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2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

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Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#171

Post by DanAtC »

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #154
throwaway89201 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.

I am running it through a certain set of filters. From my SEO days I recalled that new websites are often penalized based on the certain keywords in search engines. Considering this is a new site, and there is 300 million plus posts and I am not able to read and moderate it, this is the best way I know of to deal with it. But perhaps you're right and I should get rid of it. I'll think about it. This is a valid commen…

Please do not filter anything. A project of this scope is greater than any SEO issues you may have.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#172

Post by aaron695 »

This is pretty unethical by what normal HN standards are around privacy.

This is a bit like as a teenager going to a meeting in the 80's, having it recorded without you knowing and now it being on online.

There was no expectations usenet would be stored or be searchable back then.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#173

Post by neilv »

You might want to refine the overall approach, in the spirit of Usenet and early Internet.

Suggestions:

* Forget about "SEO".

* Forget about running "analytics" surveillance for megacorps.

* Forget about "monetizing" "content".

Also, consider that the Usenet was more a private club, in a more innocent world, and posts were largely ephemeral. We should violate expectations with hesitation and care.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#174

Post by chubot »

chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

Wow this, is an insane life story:

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/drum-and-drummer-643105...

This guy was apparently a genius drummer as a young man -- jammed with Jaco Pastorius, and a friend of John Medeski.

Then a bodybuilder, steroid user (when it was legal), convicted felon, a sufferer of chronic illness, and epic Usenet flamewar participant.

And deceased since 2012, but people still flame him on Usenet.

https://www.drumforum.org/threads/r-i-p-rob-schuh.73509/

And on top of it he also made drums. I remember that from the newsgroup:

https://rec.music.makers.percussion.narkive.com/RqlLNCp4/pro...

I remember the flames but about drums and steroids, but I had no idea back then ...

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#176

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #145
nitrogen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not speculation, it's basically an open source intelligence tool. I can't recall the name of the company I somehow stumbled upon, but they exist. Palantir, as an example, might be someone who you'd expect to develop commercial tools for intelligence gathering. High frequency traders or other investors also.

It is speculation. They do not exist. You're thinking of Maltego, and it's very far from what is being described. Palantir makes software, not a panopticon for their own use. High frequency trading is entirely unrelated to scrounging the deep dark web for crumbs to stitch together forum accounts. This is a fantasy spurred on by too many dark mirror episodes, nobody does stuff like that for the hell of it. Storing the…

Chill...

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#177

Post by Thorrez »

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #154
throwaway89201 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.

I am running it through a certain set of filters. From my SEO days I recalled that new websites are often penalized based on the certain keywords in search engines. Considering this is a new site, and there is 300 million plus posts and I am not able to read and moderate it, this is the best way I know of to deal with it. But perhaps you're right and I should get rid of it. I'll think about it. This is a valid commen…

One option is to censor by default for SEO, but have some checkbox that sets a cookie that uncensors it.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#178

Post by ksaj »

chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

I can't wait for it to eventually get back to the Joe Baptista era and the whole .loon thing. Those were awesome days.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#179

Post by m463 »

chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

If you feel old, I once located some posts of mine from the 80's when names started with net.* and everything was bangpaths like foo!bar!bletch

hmm... here's a taste of it:

https://slashdot.org/story/00/08/27/1439247/usenet-archive-f...

EDIT:

Great Renaming: n.

The flag day in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. “The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources.” There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/Great-Renaming.html

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#180

Post by dredmorbius »

usefulcat wrote: post #112
throwaway89201 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.

For that example, it's at least fairly obvious why it was censored, but this one really puzzles me: "Getting good FP performance from a micro seems to require pipelining. Keeping the p e(s) full seems to require a certain amount of parallelism and regularity." https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.arch&g=14965... Edit: Ah, the irony. HN markdown causes two consecutive asterisks to disappear.

You can note markup in a code block --- 4 space indent.

    A code block.
    
    Two asterisks follow: **
   
    This normally would be *italicised*.
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