Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username.<p><pre><code> &#x27;#&#x27; + username.md5().take(6).join(&#x27;&#x27;) </code></pre> I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.dropboxusercontent.com&#x2F;spa&#x2F;quq37nq1583x0lf&#x2F;xf17fnph.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.dropboxusercontent.com&#x2F;spa&#x2F;quq37nq1583x0lf&#x2F;xf17fn...</a> (not the best example since everyone happened to be shades of green)

It&#x27;d be cool if it showed the number of anonymous users creepily watching the conversation too.

Another chat app with mostly arbitrary ways to communicate? No thanks. I understand this is for HN community, but with XMPP, ICQ derivatives, IRC, etc I already have too many spaces to keep up with.<p>Its nice though, I like the profile key integration.

This is secretly a way for op to harvest IP addresses of usernames! &#x2F;tinfoilhat

I&#x27;ve been idling in #hn on freenode for years now, and sadly it&#x27;s consistently been dead, activity wise. Eager to see if hnchat can change the game.

Yeah, the thing is, this needs some kind of IRC bridge, with auth. If you&#x27;re an HN user, IRC is probably your usual mechanism for realtime textual communication, and I gather many would rather use their very rich tooling built on IRC than check another website.

The only problem you have is that people are leaving all their comments on the chat group instead of in here... :)

Oh gosh and it&#x27;s already devolved into tabs vs spaces and two vs four, what else should I have expected? ;-)<p>Nice, I&#x27;ll login later and check it out!

App version for android: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forty7.org&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;hnapp&#x2F;hnchat.app.arm.apk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forty7.org&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;hnapp&#x2F;hnchat.app.arm.apk</a><p>I&#x27;m making a website tool to convert website to Android apps, so was using this as a test.<p>If anyone got an x86 android device, I also generated x86 version of the app: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forty7.org&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;hnapp&#x2F;hnchat.app.x86.apk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forty7.org&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;hnapp&#x2F;hnchat.app.x86.apk</a>

I like that I can login without providing my credentials.

<p><pre><code> Forbidden (403) CSRF verification failed. Request aborted. You are seeing this message because this HTTPS site requires a &#x27;Referer header&#x27; to be sent by your Web browser, but none was sent. This header is required for security reasons, to ensure that your browser is not being hijacked by third parties. </code></pre> Erm...

I really dig the login system!<p>I thought it should be vulnerable to 1. find hash on victim&#x27;s profile, 2. login using the hash + username<p>But it seems the hash is never actually submitted to the server, neither through the login form nor later on by cookie. That is good news! The implied hurdle is that you&#x27;ll need to update the hash on each login.

I&#x27;ve been saving a similar idea of getting people to authenticate with custom text in their bios. Would be clever if the app tricked you into verifying a third party account on keybase too.

Good stuff!<p>The &quot;Login to chat&quot; should link to the login page.

someone called for this on another site recently: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newschoolers.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;thread&#x2F;845014&#x2F;NS-MEMBER-CHAT-" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newschoolers.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;thread&#x2F;845014&#x2F;NS-MEMBER-CH...</a><p>- maybe some way to have minimum karma to join, or at least a way to only see messages according to certain metrics, eg acct age, karma, avg post karma -- or else have those users in different colors, including being invisible<p>- ability to block people<p>- message replying<p>- toggle message storage, either for user or admin<p>- pausing<p>- users can make comments in another user&#x27;s chat profile, with ability for underlying user to reply<p>- highlight another user&#x27;s conversation, or have different conversations in different colors<p>- this might actually work for instagram, where any user can keep a chatspace for their followers - perhaps a new url is provided upon each new photo, that way the users have to view the underlying instagram account, and the chatspace is cleared regularly (GramChat.)

`Add the following token to your HN Bio` on login screen. What means `HN Bio` ?<p>Sorry, for dumb question.

But how do I downvote the chats?

I&#x27;m getting a 500 from Heroku.<p>btw, care to share the tech stack this is using?

Neat! I love it!<p>What&#x27;s it written in and can I host something similar myself?

What I liked the most is the fact that it creates a kind of hackernews oauth. Using this mechanism, you can have something like &quot;Login with hackernews&quot; apps. Cool!

Would be nice if it had a list of top articles that drill down to open in new window | chat (creates a private room for that article | and view comments&#x2F;threads.

It would be nice to have tab completion for typing usernames.

HTTP 503 Service Unavailable &quot;Request queue full.&quot;

I&#x27;m using this on mobile and the scroll is very sluggish, you could add this you your scrollable div:<p><pre><code> -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;</code></pre>

Aaaaand we broke it.

&gt; Add the following token to your HN bio: hnchat:p2z9iJCaT5ZXWlWp5Vua<p>Smart idea to verify users

Makes me wonder if I should modify RaspChat (yes it was posted before <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.raspchat.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.raspchat.com</a> ) to actually play well with HackerNews.

I love this thing

please add a mute feature, tga is annoying

WOW Hackers :D

Nice app, but reading the unfiltered drivel of tech executives in real time is truly more than I can handle.