from Hacker News

Show HN: Hacker XP – Hacker News styled as a Windows XP Outlook email client

by assemblylang on 1/22/22, 6:58 PM with 52 comments

• by miles on 1/22/22, 8:02 PM

  Had a brief, glorious glimpse amidst a host of "500 Internal Server Error"s: https://imgur.com/a/y3896NY

  EDIT: Did not know that links and text could be combined in a single submission, nor that the submission could be edited for so long (the archive.org and github.com links were recently added apparently).

• by Retr0id on 1/22/22, 7:54 PM

  I didn't know it was possible to make an HN post with both text, and an URL. Is this a new feature?

• by curiousfab on 1/22/22, 7:49 PM

  Thanks for making this (despite the hiccups and error 500s). I love the aesthetics of that era so much: Efficient usage of screen space, clear borders between different elements - brings back happy memories!

• by btdmaster on 1/22/22, 8:00 PM

  https://web.archive.org/web/20220122190454/https://hackerxp....

• by Multicomp on 1/22/22, 7:53 PM

  This is amazing. But I think I somewhat helped the HN hug of death hence getting intermittent 500s.

  For folks passing through, the image is of a virtual Windows XP desktop complete with Bliss background, taskbar, and Outlook Express showing emails, where each email is an HN link. I may just need to set this as my new HN bookmark!

• by ZoomZoomZoom on 1/22/22, 8:38 PM

  I just realized I'd be much more surprised and exited to see this as an actual desktop application made with something like Lazarus, than imitation of such a program with web tech. Strange times.

• by assemblylang on 1/22/22, 8:07 PM

  Working on getting the website back up now, got the so called "HN hug of death" from the traffic

• by akoster on 1/22/22, 7:38 PM

  I’m excited to try it but getting “ 500 Internal Server Error.” right now. Will check back later- looking forward to it!

• by codeflo on 1/22/22, 11:40 PM

  Genuinely wondering: Are we at the point where people feel nostalgic about early 2000s computing?

  As someone who was in their mid to late teens at the time, I find nostalgia for Windows XP in particular a bit funny because back then, people couldn’t disable the new UI and activate the “classic look” (Windows NT/9x style) fast enough.

• by ThinkBeat on 1/22/22, 10:29 PM

  This seems like it would be a good candidate for a static site responding to all the requests in an efficient manner.

  Then have a server process somewhere that generates scheduled updates of the site on a scheduled basis.

  I would think the site does not have to be real time,

• by password4321 on 1/22/22, 9:31 PM

  Nice re-skin. Suggestions vs. the 500's:

  · Show the rest of the page if the HN content isn't loadable.

  The server doesn't seem to have any problem delivering the static assets, which are the majority of the work. Server-side rendering is awesome, but there's got to be a way to not lose the whole layout on server error?

  · Load the HN content from somewhere else client-side rather than proxying through your server.

  I don't have experience to share the ideal source, but I do know HN has an official API. Implementing caching may be enough to allow the server to handle it.

  Congrats on your project getting so much traffic!

• by jbverschoor on 1/22/22, 8:32 PM

  Ahhh.. looks like good old NNTP. Time to get https://www.forteinc.com/agent/ again?

• by barelysapient on 1/22/22, 9:20 PM

  Disappointed the 500 error I got wasn't a blue screen of death.

• by qbasic_forever on 1/22/22, 9:15 PM

  Uh oh, do we need to be careful of posts going 'viral' again? :)

  The last time I used Outlook express on Win XP were the glory days of attachment and automatic preview worm emails. Back then we thought sending a bit of jscript or vbscript to an email client should of course be automatically executed and run when received or clicked to preview the contents. shudder

• by lostgame on 1/22/22, 8:20 PM

  This is adorable. A little broken on my iPhone 8, but that’s to be expected; it’s meant to emulate a desktop experience.

• by nik736 on 1/22/22, 8:25 PM

  Why is the 500 error page not a blue screen.

• by joering2 on 1/22/22, 9:10 PM

  Thanks, looks cool once I had a chance to load it.

  Out of curiosity - can I ask you what infrastructure this is running on? Is this some dedicated bare metal or a basic $5 VPS? I am curious as of what it actually takes to give your site a "HN hug of death" once you reach first page.

  Thanks.

• by cheeaun on 1/23/22, 3:43 AM

  Quite surprised that you're scraping HN and parse the DOM. Maybe should try use the API? https://github.com/HackerNews/API

• by otagekki on 1/22/22, 8:37 PM

  I keep having 500 errors... Denial of service?

  As said elsewhere, server errors should look have a BSoD-like appearance ;)

• by graderjs on 1/23/22, 1:44 AM

  That is awesome! How cool is that.

  OMG, that is so cool! :D

  I want to put my browser in an XP frame to make it look retro.

• by walrus01 on 1/22/22, 10:21 PM

  the interface reminds me a little bit of progress quest

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest

• by bitigchi on 1/22/22, 10:51 PM

  Reminded me of how Safari for Windows actually had a native Windows UI.

• by gred on 1/22/22, 9:32 PM

  This plus full screen (F11)! chef's kiss

• by ohforsure on 1/23/22, 12:43 AM

  It's... it's beautiful. Thank you.

• by only4here on 1/22/22, 7:56 PM

  currently getting an internal server error on your website, but I can't blame you for being on the front page!

• by francoismassot on 1/22/22, 10:00 PM

  thank you for this hilarious moment, the internal server error was just too good

• by bingohbangoh on 1/23/22, 1:41 AM

  cute, though I kind of expected this to go a little farther with the theme tbh

• by solmag on 1/22/22, 7:56 PM

  "500 internal error" and audible laughter sorry