
HN Office Hours - sahillavingia
http://www.hnofficehours.com/
======
ezl
Oh 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>, 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>), 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]

~~~
xtrumanx
Just wondering, why'd you opt to only allow those with hn accounts to use the
site? I've been lurking here for a long time and had no intent of creating an
account (mostly because I blame antics like mine for the decline of reddit so
I vowed never to create a hn account, but I digress) but was forced to now to
be a part of hnofficehours.

~~~
alnayyir
We wanted people who were serious about being involved in the community.
Lurkers and trolls weren't exactly a high priority user target for us.

------
petercooper
It'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
Seconded. 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.

------
trouble
" _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
_or, 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.

~~~
aphyr
"Their" is totally a gender-neutral 3nd person singular now.

~~~
sesqu
Now? It's been a gender-neutral 3rd person singular for hundreds of years.

------
jjcm
A "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
IRC handles are pretty much a requirement for me to engage. #hnofficehours on
Freenode and ops.

~~~
davidandgoliath
All kinds of empty in there :) //Op'd!

------
pero
Awesome; a web-based chat interface would be a killer feature however.

~~~
alnayyir
I'll keep that in mind if I can swing a weekend for ezl and the rest of us to
work on it.

------
rodion_89
<http://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/>

This throws an error. Also, DEBUG = False

~~~
ezl
ah yes, we suck. We were hoping it wouldn't get discovered until we had a
second weekend to really deploy it.

------
chime
Awesome 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.

------
jackowayed
It 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-
enterp...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/opzi-a-quora-for-the-enterprise/))

------
ElliotH
A 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).

------
aridiculous
This 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
Me too. I think if we, as the community, offer up our skills when we can this
will succeed.

------
docgnome
I'd suggest adding IRC handle to the ways of contact.

------
Tichy
Great 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
I 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
dunning kruger effect?

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect>

------
swanson
Here is the original HN post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579015>

And the source code: <https://github.com/ezl/hnofficehours>

------
pyre
Why does "Upcoming Office Hours" include "From Aug. 4, 2010, 2 a.m. to Aug.
19, 2010, 5 a.m."?

~~~
pavel_lishin
I, too, am very confused by this. Maybe it's only matching on time, and not
date?

------
PedroCandeias
Even 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/> 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.

------
tansey
Great! 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.

------
brendoncrawford
The "AIM" field needs to allow more characters. Keep in mind that AIM allows
email addresses as usernames.

~~~
jackowayed
Same with gtalk. My gtalk username is pretty long (because it's
@danieljackoway.com) and doesn't fit

------
JoeCortopassi
Anyone 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.

------
cool-RR
Interesting. But what reason is there to use this over one of the
StackExchange websites?

~~~
pero
Immediate response to your inquiries?

~~~
snow_mac
That 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... :-)

------
laxj11
Just 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.

------
Groxx
Needs availability views based on tags. _Really_ needs that.

------
notmyname
How 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.

------
JonathanBouman
Great job! Found a small bug over here:
<http://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/>

~~~
die_sekte
You also might not want to have stacktraces on a public web site.

~~~
apenwarr
I just used said stacktrace to find the problem. So... it has its advantages
and disadvantages :)

------
davidandgoliath
Great idea, nasty error here though:
<http://www.hnofficehours.com/profile/list/>

------
initself
I 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.

------
multiplegeorges
Buggy as you say it is, I think this is a great idea and I intend to donate
time and use it.

Great idea!

------
sayemm
Great idea, well done - this could be the start of something pretty
interesting

------
devin
I've added the link to my profile, but no dice -- I cannot sign up.

------
lisper
Is there a reason that profiles don't have email as a contact mode?

------
jlees
Would be interesting to also add IRC handles as a contact method.

------
olalonde
I get "olalonde does not appear to be a registered HN username".

------
snow_mac
So, we can go here and ask people for help basically?

------
jasonmcalacanis
This is a very neat idea.

~~~
adrianwaj
Samurai, are you going to reach out to others, let others reach out to you,
both, neither, and/or copy the idea?

