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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 624 posts

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

#491

Post by codedokode »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #34
castis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not basically electron apps. they _are_ electron apps. And it's completely absurd that mine is currently using 1514MB of memory. If I weren't required to use Slack on a day-to-day basis, I absolutely wouldn't solely on principle.

I remember when Slack in a Chrome tab committed 3-4 GB. Sounds like they've made improvements. Standalone client and its helpers are sitting on ~800MB committed on my install of High Sierra. Might be worth a shot.

Classic version of Skype (with all the "improvements" ) takes about 200-250Mb on Windows XP after long use. Pre-Microsoft versions could take a half of this.

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

#492

Post by dman »

salvar wrote: post #462
dman wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers are fickle beasts, they mutter and keep on using a product until they dont.

So rewriting all their clients would be a more sensible approach to user retention compared to keeping the current Electron client that most users seem quite happy with?

Nokia had users who were happy with the solid phones they were building.

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

#493

Post by blub »

jbob2000 wrote: post #20
saagarjha wrote: post #11

I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying…

Most accessible users use JAWS on windows. I focus on accessibility a lot for my job. In fact, we have an entire department dedicated to accessibility design, implementation, and testing. The reason why accessible users use JAWS is that it works across the entire OS and all the programs you have installed; start menu, PowerPoint, web browser, control panel, Google, etc. etc. The problem with the native accessibility…

JAWS is Windows-only, so your solution of just targeting JAWS is not a solution at all, since Slack runs on a lot more platforms.

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

#494

Post by jareds »

cornholio wrote: post #68
jbob2000 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most accessible users use JAWS on windows. I focus on accessibility a lot for my job. In fact, we have an entire department dedicated to accessibility design, implementation, and testing. The reason why accessible users use JAWS is that it works across the entire OS and all the programs you have installed; start menu, PowerPoint, web browser, control panel, Google, etc. etc. The problem with the native accessibility…

I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard. What is their moat, what exactly does it offer that it's impossible to replicate using existing libraries and APIs?

I bought Jaws 15 years ago before NVDA was out. Because of this it doesn't cost me $1000 to keep using it, it costs me $200 every two years to keep up to date. IT's the only software I know of that offers good 3270 emulator support using third party scripts someone wrote. While it may be possible to make NVDA behave similarly with python scripting it would take more then $200 worth of my time since I'm not a Python programmer. Since I rely on it for my job it's also comforting to know I can call up someone and get help or open a support ticket if something is broken. I have not had to do this recently, but I remember calling up when I switched from office 2003 to 2007 at work because the UI was so different I wasn't sure if I was having accessibility issues or not. Support was helpful and had me working in under 10 minutes.

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

#495

Post by codedokode »

amedvednikov wrote: post #435
saagarjha wrote: post #11

I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying…

I'm working on a native client for Slack, Skype and others. It's only ~100 KB(!) It will be out of alpha this month. https://eul.im

Skype protocol is proprietary and obfuscated, so I assume that you are going just to pack a browser inside an app.

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

#496

Post by enzolovesbacon »

amedvednikov wrote: post #435
saagarjha wrote: post #11

I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary. > We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying…

I'm working on a native client for Slack, Skype and others. It's only ~100 KB(!) It will be out of alpha this month. https://eul.im

> eul is a registered company, and all binaries are signed. Your data is safe.

I see a lot of companies drawing that conclusion from such premise (and you're using C, which really decreases the odds that my data is really safe).

Using that sentence on your main page makes it look shady. Specially if you're not a security company.

IMHO, if you remove "Your data is safe" it will look much more professional.

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

#497

Post by jbob2000 »

blub wrote: post #493
jbob2000 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most accessible users use JAWS on windows. I focus on accessibility a lot for my job. In fact, we have an entire department dedicated to accessibility design, implementation, and testing. The reason why accessible users use JAWS is that it works across the entire OS and all the programs you have installed; start menu, PowerPoint, web browser, control panel, Google, etc. etc. The problem with the native accessibility…

JAWS is Windows-only, so your solution of just targeting JAWS is not a solution at all, since Slack runs on a lot more platforms.

Accessible users are primarily on windows because JAWS runs on windows. It is not a use case for us to test accessibility on anything other than JAWS on windows.

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

#498

Post by jbob2000 »

bramd wrote: post #102
cornholio wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it unbelievable that a software costing $1000 is the de facto standard. What is their moat, what exactly does it offer that it's impossible to replicate using existing libraries and APIs?

What's the standard really depends on which slice of the world/market you're looking at. NVDA[0] is a very capable screenreader as well and does some things even better than JAWS. It's totally free and open source. [0]: https://nvaccess.org/

That's great, but nobody uses it, so we don't target it.

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

#499

Post by mwcampbell »

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.

I'm not aware of any correlation between blindness and programming language preference, even when blind programmers work on their own projects. I used to think blind programmers wouldn't like Python because it has significant indentation. (Note: I'm visually impaired, but I program visually, not with a screen reader.) But as it turns out, I know blind programmers who love Python and can deal with the indentation just fine. The NVDA screen reader is written in Python, and that project was started by a blind programmer who could choose any language he pleased.

Some projects developed exclusively or primarily by blind programmers do make odd indentation choices. A couple of my blind programmer friends prefer single-space indentation, or at least they did the last time I worked with them (using Python). NVDA uses tabs for indentation, which breaks with the Python convention of four spaces per indentation level. But blind programmers are perfectly capable of following the usual indentation conventions when working with sighted programmers.

Finally, I don't know of any blind programmers who like COBOL. I'm sure there are some, probably working at banks like their sighted counterparts; I just don't happen to know them.

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

#500

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

e12e wrote: post #424
brodock wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rocket.chat is the best alternative

On paper I like matrix, or prosody (xmpp/jabber) with extensions (ditto irc + logging bots etc). But after looking a bit at rocket.chat along with the api - it's hard to recommend something else as a self-hosted, open slack alternative. I'm not enthusiastic about the stack/mongodb dep - but boy is the api nice and documented, and their docker-compose a joy to get started with: https://rocket.chat/docs/installation/do…

Out of curiosity, have you looked at Mattermost? How does it compare? About three years ago when open source Slack alternatives were starting to hit, Mattermost and Rocket.Chat were the top options. GitLab even ended up bundling Mattermost with their Omnibus installer (and were going to bundle Rocket.Chat as well, had they made it possible to support Postgres, but I don't think that's the plan any longer).
Post reply on HN