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SoylentNews
from the we've-been-here-for-you;-will-you-be-here-for-us? dept.
[20200629_140251 UTC: Update 1: Encourage taking care of personal/local needs, first.]
[20200629_191024 UTC: Update 2: Added stretch goal of $1000.00 ]
[20200630_023201 UTC: Update 3: Increased stretch goal from $1000.00 to $2000.00]
[20200630_023201 UTC] What is possibly one of the worst things to hear from an editor? "I'm at a loss for words." Well, it's happened. The SoylentNews community has done it, again! We started today needing $800 to cover projected operating expenses of $3500 for the first half of the year. And you did it! So, I added a stretch goal of an additional $1000. Now you have gone and reached that goal, too! We'd run at a significant loss ($6000 so far), so that is very much appreciated! THANK-YOU!!!. Stretch goal has now been increased to $2000 [so we can continue to track your subscriptions in the Site News block]. Dare I hope? --martyb
[20200629_191024 UTC] The SoylentNews community is AMAZING! In these especially difficult circumstances, we've reached our original goal for ongoing expenses... and then some!
Thank You!!!!
We started today (Monday June 29) needing over $700.00 to cover projected operating expenses for the first half of the year.
We not only reached our original goal of $3500.00, but I added a stretch goal of $1000.00 and we are already 66% of the way to reaching *that*!
Why a stretch goal? Because we have been running at a deficit for a few years. We are are still about $6,000.00 short of having sufficient funds to pay back our benefactor's original $10,000.00 outlay. Any additional funds raised will go towards that purpose whilst giving us a larger safety cushion. --martyb
The original story (after performing Update #1) appears below:
SoylentNews could use your help.
tl;dr The first half of our fiscal year runs Wed. January 1 through Tue. June 30, inclusive. We are at 80% of the funds needed to cover our expenses for the period. If money is tight for you, take care of yourself first. But, if you can help, it would mean a lot to help us to continue to be here for you.
Please subscribe. The subscription amount provided (e.g. $20.00 for 1 year) is the minimum amount for that period; you can change that default to any larger value.
To all who started a new subscription or renewed an existing subscription: Thank You!
Times are tough. First, please take care of yourself and those close to you. But, if you do have funds to spare, we would very much appreciate your support!
Where We Stand:
So far, we have had 106 subscriptions this year which have netted us an estimated $2,794.92 (after processing fees from Stripe/Paypal) towards our goal of $3,500.00.
We run a very lean operation; $20/day keeps everything going. Staffing is all-volunteer; nobody has ever been paid anything for their work on SoylentNews. That includes the editors who get the stories out on the main page. The sysadmins who keep everything running: the servers and all the services like the MySQL databases, Apache HTTP Server, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), email... it's a long list. That we so rarely have issues is a testament to how fortunate we are to have professionals who donate their free time to keep things running. We had to incorporate to be able to accept subscriptions to pay expenses. And with that there are fees for maintaining the incorporation, calculating taxes, and paying them.
Subscriptions Breakdown:
Number of subscriptions for each subscription amount, and the totals at that level, so far in 2020:
Qty Sub Amt Total 7 $4.00 $28.00 12 $5.00 $60.00 2 $12.00 $24.00 63 $20.00 $1260.00 2 $25.00 $50.00 3 $30.00 $90.00 1 $36.60 $36.60 1 $39.39 $39.39 3 $40.00 $120.00 4 $50.00 $200.00 1 $60.00 $60.00 2 $100.00 $200.00 1 $113.00 $113.00 2 $120.00 $240.00
The Pandemic Sucks:
The world has changed in the past six months.
A lot.
The pandemic hit and with it came lock-downs, work-from-home, and social distancing. Closures of movie theaters, restaurants, and bars. Video conferencing became a norm as in-person gatherings were prohibited. And for good reason: worldwide, over 10 million are known to have been infected and over a half million have died. Untold struggles and suffering as we attempt to understand and adapt to a new reality.
We recognized that many of the community were struggling. On April 19th, we extended all subscriptions that were due to expire in April or May to the end of May. If money was tight and it was a choice of renewing your subscription or paying your bills, we'd rather you spend your money locally and so thereby help keep the money in your local community.
Folding@Home (F@H):
SoylentNews is helping in the fight against SARS-CoV-2. You might not be aware, but SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team. We are currently ranked in the top 300 teama in the world (#297 out of 254150 teams)!
F@H is a distributed computing project designed to help understand how proteins fold and thereby search for cures to various diseases. It was originally focused on Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases as well as cancer. With the appearance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, F@H has pivoted to trying to unravel the behavior of that virus. To this end, many large infrastructure companies (like AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Google) have joined the effort.
How it works: Install the client on your computer, instruct it what amount of resources to use, and you are ready to go. The client will periodically download work units and, when completed, upload the results to the F@H servers. The faster the results are computed, the more points are earned. We are team #230319. If you have computes to spare, we'd love to have you join us!
Stories and Discussions:
Through all this, we here at SoylentNews have persevered. People from all over joined us in discussions on the pandemic and so many other topics. We aim for news with a technological focus but will occasionally offer something a little offbeat.
So far in 2020, SoylentNews has posted over 2,100 stories. Separately, the community has posted 700 journal entries. To these 2,800 items, the community has posted 76,000 comments — over 400 comments per day! In addition, there have been over 55,000 comment moderations — that's nearly 300 per day.
Server Upgrades:
We are continuing our efforts to move services from beryllium (our only Centos server) to aluminum (Gentoo). Deucalion (on IRC; aka Juggs on SoylentNews) has been trudging along trying to get things brought over for IRC (Internet Relate Chat). He reports he had a 100-hour long week at work last week, but still managed to make some progress on this over the weekend. There are significant differences between the two, so it has been quite the challenge. Getting userids added to the correct groups; setting up ACLs; chron syntax incompatibilities; the list goes on and on.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Brymouse on Monday June 29 2020, @04:10PM
I've been reading Soylent for some time. Never subscribed. I just subscribed.
Thanks guys!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @04:12PM (3 children)
Implement auto downmod for millenials' posts, and I will dig up the couch for some changes.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Monday June 29 2020, @04:44PM
How does that help those of us that read at -1?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @04:46PM
Implement auto downmod of the above idiot's posts and I'll dig up some actual bills.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @09:29PM
Wouldn't fly, NCommander is a millennial.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @04:24PM (9 children)
Not sure if these low-end vms would be useful / lower costs enough to be worth it, but oracle-cloud has an offer of 2 free vms without an expiration date, "free forever".
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ [oracle.com]
1G ram each
2 virtual cores, but the guarantee is the total is 1/8th of a physical core. The VMs I got are hosted on 32 core Ryzen/Epyc processors, and are faster than my low-end box VMs with similar specs (but probably more over subscribed).
10TB/mo free forever total transfer (no differentiation between ingress and egress. Apparently no differentiation of on-site and off-site either; Oracle doc said you could "add public and private interfaces but bandwidth limit would apply to the aggregate")
LB is also free forever subject to your bandwidth limits
Both free VMs are at the same site, but they can (free) be put into different availability domains (separate power, cooling, network).
The VMs get world routable IPs, but they are assigned private addresses and the public IPs are 1:1 NAT.
100GB of block storage is included in the free forever tier, and you can split it as you like between the two VMs.
They only offer Ubuntu and Oracle Linux (Redhat clone), but if your chosen OS can be installed via something like debootstrap for Debian, you can fairly easily replace. And, they support custom images, but I haven't messed with that to see if that means you can upload something, or if that means you can customize Ubuntu/Oracle Linux, and save that as a template (debootstrap worked for me).
Google-cloud offers a single VM free forever. The specs match the lowest of the low-end box kvm offers. Also, a routable IP is not included in the free tier, and will cost more than a typical low-end box VM. You can access it via the API, though (i.e., virtual serial, ssh, or tls tunnel over API), so might be useful depending on your situation. Google also only allows 1GB/mo egress on the free tier (unlimited ingress). The free credits will cover the cost of an external IP for a year, but bandwidth charges will quickly eat up those credits.
https://cloud.google.com/free [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @05:26PM (7 children)
Who in their right mind would ever consider anything offered by Oracle?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:19AM (6 children)
> Who in their right mind would ever consider anything offered by Oracle?
Who in their right mind would ever consider paying for anything offered by Oracle?
TIFTFY
If SN used only the free forever VMs costing Oracle, but saving SN a few bucks a year, I would call that a win win.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:45AM (2 children)
I'd call it the cause of my shiny, new alcoholism.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday June 30 2020, @05:52AM (1 child)
Because you'd spend the savings on alcohol, or because dealing with Oracle drives you to drink?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:00PM
The latter. Though I suppose I could start expensing my liquor store purchases if we did move to Oracle stuff.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday June 30 2020, @08:30PM (2 children)
No, the GP was correct. If you use a proprietary or Oracle only ecosystem, if you ever need to upgrade or add functionality it will be at premium costs. The free stuff that Oracle offers is to entice students and developers to choose Oracle and then when the solution needs to scale, the implementer has to write big checks to Oracle. If the slashdocalypse ever happens and we get flooded with refugees, we couldn't afford to scale the infrastructure on an Oracle cloud.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @10:05PM (1 child)
It is just a VM. There is nothing Oracle can do to lock you in.
I'm running Debian on the oracle vms, on colo-crossing vms, google vms, local vms. If oracle one day decides that it was a stupid idea to give away the free vms, then you delete them, and spin up more elsewhere. In the mean time, I save a few bucks, and cost oracle a few bucks.
Oracle DB, yeah fuck that shit. My work spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on oracle db licenses with no way off except replacing a lot of stuff including the ERP system that cost millions for the initial deployment; the ERP system has most of its logic running on the db servers in plsql!
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday July 01 2020, @12:29AM
This is where I just don't know and get caught making assumptions. I thought there would be costs involved with scaling up the VM's resources or for automating the deployment and release of dozens of nodes. In a free development, pay for production model. Also, the VM images may be portable, but if they are using Oracle specific APIs, the ansible playbooks or whatever tool being used for automation is locked to Oracle and would have to go back to development and testing to port the VMs elsewhere.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @06:42PM
no, but thanks for the thought. i'm not affiliated with the site in any way, btw. just another random commentard.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday June 29 2020, @05:45PM (2 children)
Maybe we should have a bitcoin mining app we can run on spare cycles to fund Soylent's hosting expenses.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @06:17PM (1 child)
unless you have an ASIC based mining rig, the poor hash/watt ratio of mining on a regular CPU withan "app" means you're essentially throwing away orders of magnitude more money on electricity than what you're contributing toward mining any bitcoins, so don't do that... :)
much better to just send regular money any way you can.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @04:20AM
> throwing away orders of magnitude of their money
FTFY - see "weekends at Mar-a-lago" for details.
(Score: 1) by crm114 on Monday June 29 2020, @06:03PM
SN is a part of my daily routine. Thanks for the reminder.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Monday June 29 2020, @06:27PM
My subscription here is money well-spent.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday June 29 2020, @07:44PM
I've been thinking about it for a while but never got around to it until now. Well here you go!
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday June 29 2020, @08:38PM (3 children)
How much money would it take as an "endowment" of sorts to keep things running into perpetuity or for a multi-year period? If $3500 is the low end, what does the high end look like?
I ask this question for all kinds of things nowadays.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday June 29 2020, @09:35PM (1 child)
It's not possible to fund anything in perpetuity from a single capital investment. You are looking for an investment that gives a return that grows at least as much as the inflation rate each year - in other words, the real rate of return is positive, indefinitely. Unfortunately there are too many thing working against you for it ever to work. Wars, revolutions, periods of hyperinflation, political instability that means the country issuing the currency ceases to exist, taxes, fund managers that take large fees, fund trustees that 're-interpret' your strict instructions. It can't be done.
The best current approach is probably to invest a few megabucks in index tracker funds that re-invest income, choosing funds in the major economies. Sell just enough in the best performing one each year to cover SN's costs. Statistical reversion to the mean each year means it is unlikely the best performing one in one year will be the best performing one the next year. Having spread your risk, and selling some of the best performing outlier each year you'll probably do OK for a reasonable period. The administration costs could well dwarf the SN running costs, though.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30 2020, @04:34AM
How about if we're not looking to run SoylentNews until the heat death of the universe? None of the above is all that common an occurrence.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @09:37PM
$3500 is slightly over half a year's worth of expenses, $7K a year is our funding goal and leaves us with expenses plus a slight addition to the rainy day fund. Barring significant price increases to our base costs, you can just use straight multiplication and be pretty accurate. I can't speak for everyone on staff but I'd personally be arguing against using a sudden windfall for anything except extreme financial security, unless the initial investors (NCommander and matt_) finally agree to let us pay them back.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by toph on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:22AM (1 child)
Can anyone confirm that subscribing with bitcoin works? I've tried several times but keep getting "bitcoin is not a valid source type". I've tried with 2 different browsers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:47AM
That's our bad. We should have taken the option out quite a while ago. Stripe quit offering it as a payment type back when BitCoin transaction fees cost more than our yearly subscriptions did but we never got around to removing it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:33AM (3 children)
First, thank you all for the great work you do!
Second, I can't remember where we stand on suscription reminders: is it on? is it not?
My suscription ran out a couple of months ago and until I saw this story I hadn't bothered to check. With all due respect, if I had gotten a reminder a couple of monhts ago I could (maybe) done more than the yearly suscription but things are too uncertain and tight right now. Promise in a couple of months, $deity willing, I'll pay another suscription.
Cheers and don't lose hope, that's all we have right now!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:51AM (2 children)
I think rehash's email bits were coded by masochists. Works peachy keen after you beat it into submission then waits until you quit paying attention to it and stops working in exciting new ways.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday June 30 2020, @08:37PM
I think it is interesting that a perfectly working piece of code stops working despite no changes to the affected code. Is rehash a self modifying application constantly optimizing it's own perl code?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @09:26AM
Sounds like my PowerShell scripts.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:59AM (1 child)
Hmmm... why?
Do you need to show a clean book at the end of June?
Asking because I'm might be able to pay an yearly subscription again in December, but ergain I mite be knot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Tuesday June 30 2020, @11:06AM
Good question! I've added a short explanation to the story:
That is where we display funding progress on the main page. It shows funding goals and the percentage of those goals that we have attained.
Mostly, it bugged me we were "off scale" on the graphs, so I made more room for ya!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by prospectacle on Tuesday June 30 2020, @12:23PM
Your post was just the prompt I needed to remember to renew my lapsed membership.
I haven't posted/replied to anything for a long time but I read this site almost every day.
Love your work.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @01:43PM
SoylentNews must be behind on alimony payments...