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Yeah, we tried going to iPad for our kids but it’s so full of free to play junk.

Even with Amazon Kids, though, the games are still their free to play selves without purchases, so I still see these games where dopamine hits (get coins!) are a main mechanic :(


Apple Arcade has a bunch of good games without any of this junk (there are some “+” versions of some of the f2p games like Jetpack Joyride but lots of other good stuff).


Woah, that is news to me!

What’s strange is that iOS gives you no indication of where that sound is coming from…I guess I expected to be able to pause it somehow. Interesting, though!


Turning it off is pausing it as it’s noise and not a song.


I'm surprised investors aren't more scared of the competition, particularly Microsoft and its Teams product that is part of Office 365.

Maybe it's not a huge deal because the overlap of Slack customers and Office 365 customers isn't that big?


Teams isn't going to directly take market share from Slack, but it forms a hard barrier limiting Slack's future growth. Large established organizations are switching to Teams, and finding it good enough that they'll never want to pay for Slack.


Teams is absolutely taking share from Slack. As chat permeates organisations, it needs policies, single sign on, oversight and standards that are harder to implement in slack than Teams/Office 365. I know of many organisations who've been forced off slack because 'company policy'.


Never underestimate the power of workplace bureaucracy. At organizational size X, integrating with new Microsoft product Y, single sign on working and easy deploys to all office machines, support from Microsoft and Microsoft lackeys pitching new ideas to IT people, of course they're gonna pick teams.


One man's "workplace bureaucracy" is another man's "it just works".

To everybody who isn't a software developer and will likely never need Jira integrations and Slackbots, Slack is just another chat app.

For a paid software, Slack needs to win those people over too.


> integrating with new Microsoft product Y, single sign on working and easy deploys to all office machines, support from Microsoft

Those sound more like great features than "workplace bureaucracy".


If they can fix teams so everybody who uses it doesn't hate it, I'm sure they'll absolutely dominate.


There is also the possibility of Microsoft buying Slack to fix Teams.


It's very unlikely considering they thought about doing that a few years ago.[0] I don't think they'll rapidly push forward with adding features characteristic for Slack as well. Teams is just yet another corporate tool that is easy to sell to existing customers of Office 365.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-canceled-8-billion...


It’s basically the definition of enterprise software that the people who buy it aren’t the people who use it. The bean counters don’t care whether the users hate the software.


I'm still stuck with Skype. Go Delphi!


Have you used Teams? I've had to once, to talk to people and Microsoft, and it was _hilariously_ bad. I don't know anyone who uses it in earnest, and I know people who have used Google Chat.

(I do most of the sales calls for Latacora, which feels like a decent representative sample of startups, and I think all but one, maybe two, of the companies we have ever spoken with used Slack. Order of magnitude a percent.)


My company tried slack, Hangouts, and teams. We're standardizing on teams because it's the easiest for non-technical users to understand and use.


que? how can one not understand slack? it couldn’t be simpler.


Never used Teams. This is not a comparison just some things in Slack that are weird.

* Formatting is done with Markdown syntax instead of "word processor" style formatting.

In a word processor if you type Hello, Ctrl+b World Ctrl+b!

it would produce Hello, <b>World</b>!

In Slack it produces Hello <b>World </b>!* * .

* /commands are not discoverable or intuitive to anyone who never used IRC or CLI programs. Non-programmers have no idea what arguments are or that [brackets] means optional.

* Bots and their syntax have the same problem except that their DSLs are far more varied and arcane.

* Very few people know or understand the difference between a channel and a group.

* Threads are super weird compared to email. It's like an inbox but not really. Threads interleaved into actual message timelines are not very discoverable and difficult to follow.

* Attachments and files don't really work like most people expect.

* There are at least 5 different settings panels all with different things and scopes.

* Reminders and a bunch of stuff being implemented as a magic "account" in Slack is super confusing to people.

* Very few people really "get" apps as well in this respect. They're in your message timeline, they look like accounts, and are in some ways but aren't in others.

* The difference between a "bot" and "app" isn't super well defined. Some respond to messages in a channel, some need commands.


Excellent enumeration of the things Slack gets wrong. I’m not sure all of them can be fixed, either. I have more faith in Microsoft getting it right.


I agree that Teams is pretty bad but a lot of companies use it because they have office 365. Your view is probably skewed by looking at Silicon Valley it startups. A lot of big companies use Teams.

In my company Teams was actually a big improvement because we had nothing before.


Oh sure: I didn’t mean to imply nobody does, I’m definitely just talking to startups.


Work is a non-software company and we asked if we could use Slack and IT responded by saying that we already had Teams installed and included with O365.... therefore we should use that. That's what we've being doing except that no one chats on there....


> That's what we've being doing except that no one chats on there

...Which serves as a demonstration that nobody needs chat.

Isn't it great how that works?


You might say nobody needs it, but they might benefit from it.

As many times as I’ve hated on Slack on HN, my anger is at their bloat and sluggishness and low density UI to do basic text chat. At least I can do basic text chat in an IRC style channel in it.

Desktop Teams is a nightmare of mystery magic UI, I never have any clue where I am in it, where anything else is, how to get to or from stuff or what the chat is doing, it’s super unpleasant.

It’s basically a web browser to SharePoint but with no browser chrome or address bar or navigation hints or breadcrumbs, then the same into a Skype replacement, then a pile of chat channels which aren’t channels and have rolled up chat threads in a list in them, but all of this in one window so you can only do one thing in the UI at any time (I.e. NOT chat to someone and look up some documentation in another window because it only has one window) and Teams honking at you wherever you are with red blobs of attention grabbers and “people are trying to contact you in Teams” dark pattern Facebook bullshit where the mobile teams and desktop teams notify and then emails you.

It’s both completely overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.


The divide between customer bases actually resonates throughout the industry. It's Conoco Philips and the Department of Justice vs Gitlab and Sysdig. Old econ vs new roughly. And is sort of playing out across AWS vs Azure, etc. I wonder how Slack addresses this divide. Perhaps in keeping more of a startup ethos and attracting international players such as Grab.


No chance to survive

The explanation is here

For Slack has no moat


Hangouts chat as well, GSuite integration: https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

It's one of the few products that's forced Google to create a desktop app (even if it still is CEF based).


I wouldn't be surprised if Slack got bought up by the likes of Facebook or some other big tech.


It would literally be impossible for my company to switch from Slack. It's so tightly integrated.


Consider replacing "literally" with "practically" or something similar in phrases like these.

I have seen first-hand how much of the business can run on Slack. Yet, if it's gone one day, companies would survive.


Wow - if you're Type 1 and have an A1C in the "high threes"...you're definitely one of those exceptional patients. Your A1C is probably better than some non-diabetics!

I could see why you have a pretty high threshold for the quality of advice you want. Not sure it's a typical experience, though.


It seems dangerous to me. One unit of insulin too much and you're in diabetic coma territory.


Would you consider non-trivial install scripts as an exception to this general rule? I mean, you wouldn't write some install script in ruby or python, right?


I don't know why not?

At the least, rather than Bash, you might consider Perl as a default, lowest common denominator for scripts that need to run anywhere.

- It's nearly as ubiquitous as bash.

- It has approximately the same kinds of file/path operations built in.

- It has reasonably good support for strings/regexes/etc. all built-in, so you don't have to call out to tools like sed/awk/grep all the time and hope that they are available and compatible across your target platforms.

- It provides reasonably good arrays and hashes, which are horribly horrible in bash.[1]

- You can use syscalls very easily if you really need to, but usually you don't.

[1] Of course, no language can save you from the file system disaster (https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames....), but being able to know that "foo bar" is a string instead of two array elements is a good start.

Mostly this all applies to Ruby or Python too, modulo perhaps the degree of ubiquity.


Great point about ubiquity.

Perl regexes are the best of breed that everyone else replicates — far better than “reasonably good.”

The Perl erasure in this HN thread is startling.


> "The Perl erasure in this HN thread is startling."

"Erasure" to me implies some active effort to remove Perl from discourse. I don't see anything like that here: indeed, there are a number of positive mentions, and no negative ones I see. Granted, Python and Ruby are both mentioned more often, but none of those is at Perl's expense. Am I misunderstanding what you mean by 'erasure'?


This is what Perl is designed to be. Perl unlike the others is almost certain to be on any Unix or Linux installation. Several commenters leaving out Perl in discussions of the next step up from bash scripts is truly strange.

I suppose being ignored beats the typical herp-derp anti-Perl bigotry, but I’d prefer all-around civility.


> "Several commenters leaving out Perl in discussions of the next step up from bash scripts is truly odd."

I'm having a hard time following you here. Do you think that they're doing so for any other reason that Perl is no longer their go-to tool? There are communities where Perl is still used: PostgreSQL for example uses Perl for some of its scripting, as well as its build farm tool, in particular because of its portability on older systems.

That said, from what I've seen over the past 10 years or so, Perl hasn't had much of a presence in areas where a lot of computer work in tech is being done. For example, in cloud computing, or scientific computing, or machine learning, or web frameworks. Please don't read this to mean that Perl couldn't be or isn't being used in these cases or wouldn't be a better fit. (As an aside, I think Perl missed out a lot while a large portion of the community was focused on Perl 6: there's only so much energy in a community, and that absorbed on Perl 6 wasn't focusing on evangelism. But that's not something I'm interested in litigating here.) Or that there isn't something a bit frustrating in seeing the wheel reinvented time and time again. And so many examples on the web use bash as a common denominator. This puts Perl further out of mind if it's not already part of your everyday workflow. And how many developers today have come of age without seeing Perl in their everyday environments?

Consider the current forum. What's the percentage of front-page posts that are about Perl or tools where Perl is a part of the tool chain? It would be understandable for the people who frequent HN to not view Perl as their go-to. I don't consider it uncivil for people to neglect to mention some other language when it's not something they'd actually think of reaching for. It seems the solution would be to share examples of where Perl provides advantages, both in the comments here and in submissions to HN.


Well said, perl might be the theoretically best match in specifically this problem domain but the thing is there are only so many programming languages one can learn.

If i had to choose only one of ruby/python or perl i would choose the former and it would be able to cover my base both as glue-code and for more programs. Perl would maybe make the glue code a bit easier but instead i would be much less employable and have a much harder time finding other people who can read the glue. I'm not qualified to have an opinion on perls capabilities for other programs but i'm sure there are valid reasons most people prefer other alternatives.


Perl erasure?

After using the linux command line (or its many «relatives» like cygwin, mac os, unixes) for more than 10 years now, I’ve talked to exactly one person that used perl to accomplish anything at all. He used it to edit text files, so he could have done the same in awk/sed/vim in my opinion.

I know more people who write fortran 77 than perl.

People just don’t seem to use (or like) Perl very much.


Bash has too many surprising edge cases. A lot of my install scripts have at least snippets of Perl in them. The installation/upgrade/maintenance scripts for my employer's main product is Ruby-based.

We support a lot of different OSes, and there's usually less variance between the Perl deployed on them than there is in the shell.


I would not consider those an exception, and would typically prefer to see the use of some other language. Bash is excellent at dealing with semi-structured text, and as part of a command pipeline, and if you have no alternative than to write POSIX sh, well, it exists. Bash does not have niceties like typed variables or named function arguments, and arrays are best avoided. Even parsing command line arguments is more fun in other languages.

The problem is that Bash has about the lowest barrier to entry which can be found: just dump the things you were going to type anyway into a text file and mark it executable. It's simple, and then you bloody your nose on one of Bash's many idiosyncrasies, and people will say, "Oh yes, ']' is just a required last argument to '['. You gotta watch for that." And the true Bash master knows that my rule is silly and that anything may be written in Bash.

Just...please don't.


I say please don't write any goddamned software at all.


Yes, you would write non-trivial install scripts in ruby.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_(software)


If any of my bash scripts get long enough to where I want a reusable class, I rewrite in Ruby.


Isn't that what chef and Capistrano are at some level?


This is insane - is there any "expert" speculation out there on when this will all collapse? Before or after the new year...?


If someone gives you an exact date, how would you know if they are telling the truth? Nobody knows the future.

It can all collapse to $1K in a month or keep going to $50K. And if someone actually knew, they would stand to make huge money and would keep their mouth shut.


if we all knew that everyone would pull out earlier and it would collapse sooner.


You can sort of estimate it. It comes down to cash flow - if people are trying to invest more cash into bitcoin than they are taking out it'll go up. When people are trying to cash out more than is going in it will fall. At the moment there are a huge number of people seeing the headlines and thinking I should get in on this who have not yet so there's a while to go. The closet to this I can recall was the dot com bubble and I'd say this feels like 98 or 99 so I'd give it a year or two. BTC $100k here we come!


When information enters the market that would justify a decrease


Me, I'm an expert. It'll be around 2pm EST, January 9th 2018.


Rule #1 of cryptocurrencies, trust nobody.


And this works with traditional currencies as well :)


that's rule number 3.

1. HODL 2. BUY DIP


Reddit appears to be leaking.


>on when this will all collapse?

2 hours ago


Definitely, but they keep it pretty vague. I'm assuming they're not just counting felonies, but also maybe someone who had some minor incident when they were a teenager.

I could see a lot of parents having some stupid minor on their record from when they were a bit more reckless.


Most crimes committed by minors in the US are expunged from their records when they come of age.


I believe you're slightly misreading chucknelson. I don't think he said "minor" to mean "underage", but rather "not felony". ("Minor" may have a distinct meaning from "misdemeanor", but IANAL.)

And unfortunately, teenage bad judgment doesn't automatically end on the 18th birthday...


If the crime was committed when they were 13-17, it would usually be erased when the person turns 18. And then it wouldn't show up in any studies.


This is cool - one item I think is wrong/misunderstood is Big Data > Data Lake Store.

It has nothing to do with ETL, it's basically just "HDFS in the cloud" [1] and a successor to using blob storage/regular old storage accounts for distributed/Hadoop-ish workloads.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/data-lake-store/


While the actual change/patch is interesting, I found the long discussion and process to get it merged pretty interesting. It seemed to get bit tense at times in the "competition" between the two developers, but it seemed to have ended politely enough.


Source? I thought Google's cars used many sensors as well and weren't just a "follow this high-fidelity map and hope it's correct!" technology.


If I'm not mistaken, this is the presentation that discusses mapping the roads before autonomous travel. They compare the maps to what the car sees as it drives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk

But there are a number of reasons the need pre-mapping are not a huge issue. A) When autonomous cars start to be introduced people will still know how to drive, and can pilot the car through unmapped areas. By the time everyone has an autonomous car, and no one knows how to drive the world will be mapped. B) Google has already shown with Streetview that they can create detailed, up-to-date maps of most roads. C) This problem will likely be solved in time.


Premapping is still required as of today, but they do collect data to try and correct those maps: https://medium.com/waymo/building-maps-for-a-self-driving-ca...


In fact, Google has the most expensive set of sensors on any self-driving prototype out there, AFAIK. They spend about $150k per car on sensors. But almost all the technology they've shown is about detecting people, dogs, other obstacles, on a largely unchanging setting.

As of late 2014[0], Google engineers admitted the mapping required for their cars to work wasn't feasible at a nationwide scale, and that if they didn't know to look for say, a stoplight, on their maps, they'd run right through it. (Looking for arbitrary red lights is probably a hard problem too.)

That's two years ago, yes, but they've announced nothing, technologically, in this field in this time (please comment if you have an additional source relating to the mapping of the roadway for a Google car), despite tons of PR about the number of miles they've driven or what cities they were driving in, with the same technology they've already had. Also bear in mind, almost all of Google's senior talent in self-driving cars has left Google X. So if they were having trouble with this problem in 2014, their newer, less experienced people now, probably are having more difficulty in 2016.

[0]http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/...


I highly doubt this is still the case considering auto manufacturers far behind the curve on this tech [1] are doing things like recognizing stop signs and reading speed limit signs using on-board cameras. Lane keeping also uses onboard sensors. As far as I know, the most important thing high-resolution maps are needed for is decision-making for things more than a few hundred feet ahead (ex. when to get in the right lane to exit or turn). It also helps with driving in adverse conditions where it's difficult to use normal sensors to see road markings. There are plenty of players working on this, though, so I don't think it's a huge obstacle. For example, [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_sign_recognition [2] http://blog.caranddriver.com/how-high-definition-maps-are-pl...


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