Not a great movie in the traditional sense, but they hit on some important stuff. I loved when the one fed was reading from the Hacker Manifesto... This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you cal…
> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons This sounds like it was written by an angsty 14-year-old who has no idea what actually goes into building and maintaining public infrastructure. Not, of course, that telecoms are always good citizens, but still.
Long distance calls in those days were prohibitively expensive. He was writing about the public telephone system and BBSs, not the Internet. You did not dial a BBS outside of your area code (and sometimes not even within the area code because there might be toll charges).
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 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’…
fascinating :D I do have my own system on following/starring PoI in HN, using no extension at all, so I can instantly know who's comment is more useful no banning though, since valuable nuggets on knowledge can come from anyone
Not a great movie in the traditional sense, but they hit on some important stuff. I loved when the one fed was reading from the Hacker Manifesto... This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you cal…
> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons This sounds like it was written by an angsty 14-year-old who has no idea what actually goes into building and maintaining public infrastructure. Not, of course, that telecoms are always good citizens, but still.
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
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.
I'm definitely in group 2. Possibly in group 3 if that's a thing.
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:
Slashdot is where I first encountered both Google ('98 / early '99) and YC (the Summer Founders Program). So pretty valuable personally. Thanks for that :) I miss the enthusiasm of that community.
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 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’…
Slashdot got a surprisingly large amount of stuff right, amazing considering it was one of the pioneering web-based discussion systems. - You cannot both moderate and comment on the same article. - Limited moderation points (too limited on Slashdot arguably, but better than infinite up/down votes). - They didn't have up/down, but a system of "Interesting", "Informative", "Off-Topic" and a few others. These are the sa…
When I was younger I thought that Slashdot's moderation was brilliant, and every time that I tried to think up something better I invariably came back to that model. When I first stumbled across Reddit I thought to myself that it couldn't possibly work: too simple, too accessible, too easy to game. And yet over the years I kept reading Reddit and stopped reading Slashdot, and it dawned on me that Reddit's comment rating system miraculously was better than Slashdot's somehow, in a way that I couldn't put my finger on. Somehow their algorithm for knowing which comments out of thousands to place above the fold is basically perfect; even when I click on the "load more comments" links at the leaves of comment chains I nearly always find that the originally loaded comments were exactly where I wanted to stop reading. And of course Reddit still gets plenty of visibly-upvoted bullshit, but the difference is that on Reddit the top response to that comment will be a refutation that is just as upvoted, if not moreso. In contrast, on the rare occasion that I visit Slashdot these days, I wince at all the confidently-asserted yet blatantly wrong comments marked with "5, Informative", while the informed refutations languish invisibly below with a score of 1. Maybe Slashdot's moderation would work better on a more focused site, but in practice it just seems like the people selected for moderation just aren't often enough experts on the topic being discussed to distinguish the signal from the noise.
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, troll…
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:
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?)
Not owning a TV is pushing my kid to watch a lot of YouTube. I'm seriously considering buying a TV, after living for 30 years without one, just so that I can have a quality entertainment feed that doesn't bend to the new media's idea of what my kid should watch, because what that ends up being is endless advertisements ("open this egg! What's inside? A Ken doll!! Wow!!") and videos of pandas killing each other with c…
I occasionally hear people complaining about ads on youtube, but I have never seen a youtube ad aside from when random people try to show me a video on their computer. Do people just not use adblock+ any more?
Sure, but not on my phone and on my Samsung 65" smart tv.