Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Simplicity of IRC

susam.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 250 posts

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#31

Post by hiptobecubic »

lambdaba wrote: post #23
trixie_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The integrations are a neat trick, but often end up spamming a channel where people are trying to communicate. Teams seamlessly works across platforms, and mobile with video chat, files, outlook integration, and screen sharing. Maybe IRC could of been that, but it never happened.

There are nice IRC clients out there. I don't use them and I haven't used them in a group, because even in programming language communities many have moved to Discord/Slack, but I would prefer working with multiple simple tools than a monolith, different tools for different uses, and glue them together when needed (it doesn't need to be complicated, and if it is, than some additional effort is justified)

If you look at these communities, there is basically only one feature of Discord/Slack that they use that IRC does not easily provide and that's ephemeral/mobile. If I go offline for an hour in IRC, I lose a bunch of messages unless I've done some backflips to set up some kind of archiving/replay in a separate failure domain (e.g. znc running on gcp). With chat services, the service is essentially znc for free.

The rest of the shift is explained by discord being popular for other use cases (e.g. as a twitch companion), overwhelmingly dominated by younger users. IRC isn't getting new users and over time, this means the community will migrate due to turnover. Thank god we at least have things like matrix bridges, but discord is a lost cause.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#32

Post by hiptobecubic »

lambdaba wrote: post #28
tiffanyh wrote: post #24

Speaking of ‘simplicity’, this blog has a fantastic design. The CSS is only ~30 lines and is largely just applying spacing/padding. No JS, no custom font, etc. https://susam.net/css/main.css

It's pretty nice indeed. I like the use of keywords for sizes "thin", "large", and the shorthand hex for colors, and the fact that there's zero boilerplate and only styling what's actually used.

Agreed, but I hate this:

a:link, a:visited { color: #00e; }

Why do this?

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#33

Post by anthk »

dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

TCL/TK >>>>>> VB. By a huge margin. VB would work great under Windows, but TCL/TK kits would work everywhere.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#34

Post by layer8 »

einpoklum wrote: post #22
dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

> ... difficult to write simple things... and > Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, don't seem to agree very well. Visual Studio is a behemoth and usually results in stuff that's non-standard, non-portable and with lots of dependencies.

That certainly wasn’t the case with Visual Studio VB6 (or earlier) that the GP alluded to.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#35

Post by Iv »

epalm wrote: post #30

As an aside, can I just say how refreshing this website is? It's 100% content, just text. Now view the html source, and be amazed. I daresay the author actually wrote the html by hand. I suppose it could be a very conservative and conscientious site generator that even respects line length, but I'd be surprised. Short css file for minimal style tweaks, and readable markup. Fitting that the article is about simplicity…

Possibly a pandoc generated html from markdown. My favorite way of doing things.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#36

Post by layer8 »

323 wrote: post #17
dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

Rose tinted glasses? Visual Basic (classic) that you mentioned, discontinued in 2008, was not free, unless you pirated it. > ‘just drawing things’ For that you have much more amazing things today, like Shadertoy, or various artistic programming languages like Processing, ... Programming is easier than ever, computers are extremely cheap, software is free, documentation on the internet is free, YouTube is full of tuto…

However, today there is no VB-like experience for modern development regardless how much you’d be willing to pay for it.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#37

Post by Jorengarenar »

epalm wrote: post #30

As an aside, can I just say how refreshing this website is? It's 100% content, just text. Now view the html source, and be amazed. I daresay the author actually wrote the html by hand. I suppose it could be a very conservative and conscientious site generator that even respects line length, but I'd be surprised. Short css file for minimal style tweaks, and readable markup. Fitting that the article is about simplicity…

Source code [0] is available on GitHub; looks like they wrote their own simple site generator.

I've been thinking about something similar (maybe even simpler) for my blog too.

[0]: https://github.com/susam/susam.net

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#38

Post by Iv »

dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

> on windows

This is the mistake. Linux and, I believe, OSX come with several tools pre-installed including python.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#40

Post by signal11 »

epalm wrote: post #30

As an aside, can I just say how refreshing this website is? It's 100% content, just text. Now view the html source, and be amazed. I daresay the author actually wrote the html by hand. I suppose it could be a very conservative and conscientious site generator that even respects line length, but I'd be surprised. Short css file for minimal style tweaks, and readable markup. Fitting that the article is about simplicity…

It does appear to be handcrafted HTML, generated using [1].

> This is a static website generated using a Common Lisp program. See github.com/susam/maze for the source code of this website[2]

> Just like the original website, every line of HTML and CSS that appears in the website is handcrafted.[3]

[1] https://github.com/susam/maze/blob/main/site.lisp

[2] https://susam.net/maze/about.html

[3] https://github.com/susam/maze

Post reply on HN