Nice easter egg!

Title is a bit misleading as I clicked on the article thinking Digg had open-sourced the site (which would be pretty rad). The source code in question is the HTML source, not the code that outputs said HTML.

Perhaps it would better read "Secret message in Digg's HTML markup".

Hahahah same thing happened here. "Secret message in Digg's HTML" works well.

Hmm I couldn't help but notice that he uses cutenews. That script hasn't been updated in a while and is vulnerable to script kiddies and ugly cracker people. :(

You mean HTML. Saying HTML markup is rather redundant.

No, I don't think it is. The noun "L" in HTML is "Language", so "HTML markup" means that the markup is written in the HyperText Markup Language. Now, "HTML Language" would be redundant.

Uh?... Isn't HyperText Markup Language markup redundant?

No, you can have markup in plenty of other languages. Thus, the modifier "HTML" adds information to its subject, the "markup". The subject of the modifier is also important, as it makes clear that you are talking about some specific markup written in HTML and not HTML in general.

You're being silly. I meant that "Secret in Digg's HTML" is better of course, not "Secret in Digg's markup", which is obviously less precise. But "Secret in Digg's HTML markup" is blatantly redundant.

edit: Wouldn't you agree that "Digg's HTML" provides exactly as much information as "Digg's HTML markup"? If so then "markup" is clearly redundant. You're really missing the point by saying that not all markup is HTML. All HTML is markup, it's the HyperText Markup Language. Damn.

edit-ps: It's really annoying that I only see my own message when editing, I should see at least the immediate parent also.

edit2: "HTML" does add information to "markup", but markup doesn't add information to "HTML". "HTML" is a "strict subset" of "markup".

I think "Digg's HTML" would actually be wrong. HTML is a language, and the secret isn't hidden at the language but at a markup written in such language. Say the language is called X. Then we'd say: Digg's X markup. Why would it be different with X=HTML?

What I aggre though, is that "HTML markup" is redundant in a sense: something written in HTML is a markup, as HTML is a language for markups. So we'd rather say something more general like "HTML code" or "HTML text", as we don't need to specify markup again. But it isn't very important anyway.

It might not be an elegant choice of words, but it is not redundant in the same way that "PIN number" is redundant.

It is redundant in precisely the same way.

It is different. "PIN Number" repeats the noun twice. "HTML Markup" uses "markup" twice, but the first instance is a different use than the second instance. In the first instance, it is used as a descriptor for the language. In the second instance, it is used to describe the thing that is written in the language.

Now the question is, can HTML be used in a sentence about something other than markup, thereby making the use of "markup" in "HTML markup" redundant? I think it can, because one can discuss HTML in general (the rules, the state of the latest version, etc) without referring to some specific markup under discussion.

So, I don't think it is the same kind of thing as "PIN Number" or "HTML Language".

In the latter instance, the term you are looking for is not 'Markup' it is 'source' or 'text'.

You're wrong, it's redundant, saying hyper text markup language markup sounds ignorant. Your defense makes zero sense.

Guys, what do you say we dial down the whole power-nerd thing a little bit, okay? This really doesn't matter.

Agreed, redundant duplicates saying the same thing them both pose no problem to clear communication.

edit: http://xkcd.com/386/

it's hilarious. don't ruin it.

Which one would you remove?

Secret message in Digg's HyperText Markup Language

Secret message in Digg's HyperText Language Markup

It's called a geekstain to me, and I '2.01355321270u 137.03599911 6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2 6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2' it.

The Google logo is also partly one: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_explanation_for_the_Go...

Article on Wired -- "How Google Got It's Logo": http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/multimedia/2008/02/gal...

"There were a lot of different color iterations," Kedar says. "We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules."

Nice commenting system on Wired: threaded, voting and cut short for quick expansion - needed at TechCrunch.

-- Anyhow, I ad-block all logos that I would otherwise regularly see.

It's been there since early 2006, and was "discovered" once before.

how much does it cost digg in bandwith dollar?

OK, I'll bite.

The message itself is 106 bytes.

Digg gets ~70 million US visits per month (Compete), with 50% traffic from the US (Alexa), and average ~5 page views per user (Compete & Alexa). So let's say 700 million page views a month.

700,000,000 * 106 = 74,200,000,000 bytes/month ~= 70 gigabytes/month.

Slicehost charges $20 for 100 gigabytes/month. I'm assuming Digg pays for unmetered bandwidth, which should come out to a lot less.

So, I guess the answer is - not much.

Obviously Digg didn't read the Sequoia presentation. Cutting that out would extend their runway by at least 2 seconds.

You left out the fact that use gzip to compress their pages. So the real answer is - even less.

How does that work? Is the page sent gzipped and my computer un-gzips it? (and what specifically does that..do browsers do that?)

Yep. The browser sends an "Accept-Encoding" header as part of its request (with a list of what it supports). And the server can respond back with one of the encodings listed. Most modern browser support compression I believe.

Thats pretty kickin. If I made websites for a living I would look into that further.

gzipping saves bandwidth at the cost of cpu cycles. So it may or may not be a good idea, depending on what you are trying to save.

Most people who work on large scale websites know about it :)

  58667 digg-orig.html
  14585 digg-orig.html.gz
  58560 digg-noegg.html
  14524 digg-noegg.html.gz

61 bytes.

Yep, I remembered about compression after I posted.

So did you have anything to do with this hidden message? :p

I knew about it, not much more than that. Timeless, our dba, put it in (digg user philovivero).

lol wow, we're such nerds. I love it.

hard to call HTML the "source code" :)

brilliant. Hats off to philovivero.