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Simple Unix Chat

the-dam.org

11–20 of 175 posts

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#11
This is very reminiscent of the initial hn response to DropBox [0]. This is like saying that you can build a Tesla clone by attaching 3 pieces of wood together along with 4 wheels.

Although it is technically cool, it misses practically all of what makes Slack so popular - UX.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#12
Slack and discord have screen sharing and voice chat. These are not sideline features. They are pretty critical features to its market dominance.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#13
I think the intuition would be that if a determined "core" feature set of something is so easily and trivially reproduced, then it's not the core/source of its value.

Which makes me wonder: Just how much of UI development had software engineering had consumed and automated since 1980s, or is it still in the realm of pure human art?

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#14
Most current distros prevent you from making setuid bash scripts, on security grounds. But you can get most of the same effect with a specific sudoers entry.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#15
post #12

Slack and discord have screen sharing and voice chat. These are not sideline features. They are pretty critical features to its market dominance.

Critical yet feels like they are going down in quality.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#16
post #6

I understand the blog post here is about suc, and it is acknowledged immediately and honestly that the headline is slightly misleading, but there's an important message here that ultimately has nothing to do with suc. Almost all modern software is bloated to hell. The idea that one would need 1.7 million LoC for a rich chat server is absurd. To paraphrase Bill Gates, I don't think I could "spend" that many lines of c…

While I agree in principle, a lot of the bloat is due to trying to have one codebase for a lot of different platforms. This is generally a good ideas as it increases the speed you can ship & reduces the size of the org. But there’s a big trade off: complexity & abstraction. The higher level your abstractions the worse it gets too. So it’s not without reason.

also to make it user friendly. I know we're on HN so we're all tech people but this is super nerdy stuff lol. This would never get mass adoption like tools like Slack have that work across multiple platforms, including mobile

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#19
post #12

Slack and discord have screen sharing and voice chat. These are not sideline features. They are pretty critical features to its market dominance.

Critical yet feels like they are going down in quality.

99% of the issues I've seen for these features have been the OS making it increasingly a pain in the ass to grant an application permission to gain full-screen control or camera/mic access.

Not really Slack's fault as far as I can tell.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#20
Unix default security mechanisms are not enough, otherwise tools like KVM/Firecracker and gVisor won't be the standard for all cloud hosting. Unix just wasn't built to sandbox truly hostile code.
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