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Search at Slack

slack.engineering

31–40 of 94 posts

Re: Search at Slack

#32

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

Why are people using a chat app like a wiki to begin with

Because codifying, organizing, and keeping up-to-date general knowledge on a wiki is hard work, whereas banging out a quick answer to a specific question on slack is comparatively easy.

Which maybe should be a challenge to anybody looking to build the next generation of knowledge repositories.

Re: Search at Slack

#33
post #19

Open-source desperately needs more search-tool projects. Lucene/Solr/Elasticsearch are nice, but they need competition, especially outside the Java world.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say in your comment. Sure, there's a lot of Java going on there, but does that really matter? They're tools and you can interact with them from the language of your choice. I get the competition part, but none of the above are exactly stagnant, so I'm wondering what you'd like to see more competition achieve. Not trying to be difficult, just curious in case I missed something…

> so I'm wondering what you'd like to see more competition achieve

There's a lot that competition can help improve, for example in the areas of performance, robustness, and also in functionality, e.g. better NLP for better understanding of queries and translating them into results, image/audio search, etc. And competition can also come up with surprising new features that we can't even think of right now.

This, plus it is (imho) quite weird that we have only one source of code for one of the basic branches of Computer Science.

Re: Search at Slack

#34

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

I agree. I am dismayed when I see open source projects using Slack in lieu of IRC or a mailing list. It means I'd be forced to use their awful client (which is slow, buggy, and far too resource intensive for a chat application) or use their awful IRC integration. This is all in addition to the issue you raise of Slack being a black hole beholden to a profit motivated entity.

Just use IRC. It's practically impossible to avoid Slack at any startup now, but I'd love to be able to avoid it in FOSS.

Re: Search at Slack

#35

Question for the author: how do you actually deploy your model? Do you have a dependency on Spark in your production system?

Since its just a dot product between the learned weights and the feature vector, we do this in the application layer as lacksconfidence surmised.

Re: Search at Slack

#36

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

I agree. I am dismayed when I see open source projects using Slack in lieu of IRC or a mailing list. It means I'd be forced to use their awful client (which is slow, buggy, and far too resource intensive for a chat application) or use their awful IRC integration. This is all in addition to the issue you raise of Slack being a black hole beholden to a profit motivated entity. Just use IRC. It's practically impossible…

I've been a die-hard defender of IRC and yet, I have been using it less and less since I started using Discord.

I can finally have a single platform for communication. Voice chat, text chat, group chats, friends list, async communication, unlimited logs (no 10k max msg nonsense), webhooks/integrations that let me do far more than IRC bots ever did. All of it under one account. Oh and the client doesn't suck, unlike Slack's. It's fast. The voice quality is superb.

As far as productivity goes, I get far more done with it than I ever did with IRC. The addition of being able to hop on voice very quickly is insanely good. Screensharing and video chat coming this year as well, I'm pretty excited.

It's to the point that I bought Discord Nitro (their premium offering) the day it was released, for no other reason than to give them money.

I hope the question of protocol openness gets resolved; until then, IRC just doesn't cut it for me anymore. IRCCloud.com helps, but their interface is super slow with lots of channels and IRC itself simply has no support for the thousands of improvements that have been made in communications the past 30-something years.

Re: Search at Slack

#37

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

It's also problematic in that it chisels away at what it means for a project to be open source. The focus seems to be purely on the software licence, and increasingly less about the wider project tooling.

GitHub and Slack provide a huge amount of utility. But they also feel hollow to me. It feels harder and harder to opt-out of using closed tools.

Re: Search at Slack

#38

Question for the author: how do you actually deploy your model? Do you have a dependency on Spark in your production system?

Being that this is a SVM, which is typically evaluated as a simple linear sum of weights, I imagine they reimplemented that in the application layer. Would be curious how they handled the normalization steps (reimplement that as well?)

Yep. We normalize our features as part of training, and the stdevs of each feature are part of the resulting model, along with the weights. (The means are always 0 because of the way we construct our training set.) The weights we use in production are actually normalized_weight / stdev.

Re: Search at Slack

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I am dismayed when I see open source projects using Slack in lieu of IRC or a mailing list. It means I'd be forced to use their awful client (which is slow, buggy, and far too resource intensive for a chat application) or use their awful IRC integration. This is all in addition to the issue you raise of Slack being a black hole beholden to a profit motivated entity. Just use IRC. It's practically impossible…

I've been a die-hard defender of IRC and yet, I have been using it less and less since I started using Discord. I can finally have a single platform for communication. Voice chat, text chat, group chats, friends list, async communication, unlimited logs (no 10k max msg nonsense), webhooks/integrations that let me do far more than IRC bots ever did. All of it under one account. Oh and the client doesn't suck, unlike S…

Discord looks amazing but it's marketing materials says it's aimed at gamers and compares the product to Skype, not Slack. I actually joined Reactiflux on Discord today and was pretty confused as to what I had gotten myself into and why the messages where being read aloud in a computer voice.

Re: Search at Slack

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a die-hard defender of IRC and yet, I have been using it less and less since I started using Discord. I can finally have a single platform for communication. Voice chat, text chat, group chats, friends list, async communication, unlimited logs (no 10k max msg nonsense), webhooks/integrations that let me do far more than IRC bots ever did. All of it under one account. Oh and the client doesn't suck, unlike S…

Discord looks amazing but it's marketing materials says it's aimed at gamers and compares the product to Skype, not Slack. I actually joined Reactiflux on Discord today and was pretty confused as to what I had gotten myself into and why the messages where being read aloud in a computer voice.

Hehe yeah they sure are playing the "targeting gamers" card really well. I think it's kind of obvious they're shooting for far more than that. They're competing with Slack without competing with Slack, it's very clever.

Short of video calls though, Discord is essentially a drop-in replacement to Slack. We've been using it at my company, it works so damn well. I moved to it for our open source community as well. I use Matterbridge for a three-way mirror between IRC and Gitter as well: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/

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