Hacker News Reader

Comment by RaleyField | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty stupid. Dev machines come with at least 8 gb or ram, why would anyone run a closed source software to save a hundred megabytes and risk compromising their machine. Meanwhile the account is 1 day old and the exe is being flagged by antiviruses.

View on HN

Security concerns with this particular project aside, my dev machine does indeed have 8 GB of RAM, which Slack alone readily consumes 1/8th of whilst also using 15% of my total CPU power at rest, doing nothing at all.

There is no excuse for this - it is shoddy engineering. Sending text messages is a simple task. Ruining my battery life and performance for the sake of making it easier for the billion dollar company to ship a cross platform app which feels wrong on every platform is something I despise and I for one am extremely happy that people are trying to counter this ridiculous trend.

I'm saying this as a past user of slack and knowing that this doesn't help, but if they can't keep their frontend solid we can probably surmise their backend is just as shoddy, so we shouldn't be using it, no matter what client we choose to use.

If only I could convince my company of that!!

What a ridiculous comment.. I can assure you that the majority of the developers do not own a 8GB dev machine, and surely you can see why this application would be valuable for the average user chatting with their friends on Skype/whatever on their 2GB, i3 laptop (assuming they're lucky enough to be able to afford such a device).

I have browsed Show HN every day for over a year now, and I can't think of any project that made me as excited as this (although https://github.com/google/xi-editor and https://github.com/limetext come close). I bet that almost every Go developer on HN would love to read, study and learn from his code, so how about we ask him nicely instead of attempting to attack his credibility in hope of pressuring him into releasing his source code..

> attack his credibility

His credibility is already at 0, because he's an anon.

> in hope of pressuring him into releasing his source code..

Not my hope, I don't even install official slack client because I don't trust it to be built by competent people (it's web app for me tyvm), my hope is that everybody who installed this software formats their hard drives for the sake of other people if not for themselves. How do you think things like this http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15316394/ happen?

EDIT:

> I can assure you

How? In a cursory attempt I couldn't find any meaningful statistics, but that wasn't my impression when reading topics like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038114.

Also, 5 hour old account. Weird. Don't install warez people.

are there mac binaries for xi and lime text editors

With you here. I don't really care how much ram something uses as long as it's fast. Biggest problem I have are all these "native" apps just being electron wrappers. I miss the old days of real chat apps. Unfortunately they've all gone to hell - looking at you trillian.

I think RAM usage is important. My machine only has 8 GB of RAM, and I had to quit Telegram (1.1 GB) and Skype (550 MB) every time I launched a virtual machine to compile eul for other platforms :)

Because some people want to do more than keep a couple chat windows open at once? Anyways, which antivirus is flagging this?

Someone is this thread mentioned windows defender and I checked with virustotal where there are some others as well. These might all be false positives, even then it still seems wrong to run a random executable from some anon from the internet.

It absolutely is!

I'm going to work on signing the executables for all platforms.

Here's why I don't use Tox, the executable are provided by a bunch of anons and while I could compile the code myself I'm not really bothered, especially because I can't force everybody to do the same. I like my software to have some collateral, usually it's either someone's good name or their company. On the other hand, I can't find anything about you, your records show you live at Pobedi (victory) 112, 84, Moscow. Really?!

Thanks for pointing that out, I need to update whois data. I'm using an 8 year old throwaway name registrar account, because my primary registrar doesn't support .im domains.

I should get the code signing certificate by the end of the next week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com