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Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

Oh please. The tools I use rapidly allow me to chain all sorts of stuff together to create things that surpass even Slack and other apps.

Where is a Slack that can do "sensitivity calculation" to alert users of possibly hostile tone? That's right. Not created yet. Give me a half hour and I could have the beginning of that. I also could get translation facilities built in so that English/French/German/Spanish could be seamlessly translatable.

The sky's the limit. And your negativity diminishes your ideas.

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Yeah, I had that mentality once. "Why should I use 3rd party stuff when I am a developer and can do it all myself?!?!" Then I realized I was wasting time working on stuff that don't matter, instead of working on stuff that mattered.

If that's your thing, that's your thing and go do it. But it's not a lot of peoples, and that's why Slack is so popular.

> "Why should I use 3rd party stuff when I am a developer and can do it all myself?!?!"

But that's not what I'm doing.

Company A does really good semantic analysis. Company B does chat, say Slack. Company C file storage. Company D does search.

Now, I'm spinning up or using a current server. In this case, lets do IRC to Company Chat, B (bidi bridge). I connect to Company B with my user, and a user on IRC. Logging is turned on and saved, to Company C.

Whenever messages are sent, they are run through API from company A, checking semantics and feel. Score applied personally to help devs be more humane.

While all this is happening, search D is going through files presented and making a searchable DB of date/time, channel, user, and text.

And, I just created a new product.

> And, I just created a new product.

That's exactly the point. Is this what your day job is paying you to do?

If he's a sysadmin then yes. What he described is setting up communications infrastructure.

Someone set up Slack for the company. The same person could have set up an internal IRC server.

I do a great deal of R&D and work with emerging technologies.

I'm also one of the leads for IoT rollout. In essence, I look at many sectors and areas at the same time, and determine how it can be used in our org.

I was looking at message passing using IRC as a form of command and control. The hackers have used it successfully for controlling a force of DDoS clients; why not a server farm? I know that Ansible, chef, and others exist. But IRC is human readable, meaning status messages can be passively read.

Pretty much, I have a dream job. I can get funding for pretty much anything I want, have access to petabyte FS, access to 3 supers(HPC, not clusters), multiple clusters, and more. And then I'm asked, "what can you make with that?"

You learn quick in those situations.

You know that you can write bots for Slack just like you can write bots for IRC, right? This isn't a point on the side of IRC. Slack starts out with more features, but is just as extensible.

But when I have to pay to play, I'll pass.

It's a fools errand to extend a private platform like Slack. They're already adding IRC features to their system, along with running a modified IRC bouncer.

Why play catch-up or copy-target when I can just use IRC directly?

Hell, I could do what they're doing for $1/user/month just by hooking a RADIUS server up to my nickserv. Easy peasy.

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