Two of SoylentNews' staff submitted stories noting our three-year anniversary; one a site summary of where we are and a summary of what we've done, and the other a detailed presentation of the very early days and how SoylentNews got started.
Three Whole Years -- Thanks to You!
Three years ago, today, SoylentNews announced its presence to the world. Much has happened along the way of our providing a place for a community to grow and to engage in discussion.
It started as a fork of five-year-old, open-sourced code which had suffered under benign neglect. Perl, Apache, MySQL, and other products had continued on. So we had to deal with dependencies on unsupported and back-level versions of code. A great deal of effort went into bringing the site up-to-date with current versions of that base. See below for mechanicjay's illuminating first-hand account of how that all got started.
[Continues...]
Those of you who were with us then can attest to the fact that site outages were a regular occurrence. Bugs were found and eradicated. New bugs were made, and found as well. We invited the community to vote to name the site. We created documents of incorporation and had them dutifully filed. On July 4th, 2014 we received notice of officially becoming SoylentNews PBC. But I get ahead of myself.
Not content with just running a clone of the old code, the staff embarked on a large number of improvements to the site. Support for Unicode characters (via UTF-8) was an early improvement. Refinements to moderation took place — you could now moderate and comment in the same story. Moderation points were issued to every registered user every single day. An API was written and made available. We have our own Folding@Home team (currently ranked 314 of 226132 teams in the world) which contributes spare compute cycles to help find cures to maladies such as Huntington's Disease. (See the Main F@H site and our team page.) We sent out a call for new editors to help our beleaguered editing team which was approaching burnout; several of you answered the call and we are greatly enriched by their viewpoints and their questioning of the status quo.
And what have we wrought? Our own place on the world-wide web, supported and run entirely by the community. For the numerate in our midst, here are some statistics for the site. As of the time of this writing (20170217_002919 UTC), SoylentNews has:
- conducted 96 polls
- posted 2098 user journal articles
- registered 6496 user nicknames
- published 15660 stories
- received 18611 story submissions
- posted 462690 comments
- had 52699108 hits on stories
But that's not all! Unwilling to rest on their laurels, our development team has been hard at work bringing improvements to the site — along with some bug fixes. If you want to play with the current, in-development, subject-to-change-without-notice version of the site, hop on over to our development server. Do be aware several specially-crafted stories were created and posted there so as to evoke certain test conditions, so please respect the admonitions stated on those stories. Have an observation, question, or found a bug? We'd love to hear your feedback in the #dev channel on our IRC server.
We could not have done it alone — a great many of you have contributed to the site. There is the administrative tasks of paying the bills and handling legal obligations. Sysops support to keep our boxes up and running. Writing code and patching bugs (while minimizing the bug writing). Suggesting and testing new code/features and providing constructive feedback. Making financial contributions by signing up for subscriptions. Submitting story submissions for the editors to poke and prod at. All of this in support of a goal to provide a place where people can submit comments and engage in discussions with other interesting and intelligent people on the 'net. As with any community, there have been some 'heated' discussions. And most refreshing of all, are those discussions where nuggets of wisdom and brilliance appear — and make the whole effort worthwhile.
So, on behalf of the rest of the all-volunteer staff here at SoylentNews, let me say thank you. For your support, engagement, and questioning — we are a better site because of you. May we continue to earn your trust and support for many years to come.
In the comments, please feel free to mention anything significant that happened over these years which were inadvertently omitted as well as to tell us what we can do better.
So, to wind this up, I have one last question: "emacs or vi?" =)
Reflections on our First Days
For our third year, I have some Reflections on our third day.
In some of the pre-history of SoylentNews, here is some of the stuff that gets lost in the mists of time around the first coordinated development effort -- running on a VM, on a laptop in my basement under the slashcott.org domain. The slashcott had been announced and was to commence in some number of days. A bunch of folks thought it would be an awesome idea to get an independent version of slash running in time for the slashcott -- what could go wrong?
3 years and ton of life changes for me, makes some of this a little fuzzy, but I'll do my best to put things together. I've relied heavily on my email archive of that time which helped spur a bunch of memories. Hopefully this will be a coherent tale. (Maybe for next year I'll mine my personal IRC logs from when we were still on freenode).
At first there was a bunch of coordination in the ##slashcode channel on freenode, a bunch of emails were also buzzing around trying to coordinate some things and ideas. My first email to Barrabas was on 02/06/2014 [6 Feb 2014 for our non-US readers]. The issue at hand was that "slashcode" had been hastily open sourced 5 years prior, then pretty well abandoned. Not only did you need to build the perl modules from scratch, but it would only build against Apache 1.x. Once you managed to run that gauntlet, even compiled and installed, things barely ran and were pretty horribly broken. Anyway, it soon became apparent that robinld, NCommander and myself were making the most progress on getting something running, as I recall Robin was the first to success in getting an installed running site, but his VM was stuck behind a corporate firewall.
In the meantime, I had gotten the domain slashcott.org registered while trying to build things myself. At some point, a bunch of us decided to combine forces, Robin shipped me his VM, I got it running on my laptop (as it was the only 64-bit thing I had at the time), we got myself and Ncommander ssh'ed in and we started hacking. For some reason, RedHat vm's were horribly laggy on my openSuse VirtualBox host and work was slow and painful, but progress started to be made.
The only bug I've ever fixed in the code base was a critical piece of the new account email/password generation stuff, as I recall the generated password wasn't actually getting written to the DB. (sadly the evidence of my contribution has been lost, I think I shipped the fix to either robin or ncommander, so they have credit in the git history). Regardless, it was a critical piece - I have an email dated 02/08/2014 with my new account/password, which worked -- it was a huge boon and let us start to let a couple people in to start hammering away to find front-end bugs (of which there were countless). The next big thing I see from mining my email is the first "Nightly stories email", which came out on 02/11/2014 (from the slashcott.org domain). I think we ended up with about 50ish users on slashcott.org (gosh I hope I still have that vmdk stashed somewhere).
On the night of 02/11/2014 (or very early morning of 02/12/2014), after giving up and going to bed (I had a new born and was teaching an undergrad class on the side in addition to my regular 9-5 -- I was beyond toasted after a week). The VM locked up hard (it had done this a couple times, but I was always available to poke it with a stick and bring it back. As I was unavailable and no one had exchanged important things like phone numbers yet, NCommander made the executive decision to spin up a linode, which was great. The laggy VM on the laptop wasn't meant to last forever, though I admit I had visions (delusions?) of hosting the site myself on some real hardware at some point. In retrospect, Linode has been an amazing way to run this site and absolutely the right decision.
I got my new account on the li694-22 domain, on the 02/12/2014, that new account email was for mechanicjay, UID 7 -- which is where I live on the site to this day. I kept the slashcott.org server in sync with code changes for a bit, and was a pretty handy testing platform, until the "official" dev box came online on 02/14/2014. At some point during this week, we had landed on the soylentnews.org domain and that's where we went live on 02/17/2014.
So there you have it, we went from a group of independent pissed off people with no organization and an abandoned broken codebase to launching an honest-to-goodness site in ELEVEN fucking days.
Related Stories
I feel that its fitting to post this today on July 4th, Independence Day, given the mission and unique history of SN. I'm going to do a follow-up post on Monday with more information on where we go now. Until then, have an awesome Independence Day, and a great weekend :-)
It is my great pleasure to announce that SoylentNews has just celebrated four years of service to the community! The very first story on the site appeared on 2014-02-12 and actually went live to everyone 2014-02-17.
It all started when a story on Slashdot made reference to its "audience" which ticked off quite a number of people. Soon after came a boycott of Slashdot — aka the "Slashcott". While this was in effect, an intrepid few people somehow managed to take a years-old, out-of-date, unsupported, open-sourced version of slashcode and somehow managed to get it up to speed to run on much more recent versions of Apache, MySql, etc. Recurring crashes and outages were the norm. (See last year's anniversary story for many more details!) Further, on July 4th, 2014 our application to become a Public Benefit Corporation was approved — this set the stage for us to be able to accept funding from the community.
By the time you read this, we will have posted 20,980 stories to the site to which over 639,907 comments have been made!
We could not have done this without all of you. You (the community) submit the stories for the site. You write the comments... and moderate them, too. You made recommendations for improvements to the site. You are SoylentNews.
It has been my privilege and honor to work with a great group of folks who have done the behind-the-scenes skunk-work which has kept this site running. It does bear mentioning that this site is entirely staffed by volunteers. Nobody here has received even a penny's worth of income from the site. Like you, we have home and work responsibilities, but in our spare time we still strive to provide an environment that is conducive to discussions of predominantly tech-related matters.
Having said all that, I must add that income to the site has dropped recently. Having let my subscription lapse in the past, I know how easy that can be. Take a moment to check your subscription status. We have on the order of 100 people who have subscribed in the past, have visited the site in the past month, and whose subscription has expired. If your subscription is up-to-date, please consider either extending it or making a gift subscription (default is to UID 6 - "mcasadevall" aka NCommander). NB the dollar amounts presented are the minimum payments required for that duration -- we'll happily accept larger amounts. =)
If financial contributions are infeasible for you, we always appreciate story submissions. Submit a link, a few paragraphs from the story, and ideally a sentence or two about what you found interesting and send it to us. Any questions, please take a look at the Submission Guidelines.
Of course, the comments are where it's at. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, well-supported comments seem to do best here. Inflammatory histrionics garner attention, and usually down-mods, too. Speaking of which, if you have good Karma, and have been registered with the site for at least a month, you are invited to participate in moderation. Unlike other sites that up-mod or down-mod to infinity, we have something more like olympic-scoring here. A comment score can vary from -1 to a +5. This is how I look at scores: -1 (total waste of your time), 0 (meh), +1 (okay), +2 (good), +3 (quite good), +4 (very good), +5 (don't miss this one!).
Thank You!
On the occasion of the site's sixth anniversary, I thought it fitting to mention some of the many ways that fellow Soylentils contribute to our community. This also seems like a good opportunity to mention some of the site's history, relate some staffing changes, mention other contributions by the SoylentNews community, and to wrap things up with some site statistics.
Please accept our thanks:
These thanks go out to all of you: my fellow members of the SoylentNews community.
To the Anonymous Cowards who post comments to our site (be they inciteful or insightful). To our registered users who not only post comments, but are also the only members who can moderate comments. No matter how long you have been here; whether you have just arrived (Welcome!) or have been with us from the very start... Thank You!
Speaking of which, thanks go to our staff who bludgeoned and duct-taped an ancient unmaintained open-sourced version of the code underpinning slashdot into some sort of basic functionality, and who have since made it the site you are enjoying today. Thanks, too, to our behind-the-scenes staff members, who keep the underlying services we depend on, running 24/7. Other staff members are more visible, like the editorial team who spend several hours every single day processing the stories that get posted to the site.
And let's not forget the members of the community who purchase subscriptions and thereby fund the operations of this site. We do have real world expenses: paying for our servers, domain registrations, and paying a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) to do our taxes.
Read on past the fold for all the rest!
Don't worry; they'll make more.
[Editor's preface: SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team (#230319) As of this writing, SoylentNews.org is ranked at number 210 in the entire world! My current Core 2 Duo laptop would do little to support the effort compute-wise, so I assist as best I can by cheerleading, communicating our team's progress, and similar activities. We have a channel on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server "#folding" where there is sporadic discussion about progress. Check out the list of previous stories at the bottom of this story... to get involved, just mention it in the comments and come join our team!
If you are wondering what in the world F@H is, Wikipedia has a nice summary of Folding@Home . And, of course, there is F@H's "About" page, too. --martyb]
Intro:
If you are a Folding@Home (F@H) contributor, you may have noticed that you aren't getting your normal allotment of work units. It appears to have started some time Friday, March 13. The root cause? Schools shutting down around the United States.
Looking for Work [Units]:
Kids are scared (some more, some less) of the Coronavirus, they read something somewhere about efforts such as F@H that are working on curing various diseases. Those kid's gaming rigs are exactly what F@H and other similar research groups need. And, some of these kids have machines that most of us would envy! A well-built gaming machine is simply awesome!
https://foldingforum.org/viewforum.php?f=61
That forum is filled with "newbs" trying to figure out how to set up F@H on their machines, and then complaining that they can't get a work unit.
This post, specifically, explains that the huge influx of volunteers has depleted the available work units. https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=32424 Apparently, on Friday, the staff filled the WU servers' caches with the normal weekend's amount of WU's and they were gone by early Saturday morning. Someone volunteered to work on Saturday to refill the caches, which were promptly emptied out again.
One of the posts on the F@H forum suggests that F@H has about 4 times the number of folders that it had a week ago.
What to do?
If you find yourself unable to download a WU, take a look at the log. You will probably find complaints,
"No WUs available for this configuration" and/or "Port 8080 unreachable, trying port 80" and/or "no http service available".
Those and more are all related to the fact that the servers are being hammered by half a zillion school kids who are looking for something useful to do with their time, and their computers.
Be patient, and just let your client work through it. It will eventually download a work unit, crunch it, and return it.
Official Statement:
Straight from the F@H project: Coronavirus – What we're doing and how you can help in simple terms – Folding@home
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @02:10AM
And many returns!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday February 20 2017, @07:43PM
Happy belated 3rd birthday as well!
I've been very impressed with the contributors and staff on the site. From day one for me I felt like I got the best the old site had to offer.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TK on Friday February 17 2017, @02:20AM
I don't spend as much time here as I did in the first year, but I'll keep donating because I still believe in the idea that started the site.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by julian on Friday February 17 2017, @05:16AM
I've been absent the last few months for personal, familial, reasons, but I am getting back to a normal pace of life. Economics concerns are also becoming more favorable. I donate to the ACLU as my main social-good expenditure, but when things get a bit better this site will be the next regular donation I make. The cost of a subscription is easy to justify.
It's a good idea. I grew up reading the green site and saw it degrade. I think there's a niche for something like that. It's a good place to be, and I like being there.
I will try to be around more often.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @02:29AM
Maybe someday gewg will actually log in! :)
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday February 17 2017, @03:25AM
We actually created an account and offered it to him on 2014-11-27. At the time, the offer was declined.
The offer still holds. Nick is currently set to "gewg_", but can be changed if needed.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @05:10AM
Having too much fun watching folks point out what an oddball I am.
(I don't remember that account being offered in November 2014.
I didn't become aware that it existed until January 2015. [soylentnews.org]
Doesn't matter; the answer's always the same:
I have no interest in signups, cookies, karma, or any of that.)
3 years already?
Wow. Time flies when you're ancient.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday February 17 2017, @05:30AM
Your comments would be more visible--except to readers who intentionally choose not to see them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @05:31AM
Instead of going back and searching for what people say. The thing has a built in notification system. The rest is just whatever...
But I still hold out hope you will log in and do better!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @07:18AM
Us AC's are what made the green site, and now the red site what it is.
Nicks are just for stroking people's egos after all :)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 18 2017, @03:33AM
It's handy to know you're arguing with the right person too. Plus saved view settings.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 18 2017, @06:01AM
Nicks are just for stroking people's egos after all :)
Good thing he signs all of his posts...
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 17 2017, @02:31AM
Emacs or VIM? I gave up on the jihad, either one is great. Just dont give me gedit.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @03:19AM
Here, have a nano.
(Score: 3, Funny) by martyb on Friday February 17 2017, @03:29AM
Pffft! Real programmers use cat and just redirect input from the tty to a file. =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday February 17 2017, @07:08AM
Quiche eater! Real programmers use a disk editor to manipulate the disk sectors directly! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Friday February 17 2017, @10:56AM
"Quiche eater" as an insult... it's these small gems that keep me coming back to this site! Thank you.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @04:02PM
a magnetized needle and a steady hand
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday February 17 2017, @04:17PM
Disk editor? I thought, Hey, I did that once.
But the I remembered/ Back then in the 60's I didn't have a disk editor.
Instead I wrote an assembly language program, punched it into cards, and compiled and ran it,. It read one particular disk sector, checked that the string "END OF JOB" appeared where expected, replaced it by "MERRY XMAS" and ran it. For the rest of the Christmas season, the IBM 1620 would print MERRY XMAS instead of END OF JOB.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @01:24PM
OI, what's wrong with gedit?
(Score: 4, Informative) by tangomargarine on Friday February 17 2017, @04:04PM
There *wasn't* anything wrong with it until they recently decided to make the window border all weird...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:34AM
There was really nothing wrong with the idea of requiring X to edit a text file?
Seriously? Final answer?
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/004/403/Girls.png
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:51PM
This is Linux; there's a million other alternatives.
A lot of desktop users don't want to dedicate brain cells to learning emacs or vim, and I don't blame them. YMMV.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Arik on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:36PM
I mean, there's plenty of other things to mention, but why? That's a showstopper.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Corelli's A on Friday February 17 2017, @03:01AM
This site is the first I visit every day. I don't often feel I have much to add to the conversation, but I enjoy reading everyone's input.
Everyone who has contributed to this site: coding, administering, donating, commenting, etc: you have wrought a fine edifice and community. I am grateful.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday February 17 2017, @04:23AM
If you want to play with the current, in-development, subject-to-change-without-notice version, hop on over to our development server.
Well, a link to it would help if you really want people to try it out. ;) Better still, maybe a link on the sidebar along with the wiki/irc/etc. so that people can find it easily even after this story vanishes into the archives.
For anyone interested, it looks like it's dev.soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Friday February 17 2017, @01:44PM
Wha? Huh! I know I put a link in there when I wrote this. Fixed... you should see it soon. Thanks a bunch for pointing that out!
What a brilliant idea!
Okay, changes made, but it may take a bit for the changes to propagate out; I expect you should see it soon. (Update: I'm seeing some weirdness with our production server — the update seems to appear and disappear — be persistent!) I've passed the word onto our dev team and it should be grabbed for the next release as well. Thanks again!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 18 2017, @06:35AM
Just realised I haven't been to the front page since before there *was* a sidebar! I always rely on the mailers, so doesn't occur to me to even look.
Dang. Seems like a lot longer than 3 years. Many more to come. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday February 17 2017, @05:12PM
It *used* to live in the sidebar for a really long time. I think it accidentally got removed and got deleted by accident. Oops.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday February 18 2017, @11:14AM
Well, that explains why I was looking at the sidebar expecting to find it before I wrote that comment. I was sure there was a link there and was going to mention it since the story didn't have one...but then it was missing, so I checked the wiki, then finally just went "fuck it, I'll try dev.soylentnews.org and then complain if it doesn't work".
Luckily nobody decided to be clever with the subdomain :)
While I'm thinking about it, I noticed my login didn't seem to work there when I went to look around, though my user page shows same name/ID. Separate user database or what? Made it hard to poke around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @04:35AM
The Beatles broke up [medium.com] over The Long and Winding Road. Is martyb trying to tell us something?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @05:23AM
Someone just commented on something about bringing Cmdr Taco in, and "Putting the Band back Together", which I think is a "Blues Bros" reference.
But I just want to say, as a proud and valiant AC, that SoylentNews is the very best hive of scum and villainy on the intertubes, and thank you from the bottom of my, um, heart, to all you who created it, and keep it running! BanZai!! (Ten Thousand more years!)
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Friday February 17 2017, @12:37PM
Better that than the bottom of your bottom!
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday February 17 2017, @02:09PM
In a word: "No!"
I was thinking only of the first stanza:
To me, that says that no matter what else may come my up, there's something about this [place] that keeps bringing me back -- I just can't stay away.
No other intended meaning than that... in fact I was unaware that the song had anything to do with the Beatles breakup. (That was an interesting read — thanks for the link!)
This has been an all-volunteer project right from the start. People saw a need and jumped in. It is the community that makes this site what it is. It is my fervent hope that this attitude will continue — that people will see a need, scratch an itch, and that SoylentNews will continue to merit being on the short-list of sites you visit regularly.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday February 17 2017, @06:27AM
Congratulations to all who started this site! I can’t believe it’s been three years!
It also means I haven’t visited that other site in a long time. I have come to like the small-ish community here, even the weirdos that adorn every other news with their crazy posts.
Like other soylentils, I may not post many comments and have only one submission under my belt, but I try to do other things for the site, such as subscribing and moderating.
I look forward to many more years and once again, thank you developers, editors and fellow soylentils for creating a site I visit several times a day.
I’ll go now and pop another beer to your health!
Cheers!
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday February 17 2017, @10:14AM
I wasn't actually aware for the first few months that SN existed (I didn't see it discussed pre-Slashcott, and was avoiding /. for a long time afterward), but it has been on my shortlist of sites to check since then. Though in my mind, what says a lot more is the fact that there's enough of a real community—not just a collection of regulars—that I haven't started over with a new username every year or two like I do everywhere else on the Web. (Damn it, now I've got the annoying theme song to Cheers stuck in my head! Blargh!)
Here's to three more years and then some!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Saturday February 18 2017, @02:22AM
For a long time, our top referrer was slashdot.org. I don't know if its still true since we don't actively stat track.
Still always moving
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @10:28AM
American dates need to be banned!
just use the ISO 8601 YYYY/MM/DD never EVER any confusion.
Apart from the unparsable dates I enjoyed this trip down memory lane.
Good job keeping it short.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mmcmonster on Friday February 17 2017, @10:49AM
I love ISO 8601 dates! (No, I'm not being facetious.)
All my documents are prepended with yyyy-mm-dd so that I get proper sort order.
Sorry I had to butt in with this. Proper file nameing and directory structures get me excited.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Friday February 17 2017, @08:06PM
While I applaud your enthusiasm, and echo your file naming schemes in my own rig, I find that the contents of my porn catalog does better to excite me than the file names and directory structure of the catalog. But I understand, not everyone shares my preferences for ASCII art.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Friday February 17 2017, @12:16PM
*sheesh* just what you would expect a programmer to say at the expense of meat machines...
no, THE only date format which makes UNIVERSAL sense to nekkid apes is : fri17feb2017
even with no spaces it is 100% readable, understandable and unambiguous...
don't give a shit if it is computer-friendly or not, it is hu-man-friendly, THAT is what is important...
whip your stupid computers into shape that can handle that date format, NOT vice versa...
(Score: 3, Touché) by martyb on Friday February 17 2017, @03:46PM
Was bedeutet "di17dez2013"? [*]
Given the wide number of languages, many of which have their own names for the days of the week and the months of the year, it seems there just might be some limitations in your proposed UNIVERSAL format.
[*] That would be an example of using the suggested format, in German, which in full would be: Dienstag, 17 Dezember 2013. 2013-12-17. (cf: The Months, Seasons, Days, and Dates in German [about.com].
Once THAT has been mastered, let's move on to French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Mandarin.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday February 17 2017, @05:33PM
No, the real way to handle dates is YYYYMMDD (HHMMss) so that a newer date is always highter than an old one :)
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 17 2017, @05:58PM
Let's own up. If we were real geeks we would use stardates from Star Trek.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Friday February 17 2017, @06:15PM
So... ISO 8601 then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Calendar_dates [wikipedia.org]
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @06:33PM
Funny you should bring that up. I just saw a discussion thread about it somewhere.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday February 18 2017, @06:31AM
You could at least have provided a link. [soylentnews.org]
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Friday February 17 2017, @04:14PM
I greatly valued and continue to value SN as a practical news alternative to the utter clusterfuck Slashdot turned into and general fishiness of "mainstream" shit. Was concerned about inertia for a time there (which is why I tried to contribute in what capacity I could) but happy it ended up being irrelevant. Please continue to keep it running. I deleted my twitter account and that was the first and last time I attempted going such a route to get my news. So in other words SN is probably worth $67 billion and we must Monetize the Userbase.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Friday February 17 2017, @05:25PM
I had a serious amount of writers block which is why I didn't end up writing anything for the anniversary post, and Marty tends to do these better than I do, but here's my two cents down memory lane.
At the time of the slashcott, I was living in a small flat in Panama, with poor internet and nothing much to really do. When I got started, most of the coding discussion was on freenode in ##altslashdot, and I had some experience working on slash historically as I had been interested in playing with the nightmare of a codebase back when I really was into the other site. Robinld had gotten fairly far in getting the main page running, but install-slashsite was failing over with a lot of errors, and so I worked to independently replicate his success on my laptop. My approach was to use an older perl than what we were using (I believe MJ was using the system perl on that VM), and rebuild the entire stack module by module. This helped a lot and then I attacked most of the bitrot that had seeped into the MySQL code as the create table syntax had changed slightly.
This eventually got us to the point that install-slashsite completed successfully and I could initialize the template archive. This got slash to fully render the main page without error, and I remember people going nuts when I successfully posted the main page rendering without error. I copied my install to the linode I setup, and we started getting initial users up and to test it. On the 12th, I reset the user database once because of breakage from the first round of testing. At this point, almost all major site issues were working, though some of the CSS was broken. I worked on stripping out as much of the D2 code as possible and switching the site default to the old D1 view, and getting moderation up and working. (The moderation code was present, but the algorithm was hilarious broken; see my old journal posts). I bought two linodes, later named hydrogen, and helium as our first webserver, and DB machine and continue in service today. We went live five dates later, and nearly self-destructed from the load.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Friday February 17 2017, @06:12PM
I remember the early struggles of getting the varnish cache tuned. Once we got that tweaked, I think we were seeing something like a 93% cache hit rate, which let the Apache 1.x processes just kinda lumber along.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 17 2017, @06:09PM
Has it really only been 3 years? It feels like a couple decades have passed in that time. Maybe it's the relativistic effects as we near the Singularity.
I have been involved in founding and building a number of volunteer efforts over the years, and this is the best. It's been really interesting to watch it cohere. In the end it comes down to a small handful of people persevering on a project no matter how much resistance and criticism come their way, and how much thankless effort it takes.
Thanks, guys. You are the world builders.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Friday February 17 2017, @08:09PM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 18 2017, @03:39AM
I can relate to that sort of inversion. I prefer writing code to writing submissions myself.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by maggotbrain on Saturday February 18 2017, @12:41AM
Thanks to all of you for your hard work pulling this site together. In the last year, this place has become one of my go to sites to begin my day. The chosen topics are interesting and the summaries are very well written. The smallish community makes it non-painful to read the comments. Here's to wishing you success in the coming years. Congratulations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 18 2017, @06:31AM
Hear hear!
-The AC swarm
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday February 19 2017, @01:37AM
Always good to see a high UID posting to remind me we're growing as a community :).
(says UID 2 ...)
Still always moving