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Hack.chat – A minimal, distraction-free chat application
- waynenilsen 11y agonice work, here is a brief feature request list * when a formula is copied, the latex should be copied * support for \begin{align}
- kevinb7 11y agoIt looks hack.chat is using KaTeX under the hood. We recently added support for environments, but haven't implemented {align} yet. If anyone's interest in helping please see https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX/issues/61 https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX/issues/61.
- habi 11y agoThe thing is not my project, I just stumbled over it and submitted it to HN. You might want to add those to a GitHub issue.
- erikb 11y agoI would understand a markdown format for chat, because it's easy, short and fun. What made you use something as powerful as LaTeX? With great power comes great responsibility, right?
- jhardcastle 11y agoNot OP, but I would argue that mathematicians and physics folks deserve great tools too.
- S4M 11y agoYes, when I was student I used sometimes to include maths formulas in chats with my friends. Something like this would have been quite helpful.
- erikb 11y agoYeah look, I haven't experienced the problem, therefore I wonder about the solution. Learning about the problem it solves (i.e., sending formulas to friends for homeworks etc) allows me to understand it. It's quite hard to see problems you haven't had yourself, if you only see the solution, right? I see an "Answer: 42" but what was the question?
- nmrm2 11y agoWhy would anyone want Markdown in a chat window? No one is sending document-length chat messages with text formatting. That's what email is for. On the rare occasions you want italics or bullets in a chat, you can get close enough with ASCII if whitespace is preserved. The purpose of the LaTeX support is being able to communicate Mathematics with ease. Markdown is useless for that. And it's hugely useful e.g., when tutoring or holding office hours via chat (or even via Skype -- just typing the formula is usually easier than writing it on a piece of paper or aiming the camera at a whiteboard).
- blueblob 11y agoWhy not? At some point in time someone probably said why do you want a smiley face in a chat window? Now there are lots of "emoji" symbols. Pandoc uses markdown with inline latex, it gives you multiple ways of typing things and it's less verbose to type. Instead of using an equation array in latex, use a numbered markdown list with latex formulae. Skype has it's annoyances too, ever tried to actually communicate "(B)", you get a great beer symbol you likely didn't intend to write.
- lfowles 11y agoA subset of markdown is good in my eyes. To avoid the smiley case, just format and display everything including the formatting characters. Similar to how irssi treats _lines like this_, it will underline all of the characters inbetween while preserving the outer '_' characters.
- blueblob 11y agoOr allow user filters priority on formatting so you can modify the behavior on your own (I guess you already could with greasemonkey or some other plugin). Even with just a toggle for disabling markdown/latex would let you copy and paste the latex code out to get unformatted text.
- nmrm2 11y ago> Instead of using an equation array in latex, use a numbered markdown list with latex formulae That's a plausible benefit if you're editing a document where nice-looking numbering matters (e.g., an email). In chat, if I have multiple equations, I can just do something like: 1. $equation here$ 2. $equation here$ I prefer chat to do as little formatting as possible while still providing a way to write Math. Otherwise you end up with unintended formatting, which is hugely annoying (a la (B) in Skype). > Skype has it's annoyances too, ever tried to actually communicate "(B)", you get a great beer symbol you likely didn't intend to write. Yeah, but it doesn't change the (B) on the white board I have the camera pointed at, which is the way everyone communicates mathematics via skpy.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- snehesht 11y agohttps://hack.chat/?HN https://hack.chat/?HN
- samurailink3 11y agoParsing usernames in LaTeX could lead to abuse/annoyance. Very cool project.
- QuantumRoar 11y agoWould be nice if an error is thrown when the LaTeX can't be parsed instead of just printing whatever TeX-foo you've written down. Also, I'd like to see Tikz and pgfplots support :)
- Vexs 11y agoSeems to work pretty well after messing about on ?HN, lotsa people testing bad LaTeX though.
- comrh 11y ago> "POLICE.arrest(getAddress(badClient))" If only
- stann 11y agoThis is a cool project. Recently, I have had to teach a High School kid some basic science using Whatsapp and found it lacking. Searching on the app stores for a messaging app with Latex support yielded nothing. Already gearing up to roll up my sleeves and build one.
- dasv 11y agoThere is a LaTeX bot in Telegram, my mathematician friends use that in their group chats.
- Tepix 11y agoGreat stuff! Some feature request: a) allow ignoring users b) allow UTF-8 in usernames
- mykhal 11y agoNice, but I bet nobody is currently able to write there a proof for $\Re(s) = \frac{1}{2}$ for all s where $\zeta(s) = 0$ and $0 < \Re(s) < 1$ .. I mean, where zeta is the Riemann's one :)
- natsci 11y agodon't be sad. how can one appreciate your comment, if he can't even recognize the meaning of the formulae at the hackchat homepage?
- emehrkay 11y agoI really like how server.js is setup. Very straight-forward and I would imagine adding features would be pretty easy to build in. edit: things like storing which rooms users are chatting in using Redis so that you can run multiple instances and balance them. Or persisting the messages to a DB. Or adding processes to download images/bring in website snippets when urls are posted (like Slack).
- magicmu 11y agoMe too; I really like the POLICE handler too, that makes a lot of sense. Awesome project!
- unknownknowns 11y agoThe admin password in the config is the password on the live server FYI ;-).
- q3k 11y agoThe apparent lack of any sort of security practices by the code author should be a signal to the clients of pawnmail [1] that they should find another hosting provider. [1] - https://pawnmail.com/ https://pawnmail.com/
- Killswitch 11y agoEhhhh, I don't know... I have lots of proof of concept code that isn't very secure, but have production code that is... Just because a proof of concept isn't crazily secure, doesn't mean that his production stuff is lacking too.
- rh163 11y agoI don't think that's a fair suggestion to make based on a minimal POC.
- q3k 11y agoThe author doesn't mention hack.chat as a PoC anywhere. Additionally, it's in the same “Projects” section as pawnmail on his website [1]. So yeah, that's not a PoC in my book. [1] - http://andrewbelt.name/ http://andrewbelt.name/
- nostrademons 11y agoIt's pretty rational for a proof-of-concept in something as innocuous as chat software to completely ignore security. That doesn't mean the author wouldn't spend time on it for his actual business, the one that generates actual money. Most people pay attention to the requirements of their specific problem when designing software.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- maxerize 11y agosomeone ban :^[()D]
- curiousjorge 11y agoI just love how minimal and easy it is. No more waiting for a monolithic javascript front end to load or a "loading pleast wait", no glossy buttons or emoticons or avatars or github sign ins. It even has IP flood detection by default! Multiple line protection should prevent the flood of ascii penis art and other obscenities.
- vfvf 11y agoawesomeeeee
- codezero 11y agoThere was a time when telechat (chat over telnet, mid-late 90s early 00s) was a pretty cool niche chat medium. I really miss it. It allowed more customization and control than IRC for the host, and a bunch of small communities popped up around them.
- idoco 11y agoI posted MapChat (idoco.github.io/map-chat) three weeks ago at about the same time of the day and also got tons of traffic from HN. HN crowd was brutal, and I wasn't really ready for that. People were trying to crash it in so many ways. But the overall experience was really fun :) and I also got some very valuable feedback.
- vhf 11y agoWe had the same experience launching a chat on HN last week. Some valuable feedback, but some pretty brutal comments as well, and lots of (failed) crash attemps.
- ixwt 11y agoSomebody seems to have found a way to constantly broadcast system messages and is flooding chat. I really like how simple it is. I do like how it works similar to Mozilla Hello. Just give somebody a link, and they can join. Also, I'm getting a cert error. Identity cannot be verified.
- nunull 11y agoSomebody could write a CLI based client for this. That would be awesome and it looks like it would be very straight forward, too.
- q3k 11y agoWhy not just use IRC instead?
- alfg 11y agoGood work. The minimal design is an example of less design == good design.
- chuhnk 11y agoInteresting. Was working on something similar but more focused on streams with no identity. http://malten.me/ http://malten.me/
- jetpm 11y agoI also made a chat app, it's like the exact opposite of this, its totally distracting http://quatshy.com http://quatshy.com
- theklub 11y agoWow, this is probably the future, but for an old guy like me its horrible.
- curiousjorge 11y agoyoung guy here, can confirm this is not the future we want.
- kajecounterhack 11y agoHow young? I'm 24 and I think this is the best thing ever
- S4M 11y agoIt's fun for a while, but boy do I hope this chat is not the future.
- 11y ago
- mrcactu5 11y agothe KaTeX doesn't seem to render on mine: http://i.imgur.com/5GMaIAq.png http://i.imgur.com/5GMaIAq.png Personally I had never heard of KaTeX - since Khan Academy didn't consider MathJax fast enough they optimized it https://khan.github.io/KaTeX/ https://khan.github.io/KaTeX/
- vortico 11y agoTry refreshing that page. That's an old copy, and it's trying to merge with the new Javascript.
- mrcactu5 11y agothis is just the test page from http://127.0.0.1:8080 http://127.0.0.1:8080 without any modification additionally http://127.0.0.1:8080/?random http://127.0.0.1:8080/?random leads to a page that says "server disconnected"
- personjerry 11y agoWhy are so many people trying to make an IRC-like app right now?
- organsnyder 11y agoProbably because Slack has been valued at over $2.5 billion, when it seems (to many people) to be not much more complex than IRC. It is easy to argue that Slack provides value in other ways, but there is definitely a high "hey, I can make that!" factor for many using the tool.
- noir_lord 11y agoI've thought about this since I first used Slack and decided that they are pretty much (early) Apple (Slack) to Microsoft (IRC), both do broadly the same thing but a tight focus on design (and been fashionable, lets be fair) puts Slack over the top. That said I still use IRC and will likely do so in the future, lots of open source clients, you can run your own server and you aren't putting your entire history in the hands of a private entity (I'm not the majority). Also while many of us could create something like Slack the real devil is in the details, getting the UI to the requisite standard, the UX nailed down etc is a lot of work - possibly more than the guts of the clone as you could pull in a bunch of extant systems for that.
- cbsmith 11y agoA distraction-free chat application seems like an oxymoron...
- Aeolun 11y agoCan we have some way to block people?