A Pre-History of Slashdot - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cmdrtaco/a-pre-history-of-slashdot-6403341dabae <comment><USER3> I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :))

I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. At the the height of it these people were painted as communists by Microsoft (and if they had any real visibility in the media, I'd imagine they'd have gotten the same treatment.)

But here I am today sitting at my desk at Mozilla committed to working only on open source software for the rest of my career and never writing another line of proprietary code, after having seen enough good and pure-intentioned closed source projects morph and turn bad after the pointy haired bosses, the "visionaries", and the investor class got enough control over them.

I guess those days have always been in the back of my mind. It took a lot of life lessons to really understand how important the things the /. community was always debating back then around software licenses, privacy, and IP really were. Images of "billg" as the borg were fun, but behind those gags were serious conversations that ended up shaping our world, and ensuring to one degree or another there would always be a hedge against corporate control of software.

In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web, a community like /. is sorely needed. Here we are on the modern day equivalent, a site owned and operated by a startup incubator. It's fortunate that a community like this exists at all in some form, but how truly times have changed.

<comment><USER4> >> __ _In today 's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web_ __

I am going to have to call you out.

I had a low-digit ID on /.

We (people like me) have been calling this out for FUCKING DECADES.

I feel that we can talk about generational millenials etc.. but we can also call out DIGITAL millenials; those who thing they know what the fuck is up just because they "work at facebook"

I have been a whistle against NSA router backdoors since 1997...

So nobody wanted to hear it then - and the giants have surpassed me - and I concede...

but to think that this is some freaking revelation is bullshit.

We have been talking about it for literally decades. FFS FB threatened to sue me for that which I revealed even here on HN.

Today's "world" has been here since the 70s.

<comment><USER5> same story here. Low number ID, privacy advocate, etc since the 90s.

the part that disgusts me recently is that when these conspiracies are turned into fact by post-facto released information from official sources, a good amount of the reaction is "So? Everyone already knew that anyway."

I feel like that reaction is so blasé that it will ultimately be the deathknell of the personal privacy movement.

Whether or not the propagation of that kind of attitude and reaction to such things is state-induced is another question, but the damage that such opinions do to such activism is definetly real. If I were an adversary to a cause, I would definetly consider those kind of tactics against the ideals of my enemy.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's funny. We all heard about ECHELON a long time ago, only to find out it was true and that not many people care because they don't really get what it means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was with Slashdot for 8 years. There are a lot of memories I could share, but the thing I appreciated most about my time there was just how much Rob (and the core team of engineers and editors) really _cared_ about the site and its users. It's rare to see such conviction from tech companies or leaders of large, user-centric websites.

I'm not sure Slashdot's users ever really understood how much time and energy Rob expended defending the site from user-hostile changes tossed without concern from the upper echelons of the org chart.

Thanks Rob.

<comment><USER8> They sent pizza to Kuro5hin during a difficult time. That showed real class.

<comment><USER9> Oh, man, Kuro5hin! That was such a great, diverse, welcoming site for a couple of years. So sad what it descended into.

<comment><USER8> For anyone who wonders why HN mods are overly strict, then note that Kuro5hin tolerated trolls and they utterly destroyed the site. It doesn't exist any more.

<comment><USER10> It _had_ limped along until a year or so back when the server finally fell over.

The domain is parked now.

But yeah, the trolls pretty much ruined it, life lesson. Rusty turned up running a Mastodon instance, though I haven't seen him for a few months.

<comment><USER11> The change in direction of content of kuro5hin, is that the trolls you refer to?

I just visited sporadically and noticed focus drifted from tech related and interesting to political and sometimes into conspiracy theory areas around the time when I stopped visiting.

<comment><USER10> Not OP, but that was a significant part of it, yes.

Both the quality / topic of posts, and of discussion, faded quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks Rob for the trip down memory lane. I have two to share:

I started using Slashdot in '97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes.

My second memory was when I was working for Sendmail. Because we were "famous" and appeared on Slashdot for every Sendmail release, one of my first jobs was helping the senior admins set up a new web server for Sendmail.org. I was told by the creators of Sendmail "this server must be able to handle getting Slashdotted."

So we bought the biggest Dell server we could find, put it in Level 3 in San Francisco (back when they still hosted things — that datacenter is now Dropbox's HQ), and then I asked the creator of Bind if he could secondary my DNS on a.root-servers.net. When he actually replied and said yes I felt huge pressure to get that entry right and was a bit starstruck.

I was also awestruck as I was doing tail -f on the logs and we hit Slashdot for the first time after setting up the server. I couldn't believe one site could send _that_ much traffic.

If it weren't for you none of that would have happened, so thanks Rob!

<comment><USER13> > I started using Slashdot in '97. I remember back then you had a cron to > update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, > so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a > notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes.

I did something similar but then at some point I ended up blocking slashdot.org in my hosts file because it was killing my ability to focus or get work done. I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work.

<comment><USER14> _> I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work._

I used to have one of those! Sadly, Natalie Portman filled it with hot grits.

<comment><USER15> It makes my heart swell to know there are still those out there thinking of dear Natalie, petrified and with hot grits down her pants...

<comment><USER16> I don't have time for Natalie; I'm fretting over Netcraft's confirmation that BSD is dying.

<comment><USER14> We need a poll to determine what CowboyNeal says on the matter.

<comment><USER17> CowboyNeal is busy waiting for DukeNukem 3D to come out

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never publicly announced this but I loved Slashdot's friend/foe system so much that I built it as a cross browser extension for Hacker News. It's called Hacker Smacker and it's on GitHub.

[https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker](https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker)

Supports not only friends and foes but also friends of friends and foes of friends. Makes it easy to scan the HN homepage and comment threads and see what's good. Much like how Slashdot's friend foe system highlighted the good stuff in threads.

<comment><USER19> I have wanted HN to have a friend/foe system since I first found the site. I'd also like it to have the ability to make notes, like 'farkies' from Fark.

On Slashdot, you simply add them to a friend or for list. On Fark, you get to flag them in certai colors and then leave yourself a note (other people can't see it but admins probably can) that I use to remind me of why I put them on the list.

I'd like a combination of those two things. A simple friend/foe list with comments that show next to their name. I'd have no use for ignore functionality. Also, I usually use said note to write polite things that help me remember the user.

I think it encourages getting to know the other people and humanizes the pixels on the screen. Both sites have led to my meeting people in real life and making real life friendships. That's easier, for me at least, when I can more easily identify them as individuals and remember them.

<comment><USER20> Slashdot is where I first read your comments, then you didn't post for a while and I found HN and you post here too!

I didn't create an account on /. since AC was easy and I mostly lurk anyway but I always enjoyed the insights that everyone brought.

I remember either around the time of the revelation of the NSA phone closets there was a guy who used to do SIGINT and he posted a bunch on how to avoid surveillance. I think he had moved to the Philippines, sometimes what happened to him.

Just wanted to say hi and that you seem like an interesting guy!

<comment><USER19> Thanks! I took the karma hit to say hi to taco, in the thread. Worth it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember the early days of slashdot fondly, although I didn't actually make an account until a few years later. It was such an interesting mix of serious discussion, in-jokes, and amusing trolls (even the infamous goatsx troll that I fell for more than once.)

I still think that the moderation and meta-moderation was one of the most interesting experiments in a self-governing commenting system, even though it was clear that it was mostly a failure in the long run. My conclusion is that a site needs hands-on human moderation to maintain quality.

Slashdot is also a perfect example of the general life-cycle of cool social site. Humble beginnings -> lots of interesting people -> own little subculture -> lots of interesting content with some impenetrable in-jokes -> existing userbase ages out as they get jobs or have kids -> less interesting content, more in-jokes -> owners sell -> dry husk of a site remains.

<comment><USER22> More like:

1\. Group #1 joins who care about site

2\. Group #1 improves site. Sense of "community" keeps things in check.

3\. Site grows in popularity and group #2 joins

4\. Site loses sense of community and ability to moderate itself effectively.

5\. Group #1 leaves

<comment><USER23> For some reason I think this going to happen to HN too, and I feel it is at 3. And I'm not sure if I'm in group #1 or group #2.

<comment><USER24> I think it's been at step 3 for longer than most sites have last. I know I'm part of group 2, but I've seen a somewhat consistent culture since I arrived over five years ago.

<comment><USER23> Looks like you joined about 5 1/2 years ago. I'm surprised you think you're part of Group #2.

Before what date do you think people can be group #1? Or are you ascribing the group number to contributions rather than date of joining?

<comment><USER25> When a friend first recommended hackernews to me it didn't show up in google searches. So I gave up. I think techcrunch finally led me to finding it. By the time I actually created an account(just 10 days before nathan^), people were already complaining about the deterioration of the community, so I assumed I was in group 2.

<comment><USER26> I am most definitely Group #2. I wish I was Group #1, but I was too loyal to /. (and a few other sites), and after /. got DICEd along with the 'f*ck beta' stuff I jumped ship to Soylentnews.org which had an okay community but a rather fascist set of admins (despite what their manifesto says).

So after a few months of lurking, I registered here, and now it's my daily[1] go-to site.

\---

[1] Hourly. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Slashdot user #578 here. :) Besides pre-web stuff like Usenet and BBS boards /. was the first place I really felt like part of a community. I still remember fondly the times that stuff I submitted made it to the front page (like the story announcing the title of Star Wars Episode 1), like I was now "famous" with a bunch of people I really wanted to impress. Like most of us, I drifted away a long time ago but I'm always happy to see people in new communities who were around back then. Happy Birthday /. and thanks for all the grits!

<comment><USER28> User #527 here. I sold my username (iota) on eBay for $150, back when your slashdot user number still meant something. I've always wondered what the buyer was up to, it was funny at the time to think of "selling" something that didn't exist. I guess it's commonplace now

<comment><USER29> came here looking for a story like this. i had a 2-digit id that i coincidentally sold for exactly $150 on ebay also. college beer money. don't regret it at all.

cmdrtaco announced his site on irc and i happened to see it in the first few days.

<comment><USER30> I remember /. before user reg even existed. There was some buildup to it finally being released, I recall. I signed on within an hour of it going live and though it was all pointless. Guess that's why I wound up with a 4-digit uid instead of a 2-digit one :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Slashdot was a major inspiration to us as we grew Ars Technica, not to mention a major source of critical traffic and growth in those early years.

Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)

<comment><USER32> Frequent reader of Ars, I don't comment/post much on Civis but enjoy reading the deep dives into updates like Oreo and iOS 11.

<comment><USER33> Sadly these "deep dives" feels more and more shallow these days. More and more they are about "look and feel" or pixel counting rather than the meat and potatoes.

Frankly these days Ars Technica could just as well be relabeled Apple Technica. The site scuttled their coverage of FOSS and similar under prominent sections, while the Apple stuff keep leaking out from their "infinite loop" section.

These days if it is not Apple related, it gets binned under their generic "gadgets" section.

And this from the site that got me interested in Linux in the first place back when it was black and orange, and housed a multipage introduction to Linux internals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> User #5825 here. Here are a few of my favorites:

The whole anti-Microsoft movement on /. Thy were the evil empire and Google was saintly. It's funny how times change.

The weather station we sent you in hopes of doing a promotion for our weather equipment site, weathertools.com.

OOG THE CAVEMAN. He was DevOpsBorat at least a decade before Twitter.

The launch of Mac OS X and the launch of the first titanium PowerBook.

That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever. LOL

<comment><USER35> > That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever. > LOL

Yeah, Transmeta. That whole "stealth mode" startup mystery kept the buzz going.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta)

Re Microsoft the evil empire: it was deserved at the time. But it's nice to see they have a better reputation these days.

<comment><USER36> My college laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046) had a Transmeta Crusoe chip, running at 800 mhz. It was slow as molasses, but could easily do 15 hours of battery life (screen on) with the drive-bay and extended batteries, all in a sub-note form factor. It was a perfect note-taking machine (all of my real dev work was done on desktops or via SSH/telnet). Transmeta may have had a short lifespan, but I think they played a big part in jumpstarting Intel's movement to focus on power consumption (remember, this was the Pentium 4 era).

<comment><USER37> I was still using my Transmeta-based Sony Vaio Picturebook as a router running FreeBSD up through January 2016. Before that in the early 2000s it made a great, extremely portable hacking laptop. The attention Transmeta got on Slashdot was probably instrumental in my buying it.

<comment><USER36> Slashdot was definitely instrumental to me buying mine. I never would have heard of Transmeta otherwise, and I found out about the Fujitsu through Transmeta's site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Whether they know it or not Slashdot inspired a lot of Michigan startup founders. They proved that you didn't have to be in Silicon Valley to found a notable company.

I well remember after reading Slashdot for a few months and then finding out that they were in West Michigan and being absolutely floored.

Fun fact one of Rob's friends who helped found the company is now a professor at Michigan State University:

[https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html](https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html)

<comment><USER39> Kurt is also involved with Sight Machine: [http://sightmachine.com/company/#leadership](http://sightmachine.com/company/#leadership)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Slashdot has been a major influence. Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot. Sergey Brin, for example, was a great fan. To be mentioned on slashdot was a meant instant saturation for a website. Personally, I miss CmdrTaco's wry take on the new of the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

<comment><USER41> Wow, just realized something totally crazy.. Honestly, I ended up where I am today because of Slashdot. In 1999 I wanted to build a Slashdot site but had no idea what I was doing. So I sat down and just learned how all that stuff worked, ran phpSlash for a while, then Slashcode, then Drupal. All the while I kept learning to code and run servers because of my little site. All the while new doors opened, and I kept working and learning... and now 18 years later I'm doing what I do because of your site. I've had a great little career, so many thanks for helping me get here :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes two of us!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Thanks cmdrtaco!

Throughout the years, I'd turn to /. to keep up to date on latest shakings and goings ons. I first heard about MythTV there back in the heady days before the home media landscape was bought up and "civilized". I got to see a constant reminders of the failings for the RIAA and so....many....patent troll cases. I remember the crap packt publishing reviews too - basically getting someone to pimp their book. Tons of discussions on cell phones and where the technology was going before Apple did put out the 3g phone and created the walled gardens we have today...then reading about the jailbreaking and what not that was created.

I owe a lot to /. for helping shape me into the slightly jaded but functional developer I am today.

One of my fondest memories was the time we did an Oktoberfest party on the 10th anniversary of /. We were the only party in the state I think.

<comment><USER43> I remember the endless IBM vs. SCO lawsuit discussions.

<comment><USER33> heh, now i remind myself that i still have User Friendly in the RSS reader. Anyone know what Illiad is up to these days?

<comment><USER44> Still posting comics? [http://www.userfriendly.org/](http://www.userfriendly.org/)

<comment><USER33> My impression is that the page has been doing reruns for years now, ever since he posted that he would be taking time off.

I notice that they have since stopped labeling reruns with a original post date in the upper right corner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I have some real fond memories of reading slashdot before classes in high school. I think my favorite was the day Rob proposed, and I was late to AP chemistry because I was frantically reloading the page to see what happened..

Through it i discovered the EFF, the jargon file, the FSF, and much else (hot grits, anyone?), and I miss that community. I haven't spent any serious time there in about 8 years.

<comment><USER33> I check the comments from time to time, but i fear the place is crawling with paid shills these days.

<comment><USER46> You can pretty much safely ignore most things coming from 7-digit UIDs and not have to worry about the shills so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Slashdot was one of the main inspirations for Advogato. One clue in support of this is that the codebase was called "mod_virgule". The trust metrics were designed to be a more sophisticated moderation system than what Slashdot did, but in retrospect I'm not sure it actually worked that much better; Advogato never reached a mass audience and to the extent it had higher quality posts it was probably due to a smaller and more focused community.

I still have my slashdot account (number 3148), but rarely use it. I can well imagine the "complicated feelings" that Rob has, and wanted to add my voice to the many saying that Slashdot was an important Internet space.

</comment><comment><USER48> Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. It would be the equivalent of HN forcing autoplay videos and animated banner ads on each page.

A lesson to reflect upon--monetizing is ok when it doesn't kill your userbase. My ID is under 5000 (cue the older ID replies) and I refuse to give them pageviews now.

<comment><USER49> > Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign > on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great.

The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it real dead.

<comment><USER50> No, the redesign made it unusable, with an inscrutable learning curve. The astroturfers then took over once the organic traffic dropped off a cliff.

<comment><USER49> I recall that the redesign might have been very ugly but didn't increased the learning curve. Yet, the userbase stuck around and pushed for at least a way to get their old slashdot back. Complaining about slashdot's lack of unicode support was a in-joke.

But then the astroturfing problem blew up and in no time killed slashdot. The community tolerated trolls, even the infamous GNAA, but slashdot's industrial- level astroturfing campaigns in what I believe to be collulsion with site maintainers was something that was massively abhorrent.

<comment><USER50> The redesign changed the filtering and visibility settings and the way they worked. It was virtually impossible to read the way I did prior to the redesign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Hah, my daughter was in Voorhees freshman year (hmm, it might have been Van Vleck (sp?) the first year but there was a year she was in Voorhees). And all this time she had no idea she was living and studying in a place of historical interest :-)

The great thing this shares with a lot of stories about that time is that Rob didn't say "What can I build that will make me a million bucks?" instead he was just providing a service that was interesting and useful to him and people who shared his interests (which turned out to be a lot of people).

Congrats Rob.

</comment><comment><USER52> I recall the incredible hype on Slashdot surrounding the release of Phantom Menace. Lucasfilm released few details and Slashdot seized on every little thing leading up to the release.

I worked at the New York Times then (just a web programmer) and lucked into an advance screening two weeks before the film's release. I came right back to the office and wrote a review (in plain text!) and submitted it to Slashdot but it never got posted.

Rob, if I spoiled the film for ya, sorry about that! It seemed in the last two weeks before Phantom Menace was finally released you were a lot less enthusiastic, and I wondered if my early review put a damper on it.

I grepped my ISP account and found the original file:

[http://www.panix.com/~swain/review.txt](http://www.panix.com/~swain/review.txt)

</comment><comment><USER53> I had a four-digit Slashdot UID (just over 4000, I think). I have lots of great memories of technical discussions. As a young man who had managed to install Linux on his computer but still knew little about programming or the mighty Unix tradition, it was amazing to be able to participate there in discussions with so many big names in *nix or Free Software.

But some of my fondest memories come from trolling there with another account. Trolling Slashdot often wasn't like how trolling works on other news sites, where some user tries to make some controversial point or racist remark related to the submitted story in order to spark arguments and take the conversation off course.

Instead, troll posts on Slashdot were usually completely unrelated to the submitted story. They consisted of themes that were sometimes coarse and tasteless, but which fascinatingly evolved over time as each troll adapted the copy/paste to new circumstances or his own personal whims. The million variations on "BSD is dying" is a good example, but my personal favourite was "X touched my junk". And while I was never so cruel to link to Last Measure, I was grimly impressed by the work that had gone into it, completely with having an autoplay audio file "I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORN!!!!" which must have cost a least one or two cubicle dwellers their jobs.

<comment><USER54> goatse.cx trolling under cloak of redirection...

ah those early days...

<comment><USER55> Even now I can see it, still burned into my amygdala. Ugh.

However, the result was browsers starting showing you the link URL with a text in the info-box at the window base (remember those?) so I guess that was some positive result. Who knew this would be the wax-off training of the future?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Feels like the Slashdot guys chased the wrong end of blogging. Rather than seeing what Drupal/Wordpress saw (building the site is the real money) the Slashodt folks chased the advertising/traffic side to their site. It seems really obvious now, 20 years later, that they should've spent time on Slashcode and made that better for a larger audience and they could've maybe turned out to be something like Drupal or WordPress now.

I totally love slashdot still, tried like hell to run Slashcode many years ago, but it always feel like they were focused on Slashdot.org rather than making slashcode work for many other sites.

(really not meant as a criticisms at all, just thinking about the good old days and what its like looking back now)

<comment><AUTHOR> Our shoestring budget probably prevented us from chasing that rabbit like it deserved. And Frankly there were far more seismic shifts that rocked us more.

<comment><USER56> Can you divulge any of those seismic shifts? Would be interesting to hear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I lost access to my first account because I lost access to the email address. This was quite a while back and it was a moniker less able to be tied to me. So, I eventually stopped posting as AC and signed up with my 'real' moniker.

Same username as here.

Anyhow, I seldom post there, as of late at least, but I've met a bunch of them in real life. Mostly, they're good people.

Lately, I've found the HN conversation to be more stimulating. I should try to visit Slashdot later and see who dropped by.

What I like best about sites like Slashdot is the vast amount of intelligence there. You will need to wade through some troll posts, but it is worth it to find the gems. Reading at -1 is not for the faint of heart nor for the easily offended. Still, I find it worth the effort.

The new owners have done away with the hidden trolltalk board. They have disallowed the n-word, so people found a workaround using the few Unicode characters they do allow. Still, no sign of the promised UTF-8 support - <USER2> is funny because Soylent News got that figured out pretty quickly.

I do like to point out that Slashdot was never good. No, no it wasn't. I read it before they allowed comments and, as mentioned, even had a five digit UID. (I lost it and now have a six digit UID.) Slashdot was never good.

When people on Slashdot like to talk about how it was so much better in the past, about how the level of comments was so much better, I like to link them to the announcement of VMWare releasing their first VM software.

The comments are mostly people insisting that it can't work, won't work, and that VMs are a bad idea - because they are quite happy dual booting Win95 and Linux. The comments range from mockery to disbelief that such a product could even exist - even though virtualization wasn't _really_ new.

So, no... Slashdot was never really great. I'm not even sure it was ever really good.

And that was part of its charm - and still is. From GNAA to Yoda-in-your-ass guy, Slashdot is just Slashdot. The racism is rampant, the puns are still bad, and mobile is still broken, but not as bad as beta. Slashdot is like your drunk college buddy that you really hope doesn't show up at your wedding. And that's okay.

Yeah, I'm going to have to visit later. If you do visit, I'd suggest reading at -1, just so you get the full experience.

</comment><comment><USER57> My favourite part of Slashdot was the trolling.

Some classic trolls there like "egg troll", "The Turd Report", etc. with their quite absurd yet entertaining posts.

Then there was the rather ruder trolling, like not knowing if the link you were about to follow was yet another Goatse Man. Or the more helpful trolls, such as ones taking music requests to spam as the first post.

There was even a 'hidden SID' forum, trolltalk, which was rather amusing (and somewhat disturbing) until it was overrun by some Markov chain bot.

And spinoff trolling sites like [http://adequacy.org](http://adequacy.org) \- satire to rile uptight nerds and amuse the rest.

I think the bizarre trolling subculture, amidst the righteous frothing of Linux fanaticism, was what really made Slashdot.

Anyway, good times.

<comment><USER58> Eggtroll was, and still is, possibly the best troll I've ever seen. He carried it over to the newsgroups with elaborate multi-page trolls and crossposts. Whoever you are eggtroll, thank you for providing so much entertainment. Here's one of the archives:

[http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html](http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Fond memories, as many others have pointed out. I still check it out every few days. I find the stories there almost as interesting as the ones that make it to HN and a lot more interesting and educational than those making it to the top of reddit.

Shot in the dark and off topic, but for years I've been trying to find a comment posted on /. during the Columbia disaster. A poster mentioned how he was part of some high school science program and got to visit the Columbia before her maiden voyage. When it was lost, he was driving across remote Texas on the way back from a client visit when he saw the debris across the sky. It was quite a sad and moving story, and I'd love to re-read it.

</comment><comment><USER60>
        The notion of "A Blog" was years away, so I wrote my own code.

I wish he did so for this blog post. When I visit it, I get a full screen popup first and after closing it, _two_ dickbars that make it hard to read the actual content.

<comment><USER61> Medium is shocking for this. I added this to my uBlock custom filters list and now it's not a problem any more:

        ! medium dickbars and other bullshit:
        ##.u-clearfix.metabar
        ##.metabar
        ##.js-stickyFooter
        ##.highlightMenu

I have not limited it by domain so I can catch all the other Medium-based blogs that use other domains (hackernoon, etc). This raises my risk of false positives but that doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as all the extraneous garbage on their site does. YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I was on slashdot from the very early days until way too recently. In 2011, I joined a startup company of young guys and one of them saw that I had a slashdot page up. He said, "Slashdot is for old people. Let us show you Hacker News".

</comment><comment><USER63> I worked at The Image Group a few years after Rob left, and one of the designers there confirmed the story.

> "I took a rejected template from a project at work"

The version I heard was he pitched this as the actual website for The Image Group, except it had different colors and the boxes where on the left instead of the right. Crazy to think if ownership had accepted it.

Side note: I built sets with Rob in high school: crazy and all around nice guy. Very high energy back then. I'll never forget his rant/love letter for Pascal I heard one day during a break.

</comment><comment><USER64> I enjoyed Slashdot every single day as a passive reader but not as an user. I never received feedback from the founders when I pointed them to incorrect facts in their news and the never corrected the posts there. I specially rember an important security issue discovered by the company where I worked (Core Security Technologies) that was mistakenly reported as if was found by CERT. You can say that this is very common but at that time Slashdot was the top influential place in the community and security wise.

</comment><comment><USER65> For me, Slashdot was the first big internet community. I wasn't materially involved in news groups before that.

It's a little weird to think I wasn't 20 when I started using /. I was also a little surprised to see there's still a website at the URL. And I can still log in with my old username.

And, for the record, my autoincrement user id was 6533. During the height of their popularity having a 4 digit id give me a bit of geek cred :)

</comment><comment><USER66> User #333 here. Back in the day, someone offered me oral sex for the low user number. What a perfect metaphor for the dot-com era: offering to wildly overpay for a social media asset that would eventually turn out to be useless.

<comment><USER67> But if course you wouldn't have taken the offer, /.ers never have sex. That would require leaving mom's basement!

<comment><USER68> They could do it in ASCII, on IRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Perl Monks was my favorite thing that came from the Slashdot guys. I never _got_ Perl, but did a few projects with it over the years and I was always amazed at how cool the community on that site was.

www.perlmonks.org

</comment><comment> qu4z-2 Hey cmdrtaco. This isn't entirely related, but I just wanted to say thanks for the chili recipe from your blog. I've been using it for years and it's great.

(I also miss the Slashdot that was).

</comment><comment><USER70> I remember registering wwwslashdot.org in my young days of being a typo-domain advertiser (had to eat in college, I've repented) and CmdrTaco posted a message indicating that they "Must have made it because someone registered our typo domain."

My mailserver crashed about an hour later from the flood. Lesson learned :)

</comment><comment><USER71> In case the site is down, here's a mirror [http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg](http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER72> slashdot was one of the few news sites that stayed up during 9/11\. I think there was even a follow-up technical article about how they kept it up that day.

<comment><USER73> Yeah, but that day showed just how weak they were in the journalism department. So many unsubstantiated rumors.

<comment><USER74> But "social media" was were you'd go to for all the unsubstantiated rumors back then. For the most part the news channels that day were sticking with the facts and weren't spending much time with rumors or speculation. I seems like the roles have flipped in the intervening years, for major events news sites are 90% wild speculation and reaction videos and slashdot-esque sites moderate better information to the top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I once scraped a subset of all Slashdot posts for the month of October. There were some interesting trends. The bulk of posting is by old UIDs in the 100k to 300k range and those are dropping off rapidly, suggesting that it will die around 2022. Some of that is attributable to the rise of mobile and more frequent anon posts but that doesn't balance out the decline from logged in posts.

There is also evidence of UID inflation by only issuing odd or even numbers during certain periods.

</comment><comment><USER76> cmdrtaco, thanks for all the grits, inventing the blog and the watering hole that helped facilitate the discourse and creation of the open source movement.

#1794

<comment><USER77> Actually this is a great comment. I wonder how many ideas grew out of Slashdot? What was its influence on the world? The "watering hole of the open source movement." +1 Insightful

Slashdot shaped the minds, ideas and opinions of many people, and definitely changed the world. It helped get people into the internet, software development, perl, etc.

Would HackerNews exist without slashdot paving the way? Interesting to think about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Getting something on the front page of Slashdot was one of my proudest moments.

</comment><comment><USER79> What I miss about Slashdot more than anything was the editors and writers using the comments section to fact check the stories.

Ye ghods, do I miss that.

</comment><comment><USER80> I wonder where sites like slashdot and digg will continue to fit in to the news landscape over time? If I'm looking for tech news straight from the horses mouth, I often end up at arstechnica, anandtech, or verge. If I'm interested in the zeitgiest I might look to HN or reddit. Is there a middle ground to this that's viable?

<comment><USER81> I love(d) /. article summaries, even if the quality of editing was a running joke. Also the fact that it was simple sequential list and not constantly changing and living front page was a nice aspect. On HN you might miss a good story either because of bad title or because not checking the front page often enough. On the other hand aggressively refreshing HN and optimistically clicking more links leads to massive overload. Personally I think the middle road of /. hits a very good balance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I am where I am today because of Slashdot. All those early articles about Google running Linux...

</comment><comment><USER83> I started reading slashdot around 2000-2001, being about 14 years old at the time. I would venture to say that slashdot and its community has been as educational (or even more) as school, and played a large part in my deciding to work in IT.

Since I never signed up for an account there (I was a kid and knew I had nothing to bring to the table), I never experienced the friend/foe system or participated in moderation. Still, the site has had an amazing impact on my life and given me an insight into topics I never would have learned about otherwise. Nowadays it feels HN has taken over, but I still feel a need to express my gratitude for both the site and the community.

</comment><comment><USER84> Five digit slashdot here and star post name, but I have most switched to Hacker news. HN updates immediately, raises highest voted topics to top. I notice both cover the same articles. The slashdot ads are a lttle annoying.

</comment><comment><USER85> Wow.. time flys when you are getting old! To protect the mostly innocent, my uid is just over 64K, so definitely one of the early adopters. /. was definitely the premier place for nerdy/tech news prior to the dot.bomb and it definitely had an outsized influence in the tech world.

Many have spoken of having their websites slashdotted though it was not uncommon to get email months and years later about a story submission. Somehow early netizens believed the submitter must be an authority and would be more than happy to answer their questions lol.

</comment><comment><USER86> I had a 5 figure uid, but I read it for a long time before I registered. First started before the '97 Green redesign.

I found a comment parser attack on '98 or so which let me post a "Powered by WindowsNT" on a FreeBSD thread. The ten minutes it survived was a highlight. I actually used an image from the Microsoft site because there wasn't anywhere else you could host images back then.

One things I haven't seen mentioned is the hidden sids (remember sid=wahiscool?)

</comment><comment><USER71> Fact: Slashdot is dying

It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when CmdrTaco confirmed that he is resigning from Slashdot, now that Slashdot market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all geek news outlets. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive geek news reading test.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Slashdot YRO is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core contributors. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot contributors only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Slashdot leader CmdrTaco states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Ask Slashdot stories are there? Let's see. The number of Ask Slashdot stories versus Slashdot posts is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ask Slashdot stories users. Slashdot book reviews (or, 'Slashvertisements') are about half of the volume of Ask Slashdot stories. Therefore there are about 700 Slashvertisments. A recent article put Slashdot Security posts at about 80 percent of the Slashdot market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts.

Due to the troubles of OSNews, abysmal sales and so on, OSNews went out of business and was taken over by Digg, another troubled geek news site. Now Digg is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geek news dilettante dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.

Fact: Slashdot is dying

(source from Thursday August 25, 2011 @12:39PM: [https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054](https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054) also notice I got a n00b to respond to me... oh, such simpler times ;) )

</comment><comment><USER87> I really enjoyed the early slashdot but lost interest when politics ran rampant in nearly every part of the site. the vitriol associated with it and more (stuff you could not see) just reduced the value the site had in my eyes. I honestly cannot remember the last time I have visited the site.

tech sites need to keep their purity to stay accessible, politics, direct story posting or the constant indirect type, need to stomped out with a vengeance

</comment><comment><USER88> User 8xxx here... Slashdot was great while it provided the best daily overview of IT stories. I wonder what changed - I can vaguely recall switching to heise.de and later HN.

Perhaps the way it presented the stories worked better for a few major pieces per day and everyone tries to read "all" interesting stories every day now, so pages with just headlines and broader coverage took over?

I miss the quieter "online life" of the late 90's...

</comment><comment><USER89> I remember, about 20 years ago, having an argument with someone on Slashdot. Then realizing, about 10 messages in, that I actually knew the person I was arguing with. Being able to connect with friends online, being able to make friends through dialogue online... the site was easily the best online community at the time.

Bonus: Even 20 years ago it had better design than Hacker News! (= (Couldn't resist.)

</comment><comment><USER90> Slashdot was truly a part of my youth, it was the site I went to when I was a teenager, in between taking breaks from coding. It made me feel like there were others out there like me and was a great source of inspiration growing up in a less than stellar childhood in Ohio.

It makes me nostalgic for the web of yesteryear, when it was mostly about just a bunch of nerds sharing their passion for technology.

Thanks, CmdrTaco.

</comment><comment><USER91> Ah, slashdot. Things were good in the beginning. Then they sold out to Dice. And Dice took it in a bad direction. So bad that a bunch of us abandoned it for the comp.misc Usenet group.

And in my case, I have simply not returned, and don't plan to return, even though they 'claim' to be past the Dice era now. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

</comment><comment><USER92> Is there a way to figure out when you joined? Not seeing a "member since" date. My id # is 7xxxxx (6 digits). I was reading it regularly for quite a few years, maybe 4-5 years IIRC, before finally deciding to sign up. No idea why I waited so long, I guess I was more into the articles than the commenting side of things. Dumb of me!

<comment><USER93> Ditto. I just logged in to check. Mine is 2xxxxx (also 6 digits) and I, too, regret not signing up when I first started browsing -- was probably more like 2-3 years for me though. I'm guessing 1998-1999? But I really have no idea.

<comment><USER94> My first account was 1xxxxx, lost that, second account 2xxxxx. I remember reading slashdot on NYE 1999, code red, the Billenium in Sep 01, and of course 9-11 when it was one of a few sites that stayed up.

Back in the day the comments section was full of "famous people" like Wil Wheaton and Bruce Perens, which I found fascinating.

Slashdot inspired me to jump to Debian in 2000, and E17. I didn't stick with e17, but did with Debian until about 07 when I transitioned on to ubuntu. The standard broadcast Linux build (1200+ machines on 6 continents) for a major UK based global broadcaster is ubuntu because of slashdot introducing me to apt after a coupe of years of frustration with rpmfind.net. Funny how these things work out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Ahh the memories, especially that time I got an Ask Slashdot accepted. That was a BIG DEAL for some reason.

Addendum: Thinking back, Slashdot is where I came of age in tech. Also, I browsed casually without registering for at least a couple years before finally getting a userid in the low 600K area. I regret not registering right away!

</comment><comment><USER96> Slashdot user #4245 here, with comments dating to April of 1999, 2 friends and 1 fan, no foes or freaks. I also had the pleasure of meeting Cmdr Taco at an early LinuxWorld (1998?) in California. I admit it fed a lot of my biases at the time, but also provided a lot of useful information.

</comment><comment><USER97> Has someone yet curated a list of All Slashdot Polls Concerning or Mentioning Cowboy Neal?

<comment><USER10> 1\. Rob Malda

2\. Bruce Perens

3\. Natalie Portman

4\. Jon Katz

5\. Cowboy Neal

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Sharing the audio version of the article for those who'd like to listen to the article: [http://bingewith.com/#id694](http://bingewith.com/#id694)

</comment><comment><USER99> I can trace almost everything that helped me professionally and even many of my tech opinions to something I read on Slashdot. Really the site that influenced me the most.

</comment><comment><USER100> Can't wait to read the same post 10 years from now.

</comment><comment><USER101> I was always proud of having a slashdot userid < 262000 :) Definitely spent too much time on slashdot in the university computer lab.

<comment><USER102> You need to be less than or equal to 203094 to be one of the cool kids.

<comment><USER103> ID > 20611, No wireless, Less space than a Nomad... Lame

I always found it funny how the ranking of user by the order they joined encourages people to join. I guess its the same as not being a "green" user here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> Great. Yet another non-closable pop-up window.

</comment><comment><USER105> We were one of their first advertisers! If I recall, we traded them some RAM and maybe a server case as part of the deal.

</comment><comment><USER106> wow, crazy, how time flies. i stumbled onto slashdot in late '97 as a side effect of wanting to put together a computer for a project. i still think it had the best moderation system, however complicated it was. it gave you lots of control on how you wanted to view comments.

</comment><comment><USER107> Does anyone else remember kerneltrap?

</comment><comment><USER107> What's the story behind Anonymous Coward, the most popular slashdot user?!

</comment><comment><USER108> I learned about 9/11 from the slashdot front page. Wow, 16 years ago.

<comment><USER94> I did the same when the dupe was posted 3 weeks later

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> I learned about Slashdot from a screenshot demoing the Enlightenment VM.

</comment><comment><USER110> so much nostalgia. big big thank you to rob and the rest of the team.

</comment><comment><USER111> First post!!!

</comment><comment><USER112> +5 funny

</comment><comment><USER113> I wish that people would stop blogging on Medium, especially about Free software topics. I click the link and get an obnoxiously animated popup shoved in my face that tells me that I've read my two articles for the month and that I should log in for the full experience. Why should people be asked to sign in to follow a blog when there is RSS/Atom? Learning how to use Hugo, Metalsmith, Hexo, Pelican, or Jekyll is not difficult.

<comment><USER114> For an author, I'd imagine there are discoverability and convenience aspects involved in the decision to post on medium, versus hosting one's own blog.

<comment><USER113> Free software issues are more important than "convenience". Passively consuming TV shows from a couch is more convenient than developing technical skills and building things online, but one is objectively more useful to society than the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> I hope this doesn't come off as dickish but it's not intended as such:

I was really expecting more... well... history. As soon as I get interested "he's gotta upgrade for the onslaught of users! How will he handle it?", the article stops.

p.s. Just realized Mr. Taco submitted it himself. So let me add, "Hope your having a great day, and thanks for contributing to the internet and hacker culture." ... But I still want to hear more about your history. ;) I've thought about starting my own IT-centric social site so I'm dying for info.

</comment><comment><USER116> Ahh, memories. (I'm slashdot user #9784.)

I remember when our tiny company (with a 2 Mbit/s uplink, iirc) was slashdotted:

[https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts- on-...](https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts-on-the-pike- programming-language)

I was running (our homebrew) web server with debug output in an xterm (with timing details for every request served) throughout this ordeal, just to be sure it didn't screw up. (We didn't really have a thorough testing regime, ahem.)

</comment><comment><USER117> I remember Chips&Dips and got confused one day when I couldn't find it. Started searching and found it again under Slashdot and have been a fan and loyal visitor ever since. Thanks a lot for this awesome write-up of Internet History :-)

</comment><comment><USER118> No mention of Natalie Portman or Hot Grits in the Post. Colour me disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER119> Coincidentally, 90% of what's on /. is also on HN. I'm not sure who's copying whom, but it seems like someone is wheezing someone else's feed.

<comment><USER120> Or they just cover the same interest areas? New Intel chips come out and both Slashdot and HN cover it, but not because someone is copy/pasting articles, it's just a story that both would cover.

Slashdot has a lot less "Everybody should switch to strongly typed functional programming language X" articles than HN, while HN definitely has fewer Your Rights Online type articles.

<comment><USER121> Yes, and I've started reading it again a couple of weeks ago when I found that my account still worked. The reason to open an account back then was that the number of comments grew so large that I could not hope to read/skim them all and had to store the filter settings.

The current HTML/JS seems lighter than I remember, which was a problem for me as I started moving to other boards like HN.

We'll see. For now I've meta-moderated again after all those years.

[edit] BTW, relevant discussion in /.: [https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years- of...](https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-of-stuff- that-matters)</comment></comment></comment>


Stanford and HP mod TouchPads to go inside MRI room for Interventional MRI - <AUTHOR> https://developer.palm.com/content/community/mri_and_the_touchpad.html

<comment><USER2> As a webOS enthusiast and interface programmer for a patient care system. I find the potential for webOS in the medical community to be huge. It would be a terrible waste if webOS wasn't allowed to mature. Palm used to be the preferred tool for medical providers; its been hard to watch that slipping away. \--Jeanette @code_monky

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> CC: Meg Whitman. See, there are use cases for webOS.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great work on this, very impressed.

<comment><AUTHOR> As an employee it's always nice to see a company actually live up to its slogans. This was an example of HP "leaving the tools in the garage" for people to tinker with.</comment></comment>


.NET Spans (Bounded and Type-Safe Pointers) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.marcgravell.com/2017/04/spans-and-ref-part-2-spans.html <comment><AUTHOR> Features:

* Works with Generic types (rather than just primitives)

* Unifies memory types: Stack allocated, Array (heap allocated), Unmanaged

* Can pass fixed window over data (and slice to make window of window)

* Can change read/write data to readonly data with ReadOnlySpan

As Arrays are always read/write; which may mean a defensive copy if passing fixed data.</comment>


87 percent of Android developers worried about fragmentation, survey says - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/04/04/87_percent_of_android_developers_worried_about_fragmentation_survey_says.html <comment><USER2> I'm scared to start developing my first Android app since I have no idea how it would work across the myriad of devices there are</comment>


SeedQuest: A 3D Mnemonic Game for Key Recovery - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/reputage/seedQuest <comment><AUTHOR> I find applications that bridge 3d game-like environments to something potentially useful in a workplace environment really interesting. Another example is psdoom ([http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/](http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/))

Sometimes while doing sys-ops stuff I wish I were in a game of portal, or a real-time strategy game where the system metrics are represented as features in the game and moving units or building a base has a real dev-ops impact on the system. If anyone has more literature on this I'm all ears!</comment>


China and Clinton Agree: Traders Should Pay for Canceled Orders - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-12-30/china-and-clinton-agree-traders-should-pay-for-canceled-orders <comment><USER2> This seems crazy.

The basic operation of a market maker is to quote both sides of the market, the bid and the ask, so that people can buy or sell "at the market" quickly, without rolling the dice on the appearance of a counterparty with a long or short interest at that exact moment and price. To do that, market makers have to constantly adjust their prices. Part of the premise of a market maker is that they don't hold inventory (and thus a long-term position on the instrument they're trading).

The way electronic market makers adjust prices is by canceling and replacing their orders (the "UPDATE" command in FIX is literally "Cancel And Replace").

How do you penalize cancels without forcing MMs to drive spreads wider to account for their costs?

<comment><USER3> A couple of small nitpicks:

1) lots of market makers hold inventory now. Its a very low margin business these days & folks are looking for any edge. Inventory management & carry risk management is one place people can compete on.

2) while you are right about the FIX naming for updates, how they are implemented is entirely exchange specific. Some are truly atomic, some aren't at all & some are only for lowering we qty of an order. A fairly common task for an HFT programmer is to make an abstraction that does the _right_ thing for updates across exchanges.

Finally, I think a cancel tax is stupid & largely shows a lack of understanding of markets by the people proposing it, but I don't think it will have much of an effect one way or the other on the markets.

I'd say it swings the markets more in favor of the big market makers at the expense of the small ones, but the industry has already largely consolidated so it probably doesn't matter.

<comment><USER2> Is that because larger MMs will just eat the fees?

<comment><USER3> Yes, its an economy of scale thing. A %5 profit margin decrease will kill some small market makers (or at least make them move to other venues/trades) but the big ones have seen their profits erode so dramatically already they have become much like utilities or gone out of business.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Case for In-App Messaging Vs Email Marketing - (Thoughts?) - <AUTHOR> http://www.evergage.com/blog/case-app-messaging-vs-email-marketing

<comment><USER2> I haven't seen many people do in-app messaging effectively, but I think it's an awesome idea. Looking forward to seeing the tech that makes this work!</comment>


Scott Aaronson: hopefully my last D-Wave post ever - <AUTHOR> http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=431

<comment><USER3> I have been following Scott's site for several years. He is at the top of his field, one of the most qualified quantum computing theorists. Sometimes his sarcasm is juvenile and falls flat, but this post is classic. Yes you would have had to been following along to appreciate it. And it would help to know D-wave at one point actively recruited Scott.If you want to know whether or not quantum computation is taking place, this is your man.

I highly recommend reading further on his site, including his papers and lecture notes. I especially recommend his lecture notes "Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science" <http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp08/6.080/materials.html> and "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" <http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/>

Enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are interested in more of the background, Scott provied this link to his previous posts that touch on D-wave <http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?cat=20>

A commentor to the most recent post points to this rebuttal [http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2009/12/in_defense_of_d- wave...](http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2009/12/in_defense_of_d-wave.php)

But it all boils down to this, as Scott replies in the comments "...the elephant that's missing from the room, namely the evidence for coherence and multi-qubit entanglement. Without that, the car never leaves the garage. So, yes, write an unbiased review of the leather seats, but don't pass over in silence the fact that nobody's seen the engine."

It's possible to build in hardware an engine that will efficiently compute a particular class of problem. It may even be useful. That does not make it a quantum computer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Fun D-Wave fact: They employ more lawyers than scientists.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Keep in mind that we're delivering a product—serving our customers, by solving the 4-by-4 Sudoku puzzles they rely on to keep their businesses running."

Brillant!

</comment><comment><USER6> This post makes the assumption that one has been following this drama for a long time in detail. I know there was a bit of controversy around D-Wave a long while back, but that's faded from memory now. The Google post brought them back into memory, but I found it hard to make it past the first few back- and-forths in Scott's post.

Can someone clarify what the situation is here without the "socratic- dramatic"? :)

<comment><USER7> D-Wave keeps making the news with their 'adiabatic quantum computers' solving puzzles and doing pattern-matching. They claimed last year that they built a 128-qubit quantum chip while other research efforts only managed couple of qubits.

The problem with all this is that they've still not managed to prove that their hardware is actually a quantum computer (in the sense that there's usefully entangled qubits)

In a previous press interview they were ripped to shreds - rightfully so - <USER2> being so vague about how they knew that the devices they build are quantum computers. At one point someone asked them about a really simple test: To maintain a quantum superposition the hardware must be kept close to 0 Kelvin. Therefore they should be able to slowly increase the temp in their rig and at some point it should change behavior - it should revert to the classical physical behavior and the quantum effects should stop. D-Wave admitted that they've not done this simple yet extremely obvious test. And today, a year later, we're still no further.

The only logical conclusion is that they've not succeeded in making a 'real' quantum processor.</comment></comment>


We Gathered 100 Open Source Sustainers – Here's What We Learned - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/open-collective/we-gathered-100-open-source-sustainers-c24f571447a4 <comment><USER2> Relevant complementary activities in Europe have been explored in a LWN article: [https://lwn.net/Articles/713073/](https://lwn.net/Articles/713073/)

Looking forward to see more from [https://techcultivation.org/](https://techcultivation.org/) !</comment>


Rap Genius on HN - <AUTHOR>

There are quite a lot of Rap Genius stories appearing on HN.  Here is a list, along with their titles and links to the discussions ... <comment><AUTHOR> There are already at least two major discussions about this. They are here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960211)

      Open Letter to Google About Rap Genius SEO
      (rapgenius.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365)

      Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For
      Link Schemes (searchengineland.com)

</comment><comment>==

Minor discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963682)

      Google Destroys Rap Genius' Search Result Rankings
      As Punishment For SEO Spam (techcrunch.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961243)

      The Hideous SEO Strategy of Rap Genius
      (rocketmill.co.uk)

</comment><comment>==

Other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963568)

      How Rap Genius Won The SEO Game (billboard.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961756)

      Rap Genius Apologizes For Not-So-Genius SEO
      Spam Tactics (techcrunch.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960362)

      Here's How Rap Genius Should Be Building Links

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964012)

      Rap Genius - Spammy SEO Strategy (rocketmill.co.uk)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964169)

      Should RapGenius be able to "negotiate" with
      Matt Cutts and Google?

</comment><comment><USER2> Well, they did something newsworthy. Their disliked public image is likely also a factor (more upvotes for "RG is doomed" stories)

Still fewer stories than Coinbase whenever they have one of their incidents.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll happily agree it's newsworthy, it's just that the "discussion" is now spread across 4 submissions and counting, with other submissions being made to create more opportunity to split it further. This is an attempt to help people consolidate the discussion and help avoid saying the same things multiple times in different places.

Probably too late, but <fx: shrug /> it's in my nature to try.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SPARKL EIoT Virtual Factory Demo [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu08VNwzKQ8 <comment><AUTHOR> SPARKL™ is new infrastructure that works inside your networks to bring transparency to your business transactions.

It dynamically provisions services and networks as it goes - just in time. And it's all logged with full integrity.</comment>


Apple Working On Tech To Detect Purchasers' "Abuse" - <AUTHOR> http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/08/06/1733253/Apple-Working-On-Tech-To-Detect-Purchasers-Abuse <comment><USER2> Who knew that when Apple released its 1984 ad that it wanted to be the guy on the huge screen. All this time we thought they were meant to be the lady who threw the hammer.</comment>


Why Indent Code? - <AUTHOR> Indentation obviously makes code easier to read and parse (by humans). It is obviously very important.
But it leads to many annoying issues, say with git tracking line changes (if I un-indent a code block it is all marked as changed even though the logic behind it hasn't, so a reviewer shouldn't waste time looking over the changes). Also having to configure your editor to indent correctly and the creation of many indentation rules. It makes reaching the "80 character limit" come much faster depending on how you indent code and pushes code off over your screen so you have to use line wrap or scroll sideways.
I was thinking, why not instead of indenting the code we could not indent the code and leave it to the editor to handle formatting it visually.
Now any editor will be able to parse this and display it how I would like. Say I prefer 2 space indentation it can do that instead of 8 which others prefer. Maybe I don't like indenting the code and instead would like the first "indentation" level to be underscored green, the second blue and the third red. Well it would be up to me.
Is this a horrible idea? I think it would solve a few problems and doesn't cause many problems. <comment><USER2> Most diffing algorithms used by code review apps support an ignore whitespace mode.

For example with Github [https://github.blog/2018-05-01-ignore-white-space-in- code-re...](https://github.blog/2018-05-01-ignore-white-space-in-code-review/)

</comment><comment><USER3> All you are proposing really is that code be stored in a common format that editors can parse and display. Tabs and spacing literally are already exactly that - a common format that text editors can properly display.

Otherwise, it would require text editors to have knowledge of how to parse a specific language or serialization, which requires a lot of extra that most wouldn't support.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most text editors have this understanding anyway. That's how they autoindent code or colour keywords and variables. Yeah I guess I'm just proposing a different common format but in the end I believe it to be slightly better since it solves a few problems.

No, I don't think this will ever happen and it would cause a lot of pain to transition to it. But I just think it's an interesting idea which could have worked had it been done like this from the beginning.

<comment><USER4> What beginning? Back in the 1950s?

Use Go. It forces a consistent format.

Not sure what problem you propose solving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your logic is sound, although I can't really imagine anyone adopting this scheme.

Actually, I would take it much further:

Instead of code being stored as a plain text file, store an abstract syntax tree in some binary form. Then all indentation, whitespace, keywords -- in fact, practically the entire syntax -- could be defined according to your preferences, while maintaining full interoperability with fellow developers.

Of course this would require an editor/IDE specially designed to work this way, and a VCS that can diff the binary AST in a syntax-agnostic manner.

This is what I'm currently working towards, as part of a programming language that is defined only by its semantics (the syntax itself is dynamic/extensible).

Check back on me in about 10 years :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not set your editor to not indent, and use git diff -w to ignore whitespace differences? Change your habits rather than try to change the world.

Most programmers would find unindented code hard to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that's the point really. Nobody would be looking at unindented code. The point of my post is that the only reason for indentation is visualisation purposes. It's not there to be read by the machine (except for in Python) and is not a description of what is being done.

Just as we leave other visualisation to the editor such as colouring variables, all I'm asking is why not follow the same approach when it comes to indentation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> it's a good idea in theory, if every programmer in the world adopted the methodology right now. practically though, if you tried to implement it, it'd just be added on top of all of the formatting strategies that already exist, adding more confusion and noise to the problem.

Relevant xkcd:

[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><AUTHOR> True, I'm not saying we should do it since not everybody would follow and it would just cause more pain. But if everybody would then I think it would work better than the current approach.

I still indent my code (obviously) and follow language style guides because if I everybody did what they thought was best every code base would be a complete mess.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Online video editor for mashing Vine with SoundCloud, YouTube and GIFs - <AUTHOR> http://weavly.com

<comment><USER2> I mixed some 69 vines yesterday and am quite happy with the result: <http://weavly.com/watch/k1bhGlloSwb>

One problem I have: With a slow connection it doesn't play smoothly but stops after every vine.

Dislosure: I know the people behind weavly and slept on their couch last year.

<comment><USER3> Vine seems to be getting really slow currently

<comment><USER2> <insert snarky comment about twitter and scaling>

I like their out of service page. Static html with popular vines from some time ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would be nice to use Youtube as sound too, but I guess it's to avoid legal issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hamai, yes, you're right. We had a close look at the TOS of all the sources we're currently supporting and offering the possibility to use only the sound of a YouTube video is one of the things we're not allowed to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Too bad it's in Flash. Can't it be done in HTML5?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Steren, yes, we're currently working on a pure HTML5 version of Weavly.

We've made the decision to start with a Flash version first as embedding an application like the Weavly player in the Facebook stream is currently only possible by using Flash - and we wanted to be present on Facebook from day one. But getting the HTML5 version finished is our next target and we should be able to publish it within the coming weeks.

<comment><USER6> Good luck! We at Cantemo have built a HTML5 based video editor and its rewarding, but hardwork to work around browser limitations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's like a YTMND for the new age.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice tool! It's really smooth

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice one, Oliver :-)</comment>


Premature Optimization and the Birth of Nginx Module Development - <AUTHOR> http://evanmiller.org/premature-optimization-and-nginx-module-development.html

<comment><USER2> I always wondered why an Nginx module that was about generating a circle had such prominence on the Nginx website and now I can say I understand =]

Although this was premature optimization I still find it a beautiful hack. The author was still not content with the C solution of actually generating the GIF each time (which took 30ms, actually a long time for servers) and instead reframed the problem at a deeper level and created a beautiful little hack that just modified the palette table.

<comment><USER3> If you like that, you should look into old-school color cycling/palette shifting techniques used in the 8-bit era.

Someone did it with HTML5 too:

[http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5)

Demo:

<http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0>

<comment><USER4> I've seen that before, but I'm still amazed at how beautiful it is. I can't fathom how simple palette cycling can produce these effects, even when I'm looking at the palette.</comment></comment></comment>