skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn't clear to me that this is a good business move...

GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store. Which means that by making available only the last 90 days, you can't keep older stuff...

And, in today's AI powered world, in slacks position that old data seems far more valuable to keep than to throw away, even for your non-paying customers.

For one thing, they might be able to make a smarter 'AI slackbot' which better understands your organisation looking at more history.

And they might one day be able to wrangle permission to sell the AI training rights to all your corporate chats if they can find some convincing way to anonymize the result.
As others have said, the UX for IRC is pretty bad, and I say this as an operator of a decently sized network for the last 20 years.

Meaningfully FOSS communities are better served by Zulip or Matrix.
Maybe I'm not getting it but you're on a free plan, which only gives you 90d of history, but Slack has been keeping all your history, which you can't access but you have an issue with them deleting >1yr old history?

I'm pretty sure they've kept this history as an incentive for people to pay so they can gain access to it. Now they've decided the costs of maintaining history >1yr are larger than the value they get from maintaining it.

If being able to have this history is important enough to you then I guess you'll want to be on a paid plan. Slack doesn't provide a free plan out of the goodness of their heart, they provide it to get people to eventually become paying customers. It's a business.
Yes, I assume that https://thelounge.chat/ exists. As to cost/maintenance... there are no free lunches. You can pay with your money and your data, or your money and your time. I happen to find the ladder preferable and frankly cheaper than people think.
This is probably why they deprecated the IRC servers. I used to use them to log everything, it was great. :'(
That said, some collector's items only gain value much later. Think 200+ yo stuff. Kinda need several generations to hold on to it though.
But you have a year to decide if Slack is worth it to you. Seems reasonable no?
Slack lets free plans to turn on 90 day retention (i.e. content auto-deletes after 90 days). Free workspace users might want to consider this as a risk reduction measure: free users don't have meaningful access to beyond-90-day content anyway (explained in the article), yet anyone who compromises Slack (via any means, be technical or legal) gets access to extended history that workspace users don't themselves get. https://slack.com/help/articles/203457187-Customize-data-ret...

And anyway, the best UX is that of Zulip, which you can self-host :-)
"One bacterium is put in a bottle at 11:00 a.m. and it is observed that the bottle is full of bacteria at 12:00 noon. Here is a simple example of exponential growth in a finite environment. This is mathematically identical to the case of the exponentially growing consumption of our finite resources of fossil fuels.

11:58 a.m. -> Bottle is one quarter full.

11:59 a.m. -> Bottle half-full !

12:00 noon -> Bottle is full !

https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art_forgotten_fundamenta....
I'm running fedora atomic, you can also use toolbx or distrobox and install apps there and then export them if you are worried about flakpak.
Disclaimer: I work at Neon

Neon makes this very ergonomic in a cloud setting (actually it works somewhat similarly to how the article does it). You can create a copy-on-write version of your prod database (a branch) and use it for testing. There's also some automation we've built up for doing it from GitHub CI: https://neon.tech/docs/guides/neon-github-app
I mean, I get it. @AndrewfromX I don't think it is as simple as a "free TB". If I can afford a few TB on my desktop, Slack can afford many-many-many TB.
I feel that these are more to apply pressure to "freeloaders be gone or become paying customers".

There have been many discussions/comments here in HN on this topic (free vs paying) so I bet a penny on the "convert or be gone" scenario.
Like I said, with "object-oriented mostrosities", it's not like it was always simple before either.

And if you know a solution should be 50 lines and they've given you 500, it's not like you have to read it all -- you can quickly figure out what approach they're using and discuss the approach they should be using instead.
I used to have one of the older ones with buttons. now I have a recent Paperwhite and don't really miss them. I just tap on the screen edge and it works fine. I can understand the appeal of buttons and am glad that you have a reader with them but it's not something that motivates me.
It's especially tough for me because they clearly pushed their sketchy marketing and sales tactics because they honestly believed they were helping people, and in their lifetimes the medical industry lauded them as heroes for "safe" and affordable ways to ease suffering.

Right now people have no problem suppressing research they don't like about the negative effects of marijuana or anti-depressants or whatever their de jour personal treatment is - in 20 years if something bad really comes to light everyone is going to pretend that they knew all along and that everything was a smoking gun. Hindsight is 20/20 and history is written by the victors.
They could have used it to train AI...
1 - Yes, we are currently doing this
2 - Right now our focus is on flat substrates, curved surfaces are a little trickier
3 - Any pure metal or alloy system that can be electroplated would be compatible with our approach. Aluminum and Titanium are difficult but not impossible. We're focused on copper as our first commercial material but have other material systems in development.
4 - Our current pixel size is 33 microns, ~50micron negative features should be doable. Controlled wick structures are actually a really good application of the technology
5 - Our primary business model actually is to offer print services to our customers. Feel free to reach out to me via email in profile if there's an application you'd like to explore
How about just a sacrificial shield well in front of the station along its orbital path?
and/or a weaker magnetic one, also further ahead (further ahead would allow for deflecting slightly at lower power surely).
Let's say I wanted to transfer a movie in MKV container format. Its binary and large at about 4gb. Would I use JSON for that? No. Would I use gRPC/protobuf for that? No.

I would open a dedicated TCP socket and a file system stream. I would then pipe the file system stream to the network socket. No matter what you still have to deal with packet assembly because if you are using TLS you have small packets (max size varies by TLS revision). If you are using WebSockets you have control frames and continuity frames and frame head assembly. Even with that administrative overhead its still a fast and simple approach.

When it comes to application instructions, data from some data store, any kind of primitive data types, and so forth I would continue to use JSON over WebSockets.
Recursion is more beautiful.

But take a newbie, and "do this 3 times" in a loop is far more clear than the recursive equivalent.
Is it just me, or has Slack been going downhill since the Salesforce acquisition? Lots of new features I don't want, the user experience has become too complicated, and they move shit around in the UI for no good reason, screwing up my muscle memory.
Guess they did the math and figured out most people don't pay to see the history anyway.

If a server stays free beyond 90 days there's probably a low possibility of converting to paid.

Or at least lower likely gain than the cost of storing and maintaining the history.
This is a great example of a common problem, which I've taken to calling "intent-solution conflation". Garbage collection is intended as a way to improve memory safety in a programming language. It doesn't fully accomplish this, and that's an important distinction

This is often more apparent (though a rampant problem nonetheless!) in policy decisions. Like how KOSA is supposed to "protect kids online" but what it mostly does as written is train people to get their identities stolen while making websites even more cumbersome than they already are. If I think it's a dumb bill, someone might say "What, you don't want kids to be safe?", as that's actually a lot of the point of calling it that
Probably blocking their tracking cookies, without which they’ll deny you access to a lot of sites. I finally gave up on blocking those just this week because I couldn’t get to sites I neeeded.
I don't think this is specific to chat; pretty much the same question could be asked about any SaaS offering. At the end of the day, rolling your own is at least somewhat of a risk in terms of how much it will cost, how soon it will be ready, the quality of the product being made by your employees who potentially aren't experts in the given domain, etc. In the ideal case, it would probably cost a lot less than paying for service, but you need to weight that by how confident you are in your ability to achieve that, and sometimes a high cost with a known upper bound is going to be more palatable than an unknown cost that's hopefully lower but potentially unbounded.
You can but you only have 30 days to do it before they delete history outside of the previous year if I'm reading this right
I’ve seen this repeated and it’s just not true. Very non-expert users can use it just because its reasonably stable and they just don’t do that many things, as long as they have a working web browser they are fine (thats the premise of a chromebook). But anyone getting work done will quickly run into things they can’t do.

I’ve come to think a better benchmark for linux having “got there” is, can i run an architects office on ubuntu ?

Architects:

- need access to industry standard, graphics and processing heavy software

- need to exchange files with many other companies, so need inter compatibility

- need things to just work, they are not interested in fiddling with the guts of their os just to make things work

- work in contexts where cost of software is a drop in the ocean in the budget of a project, so the add value of running on linux has to be more than “you get some software for free”

Thinking about reaching a state where you could run an architecture office on ubuntu raises the bar a lot on what still needs to be improved
I'm more interested in the psychology of how people have come to expect free services on a continued basis from strangers when it is behind a keyboard.
Iteration is more natural for most people than recursion. There are a few aliens for whom recursion is more natural, but iteration matches more closely daily life.
Isn't it just web-styled IRC wrapped up in Electron with an API for extensions?
The key difference: They showed onlymlimited amounts, but kept the data. So once you paid you got the full archive. Now they delete the old data and you can't pay to get the old stuff back.

Considering that I have somengroups where we'll never pay this is a good change l.
I don't understand when people complain about things like this. If you aren't paying you should not be surprised that this could happen.

If I were a paying customer of Slack and this change were made then sure, it would be "enshitification", but if you are not paying for anything you aren't really entitled to complain. They are essentially subsidizing your free usage.

If your slack community is that important, then you should be asking the community to help support its history.
> penalizing the secular tech entrepreneurs

During the divestment against South African apartheid, anyone was a fair target.

And yes Israel has been labeled an apartheid state by all the major human rights groups, including Amensty, HRW, and Israel's own Btselem. Linking the 3 reports below, in case you are interested in reading.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...

https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is...
I completely agree with that, but the problem is finding a supply of people to argue with on niche subjects. I have occasionally argued with people on the Haskell IRC and the NixOS Matrix server about some stuff, but since they're humans who selfishly have their own lives to live so I can't argue with them infinitely, and since the topics I argue about are specific there just don't exists a lot of people I can argue with even in the best of times.

ChatGPT (Gemini/Anthropic/etc) have the advantage of never getting sick of arguing with me. I can go back and forth and argue about any weird topic that I want for as long as I want at any time of day and keep learning until I'm bored of it.

Obviously it depends on the person but I really like it.
Does she seem committed to homeopathy when she has "instant" skin in the game? (Say, she needs to have a tooth drilled & filled, and the dentist would permit homeopathic "pain relief".) Or might homeopathy be more of an emotional reaction against being ill-treated (both emotionally and physically) by conventional medical practitioners? For women, even well-to-do white women, the latter is wretchedly common. And if you don't feel yourself an expert on the technical details, then "do not trust those who treat me poorly, when there seem to be nicer alternatives" is, sadly, a pretty reasonable and human strategy...
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813369.
I just read it (because of your link), and commend it to other people in this thread; quite a well-described and interesting position.
Fuzz Map – fuzzer for GUIs that automatically builds a visual map
Show HN: Continuous (Preview) Releases for your NPM libraries
A friend of mine who is a former JPL mech engineer was working on an amazing, high pressure golf ball cannon until his city issued him a citation for his smaller gun. That pretty much ended his foray into pneumatic weapons. Shame, because his gun looked amazing. He even custom built a road case to store it all. Guy is on the spectrum and has ADHD which has resulted in some amazing, but completely over-engineered, work over the years.

He engineered his own gluelam support beams in his garage which could lift a car. He rewired his house using all stranded wire, bus bars and crimp connectors and it was all mil-spec.
In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, "Everything's legal if you don't get caught."
Alzheimer seems worse to me. Although a daily recommended 1-1.5h dose of this might make me reconsider ;-) Whenever I do 30 minutes I can hear it in my ears for the next 10 minutes.
Learning two things at once – using Rust and ECS to build a cricket simulator
This post strikes me as incredibly entitled.

Slack started doing this as a loss leader. If it's not working out for them, then they're well within their rights to try and cut their losses by telling people to shit or get off the pot.
One of the biggest differences (problems, if you ask me) is that to build just about anything at all these days you have to know "a stack" which typically means at least two and usually three+ different languages: SQL, your app layer, and the client side.

So you really can't master anything anymore, at least not like in the old days, because there's just so much more of it and you only have so many hours per week.

But, this is probably inescapable. We have the internet now. You generally just can't write a monolithic app. It's going to be two apps (client and server) or one app that has to think about both client and server.

And also Moore's Law went and died on us. So no more single-threaded... anything. Everything is threaded or parallel or etc etc now.
> GDPR-like regulations basically means that data that isn't accessible to the user you can't store.

My understanding is that Slack doesn't make >90 days available to non-paying users, so by your statement above, they're required by GDPR to delete that history.
Break also considerably complicates loop semantics. For example you can no longer rely on the loop condition being false on loop termination. Instead you have to do a flow analysis of every loop and conditional leading to the break to determine the established postcondition.
Because it is what Google first and other later got us used to
Being able to search in the past for a half-remembered conversation sounds great until you have idiotic, asinine corporate data retention policies that require anything beyond 90 days to be deleted anyway, for some bullshit reason like being open to litigation or whatever and that being subject to discovery.

Then that's implemented with no warning to be able to migrate important info out into a wiki or other documentation. So in the end, no better than IRC really, but I get it, not a Slack problem, but allowing that whiplash at a click of a button doesn't help. Slack seems to help paper over deep cultural problems in a way that makes it all colorful and squishy.

But as other seem to agree, it's pretty bad at keeping anything organized like you want to be as an info repo, there are tools that are geared toward that specifically. Don't crowbar one into the other.
I was just reading this... been getting a few emails. Ha. 92 for people who don't want to click on the image.

https://i.imgur.com/N6hdfU0.png

I knew I had a lot of Slack groups, but I didn't realize it was quite this many. (And there are probably about 2x that many if I could include old emails in the list.)

But I don't really have a problem with them deleting old messages.

A lot of agencies set up private Slack groups with each client... easy way to have team chat, without the hassle of getting approved by the client's security team, or getting on the client's SSO tools. =P

I'm grateful for Slack, but the pricing model never quite worked right for agencies. I don't really want to put everyone in the same basket, the permissions would be annoying to maintain -- and the downside to messing up permissions and showing work from one customer to another would be devastating... easier to just spin off new groups. But... paying for each and every group is also not really appealing.

Anyway, 90 days still allows us "working communication" and I'm still very grateful to Slack for the platform they built. (=
How much of this issue have you investigated already?

It’s worth skimming through the Massachusetts AG complaint about their actions, and the strategies employed by Purdue (of which the Sacklers always held the majority of board seats)

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/u...
And we complain about it.

But oh man we won't pay ... and if we get really upset we will move and we'll cheer on the next one to offer us something for free ... for now.
Not really, it will be played out in a number of separate cases and each case is in a weaker position separately simply due to scale and resources. The Sacklers have an estimated $1bn liquid available to fight these things.

The $6bn ruling was significant and not an amazing outcome for either side (so, a compromise).

Additionally most of the Sacklers are well into old age, so they'll probably die before losing $6bn.
The Boeing Starliner craft has had multiple issues (IIRC 5 separate thrusters not working and at least 2 separate helium leaks) since docking with the ISS. NASA continues to stress that Starliner is authorized to return astronauts to earth in the event of an emergency. NASA, at the same time, delayed the return of said Starliner indefinitely until they can analyze more test data.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/nasa-indefinitely-dela...
I changed the URL from https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/opioid-settlement-to... to an article that has more information and a less baity title. If there's a better (more accurate and neutral) article, we can change it again.
I also bought it for the physical buttons. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there’s anyway to entirely disable the touch screen while reading (or at least I haven’t figured it out).

My only complaint is that it isn’t USB-C. As soon as that comes out, I’ll trade this one in.

I just looked on Amazon and the Oasis is out of stock. I wonder if that means a refresh is imminent?

Edit: I googled it and it seems the reverse might be true - the Oasis is out of the lineup and no replacement is coming. That sucks.

https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/goodbye-to-the-amazon-ki...
What Manifest V3 Means for Brave
Isn't that nearly every chat app these days?
They took in something like $11 billion and were going to fund something like $6 billion.

As far as purely pragmatic solutions go this was not a bad deal for victims. There are a lot of members of the Sackler family and a lot of them have a lot of money despite personally not being connected to the Purdue business in any way.

Even if they could all be connected to wrongdoing actually getting money from, like, the second step-grand-nephew who lives in Copenhagen is going to be really, really hard.
I just wish there were a good definition of "ultra-processed food", because most of the ones I saw basically equivalent to "I'll tell you when I see it". Like wikipedia [0]:

"An ultra-processed food (UPF) is an industrially formulated edible substance derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds."

But this describes almost any prepared food. For example take an good cheese, something made only with milk and rennet:

"industrially formulated" - check! (surely a cheese industry changed formula at least once in last 200 years);

"edible substance" - check! (very edible, yum-yum)

"derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds." - check! (what isn't)

.. so it's an UPF and should get a warning label?

If they want to start passing the laws related to UPF, I'd like to see a good clear definition first.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food
I'm really confused by your reply, and it doesn't answer the question I posed, so maybe that's that.
This seems very reasonable. Free service is still free even.
Could it at least be a partial shield to help slow things down?

And maybe not directly on the station itself, but perhaps as a cloud of drone-ship defensive satellites to provide a defensive array around the space station -- almost like a fleet of smaller boats providing a perimeter around a larger aircraft carrier?
We are slower because we do much more.

Yeah. Ultimately, two or three people could still write a "simple" single threaded single user app with constraints similar to the Windows NT app you describe.

But hardly anybody would buy it or want it.
Slightly tongue in cheek, but the astronauts on board are not going to be the ones doing the mission planning around debris checks - that will be coordinated from the ground.
Because they have been conditioned to expect it, not realizing that they were the product all along.
What's the difference? Either way you're turning on and off code that's already in the application. The only difference I can immediately see is that some people do feature flags as being on or off for the entire application instance, but I'm pretty sure you can do A/B testing with them at arbitrarily fine granularity and still count as a feature flag.
Sure, this a correct mindset, and an obvious one for people who build and maintain information repositories professionally, but at an average company with hundreds or thousands of people, it's a losing battle to enforce. Paying for Slack and having the ability to find information in conversations that should have been documented but were not is valuable in practice.