SoylentNews

Sir Finkus writes:

I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for Soylent News. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.

There is more information on the project here, which explains it much better than I could.

Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!

That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.

On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.

tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319

Original Submission

Sir Finkus writes:

I'm thrilled to report that the Soylent News Folding@Home team is now ranked among the top 1000 folding teams in the world! As of this submission, we are currently at rank 996. The team has been active for just over two months and has made impressive progress. Thank you to all who have participated.

Current team member rankings follow:

1. cmn32480
2. Beldin65
3. LTKKane
4. tibman
5. Kymation
6. meisterister
7. Runaway1956
8. kurenai.tsubasa
9. SirFinkus
10. NotSanguine

If you'd like additional information, or would like to join our team, there is more information available here, or feel free to join us in #folding on chat.soylentnews.org

Please note that the numbers across the different reporting sites are not exactly consistent. Team members may appear in different orders based on where and when the stats are viewed.

Thanks
-SirFinkus

Original Submission

Archfeld suggested a story which became:

[Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that takes advantage of otherwise idle computing resources on volunteer's computers to simulate how proteins fold and thus guide progress to finding a cure to diseases such as: Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many cancers. --martyb]

Back in February of this year, one of our site's members Sir Finkus introduced our community to Folding@Home with this story:

I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for SoylentNews. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.

There is more information on the project here , which explains it much better than I could.

Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!

That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.

On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.

tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319

We are pleased to announce that our SoylentNews Folding@Home team is now approaching the top 500 spot! Our team size has plateaued, but new members are welcome at any time. To put this milestone in perspective, since the time when the team started in mid-Februrary of this year, we have overtaken 229,814 teams!

We even have a channel, #folding, on IRC.

Official Stats:
http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/teamstats/team230319.html
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319

Better Stats at:
Team Summary
Teams Overall Rank
Overtake Projections - Teams Ranked 501-600
Overtake Projections - Teams Ranked 499-500

Related Coverage:
Soylent News has a Top 1000 Folding@Home Team!
Huntington's Disease: University of Toronto Researcher is First to Share Lab Notes in Real Time

Original Submission

Sir Finkus writes:

It has only been six short months since SoylentNews' Folding@Home team was founded, and we've made a major milestone: our team is now one of the top 500 teams in the world! We've already surpassed some heavy hitters like /. and several universities, including MIT. (But now is not the time to rest on our laurels. A certain Redmond-based software producer currently occupies #442.)

In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's and thereby help to find a cure. To that end, SoylentNews' team has completed nearly 16,000 work units.

If you'd like to contribute to our team by donating some spare CPU/GPU cycles, you can get started here. There are clients available for Linux, Windows, and OSX. Once you have installed the software, enter the TeamID 230319 to join us.

Feel free to join #folding on our IRC channel if you need any help, or just want to chat.

Thank you to all that have participated, and a special thanks to our top 10 folders:

1. cmn32480
2. Runaway1956
3. Beldin65
4. tibman
5. LTKKane
6. EricAlbers_ericalbers_com
7. Kymation
8. meisterister
9. kurenai.tsubasa
10. NotSanguine

Related Links:
http://folding.stanford.edu
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319

Original Submission

Sir Finkus writes:

Our SoylentNews' Folding@Home team shows little sign of slowing down. We've now passed 400th place and barring any surprises, we might pass #300 just before the year's end. UC Berkley (387 at time of writing) is one of the next big names on our overtake list, and by the time this story goes live, we may have already passed them.

In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's and thereby help to find a cure. To that end, SoylentNews' team has — as of a query at 2016-10-07 02:10:00 (UTC) — completed just shy of 21,000 work units!

If you'd like to contribute to our team by donating some spare CPU/GPU cycles, you can get started at Stanford's Folding at Home web site. There are clients available for Linux, Windows, and OSX. Once you have installed the software, enter the TeamID 230319 to join us.

Feel free to "/join #folding" on our IRC channel if you need any help, or just want to chat.

Again, thanks to all that have participated, especially our Top 10 folders:

1. malloc_free
2. cmn32480
3. Runaway1956
4. Booga1
5. AnotherMindbomb
6. NCommander
7. EricAlbers_ericalbers_com
8. NotSanguine
9. Frojack
10. wArlOrd

Related Links:
http://folding.stanford.edu
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319

Original Submission

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!

martyb writes:

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...]

[Ed Note 2: Damn devs have made a liar out of me... moved it back to the original schedule noted below. - cmn32480]

[TMB Note: Site update complete. Bumped so folks will notice.]

martyb writes:

It has been a few months since we last updated SoylentNews, and we've not been content to rest on our laurels. Our next site update is tentatively scheduled for Sunday, 2017-05-21, depending on staff availability. We'll update this story when we know for sure when it will take place.

Since this post was started, other things have come to light, so there's a bit of everything in here. Read on for the full scoop:

Web Site Changes

In this latest update (scheduled around 00:00 UTC on 5.21.2017, but we are flexible), we have made the following improvements:

1. Supported subscription payments made with Bitcoin [again].
2. Fixed a bug which blocked non-whole-dollar bitcoin subscriptions.
3. Provided immediate feedback of theme changes.
4. Added button that, when clicked, marks all comments in a story as "unread".
5. Added support for "<s>" and "<strike>" tags.
6. Fixed bug where a plus sign "+" in a user's nickname made their user page inaccessible from site links.
7. Removed unused Javascript code.
8. Made minor, non-user-facing changes (code cleanup, etc.)

Backend Changes

As always, we appreciate constructive feedback. Reply with a comment to this story, join us in #dev on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), or submit a bug on GitHub.

Separately, the team has made great strides in moving to running on Gentoo. We are taking this step very methodically, making sure we have a solid foundation in place on one server before we even think of rolling it out to the rest of our systems. Yes, that means we will be free from systemd. Kudos to NCommander, Mechanicjay, Audioguy, TheMightyBuzzard, Paulej72, and Deucalion.

SoylentNews' Folding@Home Team Update

It's amazing how spare compute cycles add up! SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team which is helping researchers find a cure for diseases such as Huntington's, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's — among many others. Our team was launched on Feb. 12, 2016. In just over 15 months, we have amassed well over 300 million points which places us at Team 304 out of 226564! Barring any surprises, and continuing at our current rate, we are on track to break past 300 and into the 2xx's on or about May 28th, 2017.

We are always open to receiving new team members. Contact Sir Finkus for more information, either via email at this site, or via the #Soylent or #folding channels on our IRC -- Internet Relay Chat server.

Accounts Milestone

New account creation has been relatively consistent and steady over the past year averaging out to a new account pretty much every day. It is a pleasure to inform the community that, on May 18th, account number 6600 was registered on the site.

Funding Shortfall

Lastly, it is my sad duty to inform the community that our cash intake has been seriously deficient so far this year. Our budget for the six-month period of Jan 1, 2017 through June 30, 2017 is $3,000 and we are currently at approximately half that, with less than 6 weeks to go.

We have in excess of 100 users who have been active on the site within the last 30 days whose subscription has lapsed. It is easy enough to do — I have failed to notice my own subscription's end on more than one occasion!

Plain and simple, the site needs to pay its bills. Please look at your subscription page and consider making a contribution. The dollar amounts shown in the text-entry fields are the minimum amount required for that subscription duration. We've had a few users anonymously contribute significantly more than that in the past.

Some have chosen to give a gift subscription to NCommander (UID: 2) as a sign of support. However you choose to make a contribution, please do so now.

Thank-you
-- martyb

martyb writes:

SoyentNews is staffed by volunteers who give of their time and knowledge to provide a forum where people can discuss stories submitted by the community. We have no outside funding source.

Per our advance announcement on Saturday, May 20th, we completed our site update... one day ahead of schedule! And, even more amazingly, the community came together and we had over four dozen people subscribe since then! THANK YOU! Read on for more details.

martyb writes:

Another year is almost behind us and I thought it would be useful to take a look at what we have accomplished up to this point.

For those who may be new-ish here, SoylentNews went live on 2014-02-17. Since then, we have:

• Reached 244th place in the world with our folding-at-home team.
• Had nearly 780 site subscriptions.
• Had over 2740 articles posted to journals.
• Signed up over 6,800 user nicks/accounts.
• Published over 20,000 stories.
• Received over 24,000 story submissions.
• Had over 403,000 comment moderations.
• Posted over 615,500 comments.
• Had nearly 9,200,000 hits (views) on stories.

All of this was provided with absolutely no advertising by a purely volunteer staff!

Please accept my sincere thanks to all of you who have subscribed and helped to keep the site up and running! We could not have done it without your support.

I must also report that we have just over 100 people who have accessed the site in the past month whose subscription has lapsed. It is easy enough to do -- I've let it happen, myself. So, please go to the subscription page to check/renew your subscription. Be aware that the preferred amount is the minimum for the selected duration; feel free to increase the amount (hint hint).

Oh, and I would be remiss in not thanking the staff here for their dedication and perseverance. Linode decided to open a new data center and we had to migrate our servers to the new location. We accomplished this with almost no downtime on the site, and only about a 30-minute hiccup on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server.

Because of performance degradation on our servers when loading highly-commented stories, we rolled out a new comment display system early in the year. It had several issues at the outset, but seems to have settled down quite nicely. We appreciate your patience, and constructive feedback reporting issues as they arose. It helped greatly in stomping out those bugs.

We have a bug-fix update to the site in the works... mostly minor things that are waiting on testing for release. We hope to roll those out in the next couple of weeks.

To all of you who have contributed to the site, in other words: to our community, thank-you! It has been a privilege to serve you this past year and I look forward to continuing to do so in the year to come. --martyb

Original Submission

martyb writes:

This is a followup to: SoylentNews Site Certificates Expiring... We ARE Working on It, But... [Updated]
and: Site Services Restored

Certs (Not Just a Breath Mint):

Thanks to the efforts of The Mighty Buzzard and NCommander we now have valid certs, issued by LetsEncrypt installed on all of our servers. Except that the IRC server needs to be bounced to make its cert active on the backup daemon, all should now be in effect. As in our original story, you can check our certificate status with these links:

https://crt.sh/?q=soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=sylnt.us
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25sylnt.us

Developers:

The past few days have brought into focus a situation that has been building for several months: We really only have a single person who is working on developing features for the site, The Mighty Buzzard. As with any large and on-going undertaking, this burden is taking its toll. I try to help out as I can, but as I am the primary QA/Test guy who is much better at the user-facing things than what all happens "under the covers", my abilities and assistance are limited. If you have any spare time and would like to lend a hand (and every bit helps), please reply in the comments or contact The Might Buzzard directly on IRC.

Community:

I recall in the early days of this site when things would fall over several times a day. That has largely become a thing of the past... to the point where it is unusual for any issues to appear on the site and the support services we maintain (email, wiki, IRC, etc.) The baseline code on which this site was founded (open-sourced, out-of-date, back-level, and non-functional) was not promising, but the staff managed to bludgeon it into shape and we now have a solid foundation. That it continues to run as smoothly as it has is a testament to our SysOps folk who toil largely in the background and just keep things working... as well as the continued care-and-feeding that TMB so generously provides. To all of you, please accept my heartfelt thanks and appreciation!

Some numbers: we are approaching the 23,000th story posted; have recently passed 700,000 comments submitted; have had over 3,300 journal articles posted; and are on the cusp of having our 120th Poll!

Though all numbers are approximate and unofficial, it appears we surpassed our funding goal for the first half of the year ($3,000) with a net subscription tally of just over $3,250! I'll leave it to our treasurer to collate and post the official numbers. I'll leave the "Funding Goal" side bar as is for a week or so to commemorate this accomplishment. Do note that subscriptions are still being accepted and will count towards the second half of the year's funding needs.

Folding@Home: Not all of you may be aware, but our soylentnews team for Folding@Home is currently at 240th place... in the world! It started with a single story posted to this site. Just over four years ago, we were at 230,319th place! If you have any spare computes you would like to contribute, especially GPU-based, we'd love to have you sign up! Just reply in the comments and I'm sure someone will get back to you.

Whenever I write one of these stories, I always fear I'll have omitted someone or something important. Please accept my humble apologies if I have done so as there is no intent to slight any contributor.

To the community, I offer my thanks for your contributions to the site as well as your patience and understanding during the challenges of the past few days. Contributions are not just financial (though we wouldn't be here without them -- Thank You!), but also submitting stories and comments, and moderating comments, too! The community continues to impress me with your wide-ranging knowledge and expertise; I have learned much from the exchanges in the story comments!

Lastly, please keep janrinok (our Editor-in-Chief) in your thoughts and wishes while he undergoes a medical procedure and attendant recovery period. Best of luck JR!

--martyb

Original Submission

martyb writes:

On July 5th of 2014, SoylentNews was officially given approvals for its letters of incorporation as a Public Benefit Corporation.

This is a good opportunity to take stock of where we are. Read on past the fold for coverage of:

• Fundraising
• Site activity
• Folding@Home
• Journals of Spam Accounts
• Submit Stories
• Thank YOU

martyb writes:

Greetings!

To those of you who may be celebrating a holiday at this time of year, on behalf of the staff at SoylentNews, please accept my best wishes to you and those you hold dear.

For Fun:

With glee I am pleased to announce that The Mighty Buzzard has given a gift to all registered users on the site. These are good until 2019-12-26 00:10:00.

Thank You!

As the end of the year approaches, I extend my humble thanks to all of you who have subscribed to SoylentNews!

As of this writing, we have received $1799.47 towards a goal of $2000.00 for the second half of the year. All funds received go directly to supporting the site: web hosting, domain name renewal, tax preparation, etc. Nobody has ever received any money for their work on SoylentNews. We are staffed entirely by volunteers who give of their free time to keep the site running and the story queue filled. By my estimate, we have probably passed the minimum funds received that are needed to support the site for this half of the year... but actually reaching the goal would give us a bit of a cushion against the unexpected. To those who have let their subscription lapse and to those who may have never subscribed before: please subscribe and help us meet our goal.

Folding@Home:

Rarely mentioned, but SoylentNews does have a folding@home team which recently surpassed one billion points earned and now holds 218th place in the entire world! Here are views of their progress individually and as a team. Their efforts contribute to helping medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.

This Year So Far:

The SoylentNews web site has been available 24 hours day, 7 days a week... except for a couple relatively brief unplanned outages. Further our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been available throughout this time, as well. (There may have been a brief downtime due to scheduled Linode maintenance on our servers.) Also, behind the scenes, all the supporting back-end stuff has been chugging along: web servers, databases, caches, E-Mail processing, and lots more. Those of you who have been with us since the start remember the frequent site crashes of those early days. Often several times per day! The rarity of site crashes, now, is a testament to the hard work of many people who gave of their time and expertise to make SoylentNews so stable, today.

These are the folk who quietly mind the underpinnings of and automate everything so well you don't even know they are there and would likely feel embarrassed if attention were brouht to them. Please join me in thanking them, anyway!

Some Numbers:

The editorial staff at SoylentNews has posted 4,884 stories to SoylentNews since 2019-01-01. With a very conservative estimate of 5 minutes per story, that amounts to 407 hours' time. Put another way, that is 10 full-time person-weeks.

Please join me in thanking the editors who have so generously given of their free time to make this happen!

Thanks Again!

Lastly, I am taking advantage of this opportunity to again thank everyone who offered their support during my recent health issue. I'm still a little wobbly typing with my left hand's pinky, but as things could have gone, I'll take this any day of the week, instead! It is my sincere hope that by sharing my experience, it may help someone else make a change in their life and avoid my experience or much worse.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Please note the official web site for folding@home is https://foldingathome.org. As a free service, folding.extremeoverclocking.com (FEO) provides a variety of reports based on data it gathers from the official site. This story is from an announcement made on FEO.

Basically, folding@home is a distributed computing system whereby volunteer's machines are issued "work units" to process and, when they have completed their processing, upload their results back tofolding@home. See the excellent write-up at Wikipedia for more details.

tl;dr: When F@H announced they were working on SARS-CoV-19 (COVID-19), the outpouring of support has overwhelmed their infrastructure; their servers are having trouble keeping up with the demand for work units and the subsequent upload of results. Don't give up!

Where did the day go? (03.18.20, 9:32pm CDT)

Important news first! I've noticed this and I know many others have too, yes the official Folding@Home stats seem to be loading slow for people, or it might timeout with an error. Same goes for getting your passkey and work units! There have been so many new people signing up these past few days that you guys are overloading their system!

With that said, one of the guys over at Linus Tech Tips let me know they have created a special folding Emergency Response Thread to Covid-19 that has some up-to-date info on registration / server issues, and are offering direct troubleshooting and support to help people get their clients up and running!

Also, before sending me an email, please check out the EOC Folding Stats FAQ as it answers a lot of the common questions I've been getting!

With so many people emailing me asking where their stats are, and the loading issues with the official site, I'm going to try to expand processing to additional teams & users. My initial goal is to increase processing of Team data from 6,000 to 12,000 teams. Individual data I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle quite yet, I'm going to get the team data going first and see how many are active and what kind of movement there is.

I was looking over my server's performance charts this morning, and I noticed a considerable peak in the mysql query-per-second. Did some digging through the logs and it looks like the French "Z Event" plea to join folding went gangbusters on Twitter and their team is moving up fast. I noticed PC Master Race has added over 20,000 new users in the past week too!

So, if you have been experiencing problems with your F@H client, this may be the reason why! And, if you were unaware, we have our own folding@home team: "SoylentNews.org", and currently ranked 210th in the world. Go Team! Come join us!

Follow along at home!

• https://apps.foldingathome.org//teamstats/team230319.html
• https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=230319
• https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_overtake.php?s=&t=230319
• https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/extra_page.php?s=&t=230319
• https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&t=230319

Previously:
Folding@Home Joins Fight Against SARS-CoV-2; New Folders Prompty Drain Work Unit Queue

Original Submission