How I Ruined Office Productivity with a Face-Replacing Slack Bot

http://blog.zikes.me/post/how-i-ruined-office-productivity-with-a-slack-bot/

by wjh_ • 9 years ago

657 74 9 years ago

blog.zikes.me

nunez• 9 years ago

THIS IS AMAZING.

teach• 9 years ago

It's one of the social norms on HackerNews that "low-value" comments like "Love it!" and "THIS IS AMAZING" are discouraged. Although such comments are polite to the poster, they add nothing but noise for all the other readers of the thread.

Instead, it seems to be preferred that you simply upvote the post without replying.

rroriz• 9 years ago

I don't know why you foto downvoted. I had exactly the same thought!

Now i'm going to make a telegram bot of this!

auggierose4• 9 years ago

Cool idea. Anyway, I am glad that "Scientists have detected a major change to the Earth’s oceans" is higher on the front page, at least right now.

avip• 9 years ago

Don't upvote this!

auggierose4• 9 years ago

Yes, please don't, just expressed a personal feeling and not related to the topic at hand.

chrisper• 9 years ago

Well, it's #1 right now and the ocean one is #18!

throwaway5752• 9 years ago

Basic formula is that "controversial" posts get a nudge downward in placement. Climate change posts attract trolls that get downvoted and flagged more frequently that normal stories, and AGW deniers downvote the story and downvote/flag many comments. Has the net effect of pushing those stories off the front page quickly.

That said, credit where credit isdue: this is a nice hack from the submitter. Facefinder looks fun.

pavanred• 9 years ago

I don't understand this sentiment. And, I am surprised to see it on HN this often too. It's saying - I care about X, till problems with X are all solved, any effort on anything else is snarked upon with judgement of wasting effort.

It used to be only on threads discussing an accomplishment of a space agency of a poorer country, and a popular sentiment was if a fraction of their GDP should be spent on science and technology till poverty is eradicated. Same thing here, why one person should spend time on a personal project until we resolve climate change. I understand prioritizing bigger problems with more time, effort and money. But, ridiculing others for spending time and effort on making/discussing something you think is not the most important is something else.

auggierose4• 9 years ago

I don't see where I ridicule anyone with my comment.

BJanecke• 9 years ago

I'm so happy right now. There really are hackers(In it for the lulz) left in the world :')

jasonzwalker• 9 years ago

I have to use Slack at work, and it is fun.

But when I'm trying to focus on programming, it is like being in an all day long meeting without an agenda.

patricklynch• 9 years ago

Same situation for me. I disable notifications for everything but direct messages.

Sometimes I'll exit it entirely for an hour or two, but I don't want to look like I'm unavailable to help teammates.

hackermailman• 9 years ago

I successfully convinced my coworkers to run Slack like old IRC where you just dumped to one channel and there is no urgency to immediately reply, instead whenever we have the time can go through the history and respond. Cut down on meme spam and other interruptions. It also relaxes junior team members since they don't worry about interrupting somebody to ask questions. If it's something catastrophic we can just call each other.

snarf21• 9 years ago

It can be very distracting. My analogy is that Slack removes all meetings and emails. You instead have 1000 micro meetings and 1000 micro emails that you have to context switch in and out of all day.

r00fus2• 9 years ago

My only recourse on some days is to shut down the app on my desktop, and let my iPhone ping me if I get a DM or mention. @here messes it all up, but I've found a way to at-a-glance determine if it's directed to me without losing much concentration.

Has anyone else gotten a good way to merge things like slack/email with Pomodoro or other focus hacks?

whorleater• 9 years ago

This involves that your channels are setup sanely, but I just selectively mute/unmute on a per channel basis, and try to encourage not using @here among my coworkers. I have a textexpander macro for the `/dnd 30 minutes` for my Pomodoro.

zulln• 9 years ago

The @here mention lets you notify just the team members in a channel who are currently active in Slack. @here is best for sending announcements relevant to team members that are currently working or available.

If anyone else had to Google it.

chimprich• 9 years ago

Slack does have a "Snooze" and "Do Not Disturb" setting, in case you weren't aware -> https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/214908388-Do-Not-Di... .

This alone makes Slack far more useful for me than HipChat.

biot• 9 years ago

Some days, HN is like a Twitter rehash: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/700314634939543552?lan...

notatoad• 9 years ago

can't you just close/mute it when you're trying to focus? i thought that was the whole point of slack

bsharitt• 9 years ago

It's HipChat where I work, but the end effect is the same. I've gotten myself trained to ignore the HipChat noise to the point that now when someone does message me about something important, I sometimes miss it.

sprobertson• 9 years ago

like being in an all day long meeting without an agenda.

By far the best summary of the "slack effect" that I've come across.

wtbob• 9 years ago

I use emacs-slack and dunst to display the notifications for just long enough to read them. No flashing, no beeping, just a simple text box. And I don't reply or jump into a conversation unless it passes a threshold of importance, or I need to step away from work for a few minutes.

mosselman• 9 years ago

All you ruined was the fun of photoshopping his face into things.

Let me draw a parallel with a story of my grandfather, whom I never knew: Apparently a great hobby of his used to be to collect sayings from people. Whenever he'd meet anyone, let it be new or already known, he'd ask them if they knew any new sayings. He wrote all of them down in his little book of sayings. My father started picking up the hobby and they'd get excited when they had learned a saying the other didn't know yet. They'd do this at diner, around the fire place, you name it.

Then came my grandfather's birthday and one of the 'gifts' he received was an encyclopedia of sayings, within it were almost all the sayings in existence.

Suffice to say the fun of collecting new sayings was gone, the interest in sayings was gone and a great hobby got ruined.

So all I can see is that you took something that was a culture thing in your team and you took a nice fat automated dump on it.

The tech is very cool nonetheless :)

nealabq2• 9 years ago

So you're saying social-bonding hacks/disruptions sometimes ruin the fun. What about other situations?

Will gatherings be less fun when Alexa becomes the life of the party, cracking jokes and proposing toasts? Will Siri join in the dinner conversation (parent, friend or good-listener mode, with wit, personality and intelligence sliders).

Will fans be turned off when self-driving cars start winning the Indy 500? How about when the Boston Dynamics Red Sox win the World Series?

pjc50• 9 years ago

Yes to all of those?

exergy• 9 years ago

social-bonding hacks/disruptions

First, honest question: is there some secret lease that needs to be signed before posting on HN that requires that every real-world phenomenon be framed using 1337 h4x0r terminology? For some reason, it really rubs me the wrong way, people trying to shoebox anything and everything into a faux-technological perspective.

Also, the reason Vinyls still sell is that there is a sense of occassion about taking a record out of it's cover, carefully placing the needle on it, sitting back to focus on the music and nothing else. Same reason the physical joy of playing a piano will always have a place despite being able to get nearly the same sounds out of a computer. I'd hate to watch two self driving cars competing against each other to see which has the best code. That sounds tedious as all hell. I'm not sure about the others, but fuck yeah I categorically do NOT want an AI cracking jokes at a party.

Somethings are better when they are lower tech.

anigbrowl2• 9 years ago

Yes to all of those questions. If people can't imaginatively project themselves into winning circumstances, then they become despondent because their escapist fantasies (which some people take seriously enough to make into real accomplishments) are now dashed forever.

This is something technologists and scientists largely don't get. People are always 'look at how many material comforts and and entertainment options you have now, are you not entertained?' Likewise scientists are often 'I spent years of my life and a small fortune learning to be expert about this obscure thing that you'll never be able to experience directly, isn't it awesome?' And people are entertained and they are awed - to an extent.

But they're also sad because the more the world is codified and quantified and parceled out for ownership. there are no new countries to discover, no more large exotic fauna to find, we're constantly reminded that religion and magic are illusory and that the economics of capitalism are inevitable, so there's nothing to look forward to in life beyond being ground up in the gears of the consumerist machine.

That's why there are so many movies about superheroes and rebellious people with psychic powers and so on. People need something to believe in other than the ultimately extremely boring prospect of working, raising a family, and retiring. They want 'adventure and excitement and really wild things.' This is why we now have an administration whose stated Big Idea is the construction of a giant wall* because at least that sounds like a project you could get absorbed in for its own sake, whereas preserving the earth for future generations feels nice but is never really done and so can't deliver any sense of adventure or accomplishment for more than a few people with the resources to get a PhD.

It's also why countries (soo to include the US) are apprehensive of war but develop tremendous enthusiasm for it once it's declared, because it provides a massive uncertainty that offers the possibility for drastic change, heroism, betrayal, defeat, victory and so on. I don't know how to articulate this better than by saying that capitalism is boring for most people, in the same way that if you are playing Monopoly there's a point at which you realize who's going to win and all the fun goes out of the game for everyone else in direct proportion to their declining odds of success.

* If you don't mind losing 2 hours on a bad movie. go watch Pacific Rim, a stupid science-fiction romp about giant robots vs giant aliens. It's stupid in the sense of not really caring about the science at all to the point o making jokes about how stupid it is - at one critical moment, someone 'solves' the problem of The System collapsing due to 3v1l h4x0rs but remembering that they have a nuclear-powered robot and exclaiming 'It's not digital! It's nuclear- it's analog!!'. The very badness of this movie makes it worth studying because the psychological symbolism is so thinly disguised. Almost all alien invasion movies are vehicles for conservative ideology, and it's not an accident that a political campaign for building a giant wall was anticipated by various movies involving the construction of giant walls.

autokad3• 9 years ago

before the internet, there was real capital in knowing jokes, and the same for unusual facts. you wanted to know who was in that movie? you called your friend who knew those things. now just IMDB it.

i suppose that is part of the reason for the appeal in the seemingly recent interest in bar trivia nights. i think we are still working out the kinks in the things we lost due to the internet.

toomanybeersies• 9 years ago

I thought that pub quiz nights were becoming popular because people were getting so much useless information from IMDB et al, and needed somewhere to use it.

fzeroracer• 9 years ago

I think this is also why we see continuous growth in the Vinyl industry. People like the internet, but they also want the option to go offline with whatever they buy and have something tangible.

kop316• 9 years ago

Personally, I think the big appeal of trivia nights is very much the same reason for the resurgence of board games, it's an in person social thing to do. I can go out with some friends, have fun, and I have met some other people and made new friends that way too.

I have tried to do a lot of the online video games (even with friends), but to me, it doesn't have nearly the appeal of having friends over and we all play a game together For me, the Nintendo 64 was one of the best consoles to do this.

emodendroket2• 9 years ago

How could a book possibly capture "all the sayings in existence"? That's a lot of sayings.

samstave• 9 years ago

so says you!

teknologist• 9 years ago

But making a saying doesn't take any source material. I'd imagine there's a lot of fun in giving this bot an image and seeing where it puts the faces and which "poses" it opts to use. Have a look at the examples where there are heads put in random places and some more obvious positions left out. The hilarity is in the imperfections.

ashark• 9 years ago

Vonnegut's Bluebeard:

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.

That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist".

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!"

jmkni2• 9 years ago

Side point, but what is going on with the scrolling on that page? Anybody else find it caused performance issues?

That aside, great article!

Zikes2• 9 years ago

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the article.

Sorry about the scroll problems, I really hate scrolljacking so I don't have any JS for that on there, but I imagine that fixed background image could be causing some problems. Would you mind sharing your OS/browser info so I can investigate?

jmkni2• 9 years ago

No worries, Windows 10 Professional, Chrome 56, no issues on Edge/Firefox, maybe it's a weird bug with this particular issue Chrome?

djm_• 9 years ago

I can confirm that it is at least something to do with the fixed background on #main-wrapper as removing it solves the problem here. [1]

[1] http://www.whatsmybrowser.org/b/O5BEERJ

jnordwick• 9 years ago

Excellent. This shows simplicity, good research, capable coding, and creativity. Even the write up shows an appropriate level of detail.

+1 would hire

notadoc• 9 years ago

Saving the world.

addled2• 9 years ago

About 15 years ago, I remember Zikes offering to let me borrow a web development book he had finished reading.

I turned down the offer, thinking I had little use for such things.

Fast forward 10 years and I end up going back to school for programming and slapping myself for not getting into it back then.

Can definitely see the difference that experience makes.

Zikes2• 9 years ago

Oh wow, 15 years ago? Did we go to school together?

addled2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I'll send you an email and we can catch up.

planetjones• 9 years ago

This kind of stuff fits the Hacker News bill perfectly!

donquichotte• 9 years ago

"I turned the face manipulation code into a runnable binary, which I intended to wrap with a Slack bot."

So you turned your Python program into a single, statically linked executable? May I ask how you did that?

orng• 9 years ago

So you turned your Python program into a single, statically linked executable? May I ask how you did that?

I think the author's application was written in Go which as I understand it does static linking by default.

However, creating standalone executables from python is called freezing and can be done using various tools[0].

0: http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/shipping/freezing/

How I Ruined Office Productivity with a Face-Replacing Slack Bot

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