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

201–210 of 250 posts

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#201

Post by denton-scratch »

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…

> Programming is easier than ever

Really, it's not. This trade has got much, much harder since I started. The languages are harder, because the targets are both more complicated and more various. Computers were mainly used to do sums (I worked on accounting systems written in COBOL).

I mean, it's easier if you take into account the complexity and richness of the modern computing environment, USB, PCI, caches, what have you. You are producing more powerful programs. But the onboarding ramp for modern programming is steep.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#202

Post by dan-robertson »

Iv wrote: post #38
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.

I wanted to focus on a ‘first introduction to programming’ which on average means windows. Obviously installing and running python can be easier on Linux but you still have problems with anything not-just-text.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#203

Post by laumars »

trixie_ wrote: post #190
laumars wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot comment on the switching between WiFi and data aspect because I’ve not tried that myself (though it didn’t work on my MBP switching between Ethernet and WiFi) but everything else you’ve described is pretty standard features for video conferencing solutions these days. I’d like Teams more if it just focused on the video conferencing side of things. It’s chat and Sharepoint integration just adds more frustrati…

Seamlessly going from a chat about a problem, to a video meeting, to screen sharing, to sharing files, and then continuing the conversation on mobile, to scheduling a teams meeting later in the week to follow up and fully integrated into outlook is what I’m talking about.

Which is fine if your chat UI doesn’t totally suck for 99.9% of the other use cases. I’d readily take the additional pain of switching applications if it means I don’t have to deal with Teams for chat.

Also all video conferencing and chat applications support sharing files. This isn’t some unheard of feature that Microsoft have pioneered. It’s been possible since the BBS days. It’s possible in XMPP and IRC. It’s possible in every other commercial service I’ve used. And I happen to think Teams does it the worst out of everyone of them because of the weird UI decisions and Sharepoint integration. Compare Slack to Teams and you see what I mean. Files are in lined in Slack and it’s easy to preview and work with them. It’s a pain in the arse in Teams. Slack also has all the other features of Teams that you’re boasting about. And Slack isn’t even perfect itself yet it still runs circulars around Teams in terms of usability.

Literally the only thing Teams gets right is the way of marking the confidentiality of shared content. But that doesn’t justify the mess Microsoft have made of Teams UI.

I’m not one of these FOSS evangelists who throws their toys out of the pram if we don’t use IRC. But Teams UI is really just a clusterfuck of bad design decisions. It’s easily the worst designed solution out there. Except maybe WebEx - which is a pretty fucking low bar, scraping the barrel really.

Microsoft know they automatically win the enterprise because of AD and Office integration. So they don’t need to compete on quality. They just need to be present.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#204

Post by dan-robertson »

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.

Visual studio won at the zero-to-interactive-program metric. People who have never programmed are not going to care so much about portability as they are about not getting stuck trying to figure out how to install/make things work properly on their systems. The modern ‘getting started’ choice is often python which doesn’t give you such an easy path to interactivity and has its own portability problems.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#205

Post by u801e »

alkonaut wrote: post #127
u801e wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Requiring a second app to do it (posting a link) isn’t nearly as good a UX as simply pasting in pictures. But what about the UX of other people in the channel? Someone posts an image and the previous text is moved off screen. Now they have to scroll up to read what they were just reading. What about the case where someone posts an animated gif which becomes a distraction that requires you to stop the animation or h…

Auto playing animation can be a client setting. As can rendering pictures at all. Regardless, the UX of slack, discord, teams etc. is different from IRC because it’s what people expect from an IM client

That may be true for personal use, but not necessarily true for business related use. That's because the former case is limited to users who want to use the product precisely because of its features. In the latter case, users are required to use the product as part of their job. Given that, the ideal case would be to not introduce features that lead to a negative user experience.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#206

Post by progval »

tarkin2 wrote: post #182
c0l0 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had an internal instance of ZNC for human users to connect their clients to (at their option - but that was the documented and preferred way of getting onto the IRC network). Creating ZNC user profiles was part of the semi-automated onboarding/setup procedure, whilst ZNC authentication was done against the dovecot IMAP/SASL server we had for email. More casual IRC users in the company (marketing etc.) usually pref…

Thanks, I was inspired by your post and looked at irc servers. The main problem, vis-a-vis slack, was the channel history. There are modules but they have timestamp and limit problems. And irssi in gnu screen would only work while screen is running and would only work for those happy with the setup. ZNC, although sadly adding more complexity, seems to be the way to go.

> There are modules but they have timestamp

You need a client and bouncer (or server, if you connect directly) that supports this extension: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/server-time

> and limit problems.

ditto, but https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory if I understand you correctly.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#207

Post by userbinator »

tl wrote: post #149
efdee wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is, unless the enterprise has policies to abide by disallowing API calls ...What?

Welcome to enterprise, where breaking things is a feature so commonly used Microsoft has documentation for it [1] and things are often deployed by people whose sole concern is "minimize attack surfaces". Our Teams installation not only disables API calls (official Teams client only), chat sessions are deleted if no one posts to them meaning most chat history is lost every weekend. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us…

If the official client can still post and receive messages, what's preventing anyone else from doing it in the exact same way...?

Or is this something stupid like a user-agent check?

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#208

Post by pmarreck »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #175
tarkin2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With your IRC system, how did you deal with channel history, i.e. seeing messages that were delivered to the channel while the user wasn't there, something that slack and teams does well?

I'm not the OP, but the usual method is that everyone runs an irc client in a screen on a server that they SSH into from their workstation.

I did this years ago and this was indeed one way to do it (apparently still is)

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#209

Post by pmarreck »

emeth wrote: post #57
Iv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS won’t include scripting language runtimes by default, and might require you to install additional packages. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/406244/will-macos-...

That's probably for the best, as the ones that ship are often old and buggy, and Apple doesn't seem to care for maintaining them (even if they pretend to care about developers). As long as there's a way for actual developers to install these tools themselves (such as Homebrew), things will work out fine.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#210

Post by tptacek »

lloeki wrote: post #88
mcfedr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not used teams, but both slack and Google chat make it very easy to post messages, a simple curl call has often been more than enough in lots of scripts

That is, unless the enterprise has policies to abide by disallowing API calls, in which case you're stuck with the official client and vetted integrations. Same for mobile, the advantage vanishes once enterprise requires your (usually personal) phone to be surrendered to corp IT via MDM (which I sure as hell won't do). The whole value proposition of Slack and Teams for their customers is control.

It's self-evidently false that the whole value proposition of Slack is control. The value proposition is, obviously, "IRC but more stuff, with searchable, durable messages". Which is why all sorts of groups that don't care about control at all still use Slack, rather than IRC, to coordinate.
Post reply on HN