Having worked with Will for quite a few years, he has a great ability to create some impressive projects like this. Even his commit graph on his GitHub (https://github.com/will) has been consistent for I think 10 years now?
It needs one of those things that alerts anyone who tries to right click :) An even better one would be to totally preventDefault oncontextmenu. That'll stop them!
On the note of GitHub commit history, incredibly off-topic: I hate when potential jobs ask for my github profile (sometimes as a strict requirement). All of my (4+ years) profesional work has been in private Bitbucket repos so my github is a random college project and some community project I did one weekend. Should I be feeding the "grind mentality" and contributing to open source or doing random side projects to fluff it out? Am I the odd one out?
No, you shouldn't. It's obvious that any job that "requires" this, will not be a job that you want to be in.
I do all my work on private repos. My github looks bare. If they want code I'll send them code. If they want my github profile, I'll send them that and tell them all my code is private, hit me up for it/examples.
no you're fine without a filled github account. most engineers don't write code during their free time and, like you, work in private repos for their corporate job.
At least from my (single data point) perspective it is. I feel the pressure to always be developing the next greatest thing in the next greatest language or framework and producing conference/journal-worthy research papers (I work in research).
Will is a legend. He is the epitome of big dick energy on GitHub. The sheer audacity of his username being "will", his commit graph, the fact that I already knew who he was before this was posted on HN... legend...
Since we're talking about stupid Slack bots, I feel compelled to mention my stupid bot: REPLbot [1] is a Slack/Discord bot for running interactive REPLs and shells from a chat.
It is fun and marginally useful. It supports sharing your own terminal in Slack too.
While I do appreciate the humor here, it's a personal gripe that conversations on Slack tend to optimize towards speed of responses - and when taken to an extreme, they take the form of:
> This message
> is
> sent over a few lines
(awkward pause)
> so that
> I can get in a point
> before you start typing something
Asynchronous means of communication (Github PRs, Jira tickets, dare I say e-mails) mean that I submit a fully-formed thought as a digest, but Slack sometimes becomes a stream of consciousness - one that I have trouble breaking someone out of.
Usually it doesn't look like that, the first part is self contained and the remaining are small additions that they figured out in the moment. If you tell people to stop doing that then all that will happen is that they wont write those clarifications.
I on the other hand don't enjoy people who write paragraph upon paragraph in a single message. Its chat. Just quickly hammer off your stream of consciousness rambling into the chat; send an email otherwise.
Look at it this way, they're gonna make their point anyway. The sooner you know the better ;)
Sending message after message with no complete point until last one is like holding a mutex to the person’s attention. Annoyance, there is no other way to look at it.
As long as it's asynchronous I'm fine with people doing this. It's coworkers who go "Hello dukeyukey" and pause is what annoys me. Being polite is great, but let me know what you want before I decide to drop what I'm working on to chat about it.
The above is a way more frustrating interaction because it feels that now the coworker feels I'm obligated to respond to a much longer query than I had anticipated. I'd expected a short query which I could either answer offhand or evaluate its priority to indicate if I had time to handle it. Instead I now need to let someone down that after 20 minutes of explaining their problem, I actually don't have the time or info to help them debug their CI build.
It's gotten to the point that I simply stopped answering these naked hellos/yt questions.
It is pretty annoying when people pause like that. I don't see why they can't buffer their writes until they get a complete thought (Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst).
It isn't fully asynchronous if notifications are enabled. With notifications, you are more like a single cpu server that has to handle hardware interrupts for disk/network io. It stops you from working and forces context switching, only people aren't as good at context switching.
"Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst"
Pro-tip if you're one of those: If you look at the slack interface, there's not a lot of visual difference between two messages in a row, and a single message separated by two newlines (SHIFT-Enter if you don't know how to enter those).
It looks exactly the same to type "Hey.\n\nJust wanted to check up on the status of the de-fooification project. How's that going?" as it is to send those as two separate messages, it looks just as polite on the screen, and it's way less annoying.
Not relevant for your "Hey" example but I often do submit successive thoughts as separate messages rather than one less disruptive message because it allows readers to add reactions/responses to the individual thoughts.
Conversations are fine as long as messages contain complete thoughts that merit a response. Saying hey in one message, then typing and then sending the message does no one any good, all it does is interrupt the receiver and force a context switch before you can run any instructions/respond.
I have no ideas how many times I'd have been fired if Slack did this. Let's just say my first pass on a message in the heat of the moment can sometimes be less than professional.
When talking in person over some beers that is exactly what you get.
I talk to people in chat like I would IRL.
Personally I only like working with people that don't feel they need a filter. I sure don't have one.
I find it is easier to trust people that say what they think and feel as they think and feel it.
If you think "this code is an insecure joke and I keep trying to convince myself why we should not scrap it all and start over", then say it.
I said that to a CEO once and he admitted he wrote most of that code, thanked me for my candor, and agreed it should be rewritten given how important it had become.
There's a balance. Like the example the OP gave is abysmal. I do not want that. Have one or two actual sentences and send it, if we're in an actual live conversation. If you can't type that fast enough, take a typing course.
If we're not actively talking, write the whole damn paragraph before you send it! One thing I really dislike is:
> Hey, how's going?
...
some time later
...
> Can I ask you a question on $TOPIC?
...
Will not get an answer from me. Well maybe once, if we've never talked before and that will be along the lines of "just go ahead and ask, don't bother with the chit chat". Most people 'get' this nowadays but there are some hold-outs. I suppose the hold-outs might be more numerous in non-tech companies or in the non-tech departments of those companies.
The worst is when I ignore their preamble, waiting on the question and the other person turns around and shoots an email to my manager, cc'ing me and saying 'so and so was away, do you know who I might ask about x?'. Like, no, I was just waiting for you to get to the point!
Man, I'm the complete opposite. It's pretty much instantaneous for me to read (or not really read) a few words on a screen, but if you're droning on in the video chat or on the phone, god help us.
I think one should make a distinction between chat in public channels and direct messages; with the latter, you're causing the other party a notification and drawing the attention, with the former, the reader can engage with it at their own leisure.
While your example is clearly a strawman, I have to admit I tend to many short messages on chats.
It's not email, there is someone sitting on the other side who waits, so I give them something to read. When I call them, they also hear what I say when I say it and not after the whole message is complete.
There's Slo, which is a slow mode admin plugin for Slack. I wish it were baked in like Discord's slow mode (hopefully it exist in Slack and someone will correct me.)
I agree it's really poor etiquette to make the view scroll for no reason and to make it hard for others to participate. It's fine in DMs or maybe with 3-4 likeminded people, but in anything meant for wider reading or participation it's rude (usually unintentionally) and counterproductive. Fortunately, since it's not intentionally rude, it's not a big deal to teach that good middle ground.
I turn off typing indications and also don't send my status to the server for the same reason. I've never liked them, and actually have always felt that they were a bit invasive. Why should the other party know that I typed up something and then decided not to send it?
(made a coffee, put out the bins whilst I had your imaginary attention)
.. I completely agree with what you wrote. Just please skip the niceties and write the whole request in one message. Prefix with the greeting! And any follow up details can go in a thread.
Slashdot’s slide into rampant abuse and 4chan levels of racism was gradual until it was sudden. When I finally stopped visiting, I felt confident saying “nothing of value was lost”. But that was wrong.
This is the umpteenth time I’ve seen an appropriate, relevant XKCD reference downvoted for no apparent reason in the last few days. I miss the inevitable perfect recall for relevant XKCD in the old Slashdot days. It’s sad that there’s apparently such disdain for that sort of fun on here, even in comments on a fun submission.
> Slashdot had turned to garbage before the first XKCD was ever published.
Sure, and it was probably always garbage. The point of the observation was that as garbage became sewage and filth, I thought whatever value there ever had been was naught. But I realized something was lost in that process. Clearly you disagree with that…
> "Obligatory XKCD" comments read like low-effort karma grabs to me and presumably others.
The link above and many of the others I’ve seen haven’t engaged that way. But even if so, so what? The actual linked content is both relevant and engaging for those curious. I still find myself amused going back to them when I don’t fully remember their contents, and I very seldom find them unthoughtful.
But who cares? It’s not like karma is scarce. Why shouldn’t people who enjoy it as side banter have that joy? The world is hard enough as it is without punishing completely harmless fun.
I saw the headline and got excited that someone wrote a modern talk/otalk/ytalk program... I miss being able to watch someone else's typos when I'm touch-typing.
MSN in 1999 was the first according to the person who made it for Microsoft, David Auerbach.
> the feature was well-received and soon copied by AOL and Yahoo, the other two big IM forces back then.
No big insights about typing indicators in the article, though, e.g
no user research was done or anything.
Near the bottom of the article is an interesting bit about messengers showing the message, not just a typing indicator, in realtime. I guess people nowadays (I certainly would) think of it as something Google tried, but it sounds like this predates MSN. The author says they prefer that over typing indicators.
> guess people nowadays (I certainly would) think of it as something Google tried, but it sounds like this predates MSN. The author says they prefer that over typing indicators.
"talk" which he describes dates back to the early 80's, but there were predecessors on systems predating Unix as well long before that.
> Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex - and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.
His descriptions of layers on layers of ancient code still running in that far future setting is somehow one of the most horrifying things I've read in scifi.
That time I just saw it while browsing the thread. There's no systematic way. But if you want to be sure we see something, you can always email hn@ycombinator.com.
Presence awareness is an insidious overreach IMO. Warms my heart to see petty rebelliousness automated in this way. I'd also like to see something that edits the same Slack message ad nauseam with banal remarks.
Pidgin has a feature that notifies you when someone starts typing at you or goes from "Away" to "Online". Kind of weirds people out when you message them just before they message you, or you message them the instant they sit down at their PC.
> Kind of weirds people out when … you message them the instant they sit down at their PC.
I miss the AIM days when you’d hear the “door opening” sound when someone signed on. It was totally normal to immediately ping someone then because signing onto AIM was asking to be pinged. And that sound made your heart skip a beat because it might be the girl you like and she might even IM you first :o
MSN user here. Feigning a sign in and out was a good way to start a conversation with someone without looking like you wanted to talk to them first. i.e. crush, gf, friend you're not so close with.
I dunno, I find the typing notification useful in group discussions so I know that coworker A is about to say something (and I know that she's going to make the exact same point I was going to make).
I find active/non-active presence helpful so I know whether or not to expect a reply soon.
I've been talking to friends every day, for what amounts to decades now, over chat tools that don't show when anyone is typing. In contrast to e.g. the tools at work that do, I feel like the interactions we have not only don't suffer from not seeing who is typing, but generally feel "easier" to me. There is no "oh I was about to type but now you're typing so I'll stop typing", or "I started typing but on second thought I don't have anything to add right now (or maybe I was interrupted) and now you're waiting for me", or any of that tired stuff.
I prefer to communicate asynchronously via text to keep myself and others focused on work. People become surprisiginly resourceful when they no longer expect or rely on realtime (or near to it) replies. To each their own, of course.
That's what makes Slack presence so useful, I pause my notifications when I don't want to be interrupted -- others can see that in my presence (but if they really need me, they can choose to notify me anyway). So I can stay heads-down and work, but if something important happens, I'm still reachable. And at least in my company, people don't abuse do not disturb.
Plus, I never need to wonder if it's safe to send a message to a coworker for their timezone "George is in Germany, am I going to wake him up if I send me a message now?" I can rely on him setting notifications appropriately.
Why? You can easily tell if someone is paying attention if they are talking in person.
This seems really selfish to me, I personally find it one of the best modern chat features. Then again, I grew up with it and have learned to be zen about several minutes of typing... followed by "k"
> You can easily tell if someone is paying attention if they are talking in person. This seems really selfish to me
Privacy and concentration are selfish interests? Why not have a 9-5 webcam of yourself feeding into my surveillance dashboard? This way I can see my team hard at work as I would in an open office. They'll love that.
The prior in-person work setup is not the ideal nor the standard. I don't need or expect others to pay attention to what I'm saying right when I'm saying it unless there's real urgency. We're all IP-enabled meat functions now; there's no going back.
Pidgin IM client comes to my mind where there was a feature (not sure if only for Yahoo Messenger or also for other services) that when someone started to type, their chat window appeared for me. People were shocked about how I knew they were going to message me. Would be fun to have something like this on slack.
