I would imagine that a fairly large percentage of the Hacker News community probably works for themselves or as freelance contractors. The main problem is not that of hiding your browsing from an employer, but having the self control to work rather than browsing.
With 100 upvotes in the first hour, I would imagine a fairly large percentage of the Hacker News community thinks this is useful. Or (more likely) funny.
It's not really about reading HN getting you fired, it's just about perception management. People walk behind my desk. I'm salaried and so free to manage my time, but some people like the CTO are kind of peep-ey. I'd rather minimize the number of times someone who might care walks by and I'm doing something non-worky.
Once a bad perception happens, it's hard to counteract it, so it's better to just work a little to manage it. If I have something I can use to kill time while I'm blocked on something, while not worrying about how it looks, I kind of appreciate it.
The only way I can see to do it is constantly scraping HN's pages(unless there's an API?). On another note, having source code on your screen randomly shift and change large blocks of itself might be suspicious, defeating the purpose of this.
There is not an official API. However, there is a partially complete API available from the guy who made iHackerNews at http://api.ihackernews.com/ -- it works well, but stuff like voting is disabled.
This is a decent example. I've seen others that have more options and presumably more functionality.
A few notes from past experiences. Your IT department will completely freak out. Hopefully they'll also be impressed. HR will freak out worse because they won't understand. A good IT employee will come see what the heck is up with your ssh throughput to a weird vps or home box - befriend this person if you haven't already. Average code-monkeys will be impressed, especially if you don't do web development. Finally, it's almost certainly a violation of that 20 page agreement you signed on the first day of work.
This is what I do to get around blocks on some IM services. I work for a large, well-known and presumably IT-savvy organization. Nobody has confronted me about it yet, which in itself is actually kind of worrying. I half expected an IT SWAT team to rappel through the window after starting the tunnel.
Where I work, we have to ssh tunnel. Our cvs, bug tracker, internal websites and other servers are all located on the other side of the world, and only accessible through a tunnel.
It's 100% legal and quite common. It's their network, (usually) their computers, their time. Mostly organizations doing that are looking for threats to the business and not employee behavior though, of course YMMV.
I really enjoyed this, its an excellent UX pun. If you could use enough javascript to make it look like an emacs buffer some pointy haired types would be hard pressed to discern between this and actual work.
That being said, if you are truly into employee surveillance (and I know of at least one company that is) then what the screen shows is irrelevant since the http{s} traffic between your work station and the world is just as clear without having to 'walk around and look into your cube.'
Total kudos to the skinning though, I really enjoyed it.
This is exactly the same way I think, too. I mean, you don't learn everything when not putting effort in but familiarising yourself with a new technology is half the battle.
Me too.. I'm sort of the HN-rep for our group.. and yeah, it's good for me as a coder and for us as a group to keep in touch with what's happening in the tech world.
I spend most of my day talking with customers and reviewing contracts etc.. As much as I would love to, I think if my boss caught me looking at code like this he would fire me !
Why would you get fired over browsing websites that fall within the set guidelines by your employer? If a website like HN doesn't fit in there, you got screwed over and time to find a new job.
An employee should have the freedom to browse the web with limited restrictions. If that is not the case then it is a violation of the employees creativity and could hurt the employer in the long run since his/her employees are bound to limited creativity on the job sight.
Someone came up with a very similar solution for Reddit a short while ago: http://codereddit.com. Not to say that this is plagiarism; great minds often think alike.
You've got a bug on Ask HN posts, though, where you get a relative URL from HN (/comments/blah) which ends up relative to your site rather than news.yc.
More active than it ever has been before. Currently 335 people in the channel, and there's been effectively constant conversation for months (a year?) now.
I've only been on HN for a few weeks but I also was hoping for a good mobile app. I was using Flipboard on the iPad at first but I felt cut off without the comments.
Didn't even know these guidelines existed, but it was fun to read:
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
