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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#591

Post by stordoff »

benbristow wrote: post #326
bartread wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the love of Pete! It's a frigging IM client: 800MB is absolutely not a reasonable amount of memory for it to be consuming, and I don't care how long your message history is. A big part of why this occurs is Electron. Same with any app that's basically a browser app: memory usage is out of control relative to what the application does. Case in point: https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/ (disclaimer: I wrote this).…

Use a machine with more RAM then. If your machine doesn't have at least 8GB of RAM then you're doing it wrong.

Regardless of how much RAM you have, 800MB for a chat app is ridiculous. If every common utility started using so much RAM, "[u]se a machine with more RAM" stops being viable - you can only cram so much RAM in current machines, and if you start peeling off a couple of GB because you need to run more than one chat client that's a huge loss.

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

#592

Post by BlackLotus89 »

hultner wrote: post #474
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…

For anyone who like me want to keep using slack via irc there's a solution using weechat. See my other comment for more info https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16544045

Thx I was using [0] slack-term up until now when I was using slack from the terminal. Could make a nice addition to my weechat setup.

[0] https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-term

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

#593

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

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…

Couldn’t agree more. I see this all the time and it was echoed in that recent popular post by the guy who left Google after failing to get a promotion. Besides the modern software engineering approach this type of work (optimization) is also often not valued by leads. It’s all about visibility. Add new features fast and it’s visible. Good! Fix something, make sure your new feature isn’t hogging memory but take a little longer to complete the work? Bad. Added together no ‘owner’ for any specific part of the app and it’s like the public commons, the person who picks up the litter won’t be acknowledged. The incentives are screwed up. Ultimately though it’s also the customer, if they don’t care (and most of them don’t since Slack is highly popular) then why bother. In a market and business sense that makes complete sense too.

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

#594

Post by cyphar »

Spivak wrote: post #312
def_true_false wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of the kind of business problem Slack isn't solving at all. Or did they add e2e encryption recently?

The people who pay aren't asking for E2E. They're asking for auditable shared history. We're in a forums of tech nerds, outside of our bubble encryption is pretty low on the feature totem pole.

How do explain the rising usage of Telegram/WhatsApp/Signal, if encryption isn't important to people? I find that most people actually do care about their privacy, but they want it to be made easy for them as well.

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

#595

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

nasredin wrote: post #468
dullgiulio wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E-mail is not preferred by the youth until they use it at work. Then it is a godsend that you can only ignore it and reply when you have time. We have been chatting since we have had networks. Believe me, e-mail is here to stay.

Maybe we could do something about voicemail then? ducks

The only people who leave me voice messages in 2018 are unsolicited job ‘recruiters’ here in London. It’s guranteed when I have a voice mail it’s them, like it’s 1998.

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

#596

Post by cyphar »

Spivak wrote: post #316
cyphar wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of my comment was talking about Matrix, which is an open protocol with free software server/client implementations.

Yeah, but they're not that different. They use their own protocol and their flagship client is a web/electron app.

When you put it like that, sure. But Matrix is federated (sort of like IRC but it's "open federation" in that any room can be shared between home-servers) and has e2e encryption. Rocketchat has neither of those features (though it is nice and simple if you just wanna throw up a chat server at a company -- which is the main purpose of the project as I understand). If you want to talk with other people then I would recommend Matrix.

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

#597

Post by defined »

bramd wrote: post #62
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…

> 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…

I hear you.

I worked with two blind systems people for close to 5 years - we were all working remote, so initially I had no idea they were blind - and subsequently learned from them about their struggles and frustrations dealing with shitty or nonexistent accessibility features.

And with assistive devices’ drivers that were broken, or not updated since Windows State of the Ark version, or not available on Linux or Mac, and so on.

These two people dramatically improved the accessibility features of the smartphone product that the company sells, by reporting the issues they found while dogfooding it. They raised the awareness of many people, including me, of the challenges of the blind, particularly in technology settings.

As a result, I learned ‘dot’ (graphviz) pretty well, and became much more text-centric in other ways (e.g. using markdown, avoiding images when possible, adding alt text).

Slack has done the community a disservice by dropping support for open protocols like IRC and XMPP, which support text-based interfaces that work well with screen readers.

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

#598

Post by sriharis »

aw3c2 wrote: post #534
sriharis wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relay is actually hosted mattermost. Just a means to offload maintenance and uptime to someone working on it full time. The part of software in Relay that makes mattermost SaSS is open source too.

Tell your team to stop spamming it around then please. Spam mattermost if you must.

They're not the team though.

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

#599

Post by joeevans1000 »

Duh of course. I can't believe the wholesale abandonment of IRC by so many open source communities for Slack. It's been so... so... horrifying to watch. Can't you see we're giving up critical data and history to an outfit that no one has control over whatsoever.

Slack charges you to search the history beyond a certain number of messages.

SLACK CHARGES YOU TO SEARCH THE HISTORY BEYOND A CERTAIN NUMBER OF MESSAGES!

Yeah, let's make everyone all across the world pay to access a software community's most vital resource regardless of their income or even means to pay. Let's actively make this information sit behind a paywall accessible only by those privileged enough to breach it, but only as long as they keep paying month after month.

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

#600

Post by flukus »

mwcampbell wrote: post #519
spdionis wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"parens parens parens parens parens parens parens some code here parens parens parens"

The regularity of Lisp's syntax suggests an interesting way to render it in speech, at least for blind people who happen to have a good ear for music. Set the TTS engine to monotone (i.e. no attempt at natural intonation), and increase the pitch for each level of parenthesis nesting. So it would basically be singing the code, going up a note or two for each level of nesting. It would sound weird, but I think it could…

What if instead of just the pitch it said "do ra mi fa so la ti do" every time you went up/down a level? If I ever lost my sight I doubt my tone deafness would would go away.
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