Live data from Hacker News

Slack was down

status.slack.com

71–80 of 243 posts

Re: Slack was down

#71
post #57

Slightly offtopic : As a remote engineer, I wonder if half-duplex voice (kind of like a CB radio) would be superior for communication vs typing everything? E.g. when I have an idea, I just talk, that comment is recorded and made available to the chat room. I'd like to get back some of the nuance of language that just isn't possible with text. There'd have to be some easy way of playing back the voice snippets in orde…

I think it's a terrible idea. Writing things down, is the first step towards really thinking it through, making sure it makes sense, etc.

Re: Slack was down

#72
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... we pay managed solutions like Slack so we have 100% uptime...

Actually it's only two nine's, which means Slack can be down for 52 minutes every year. > 1. We purposely made our commitment to the ‘fourth 9’, viz. 99.99% uptime guarantee in contrast to the typical SLAs which tend to offer 99.90%. We believe that extra availability makes a difference: the ‘fourth 9’ is important when your team relies on Slack every day. You need Slack at least 9,999 out of every 10,000 minutes. [1…

99.99 is four nines, not two. https://uptime.is/four-nines

Re: Slack was down

#73
post #34
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing one proprietary service to federated and open services? I'm not following you

While email as a whole is indeed federated, email service for a single company is usually not, that is you have a single provider and when that provider happens to have technical issues your email might be down. While obviously you could use other provider (or even free email) almost immediately to send emails, you will not be able to receive/access emails that are sent to your primary address/domain until the provid…

> email has built in retries and feedback

Yes it has and it is a great thing - hopefully no messages would be lost assuming that downtime is relatively short. This still does pose a (possibly minor) problem when some mails are urgent.

Re: Slack was down

#74
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... we pay managed solutions like Slack so we have 100% uptime...

Actually it's only two nine's, which means Slack can be down for 52 minutes every year. > 1. We purposely made our commitment to the ‘fourth 9’, viz. 99.99% uptime guarantee in contrast to the typical SLAs which tend to offer 99.90%. We believe that extra availability makes a difference: the ‘fourth 9’ is important when your team relies on Slack every day. You need Slack at least 9,999 out of every 10,000 minutes. [1…

I think you mean 4 nines.

Re: Slack was down

#75
post #55

With Slack unable to send messages, I had to contact people via trembles Skype for Business

I would love it if I could use Skype, but Skype has been consistently crashing on my machine for the last month. And even when it opens, it almost never works correctly.

Re: Slack was down

#76
post #68
post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

2GB of RAM use for 6 open tabs in Slack is pretty awful, their desktop client has set the bar to compete with Slack on performance very low.

This abusive resource usage has created a dislike of Slack among a subset of its users.

Re: Slack was down

#77
post #66
post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

> then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I really want to like Zulip Chat. It has everything all the alternatives have + self-hosting, but as soon as they switched to their Electron client, it has become yet another resource hog that I have to put up with. I already have to put up with 10+ electron apps slowing down my Macbook. I shouldn't have to make s…

10+ electron apps seems excessive, what other Electron apps are you running? I think Slack is the only one I'm running (that I know of)

Re: Slack was down

#78
Any alternatives to Slack with parity screensharing functionality?

Being able to draw on the screen is so valuable for remote pair programming—Hangouts/Skype don’t cut it

Re: Slack was down

#79
post #70
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

"suck less" is a specific software development philosophy https://suckless.org/philosophy/

It's also not what op meant.

Re: Slack was down

#80
post #68
post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

I don't mean it in a disparaging way. Most software sucks to some degree so the goal is to find something that "sucks less". Pretty much everything can always be improved on.
Post reply on HN