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]
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.
I don't care so much about the bugs: the big problem with these HN+ sites seems to be that they get an initial boost and then sort of fade away because people forget about them and new people don't find them.
For something like this it's not a maybe. I hear about services like this all the time and never hear about them again. If you want this thing to become a part of the hn community someone's going to have to put work into seeing that it hits the front page from time to time.
Otherwise it's often just a flash in the pan. Good luck!
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.
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.
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.
His was a universal pronoun for almost 200 years until the women's lib movement of the 1960s. Know what? A lot of dumb things happened in the 1960s. It's 2010. Let's not spend our time arguing over pronouns.
Please link your company & other projects in your profile so I and other tech women know we're not welcome in your efforts. Seriously. I'm done fighting sexists, I just want to know where you are so I can avoid you.
for this to work, really, we'd need another pronoun to mean "specifically male" as we have another pronoun to mean "specifically female" - "xhe" or something. Maybe then we could refer to "man" meaning human, "testicleman" meaning male, and "woman" meaning female, you know, both genders being prefixed by the reproductive organs that are specific to the gender, you know, to be fair.
Really, I think a more realistic solution is to just alternate between using 'he' and 'she' in your work; "they" grates on my ears when it's used in the singular, personally.
Just as an aside, there is a word for "specifically male man", it's "wereman" (just as "wifman", the old version of "woman" meant "specifically female man" -- "man" was short for "human", from "humanous" -- earthling, which both women and men are, despite martian/venutian assertions to the contrary...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I think interacting with folks over skype/chat might build a deeper relationship--gasp! even friendship--than a message board.
There is spontaneity to chat that the highly transactional Q&A format doesn't allow.
I love this idea... we're actually been thinking about taking some of the experts at Mahalo (i.e. our guitar teacher), and doing streaming lessons/chat/office hours.
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.
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]