Slacktyping: I'm typing when you're typing (2018)

https://github.com/will/slacktyping

by thunderbong • 5 years ago

519 139 5 years ago

github.com

Zababa3• 5 years ago

Looking at the repo and the tweet, this should be dated (2018). Which would explain a lot of things.

dang2• 5 years ago

Ok, we'll put that up there.

thatguy0900• 5 years ago

Out of curiosity, how is is that you see these comments?

Zababa3• 5 years ago

Thanks!

dkdbejwi383• 5 years ago

Which things, specifically?

notyourwork• 5 years ago

Specifically that the year is 2021, not 2018.

Zababa3• 5 years ago

It's intended as a joke, because I've seen this happen (someone typing when I am, stopping when I stop) a lot.

jedberg• 5 years ago

"Everyone loves it so far and doesn’t find it annoying at all!"

lopatin• 5 years ago

You wrote code for with the only potential benefit of (successfully) making us lol. All I have to offer is an upvote.

alex_c• 5 years ago

This is pure, distilled, 100% evil. I love it.

neutronicus• 5 years ago

Always good to see a "Fix 100% CPU Usage" commit message

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

I learned Rust by writing a game boy emulator. It always takes 100% CPU because that’s apparently how VSYNC blocking works in SDL or something.

But the actual effect never feels like the computer is dragging. Perhaps because multiple cores.

It’s better than a “fix 400% CPU usage” commit.

lapetitejort3• 5 years ago

However, pegging your CPU at 100% would make your computer seem busy, which matches the theme of the plugin.

dylan604• 5 years ago

maybe if you only have a single core CPU. otherwise, pegging your CPU at 400% or 800% might feel sluggish

cozzyd• 5 years ago

that can only be achieved by uninstalling slack

Johnny5553• 5 years ago

That update broke my workflow. I configured Slack to interpret a rapid CPU temperature rise as "send thumbs up emoji".

(stolen from https://xkcd.com/1172/)

eyelidlessness3• 5 years ago

Slashdot’s slide into rampant abuse and 4chan levels of racism was gradual until it was sudden. When I finally stopped visiting, I felt confident saying “nothing of value was lost”. But that was wrong.

This is the umpteenth time I’ve seen an appropriate, relevant XKCD reference downvoted for no apparent reason in the last few days. I miss the inevitable perfect recall for relevant XKCD in the old Slashdot days. It’s sad that there’s apparently such disdain for that sort of fun on here, even in comments on a fun submission.

craigkerstiens2• 5 years ago

Having worked with Will for quite a few years, he has a great ability to create some impressive projects like this. Even his commit graph on his GitHub (https://github.com/will) has been consistent for I think 10 years now?

andjd• 5 years ago

It's pretty easy to spoof the commit graph on Github like this, since Github bases it on user-provided timestamps and does not question them.

lapetitejort3• 5 years ago

Will has a repository just for that: https://github.com/will/githubprofilecheat

gruez• 5 years ago

Even his commit graph on his GitHub (https://github.com/will) has been consistent for I think 10 years now?

umm... https://github.com/will/githubprofilecheat

craigkerstiens2• 5 years ago

So it has been 10 years :)

Glide• 5 years ago

It even spells out his first name....

teruakohatu• 5 years ago

He has pushed 21,383 commits to that repo to keep his commit graph looking that good.

Note the few days he had to push commits when they were zero commit days.

skylanh• 5 years ago

One day Will will while away Will's last wonton day, and a scheduled task somewhere will continue this repo.

lapetitejort3• 5 years ago

Very clever of him to have Friday align with the horizontal strokes of W, I, and L. Ready Only Friday manifested.

shoo• 5 years ago

consider paying a visit to Will's homepage: http://bitfission.com/

Even though the site is under construction, it is still very nice, with some enjoyable tunes.

willlll• 5 years ago

Thank you. please don’t try and right click to steal the source though

mcbishop• 5 years ago

I had a good laugh there, thanks.

volkk• 5 years ago

i clicked back to get back to HN after visiting and the music was still playing. oddly enough i didnt hate that.

jaredsohn• 5 years ago

Make sure you're running Netscape 3.0.

It won't play midi files natively for me in Chrome.

exikyut• 5 years ago

Wow, so this is the webmaster who maintains Ling's Cars!

rualca• 5 years ago

Oh dear God...

WEBRING!

I haven't heard that in a while.

I'm starting to have flashbacks, hearing the sound of 56kb dialup modems...

sam0x17• 5 years ago

Will is a legend. He is the epitome of big dick energy on GitHub. The sheer audacity of his username being "will", his commit graph, the fact that I already knew who he was before this was posted on HN... legend...

stavros• 5 years ago

big dick energy

Should I keep fighting against this phrase or is it futile?

astrea2• 5 years ago

On the note of GitHub commit history, incredibly off-topic: I hate when potential jobs ask for my github profile (sometimes as a strict requirement). All of my (4+ years) profesional work has been in private Bitbucket repos so my github is a random college project and some community project I did one weekend. Should I be feeding the "grind mentality" and contributing to open source or doing random side projects to fluff it out? Am I the odd one out?

jypepin• 5 years ago

no you're fine without a filled github account. most engineers don't write code during their free time and, like you, work in private repos for their corporate job.

seoulmetro2• 5 years ago

No, you shouldn't. It's obvious that any job that "requires" this, will not be a job that you want to be in.

I do all my work on private repos. My github looks bare. If they want code I'll send them code. If they want my github profile, I'll send them that and tell them all my code is private, hit me up for it/examples.

hop34s3w• 5 years ago

What is "grind mentality" in this context? Is this common in the programming world too?

itisit3• 5 years ago

Presence awareness is an insidious overreach IMO. Warms my heart to see petty rebelliousness automated in this way. I'd also like to see something that edits the same Slack message ad nauseam with banal remarks.

dilap• 5 years ago

Yeah, I've realized nothing good ever comes from knowing when someone else is typing. As this rather extreme example illustrates.

bentcorner• 5 years ago

Pidgin has a feature that notifies you when someone starts typing at you or goes from "Away" to "Online". Kind of weirds people out when you message them just before they message you, or you message them the instant they sit down at their PC.

throwaway287391• 5 years ago

Kind of weirds people out when … you message them the instant they sit down at their PC.

I miss the AIM days when you’d hear the “door opening” sound when someone signed on. It was totally normal to immediately ping someone then because signing onto AIM was asking to be pinged. And that sound made your heart skip a beat because it might be the girl you like and she might even IM you first :o

Johnny5553• 5 years ago

I dunno, I find the typing notification useful in group discussions so I know that coworker A is about to say something (and I know that she's going to make the exact same point I was going to make).

I find active/non-active presence helpful so I know whether or not to expect a reply soon.

itisit3• 5 years ago

I prefer to communicate asynchronously via text to keep myself and others focused on work. People become surprisiginly resourceful when they no longer expect or rely on realtime (or near to it) replies. To each their own, of course.

dllthomas• 5 years ago

I added a loading indicator emoji that I use if I want to respond to something but it's going to take a bit.

anyfoo• 5 years ago

I've been talking to friends every day, for what amounts to decades now, over chat tools that don't show when anyone is typing. In contrast to e.g. the tools at work that do, I feel like the interactions we have not only don't suffer from not seeing who is typing, but generally feel "easier" to me. There is no "oh I was about to type but now you're typing so I'll stop typing", or "I started typing but on second thought I don't have anything to add right now (or maybe I was interrupted) and now you're waiting for me", or any of that tired stuff.

riversflow• 5 years ago

Why? You can easily tell if someone is paying attention if they are talking in person. This seems really selfish to me, I personally find it one of the best modern chat features. Then again, I grew up with it and have learned to be zen about several minutes of typing... followed by "k"

itisit3• 5 years ago

You can easily tell if someone is paying attention if they are talking in person. This seems really selfish to me

Privacy and concentration are selfish interests? Why not have a 9-5 webcam of yourself feeding into my surveillance dashboard? This way I can see my team hard at work as I would in an open office. They'll love that.

The prior in-person work setup is not the ideal nor the standard. I don't need or expect others to pay attention to what I'm saying right when I'm saying it unless there's real urgency. We're all IP-enabled meat functions now; there's no going back.

tunesmith2• 5 years ago

I saw the headline and got excited that someone wrote a modern talk/otalk/ytalk program... I miss being able to watch someone else's typos when I'm touch-typing.

dmd• 5 years ago

I made that! http://typeto.me/

(yes, http. https won't work. sorry. i'll fix it someday.)

also, we would LOVE someone to fork this and/or take it over, we really don't have time to maintain it.

tunesmith2• 5 years ago

Ah so cool! That really took me back.

hasmolo• 5 years ago

i’d be interested. how’d you like me to reach out?

binwiederhier• 5 years ago

Since we're talking about stupid Slack bots, I feel compelled to mention my stupid bot: REPLbot [1] is a Slack/Discord bot for running interactive REPLs and shells from a chat.

It is fun and marginally useful. It supports sharing your own terminal in Slack too.

[1] https://github.com/binwiederhier/replbot

maddyboo• 5 years ago

That’s not stupid, that’s really cool!

fdr• 5 years ago

My favorite WillSoft so far is his emoji film renderer. https://youtu.be/v32XHJxljKI?t=876

teeray• 5 years ago

Cool, now I want one that will suppress these so I can write in peace without the other person wondering why it’s taking me so long to write.

tyingq• 5 years ago

As a chrome extension, but the source gives you some idea what to tweak...

https://github.com/andrewconner/slack-hide-typing/blob/maste...

allenu• 5 years ago

I love little hacks/projects like this. It's art.

marstall• 5 years ago

Colin Robinson, the psychic vampire character on the show "What We Do In the Shadows", would looooove this tool.

amerine• 5 years ago

Ahhhh one of my favs humans. Hahha. If you get a chance to work with him, jump on it!!

don-code• 5 years ago

While I do appreciate the humor here, it's a personal gripe that conversations on Slack tend to optimize towards speed of responses - and when taken to an extreme, they take the form of:

This message
is
sent over a few lines

(awkward pause)

so that
I can get in a point
before you start typing something

Asynchronous means of communication (Github PRs, Jira tickets, dare I say e-mails) mean that I submit a fully-formed thought as a digest, but Slack sometimes becomes a stream of consciousness - one that I have trouble breaking someone out of.

lrvick4• 5 years ago

I for one prefer stream of consciousness in chat.

That is the point of chat.

If I want structured longform discourse I use mailing lists.

e-clinton• 5 years ago

If I have to read it, I’d rather you take your time thinking about what you are writing. For voice or video, stream of consciousness works well.

grimgrin• 5 years ago

I wonder if the OP is referring to channels versus DMs? Also this is maybe a huge culture thing at least regarding "inherited channel etiquette"

In a DM I am _for sure_ stream of consciousness

edit: also in a #red channel

bostonsre2• 5 years ago

Conversations are fine as long as messages contain complete thoughts that merit a response. Saying hey in one message, then typing and then sending the message does no one any good, all it does is interrupt the receiver and force a context switch before you can run any instructions/respond.

matsemann• 5 years ago

https://nohello.net/

Cthulhu_3• 5 years ago

I think one should make a distinction between chat in public channels and direct messages; with the latter, you're causing the other party a notification and drawing the attention, with the former, the reader can engage with it at their own leisure.

sundvor3• 5 years ago

Hey Don-Code

sundvor3• 5 years ago

(made a coffee, put out the bins whilst I had your imaginary attention)

.. I completely agree with what you wrote. Just please skip the niceties and write the whole request in one message. Prefix with the greeting! And any follow up details can go in a thread.

Jensson• 5 years ago

Usually it doesn't look like that, the first part is self contained and the remaining are small additions that they figured out in the moment. If you tell people to stop doing that then all that will happen is that they wont write those clarifications.

bostonsre2• 5 years ago

It is pretty annoying when people pause like that. I don't see why they can't buffer their writes until they get a complete thought (Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst).

It isn't fully asynchronous if notifications are enabled. With notifications, you are more like a single cpu server that has to handle hardware interrupts for disk/network io. It stops you from working and forces context switching, only people aren't as good at context switching.

jerf• 5 years ago

"Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst"

Pro-tip if you're one of those: If you look at the slack interface, there's not a lot of visual difference between two messages in a row, and a single message separated by two newlines (SHIFT-Enter if you don't know how to enter those).

It looks exactly the same to type "Hey.\n\nJust wanted to check up on the status of the de-fooification project. How's that going?" as it is to send those as two separate messages, it looks just as polite on the screen, and it's way less annoying.

Emanation• 5 years ago

Ha. I do this. It's emotional energy. Lacking seriousness or im too preoccupied with how my reply will be understood or not.

Granted, I dont think I ever stopped at 'hey-'

jacobsenscott• 5 years ago

Even worse is people who type "hey", and then don't type anything else until you "hey" back.

Even worse is "Hey, I want to talk about something. I'll call you in 30 minutes."

wruza2• 5 years ago

Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst

You don’t have colleagues who type “hey” and then wait for your reply, do you?

the_gipsy• 5 years ago

Someone should write a bot like the gp that autoreplies “hey, how is your day going so far?” to a single “hey” line.

vidarh3• 5 years ago

Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst

"hey" [waits for a response; then a long pause and agonisingly slow typing after you've said hey back]

"Can I ask you a question?" [waits for a response] [agonisingly slow typing coupled with intermittent pauses].

Always makes me want to yell at people to just ask their damn question.

1123581321• 5 years ago

There's Slo, which is a slow mode admin plugin for Slack. I wish it were baked in like Discord's slow mode (hopefully it exist in Slack and someone will correct me.)

I agree it's really poor etiquette to make the view scroll for no reason and to make it hard for others to participate. It's fine in DMs or maybe with 3-4 likeminded people, but in anything meant for wider reading or participation it's rude (usually unintentionally) and counterproductive. Fortunately, since it's not intentionally rude, it's not a big deal to teach that good middle ground.

ulrikrasmussen• 5 years ago

I turn off typing indications and also don't send my status to the server for the same reason. I've never liked them, and actually have always felt that they were a bit invasive. Why should the other party know that I typed up something and then decided not to send it?

isoprophlex• 5 years ago

I on the other hand don't enjoy people who write paragraph upon paragraph in a single message. Its chat. Just quickly hammer off your stream of consciousness rambling into the chat; send an email otherwise.

Look at it this way, they're gonna make their point anyway. The sooner you know the better ;)

wruza2• 5 years ago

Sending message after message with no complete point until last one is like holding a mutex to the person’s attention. Annoyance, there is no other way to look at it.

k__• 5 years ago

While your example is clearly a strawman, I have to admit I tend to many short messages on chats.

It's not email, there is someone sitting on the other side who waits, so I give them something to read. When I call them, they also hear what I say when I say it and not after the whole message is complete.

dangerface• 5 years ago

Chat is for conversations it should be a back and forth, if you don't like that choose a method of communication that isn't a conversation.

Recurecur• 5 years ago

Ha, someone on my project does exactly that...it never occurred to me it might be for perceived speed, I just figured ADHD... :^)

nabaraz• 5 years ago

Somehow related, most of my typing on Slack is adding a line break because I find messages too close to each other.

-----

colordrops• 5 years ago

Does this also make your status green?

danielandrews43• 5 years ago

My slack bot is a dictionary for acronyms at work https://tryplayground.slack.com/apps/AKCHPAYCC-acronym-bot

amoe_• 5 years ago

I know it's a joke but IIRC these simple scripts don't work anymore, as Slack deprecated the token-only auth mechanism.

shadeslayer_• 5 years ago

Chaotic evil.

caramelazimuth• 5 years ago

The person who invented the "is typing" feature:

https://slate.com/technology/2014/02/typing-indicator-in-cha...

Aachen• 5 years ago

MSN in 1999 was the first according to the person who made it for Microsoft, David Auerbach.

the feature was well-received and soon copied by AOL and Yahoo, the other two big IM forces back then.

No big insights about typing indicators in the article, though, e.g no user research was done or anything.

Near the bottom of the article is an interesting bit about messengers showing the message, not just a typing indicator, in realtime. I guess people nowadays (I certainly would) think of it as something Google tried, but it sounds like this predates MSN. The author says they prefer that over typing indicators.

vidarh3• 5 years ago

guess people nowadays (I certainly would) think of it as something Google tried, but it sounds like this predates MSN. The author says they prefer that over typing indicators.

"talk" which he describes dates back to the early 80's, but there were predecessors on systems predating Unix as well long before that.

izerik• 5 years ago

Pidgin IM client comes to my mind where there was a feature (not sure if only for Yahoo Messenger or also for other services) that when someone started to type, their chat window appeared for me. People were shocked about how I knew they were going to message me. Would be fun to have something like this on slack.

Slacktyping: I'm typing when you're typing (2018)

Related Stories