Live data from Hacker News

Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

bloomberg.com

701–710 of 730 posts

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're confusing communication throughput with latency. I also don't like using chat at work. It's not because I want less interaction , it's because I want less interruption . Email has a norm of asynchrony where I can respond to email when I reach a good point in my current task. With chat, the other party is presumed to be sitting staring at the screen waiting for my reply, so I have to drop what I'm doing…

I have never expected that the other party is sitting and staring at the screen in any Slack or chat I’ve used. An @mention will change the expectation of interrupting or not, but as someone who has used various chat programs for 24 years of my life, this ha never been an expectation I’ve had, nor one I’ve seen too frequently expressed. What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind? Do you wish that for…

> I have never expected that the other party is sitting and staring at the screen in any Slack or chat I’ve used.

OK, maybe not literally staring at the screen.

> What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind?

I think the structural analogue and communication style — even the name! — of chat is a verbal conversation. In a conversation, you say as little as needed and then pause for the other person to take their turn. Each utterance is pretty short so that you give the other party a chance to respond.

If you do that asynchronously, it takes forever to work through a sizeable quantity of content.

In email, the analogue is written letters. The expected asynchrony is high and in return the writing style accommodates that: each email is usually a roughly complete though with possibly some paragraphs. Since you know the person replying to you can reply to individual sections, it's OK to put out a complete thought. You don't have to shorten it to give them a chance to interject.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you not like about the protocol? Like everything, it has its warts, but having worked on a few more-or-less proprietary protocols XMPP is much better designed and thought out than most of them. The community has had a lot of time to address some of its flaws whereas Slack, Stride, et al. tend to reinvent the same problems XMPP solved 20 years ago.

Let me just start by saying that I'm a big fan of XMPP. I run my own server, and talked to my friends exclusively through XMPP until that fateful day that Google turned off federation support for Gmail chat, and I lost contact with a bunch of friends. I still run my own server, though I don't use it nearly as much as I used to. XMPP is a well-thought-out protocol, and a lot of the XEPs are great features. The problem…

I thought about this too. My idea was to introduce some sort of version badges, like 'This client supports feature set 2018'. Every 2 to 3 years there should be new definition of which XEPs a client should support in order to be allowed to be called 'Supports feature set xxxx'.

That way you could very easily coordinate a common target for XEPs. Clients which would not support the newest features would still work with the others but users could simply see which clients support the state of the art features. And for developers it would make it easier to identify and skip old XEPs (e.g. how many XEPs are there to confirm a message has been received? Which is the recommended one for new implementations?).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's easier for development. os x sucks, I use it to surf the web on my ouch. my real dev machine is in my office with linux

It "sucks", really? You don't think that might be a bit of an overstatement? You may not prefer it, but it objectively does not "suck".

Lol tell me about the openssl version osx ships with. You have to install a 3rd party pkg manager to install a serviceable openssl pkg. not to mention the garbage bsd userland I have to immediately replace w/ coreutils in addition to the insanely busted openssl libs. Not exactly batteries included. Recognize your bias. In many (most?) cases Ubuntu matches your server env in a way OSX never will and works a OK with non-gamer hardware.

That's just scratching the surface. OSX empirically sucks for developing apps that run on Linux.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#704
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the "software dev" distinction here is not relevant. However, it's definitely true that email is typically used both for "serious and well-argued discussions" and for chatty threads along the lines of Thanks. BTW How are we looking for this month's revenue target? >No idea, maybe the data load didn't run last night, >I'll look into it. > >>This report looks broken, the opportunity I closed >>yesterday is…

Sure, but it's not like a software dev wouldn't send a similar email, just discussing something development-related instead of revenue-related.

I am in complete agreement on this point.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#705
post #523
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that mattermost has made pretty significant improvements around this in the past several months, now that there's a large customer: https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ web/apps have been pretty much completely rewritten too. it's noticeably better, if you haven't used it for a while.

Unfortunately I can't name any names, but I can say that Uber isn't the largest company Mattermost, neither in terms of revenue nor number of employees. I don't know for how long not-Uber has been using it, but at least a bit more than a year now.

Neat. Thanks! I haven't kept up on other-users outside of the uber post, good to hear there are more fish in the ocean :)

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#706
post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it's not like a software dev wouldn't send a similar email, just discussing something development-related instead of revenue-related.

I am in complete agreement on this point.

Sorry about that, seems my eyes skipped over the first line of your previous reply.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#707
post #681
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I can't name any names, but I can say that Uber isn't the largest company Mattermost, neither in terms of revenue nor number of employees. I don't know for how long not-Uber has been using it, but at least a bit more than a year now.

the fact that companies like HP builds/sells mattermost deployment/support/... yet internally still relies on lync is a joke (and pain to live with)

They use Mattermost internally, they don't sell it to customers (not sure if you were assuming I was talking about HP or a similar company that just deploys Mattermost for customers).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might have to revert to talking. Aahhhhh!

I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but for a lot of distributed companies, it just isn't realistic for people to get on the phone every time they need to talk to one another.

Wasn't too serious

But ...

For distributed companies: email for async communications, phone for sync. If you need to bother someone immediately you might as well have a high bandwidth audio (or even video) call.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is you current solution so ressource hungry? I mean, my 10-active-users off-the-shelf XMPP server (ejabberd) uses about 100MB RAM currently.

a 10 active user Synapse should use about 1GB max, so unsure what’s up with the earlier post. The reason it’s currently so much heavier than XMPP is that resource usage scales with the size of rooms being participated in, not the number of connected users - and we aggressively cache those rooms in RAM. However, 100MB is a much more sensible target and we’re busy optimising to try to shrink things down.

> a 10 active user Synapse should use about 1GB max, so unsure what’s up with the earlier post

It's actually not as bad as I remember (time made me think it's worse than it really is) - it's really only large rooms that feel slow. Oops.

I just guess the whole thing doesn't feel responsive. Messages sent take a while to sync between different clients, etc.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#710
post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will be soon able to evaluate Nayego as well: https://nayego.net/ you can subscribe if you want to see the preview. Nayego is an open source and open standard team chat, that is federated/distributed/decentralised.

Where's the source? nayego.net doesn't have any links.

I'm pretty sure it's spam.

I found a link, but it only has a README

https://github.com/Nayego/Nayego-client

Post reply on HN