Slashdot Mirror
Vote in 5K Contest
antidigerati writes: "The annual 5k website contest is closed and in the voting stage! Some impressive entries this year. Take a look and vote for your favourites!" Slashdot will take first place in its little-known cousin, the 500K contest.
Er...what about http://www.the5k.org/about.asp and the attendant explanation of what the site is about?
You really ought to look a little harder.
But that wasn't the purpose of the 5K competition. If you want to see a competition where people code *useful* sites in 5K you're free to go found your own.
And why not? You'll probably get some decent entries.
Sorry if you're not able to parse English or infer meaning but this was blatantly obvious to me from reading the text.
Accessiblity of information does not mean explaining everything in words of one syllable.
...on an IBM 1620 decimal machine (made in late 1950s), I had 120 digits of instructions on a single 80 column card (which could be run as a boot loader card directly from the card reader). Overlapping instructions, donchaknow. Printed out THIMK over and over on the system console, one sense switch changed the speed, another halted it. The M in THIMK was the halt instruction, which is why it wasn't THINK. Think was of course the IBM (pseudo?) motto of the times.
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Infuriate left and right
You may have optimized the size, but that doesn't really prove anything as the size of Your entry in such format that it would be maintainable is a lot more.
Can You provide documentation to the entry in under 5k?
Yes, it relies upon (usually) IIS and a Windows server which has it's own issues. There are several other languages that are inferior to ASP as far as performance and development time goes.
PHP would have been my choice, but ASP still runs at 43pps while PHP was only hitting 47pps. I'll ignore perl, as it's strong suit is definitely not in speed and efficiency. Even with CGI::Fast or mod_perl.
$ ls -l 5k5.gif
-rw-rw-r-- 1 xerithan xerithan 613 Apr 12 10:25 5k5.gif
Mhm.. not sure what other images you are talking about.
$ lynx -dump http://www.the5k.org|wc
101 552 4086
And I get the page in a nice 16 seconds (granted, isn't best but typically faster than the load time for slashdot)
I'm not sure where any irony is at really...
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
It's late.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
As a participant of last year's 5K contest, I just want to say thanks to Stewart for making this more than just a one-shot wonder. By the entries I've seen so far, the first 5K served as the thrown-down gauntlet, and it's great to see so many people take up the challenge, and doing such an admirable job.
It's also wonderful to see the5k.org doing so well. The whole site was made quite a while after the 5k contest ended, and a lot of people would have been loath to put in the effort.
Thanks Stewart!!!
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
Sometimes I feel like booting to DOS and writing a 4KB demo again.
but instead I'm sure you'll waste your talent replying to this post :(
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
http://www.google.com/search?q=perl+golf
According to netcraft they're running IIS or Win2K with ASP. Betcha they're running SQL Server too.
They have a nice lean design; it really ought to fly. How much to you want to bet everything including the front page is dynamically generated for each and every request?
Maybe there ought to be a web design contest for minimizing server end loads with dynamic content.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Judging by votes and sheer coolness, the 5k Chess is the big winner. Hell, it beat me. If something under 5k can beat me at chess... well, my TI-85 has 32kb, maybe I should let it think for me on a more frequent basis.
The big loser? Skadden Arps Recruiting site. Arriving at the entry itself is sort of like buying a car in the classified ads and then finding out that it's a tiny plastic model of a car. The joke is barely funny until you realize someone submitted that entry for real, and that the entry was posted on the list anyway.
Timepiece is pretty funky, I have to say.
By the way, I have made websites under 5k before, and I've found them highly entertaining. They consist mostly of ranting text about my high school from about 5 years ago. Oh well, maybe my tastes are unique to the world...
a.> they use active server pages
b.> their own images are 5k plus
c.> their pages are bland and slow
Yeah... Billyboy was right: No one will ever need more than 640K
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The shareholder is always right.
Currently as the site is slashdotted i'm getting an amazing 17 bytes/second from them. So these 5k sites will still take minutes to download :D
now THAT's web karma for you.
fross
http://entries.the5k.org/352/index.htm
By far the niftiest entry of the bunch.
Nice smirky attitiude! My name is Eric and I built the site.
/. traffic.
/was/ created dynamically so as to show up to the second stats for the entries, but it was a matter of changing few lines of code to have it used the cached XML.)
>Betcha they're running SQL Server too.
We are indeed running SQL2k. The server is doing fine, btw, though we seem to have maxed out the pipe with the recent
>How much to you want to bet everything including
>the front page is dynamically generated for each
>and every request?
I will take your bet! I am using an XML caching system I built so that calls to the DB are minimized, which means that the front page is not dynamically created every time (unless you count an XSL transformation). Each entry description page, and even the list of all entries are pulled from cached XML now (the list
Anyway, thanks for your interest in the contest.
--
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I like to watch.
You really ought to look a little harder.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I've seen this several time, and it's quite frustrating: people write their website with themselves in mind, assume that everyone who visits it will have a certain knowledge base to make sense of it, and never think of those who don't.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
we all know the demoscene belonged to the amiga :) the 4k and 64k demos were so damn impressive. sometimes I wnna plug ym 1200 (I sold the 500) in again and play... but then I think.. naahh
lovely mahcine that it was it's a little long in the tooth nowadays
dave
I'm still bitter about last year's competition. I made a little Java applet which cranked out fullscreen IFS fractal images of a grassy patch of land covered in rosebushes (you'd never see the same rosebush twice - or blade of grass, for that matter). It was going to be animated, with each branch of each tree bending in the wind, but I had to cut it down as the deadline fast approached. Submitted it on time. And they never judged it, or even put it on the main list. Yeah, I was a little mad.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Did you see the 5k Chess entry?
Truly fabuluous...
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
With modem compression technologies you only optimize the link between the client and the ISP. The problem is that the bandwith of the web server limits the number of users connected (aka slashdotted), and gzip'ping the page theoretically doubles or triples that number.
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
Been there, done that. Where's my award ;-)
Our site had code that created dynamic Flash movies with perl. Now, for those of you that can imagine dynamic image creation meets slashdot effect - think bigger and you're about there. Ouch!
My server got a load of about 50 and stopped responding to outside stuff (it timed out) but Linux didn't go down or crash.
Mark.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
People can make the most pessimistic site, sent it in and you can judge them and decide which site is the least though out, lame, pessimistic, no sence of fun and ignorate?
Sounds like a cool idea? Cause by the tone of your post, It seems right up your ally.
Please.. it's just a bit of fun, don't spoil it for others just becasue you don't like it. If you don't like it, don't f'n go to there. Just don't moan on about how bad it is to others.
Anyway... not everything has to be usefull.
it also depends on your idea of usefull. I'm sure alot of the concepts could be taken and out and put to use.
Funny you mention that, I had to do the opposite... I could never work the mouse with my left hand so I had to train the left to do the actual work.
There's also the 7 kB web competition in Germany, and the winners have been announced.
rb
But that still leaves alot of crap, did you see the 5k run one?
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
I only saw one entry that was pure html...the sad sad story of the armadillo. I didn't get the joke, but I do want to know what that guy is doing in bed with an armadillo.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Coding a website isn't programming. A htmldocument isn't a program.
(-% TwistedMind %-)
The juggling one (about 10 up from the bottom) was pretty sweet, good use of java. The 'ask your site' one, next to the last on the list, seemed pretty cool, until I thought about how it was done, and realized it was far simpler, and thus less impressive, than most of the others. That notwithstanding, some of those are really pretty impressive for their size. I'd like to see who wins. (pay attention editors: make sure you let us know when the winner's been announced).
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
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Heh..it seems pr0n invades ALL aspects of the Internet -- even the 5K contest.
Check out the Pixxxel Chix. Hilarious! Just think of what "video strip poker" whould look like on the Atari 2600 and you'll get the idea--it's a great spoof of the typical smut site and quite impressive for 5K!
(btw, if it asks for a password type pixel)
I just love the "ask your site" entry....
/. - Thats causes bubba.. they ain't there!
I put in www.slashdot.org with the title "news for nerds" and It came up with forrest gump
I can only imagine slashdot playing forrest and kiro5shin playing bubba whenever slashdot posts a link...
kiro5 - I can't feel my webpages...
*chuckle*
(define the-question (or (* 2 b) (not (* 2 b))))
Perhaps the geek community would understand this contest better if it's explained as an optimization contest. You're given a 5120-byte limit on your entire Web site. Produce the best thing you can, with the best functionality and the best design, under that constraint.
My own entry ("Puzzle Cube") was a fantastic exercise in JavaScript optimization to this end. Make the code as functional as I can. Okay, now remove the whitespace and linebreaks. Retitle the variables and functions with single-letter names. Remove unnecessary braces. Replace array declarations with .split() methods to save a few more characters. Trim the fat. Make it lean. And oh, make it still work for 95% of the browsers.
Of course it's a gimmick -- but more accurately, it's a challenge. Or a proof-of-concept. Whichever you prefer.
If anyone is wondering why the site is so slow, here's what they have to say:
::Please accept our apologies for the site performance issues. The problem is that we had set the dial on the front of the web server to "slow" and now it appears to be jammed up. (Seriously: some complicated SQL issues which are being resolved as we speak. Some pieces of functionality may disappear and reappear as the work is done. Enjoy your nice non-SQL-optimizing and server-reinstalling day.)
Wednesday, April 11
I'd have to say this is first - of course, now we're just going to kill it dead.
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
How about a 401k website contest?
The reason is that HTML is so clumsy and inefficient that a 5K site must be devoid of all formatting, structure, images, and content to slide under the cap. Look at the HTML only entries. They are crap, amateur-looking sites. The reason is that even a professional web-monger like myself simply cannot pack anything good into 5K.
It's not a matter of finding the right optimizations, because there are none. There are right ways, and clumsy ways, but no elegant or clever ways. If the promoters of this contest want to see some real creativity perhaps they should raise the cap in the HTML only category to 30 or 40 K.
This would allow designers to demonstrate their creativity and cleverness, while producing more than 4 mono-color icons which lead to slightly different versions of the first page (This is the Earthsite entry, the highest scoring in the HTML only category). Take a look at the poorness of the entries, make your own decision, then flame me.
I'm reading a lot of people saying that 5k is not enough or 5k is not realistic....! Sure understandably, hey it's a challenge, not a walk in the park. You actually have to work at creating a page that's either entertaining, useful, and under 5k.
My next comment is, "Have you actully gone to the site and seen the 5k submissions?" Some are unbelievable! You've got to check out the flash dolphin submission near the bottom of the page. Or the chess game, or the useful yearly calander!
With out people trying to make java and/or scripts as small as possible we would have nothing left but bloated / slow web pages.
Give these guys a break, they worked their butts off and deserve tons of credit.
Linuxrunner
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
And i still say it'd be smarter to make a backup copy of a website before slashdotting it. (The backup can be auto'ly disabled as soon as the website staggers back to its feet.)
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
A HTML document (along with style sheet) contains instructions on how a document is to be rendered by a browser (or other devices). In a way it is like writting one of those nifty perl script that will print out itself :-) But this is getting OT.
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Codeala - Just another mindless drone
As many posters already pointed out the the5k.org itself is extremely bloated. You have to jump through so many hoops just to look at a couple pages... Wouldn't it be nice if the 5k principle is applied more often in real life.
Size does matter, even if you have a fast connection (at the server AND the client side). Don't use FONT tags, don't specific "Arial, Verdana, sans-serif". Instead use Style Sheet and "sans-serif". Remember "Dynamic Font" from Netscape? "You want me to download some fonts just to look at your text page?" How silly is that?
I like to consider web programming, with HTML, CSS, images and other sources, an art form. An elegant programmer can (and will) create a well layout page using minimum amount of code. Not some hacks that know how to convert a .doc file into a "web" page or make an image map with DreamWeaver.
So yeah the 5k contest was interesting, but I would rather see more real examples of people writing good clean web page.
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Codeala - Just another mindless drone
Isn't 512K a much rounder number? With winners being a member of the 'helf-meg club'?
$ ls -l index.html
-rw------- 1 anne_m anne_m 8676 Apr 12 2001 index.html
$ ls -l 2001_5k.gif
-rw------- 1 anne_m anne_m 3316 Apr 12 2001 2001_5k.gif
$
That's well more than 5Kb.
-- Anne Marie
For a bunch of pages that are only supposed to be 5K long they sure are taking a long time to load...
--Do you even know what it's for?--
The "You have Been Slash Doted and Survived Without A Crash" award? That would really mean something to a web admin...
Plug for my website:
Wireless Networking Systems
Network over a 15 mile radius!
Create your own Wireless ISP!
www.techsplanet.com/wlan/
Of course we could do amazing things in the long lines that Applesoft BASIC gave us - 127 char I think?
I understand the APL programmers were the real stars at "one line of code" though.
As they say - the Lord created the world in 6 days, but an APL programmer could do it in on line.
R.
Please give me a high score ;-)
How about a 5k operating system contest?
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
Uhmm, what ever happened to the idea of sending compressed data over HTTP and letting the browser decompress it? .. Size of slashdot front page for me, as it is now: 36,793. Gziped: 9,248. Not that I care personally, since I have cable.. but most people aren't putting the cpu to use while "surfing the net". Wouldn't it make sense to cut bandwidth this way rather then try to do a clever "html hack"? yeah, I know, that's not the point of this contest, but I had to rant..
Are you sure it isn't a way to make you cringe, by waiting for 5 minutes to download a 5k website?
I'm not a Troll i prefer to be called a Goblin.
It's efficiency? I'm all in favour of efficiency, but when the useful information is near zero, you get a very bad ratio, no matter how little resources you used.
It's a way of reflecting about the design, by adding constraints? That would be a wonderful idea. If they stated a goal, lets say design a web site with the periodic table of elements, and some strong size limitations, and let people use their minds on it, that would be something, IMHO. That perhaps would provide us with useful insights. But with no goals, it's only a collection of nonsense. I'm not particularly interested in how somebody solved a problem of his or her own invention, where the specifications could be changed at will.
It has no point, it's simply a fun site? Well, I have seen funnier.
So for me it's just another self-congratulation site. I have no time for it now, I must contemplate my navel, I think...Oh my! Isn't it interesting?...I think I'll forget everything about the outside world...ohmmmmm...
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Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
There are Forth systems that do triple duty as OS, shell, and programming language, in under 5K.
Take a look at Chuck Moore's work. His attitude is that the right amount of software for pretty much any task is about 1000 words (tokens).
(geez, these spoiled youngsters, with their gigabyte ram and their terabyte hard-drives... no clue about the days when you were happy -- happy! -- to have 16 kb of RAM)
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This just makes me wish for the "good ol' days" when websites above 50k were considered "horribly bloated" Now we've got a contest to see who can write a small webpage. Why? That's the same stuff we did years ago simply because we *had* to! ;)
I have found Postgres to be pitifully slow compared to MySQL. It's not like the 5k site requires any RMDBS features - MySQL would be a good choice.
Unmuzzled power corrupts, unmuzzledly.
Look i don't want to take anything away from this competition but what is the point of manipulating you page to be less than a certain size. I'm all for small pages, without stupid graphics, java applets, flash, etc... but this seems more like a gimmick than anything else. As someone said before, if this was the 5k & useful poll then maybe it would mean something. (Hell, i know hundreds of sites that are less than 5k... too bad they're all crap :-) )
can't sleep slashdot will eat me