@dang seeing as this is a derivative of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472170 but the credit isn't very clear, could you give the original Show HN another repost perhaps?
Seems a shame that the author of the majority of this work (pieterhg) didn't get a lot of credit here or the same level of interest in their original Show HN.
I wouldn't assume ill-intent, or even that the company sucks.
This might be just a fun joke. At my previous job we had a company-wide shared folder with some stealth Excel games [1], my boss loved them.
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-iconic-games-recreated-micro...
I had written TSR (Terminated and Stay Residendt) MS DOS "Boss key" program which when activated shows TurboC screen with compilation going on and compiled lines number counter changing. Used it when I played games during my internship in early nienties.
Nice work! Reminds me of the old days of the 'Boss Key' in most games of the 80's. +1 on the suggestion to actually make this a VSCode extension so you can have it running in a tab in your actual workspace and check it from time to time.
I was always fascinated by these kind of things and I always wondered why they are necessary, as I had never had a job in the past 15 years where you couldn’t open a sports page once in a while. Or better said, where someone would expect you sit 6-8-10 hours in front of the computer and churn code without interruption. Or go outside and check the scores on your phone
Reminds me of the PhD Comics "Emergency button" (http://phdcomics.com/, bottom right) redirecting to a fake journal article and a similar tool for Tinder redirecting to a spreadsheet.
In the case of PhD Comics is clearly an inside joke (I guess). For other tools I find it a clearly desired yet not the most honest feature.
I had a video camera and a motion detection algorithm running to alert me if someone was approaching my cubicle, where I was napping.
This made me laugh, nice one.
Reminds of all the old apps/games that had boss key/buttons -- I wonder if there's a gallery of a bunch of them somewhere? Creative 'fake' docs and spreadsheets etc kinda funny
A file named "index.js", when you open it, the tab says "index.php", and the file contains HTML code.
A comedy at it's finest.
Made me laugh, but also made me think of all those bad experiences I had working with teams from Indian / Pakistan... I can definitely imagine those guys watching cricket instead of pushing new code.
Just goes to show the difference in work cultures. Here in the UK I could quite happily have the match up on another monitor, nobody would bat (pun unintended) and eyelash. I'm not sure I could do that with a game that requires more oversight though, test cricket, especially, is slow to watch. Fun though!
If your job prevents your from taking your mind off temporarily off of a task, then this is nothing short of abuse.
I cannot focus on the task for more than 10-20 minutes, then I take few minutes break, sometimes more. If I couldn't do that, I wouldn't get any work done because quickly my brain would sort of shut down.
I've been through this many times - manager would get me to a meeting room and say "people complain that you are browsing the internet rather than working". I'd say "do I deliver on time?" the answer would be "yes". That would be the end of it. I would also say he or she should talk with those who reported this, whether snooping on other workers is a good use of their time.
Nonetheless nice project! I remember doing similar thing to browse Reddit ages ago ;-)
Excellent!
Reminds me of those old MS-DOS games that often had a "boss key" which switched the game display to some fake spreadsheet.
Great work, but the fact that you had to build it means you need to change the company you work with ;).
Reminds me of the Boss Screen in the famous German PC game 'Moorhuhnjagd' where pressing [B] would pause the game and show a fake Word document.
I was hoping the cricket score was a pleasant musical soundtrack of live crickets chirping, to listen to while you code.
Very good! About 7/8 years ago I did the same to make HN look like some PHP code - did a looot of "code reviews" back then.
For those not too familiar with cricket - matches can go on for days and a summary of the score can be a couple of numbers.
Browsing the score might mean a glance at those numbers every fifteen minutes or so - probably about the same impact on productivity as checking the time.
If you use VS Code, why not just build that as a plug-in?
You all might like CyberCoderOnline, a multiplayer game which runs in a browser and looks like vscode (though it also has another mode that is slightly more graphical). It would be cooler if was an actual vscode extention, though.
My work is already pain. I don't need to know how bad South Africa is doing while at work.
I think this is hilarious. And let's be honest here. Getting a score feed like this is much less distracting that launching a browser and visiting some site and somehow ending up on Facehook.
I think it would it be easier to make a repository with a file that just auto updates with the scores? You could use it in any editor, and you wouldn't need a facade.
Clever! Next step would be to build a VSCode extension so you can actually work in VSCode and keep track of live cricket scores
This adds an item on my long list of fun little projects I unfortunately never start: a general purpose information consumption tool disguised as VS Code (with an extra feature to look like the IDE used at the firm in question)
From tennis or football games to text adventures, there would be so many great options to give the mind a quick break from work.
When I was in high school, I wrote an IRC client that looked like microsoft word. In visual basic. Simpler times...
bro thank you very much I was looking for this my whole career.
If it’s just the scores, I would think using curl/wget in a terminal window might be simpler.
Back in the days I remember the manual (or help file or something) for some submarine simulator game containing an "emergency key" that brought up a spreadsheet screenshot.
Can't remember the name though, but it was on a Mac in the 90ies sometime so before Mac OS X.
Years ago ( 15+ ) I created not to automatically send cricket updates to office chats.
Bro, It is amazing but I would suggest you to look for another job. In my office in Bangalore, we watch on TV and screen in cafeteria leaving the work aside although some meetings have to be attended.
This used to be a fake excel :-D Thank you for make me smile today.
yeah, but why do you want to hide that you browser this cricket stuff in the first place? Does someone constantly watch what's going on on your screen?
Separately, I used to keep an ssh session to one of my servers open with lynx running, so I could browse HN and have it still look like work to a non-dev
I learned alt-space-n for minimizing a window, which can be done discreetly without any obvious mouse motion. That and a rear view mirror on my monitor.
I always seemed to have a putty window with a colorscheme similar to my editor. Then I ssh into a VPS, browse whatever over lynx, have IRC open...
It's so sad if one has to resort to these kind of tricks. Mostly for the management, I guess (assuming no abuse level of diversion).
Hope you didn’t regret it after yesterday’s match.
Some posts I upvote just by reading the headline.
Can't imagine going this far without taking the next step of bundling it into an electron app with matching icon, etc.
Modern problems require modern solutions. I hope your boss isn't on HN. If my team wanted to check the scores it wouldn't bother me - I hired people not robots.
Great!
Next step, create a VBA macro that drops the results into Excel worksheet, for those more tasked with Office activities.
someone make the HN version of this plz
You could just change jobs to a company that allows you to have a window like that open on the side.
Title should be appended with "...and could have gotten away with a .sh/.ps instead"
Now, I'm interested in an NBA score like this. I wonder how it will look like on code.
I can't imagine working at a company that micro-manages like this. I have a style where i Code at like 500% effort for short bursts, then relax/browse web stuff for up to an hour.
doing the needful
Anyone remember Ghostzilla?
Fake VS Code everywhere!
Sooo, do we already have something like this for Hacker News?
Great! Can we have one for HN as well, please? :)
used to play some Nethack when didn't felt much like working. quite indistinguishable
Is there a vim plugin for it?
it would be nice to have it to read HN newest topics. Open source for sure :)
Which APIs are you using?
That is spectacular
Who's getting in trouble for looking at sports scores in the office? What archaic organization do you work at this pt ?
file has extension .php but is html
A+
the website hang up
VSCode has an auto-load feature, it will refresh any unmodified buffer where the file has changed on disk. Why not just use that and save yourself the bother of making a whole fake VSCode. You can even do some work at the same time!
I guess people who use VSCode aren't necessarily familiar with the UNIX way.
So cool to see this on top of HN.
Pankaj took my VSCode for Remote OK and modded it for cricket scores. Great work and it even still says index.php, hah.
If you'd like to see the original from a few weeks ago: https://remoteok.io/vscode