Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

Post by spdionis » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 8:52 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #381

mwcampbell wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the punctuation level set to all, the NVDA screen reader for Windows reads your code snippet like this: n s dictionary star my compounded word equals at left brace at left quote key colon [pause] left bracket n s number number with int colon [pause] 7 right brace right bracket semi It's a lot to absorb, but people do program productively this way. For example, the NVDA screen reader is itself developed primarily…

Interesting, how do blind developers feel about minimalist languages like lisp? On one hand it seems like it would read very well in some circumstances (+ 1 2), but the scoping could be a real pain. Cobol seems like another language that might be well suited to them.

Post by Kliment » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 9:09 AM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #366

tannhaeuser wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, what's your concern with Skype? After a hiatus of ten years, I'm using it currently for a customer, and, maybe apart from cheesy emoticons and space inefficiency, so far it has worked well. Am I the only one to like a native (Linux) desktop client with notification integration etc. more than a bloated web/Electron app?

The current iteration of Skype for Linux is a bloated web/Electron app. I really liked the bare-bones interface of the previous version and would have loved to opt out of animated emoji and the other UI changes, but not updating a program that's continuously connected to the internet didn't feel like a good idea.

Post by Doxin » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #46

Everybody here is disappointed at Slack, and I like open protocols and open platforms just like everybody else, but I still have a contrarian view. Instead of blaming Slack, why not accept that the open protocols indeed suck? IRC does not specify encoding, netsplits are a common issue, file sending sucks, etc. XMPP also has file sending problems, does not play nice with mobile, is fragmented (not every client impleme…

Post by astrobe_ » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

godot wrote: post #149

dijit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely gargantuan. How can any general purpose application justify 4G of memory, half of a factory macbook pro's memory. To put this in perspective, I was talking this week to a developer who was essentially apologising to me for a new feature that was going to require insane amounts of memory. This is for a process to handle literally millions of users. How much memory was it? 3G. Per "instance" of which…

I know most of this thread has been about making fun of Slack, but I wanted to write a somewhat serious response to this. I think "team software engineering" plays a big part of this, if not even the main reason. When one developer is working on a program, the person tends to be able to keep track of program flow, memory usage in their head and know when things are about to go out of bound, memory shoots up, etc. Whe…

Post by michaelt » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #353

bramd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team. Not just that, but it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a userscript in a few days. So yeah, I…

As someone who doesn't use slack, why did we ever move away from chat programs and protocols that worked fine? I don't know why I need to use slack, hangouts, discord, etc, that are just reinventing irc and/or the garden variety instant messaging platforms that already exist.

  I don't know why I need to use slack [...] just
  reinventing irc