SoylentNews

This is fodder for testing https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/59.

Nested "blockquote" and "q" elements:

test1: zero

one two three

four five six

seven eight

nine.

Nested "blockquote" and "em" elements:

test2: zero

one two three

four five six

seven eight

nine.

For a while now I've had a little bot running in the #rss-bot channel on irc.soylentnews.org and a few people have asked how to contact me to suggest additional RSS feeds or possible improvements etc. (Thanks Bytram, for jogging my memory to do something regards that).

So to that end - if you have any such suggestions please reply to this Journal entry with them and provided they are something within the bounds of sanity, reality and my ability then I will endeavour to incorporate them.

In this week's poll on Pipedot I ask you to rank popular websites using the Borda Count voting method. In other words, how much do you trust these sites to maintain your data and your online privacy.

Instructions:

Rank any number of options in your order of preference.

Notes:

• The highest preference is "1" and will reward the highest number of points
• The largest number you can enter is the count of the options (In this case "8") and will award 1 point
• Don't duplicate numbers
• You can leave some options blank; no points will be given to these choices

This marks the 3rd voting method supported. Approval Voting was added last month.

A $1,499 supercomputer on a card? That's what I thought when reading El Reg's report of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card which is rated at 11.5 TFlop/s(*). It is water-cooled, contains 5632 stream processors, has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and runs at 1018MHz.

AMD's announcement claims it's "the world's fastest, period". The $1,499 MSRP compares favorably to the $2,999 NVidia GTX Titan Z which is rated at 8 TFlop/s.

From a quick skim of the reviews (at: Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware), it appears AMD has some work to do on its drivers to get the most out of this hardware. The twice-as-expensive NVidia Titan in many cases outperformed it (especially at lower resolutions). At higher resolutions (3840x2160 and 5760x1200) the R9 295x2 really started to shine.

For comparison, consider that this 500 watt, $1,499 card is rated better than the world's fastest supercomputer listed in the top 500 list of June 2001.

(*) Trillion FLoating-point OPerations per Second.

1. Corrupted User Settings
   There is currently a bug with the way slash handles TimeZone information and user settings. Basically, it seems that user settings are somehow getting corrupted in the database leading to unexpected results. One of those unexpected results is that slash doesn't show you new stories in a consistent fashion. In order to fix it, visit your Homepage (link in the sidebar) -> Restore Defaults -> Set Time Zone -> Revisit the front page. We are aware of this issue and is in the dev pipeline. Please email dev@soylentntews.org if you're interested in helping out the development effort!
2. Static Page generation and caching.
   Anonymous users get statically generated pages for the main index and article pages. This is run by some cron-like process in the backend slash daemon. The particular job that regenerates the static pages and updates the comment counter on the main index along with some other stuff, is "freshenup". This runs on some interval, (I believe its configured to run every 5 minutes currently). Combine that with a Varnish caching server sitting in front of Slash's Apache instance, which will cache for 5 minutes and Anonymous users can see up to a 10 minute lag in some information on the front-page vs. Logged in users, who get dynamically generated content all the time. This is an artifact of our current configuration and can be re-evaluated in the future, but for now, given the site load and the hardware we're running on, it seems to be working well.
3. The "freshenup" task looses it's mind. (ie. SN is actually borked).
   There are times however, when the "freshenup" task goes wrong. At this point, static page generation and comment count updates stop occuring. A sysadmin needs to go bounce slashd at this point. This has occurred approximately 2 times in the month that site has been live. The symptoms are that when browsing as AC, stuff is more than 30 minutes out of date, story links are broken and comment counts are frozen in time (for all users), it could be that the "freshenup" process has hung, but a lag of up to 10 minutes is expected for AC. Please email dev@soylentnews.org if you think this is happening or hop into the #Soylent irc channel -- there are usually a bunch of staff and devs hanging out there.

Hopefully this will help to alleviate some confusion about when you should see differences and give everyone a little bit better idea of all how SN is put together.

I've just pushed out my first version of expandable comments! They may still be a little rough around the edges, but you are welcome to try them out.

As for the nerdy details, the scripts are using jQuery to pull the raw comments in JSON format from the server. The two HTML5 slider elements control the display thresholds. Comments that are under the "Hide" threshold are completely hidden. Comments that are under the "Expand" threshold are collapsed. The rest of the comments are shown in full. Collapsed comments show the subject text + the first line of body text. You can click on any collapsed comment to expand it.

For those that prefer to be script free, I will offer an "Enable JavaScript" checkbox in the user settings page. Unchecking this option will present you with server-side-generated pages instead of the JavaScript enabled pages.

As the SoylentNews site has gone live, I've seen several URLs posted for access to different "areas" of the site as well as to other supporting resources. I'm using this space to collect the SoylentNews links I've found, in no particular order. Some are for historical reference, others for current access/reference.

The following links may be somewhat dated or obsolete:

• Development Forums
• Development Activity
• Bugs - List
• Bugs - Submit
• Wiki
• GitHub
• Web Chat - ##altslashdot

Alternative URLs listed here were found at the top of http://irc.sylnt.us/

• sylnt.us - wiki
• sylnt.us - forum
• sylnt.us - code
• sylnt.us - IRC Logs
• sylnt.us - Got Bugs?
• sylnt.us - Who's Who?
• sylnt.us - Leave your IRC comments here

If you are new to IRC, a good place to start is the www.irchelp.org web site!

More #Soylent IRC-related links: NOTE: issue "/msg NickServ help" to get started.

• IRC (toplevel)
• #soylent - General main channel
• #editorial - Home of the editors
• #dev - Home of the developers
• #sysops - Home of the system administrators
• #help - For IRC related questions
• #trivia - For some trivia
• #idlerpg - Idle away!

I had a dream last night that I visited a school. All the classrooms were in the basement of a building...the only way to get between rooms was by boat. When I finally got to the computer room, I found my workstation. My old Atari 800 was there waiting for me. I sat down at it and immediately started working on Soylent News. This seems like some twisted metaphor.

More text, I just want to see the error message.

Don't know how much filler is required.

https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford/journal/