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Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

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Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#51

Post by asaph »

cge wrote: post #38
smoyer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... gone to Sweden on vacation. More seriously, I think a better analogy is putting a frog in cold water and turning on the stove's burner. Things are much worse but because it happened so slowly, we simply have a "new normal". The change from one day to the next on this time-scale is undiscernable.

If you put a frog in cold water and gradually heat the water, the frog will jump out ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog ). The premise of that analogy is widely considered to be completely false.

This underscores the importance of independently reproducing experimental results of others. It's not done often enough.

Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#52

Post by JoshMnem »

Steuard wrote: post #5
wmf wrote: post #3

It's pretty sad that a bunch of people sent historical Usenet archives to Google, they imported them into Google Groups, and then... basically hid/lost access to it over time. I assume the data is in GFS somewhere but it may never see the light of day. But maybe we just need to shame them every decade: https://www.wired.com/2009/10/usenet/

Google Groups was great when they first acquired all those archives! It just got progressively worse and worse over time, and I've never understood why. (Stagnation I could understand, but how did the same searches get less effective?)

Google Groups was always terrible. It almost immediately started ruining Usenet.

Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#54

Post by GuacheSuedeHN »

mailxplorer wrote: post #31
zokier wrote: post #26

> After a month I had most newsgroups - excepting binaries - and it came to 800GB. > Trying to index THAT lot was impossible Stupid question, but why would indexing 800GB of newsgroup postings be impossible?

Clucene was way too slow for body text, more than 1GB. I had my own header parser in C++ (though you can do that in Python easily). I'm trying again on that 800GB with KISS DB (append-only hashtable), and Elasticsearch. Doesn't matter if GPL because it's a website.

Do you mind sharing the code ? I think that is an interesting thing to see

Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#55

Post by linguaz »

llao wrote: post #27

Thank you! If I read it right, humanity has lost 1991-2003 to Google though, correct?

Take a look here:

https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical

"This historical collection of Usenet spans more than 30 years and was given to us by a generous donor"

This group for example, from that collection:

    https://archive.org/download/usenet-comp/comp.emacs.mbox.zip
    [69.8M]
includes posts spanning from December 1988 to June 2013.

For some reason the mbox files have an odd format, with From lines that look like:

     From -8118066241627336028
I wrote some scripts to fix that so I could open the mbox files in Mutt.

BTW, found the above links on this page:

http://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2015/02/23/early_usenet_history_...

which has more info & links about historical usenet archives.

Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#56

Post by llao »

linguaz wrote: post #55
llao wrote: post #27

Thank you! If I read it right, humanity has lost 1991-2003 to Google though, correct?

Take a look here: https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical "This historical collection of Usenet spans more than 30 years and was given to us by a generous donor" This group for example, from that collection: https://archive.org/download/usenet-comp/comp.emacs.mbox.zip [69.8M] includes posts spanning from December 1988 to June 2013. For some reason the mbox files have an odd format, with From lines that look like…

Oh wow, does this mean that we have all of usenet texts? What stops people from providing a better interface than Google's then?

Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#57

Post by edraferi »

sverige wrote: post #49

For all of you who are misty-eyed pondering those wonderful, probably-lost-forever Usenet posts from the 90s, I dare you to read Kibo's .signature (last updated 5/5/94 4:52AM http://archive.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt to cure yourselves of misplaced misty-eyed nostalgia for those long-ago times when the Internet was something else. Kibo for President!

What did I just read. It’s like trying to understand satire from a hundred years ago.

I was convinced it was hopelessly corrupted by the archiving process, but some of the ASCII art still works (mostly).

Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#58

Post by edraferi »

forapurpose wrote: post #25

Usenet article periodically get promoted to the front page. I wonder what that says about the age demographics of HN, given that Usenet hasn't been significant in maybe 20 years (and even then it was a niche). Is the younger generation here? And if not here, where?

I’m too young for Usenet, but I think it’s an interesting bit of history. I like how open it seems relative to current social media.

Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#59

Post by alxlaz »

I'm gonna put my dinosaur hat on and remind everyone that you can still use USENET in 2018. It's alive, well, and if you don't need access to binary groups, it's also free and very straightforward.

There are still some intresting discussions going on, mostly in the technical groups.

I still open it up maybe once a month or so for nostalgia, though I haven't posted in a while.

Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

#60

Post by jstarfish »

edraferi wrote: post #57
sverige wrote: post #49

For all of you who are misty-eyed pondering those wonderful, probably-lost-forever Usenet posts from the 90s, I dare you to read Kibo's .signature (last updated 5/5/94 4:52AM http://archive.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt to cure yourselves of misplaced misty-eyed nostalgia for those long-ago times when the Internet was something else. Kibo for President!

What did I just read. It’s like trying to understand satire from a hundred years ago. I was convinced it was hopelessly corrupted by the archiving process, but some of the ASCII art still works (mostly).

It's a usenet signature that grew longer and more ridiculous over time, with the changelog slapped on top.

It really is archaic; we don't use signatures for anything anymore (email, barely).

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