I believe in quality over quantity, and /. doesn't have the intelligent conversations with knowledgeable people that it once did. They've nearly all fled.

I learned a huge amount from submitting stories to Soylent and Pipedot, and comparing them to the crud was on Slashdot at the time... Namely, /. likes to publish a completely inaccurate and twisted stories any idiot knows is slanted and wrong, and then 99% of the comments are made-up of people correcting (and ranting about) the bad story. If you don't publish such crap, you can have informative discussions with 1% of the audience...

In addition, it's the very few, high-quality commentors that make the site, not the rest of the horde. You can have a very small community, as long as it contains a few very smart people, and have just as much insightful conversation. I saw it working wonderfully back in the early days of /. but there's nothing of value left here, now. If Pipedot can continue to maintain the high signal-to-noise ratio as it grows, it *could* be better than /. ever was. But who knows what the future may hold...

Get better content, do better at troll control and get more of us to subscribe.

Why are you a cheap jerk and not paying a subscription? http://slashdot.org/subscribe....

I would mostly agree with parent. Soylent is fine execpt the community isnt big enough so the comments are barely there or worth reading, the name is kind of bad and the stories are routinely just old enough to be yesterdays news on Slashdot or Hacker news.

Their Twitter feed, which is where I get my news feeds, also puts these really annoying lame "from the deptâ attempts at humor in the tweets instead of just the title of the story and the link:

Razer Acquires Ouya Software Assets, Ditches Hardware from the kicked-down dept

They will even thorten the title to make room for the utterly stupid âoefrom theâ.

The best solution to replace Slashdot would probably be if Hacker news grafted the classic Slashdot look, commenting and moderation system on to their generally good stories and great community.

There is a high probably no Sunday talk show would have let him speak once they found out what he was going to say. They are all owned by giant media conglomerates you know. They wouldnt risk the wrath of the Federal government. Pretty sure Snowden went to Greenwald because he was one of the few journalists with the balls to do the story. The Guardian was hammered by the UK government for running it.

Remember when the CEO of Qwest defied the NSA plan to tap all data and phones lines after 9/11. The Federal government pulled all their contracts from Qwest, hammered their stock and then put him in prison for a phony securities rap. Qwest was a rare corporate hero among telecoms, long since swallowed up by CenturyLink who are just as bad as all the rest.

You've basically just described SoylentNews, a Slashdot clone that appeared when the Slashdot Beta shit really started heating up.

SoylentNews never aspired to be anything like slashdot. Instead NCommander stated clearly "SoylentNews intends to be a source of journalism", which just resulted in it becoming HuffingtonPost with discussion, instead of a /. replacement.

The only direct replacement for /. that appeared was PipeDot. "pipedot intends to be a better slashdot". https://pipedot.org/comment/2C... Unfortunately, the word hardly got out, and readership over there is pretty low.

I've included some notes from my own experience to help those (not necessarily parent poster) avoid similar failures.

- don't get locked in to single-vendor technology that might disappear on a moment's notice.
Realistically, evaluate if said technologies can survive company collapse or not. Languages / Technologies with heavy internal investment like C# are a lot more coupled to their companies than say PHP, Ruby, etc. That said, maybe the Mono/Apache/etc.. type groups out there could keep the lang alive if MS pulled the rug. Java could be better off if Oracle killed it to open up the ecosystem pieces they've kept ransom. HTML/Javascript are completely open (though standards keep things semi-coherent) but realistically 3-4 vendors control the narrative and if 2 decided to go in a different direction, you'll have a lot of chaos to keep things working.

- hide API's inside your own classes. That makes ripping them out and replacing them with something else so much easier.
Well, the general mantra of layering access to things certainly mitigates unnecessary coupling which is a good thing. This should be applied everywhere though, not just inner class scoping.

- stick to standards.
Yep, and invent some of your own if there's a lack of good standardization where there should be.

- invest in regular modernisation. Do it when reasonably can, not when you absolutely must.
A tricky proposition, but one that should certainly be striven for. Admittedly, saying lets drop all this stuff that produces more revenue to work on X which may eventually help us maximize revenue in the future is certainly not as clear cut, but in the ideal world, the code is always getting improved, polished, simplified, etc.. Writing (CS101 here) low coupled, high cohesion code will vastly simplify future improvements. Just make sure that you always consider 3rd party libraries / platform libraries / language quirks included into external dependencies that may evolve over time.

- refactor whatever stinks.
Whenever I try refacting crap (core piece of functionality), I write a TON of extra tests for before/after comparison because no matter how perfect your re-implementation, there will always be those bazaar corner cases that worked (possibly through fluke/magic) in the original spahgetti that violates the implied or explicit contracts in the future. Refactor for sure, but don't ripshod, or your eventual replacement will be refacting/fixing your POC for much the same reason you refactored.

- keep your own skills up to date. Apply as needed.
This is never bad advice, but just remember that just because you learn a new technique / technology, don't go running out to refactor everything to use it. Generally if it was popular 10-15 years ago, its probably stood the test of time and passed, while newer tech should be looked at carefully and evaluated for specific cases where appropriate.

2. shameful attempt to ignore Gamergate (still not a single article on /. covering the journalism scandal

Pipedot had a pretty good GamerGate write-up a few months ago:

http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...

/. is just an empty name, and it has less value than ever. All the best parts of /. can and have been forked.

SoylentNews is like HuffingtonPost on slashcode, while PipeDot is a working rewrite of slashcode that kept the sci/tech focus and high standards, but hasn't managed to build a big community of users so far. Just pointing /. readers to Pipedot instead would do the job, and rescue millions of dollars from Dice's pockets.

Worth adding is that the answers to someone's "security" questions often are easily obtained with just a small bit of social engineering.

Yep. Even easier if the information ("correct" answers) are available via Google.

But also, since you're already using unique passwords ... and the crackers managed to get your password ... how did they do that and would that have also yielded your "security" answers.

Their thinking seems to be:

1. So, one username / password isn't enough.

2. A second password should be enough, but it will use the same username as in #1.

3. And that second password should be SUGGESTED to be based upon something that can be researched / socially engineered / tricked out of the person.

4. And entered using the same channel as #1.

Okay, if you cannot get two factor authentication then at least use a different email address for each bank AND ONLY FOR THAT BANK. Email addresses are free. And always use completely unique passwords. Not bankname1 and bankname2.

The same for the "security" questions. Always completely unique.

If you have to write them down, do so. Just keep the paper in a secure location. It's far less likely that someone will break into your house to look for passwords than it is that someone will crack your computer.

Robin Miller: One thing that I think my wife and I are doing right: we don't have a bank anymore, we have a credit union, a local credit union and they do use secondary authorization on everything, you have to not just know the account number and the password, but you also need to know the answers to fairly obscure questions about our past, what year teacher was your favorite in what grade, things like that. Does that help?

NO!!! It does NOT!!!

1. It does not because that information can be collected at other sites controlled by crackers. So unless you enter incorrect information (which is, in effect just another password) then it is useless.

2. It is still on your computer. So if your computer is cracked then the crackers get your username / password / favourite-dog-food / whatever.

3. Find a bank / credit union that uses real two factor authentication.

Read carefully and you'll notice the government said he'd even have to accept the consequences of speaking out and engaging in constructive protest: they decree you can dissent against their rule, and that's well and good, as long as they can punish you for your dissent--which is precisely the situation in North Korea, where you may speak out against Kim Jong-Un, and, importantly, accept the consequences of speaking out against him.

Exactly.

If the end result of civil disobedience is the exact same in the USofA as in North Korea ... then what is the difference?

The politicians demanding martyrdom would be just as comfortable working for North Korea's government as they are working for the USofA's government.

And THAT is a very big problem.

Gamergate was ignored because gamergate is not news.

My problem with it is that even if the initial event happened EXACTLY AS CLAIMED then it is still nothing.

The "story" became the reactions to that nothing event.

And then the reactions to those reactions to that nothing event.

And now we have a post mod'ed +5 Insightful for claiming that Gamergate wasn't covered.

And also, from TFA:

If he felt his actions were consistent with civil disobedience, then he should do what those who have taken issue with their own government do: Challenge it, speak out, engage in a constructive act of protest, and â" importantly â" accept the consequences of his actions.

He IS dealing with the consequences. That's why he left.

What Lisa Monaco is pushing for is martyrdom.

We are supposed to be a country of laws. We should not have officials demanding martyrdom of those who oppose their policies.

What depresses me bout software is how often we JUST DO NOT LEARN!

And not just software. Look at security as well. And so many other computer-related areas.

Software development seems to be riddled with arrogant know nothings who think they can cut corners or reinvent the wheel because doing the right way isn't "7337".

For me it's more like ... someone "learned" one way of handing it when s/he was working ALONE.

Then that person never learned that the practices need to be changed when you are part of a TEAM.

And releasing your code to the public is being part of a team.

Alrighty then, will John Corzine receive an indictment? I think we all know the answer.