Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#531

Post by philwelch » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 5:18 AM UTC

u801e wrote: post #432

philwelch wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

> I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp I wish there were more people who were in the "newsgroups should be used for substantive discussions" camp. They're better than email in that context.

I never had a chance to get into newsgroups that much, but I believe you.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#532

Post by closeparen » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 5:19 AM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #361

smt88 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.

If you want secure emails use GPG. Unlike slack, GPG is both open-source and offers government-level security. I don't think slack is more secure than GPG.

Companies are generally at more risk from failure to produce message content in a lawsuit, regulatory action, HR investigation, etc. than from eavesdropping. "Secure" in a corporate setting means subject to IT's surveillance, filtering, and archiving. If anything, security's job is to make sure employees aren't using things like PGP, personal webmail, Facebook, etc. to evade corporate retention policies.

Maybe mysterious quasi-state actors will steal your secrets and outcompete you decades from now, but they could probably do that anyway. The SEC will certainly fuck you up right now if you can't demonstrate adequate controls on regulated employees' communications.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#533

Post by davnn » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 5:26 AM UTC

solatic wrote: post #201

sparkling wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiding enterprise pricing is quite common for many SaaS companies.

And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing. Because enterprise sales have such a long sales cycle, that transparent pricing gave people inside their enterprises the confidence to push for a product they knew their budget could afford, rather than spend large amounts of internal political capital getting colleagues to rally behind a solution that wasn't affordable for them t…

> And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing.

Who knows if that had any influence on their success?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#534

Post by omnimus » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 5:41 AM UTC

tabbott wrote: post #487

AntonyGarand wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, there are tons of very low severity vulnerabilities disclosed on HackerOne and this does not mean the application is vulnerable. Slack is definetly not vulnerable because it is written in php and you can pollute an iframe on their career website. Having such a program in place is actually good for the application security as it does get audited by tons of hackers thanks to the monetary rewards.

I agree it's theoretically possible to write a secure project in PHP, but it's very difficult, especially if you're hiring people like crazy. If you divide the amount they've paid out in bounties by the number of bounties paid, and compare with their bounty tier rules, it's clear that a lot of the vulnerabilities that were reported in Slack are relatively severe. (And I agree bug bounty programs are great; we also us…

It is not about the language is it... I don't think there is so big difference between php and python. Besides Slack is most probably using whole lot more tech than php.

It is about Zullip being open source.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#535

Post by std_throwaway » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 5:43 AM UTC

solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

This shows one strength of open source where you have the option to fork and maintain your own solution in the case the project heads the wrong way.

Unfortunately the whole world seems to be heading the wrong way with cloud based "everything as a service" where you control nothing. If the provider or cloud goes down you have nothing. Even if they just take your keys you have nothing. It's quick and easy to setup and convenient but you're basically a hostage.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#536

Post by omnimus » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 5:59 AM UTC

People are talking about secure alternative matrix/riot, mattermost, zullip... not that i have anything to do with them but Wire https://wire.com is pretty impressive (you can geek out on haskell backend).

In small org we have been using riot/matrix and it is great. Works well but it is more like modern IRC. It doesnt have too much ui sugar. Mattermost on the other hand looks cool but had slow clients and there was some bullshit with push notifications requireing some enterprise server license. Hope its no longer the case - i mean why would you want chat without notifications?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#537

Post by dang » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:14 AM UTC

nichochar wrote: post #502

solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

lol you thought boards that make the acquisition decisions give a shit about customers? Welcome to the world buddy, money is everythting

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#538

Post by itomato » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:16 AM UTC

tommoor wrote: post #470

alienreborn wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use wha…

We've been working on an open source solution for this, if you're interested - markdown or wysiwygy based editing with a hosted option – http://getoutline.com/

How do I write macros? What advanced styling options are there? How do I manage templates? How do I restrict access to certain content?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#539

Post by edhelas » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:19 AM UTC

travbrack wrote: post #391

Alupis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For on-prem, why not use a free and enterprise-quality XMPP server, like Openfire[1]? It's Java so runs just about anywhere, and with even relatively low resource allocations, you can support a large number of concurrent chats and group sessions. Plus, since XMPP is an Open Standard, you can use any XMPP complaint client of your choosing. Cisco embeds Openfire in a few of their enterprise products already (including…

The client-side story of XMPP is pretty bleak, especially if you're trying to get non-technical people to use it.

Already tried Movim :) https://movim.eu/ ? It's a fully-featured web-based XMPP client. It integrates all the modern XMPP features (message editing, history management, file-sharing, video-conferencing, publications…), it's responsive and easy to use and deploy on a self-hosted instance.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#540

Post by mnm1 » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:19 AM UTC

corv wrote: post #518

mnm1 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are too arrogant to communicate asynchronously successfully. People think that chat is like being on a telephone or in person and that they can demand one's full, exclusive attention. That is some serious arrogance bordering on narcissism when done in personal conversations. At work, it could me more tolerable, but the downside is that no work gets done. Managers need to start to understand this. If you k…

It’s also possible to mute chats, disable notifications and revisit them periodically. You get to decide if you want to communicate asynchronously.

I don't see how this helps when someone is demanding your attention in your personal life or at work. But it will definitely make things worse with people who demand exclusive attention and on the job possibly get you fired.