xtrlock`). So you can use one of those in a script that also launches this tool.
- neals 2y agoI used to type "tree" and go get coffee
- bilekas 2y agoThis is hilarious, at work sometimes I need to catch up on some friend through irc and use weechat so as not to draw any attention, most non devs simply ignore anything terminal related. I even tend to use the hn-text cli for hacker news just to not give anyone a reason to think I’m slacking.
- Locutus_ 2y agoI had this literally happen to me a couple of months ago. Slacking off while waiting for some performance tests to run (Shoutout to Locust.io!) with my big 27" screen full of terminals for each runner, server logs etc. ...And then on my laptop screen I honestly was just slacking off and reading Reddit. 'VP Of Technology' comes over "I dont know what you are doing, but it's the most impressive thing I've seen in a while". ...Yes sir!
- improbableinf 2y agoDoes it work as well for remote workers?
- dijit 2y agoNever underestimate the power of colour on a terminal. Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either. However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was incredibly right, and though the development team avoided colour codes (they can mess with things like stdout redirection) the admin team leaned into them- and the managers lapped it up like crazy. "Red bad" is a universal language in our culture, and it makes managers feel like they understand, I guess.
- iammrpayments 2y agoRed means good in a lot of Asian countries, I bought my macbook there and the stock market shows red when it goes up.
- dijit 2y agoyeah, I’m aware, which is why i was careful to say “our” culture, like- predominantly english speaking countries. it is interesting how this difference can exist though.
- greenchair 2y agomind blown, thanks for sharing.
- itsTyrion 2y agoYou also originally confirm with circle and cancel with cross/X on a Japanese PlayStation, that’s why the symbols are what they are
- pasc1878 2y agoEven worse - My part of project just did a release of new functionality making things much quicker. Others just did a change of the screen colours making no difference and got massive praise for their work.
- gchokov 2y agoFired on the spot when I walk in and ask what is that.
- v3ss0n 2y agoHow this hit top HN news? I believed in HN ...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pacifika 2y agoGood fun to write these tools. In practice but simply rolling back a git repo and deleting a JavaScript vendor folder or simulating a CI run would have the same effectiveness I think. Or helping understand people that engineers need thinking time.
- ohmygoodniche 2y agoLove this project!!!
- mkzetta 2y agoPretending to work is self-degrading. Fix whatever authority problem incentives sending out false signals instead.
- lfsh 2y ago100% agree. When you need this tool it is time to look for a job at another company. Maybe it is very useful for the movie industry or something.
- marban 2y agoAlternative ;) https://terminal.news https://terminal.news
- anthk 2y agoOr https://neuters.de https://neuters.de under Lynx also: gopher://magical.fish/1/news
- assimpleaspossi 2y agoI worked one place where a co-worker advised me to move my workstation against the wall so my screen could be seen to the rest of the space. That way the boss could walk by and tell if I'm just surfing the web or working.
- gryfft 2y agoYears ago I made up a script that would incrementally output from random files in a given directory at configurable speeds. Then I'd run a few instances of the script in a bunch of tmux panes so I could make my second monitor look eternally "busy." I was _actually_ busy enough, and the cubicle walls were high enough then, that I virtually never used it as a real "boss key." But it's fun to make this kind of thing.
- seinecle 2y agoThis reminds me of my time as a professor at a business school, where I worked in an open space with my screen visible to everyone. I spent a lot of time coding, so my IDE was always in plain sight. Yet, it was only when I had the terminal open, running a few basic commands, that people would stop by and say—impressed—"Oh, I didn’t realize you could code."
- datavirtue 2y agoWhere was this in the 1990s when we needed it?
- westurner 2y agoThe amount of time I spent getting asciifx and agg to work with syntax highlighting because IPython now has only Python Prompt Toolkit instead of deadline. In order to leave Python coding demo tut GIF/MP4 on their monitor(s) at conferences or science fairs. stemkiosk arithmetic in Python GIF v0.1.2: https://github.com/stemkiosk/stemkiosk/blob/e8f54704c6de32fbb29eccd265ded80dfb9c59de/docs/topics/math/arithmetic/arithmetic.py.cast.gif https://github.com/stemkiosk/stemkiosk/blob/e8f54704c6de32fb...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hackburg 2y ago[dead]