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Comment by comprev | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, it's Slashdot - which got it's name from trying to spell out the web address over the phone. Silly and confusing...

h..t..t..p..colon..slash..slash..slashdot..dot..org

When you see "Hacker News Hug" on here (recently due to Cloudflare's issues) or Reddit's "Hug of Death", the original was "Slashdotted", when tech people hosted personal sites on their _own_ home DSL (even Dial-up via Dynamic DNS!) connections. These asynchronous connections had terrible upload speed by design.

If their webpage hit the front news of Slashdot, their upload bandwidth very quickly ran out due to the torrent of traffic!

View on HN

My brother writes xkcd. In 2006 I was living at home while attending community college. At the time, his site was still hosted on the old HP desktop that used to sit in our family room and now sat in his old bedroom. One day I was playing in an unofficial Counter-Strike tournament when one of his comics (possibly "Pi Equals"[1]) got posted to either Slashdot or Boing Boing. My ping immediately went from probably ~25 ms to over 300, and then I timed out completely. I think it took us a couple hours to get our connection back, which I assume involved getting a new IP address.

Sadly, I didn't win the tournament.

[1] https://xkcd.com/10/

The best posts are sometimes found in the comments

Please thank your brother! Some of his work has genuinely turned shit days into a positive ones over the years.

Aw I’m glad to hear that

> My brother writes xkcd.

Username checks out.

This strip had a profound effect on my life after I read it for the first time. To this day it still means a lot to me. Thank you for sharing your story and to your brother for sharing his art.

https://xkcd.com/154/

> These asynchronous connections had terrible upload speed by design.

As opposed to today, where connects have terrible uploads speed because ISPs don't want you to host servers.

I've heard of people getting gigabit down, but only 16 mbps up.

Fiber doesn't do that. I think it's a cable issue tbh

Not really. For example cable internet (and ADSL) goes thru cable (shocking knowledge, I know). Cable have limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited bandwidth

Which essentially means you have X bandwidth to distribute between upstream and downstream. And it's far more profitable to sell X 40/10 Mbit connections vs selling a bunch of 25/25 Mbit ones, where most people there won't be using upload all that much.

> Cable have limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited bandwidth

DOCSIS 4.0 supports 10Gb/s down and 6Gb/s up using that same coaxial cable that's been in your house for decades.

Isn't Slashdot a reference to the current directory in Linux?

It could be but the version I remembered was trying to tell someone the website over the phone.

Perhaps someone on HN has a more reliable source than my brain?

How do you create the name for a website by trying to tell someone how to get to it over the phone? Doesn't the DNS entry have to exist first?

"Hey check out this website I discovered - it's called Slashdot" "It's called what!?" "Slashdot" "How do you spell that?" "http://slashdot.org" "Hang on, what? How many slashes and dots?"

So the conversation of what might happen occurred before the site was created?

See the FAQ for an official answer - https://slashdot.org/faq

I probably got the telephone part mixed up but was right about being confusing to read aloud.

Can’t get a better source that /. itself!

I have a 6 digit /. id and somehow never knew this. Thanks!

I feel like no, trying it out (though on my Mac using zsh and not a 25 year old Linux box) the slash being first makes it reference the root directory.

yes, the correct syntax would be: ./ not /.

Dot is the current directory.

With ~, ~/. could mean your home directory if your shell recognises ~ as $HOME.

Don’t think /. aka slashdot has any intrinsic meaning in Linux.

I didn’t give you permission to make me feel this old this early in the week.

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