141–150 of 199 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last time I used an actual usenet group must have been around 2000 or so. I have no idea how I'd set up NNTP and get to a group now. Not that it wouldn't take me long to work it out, but I'd have to start from first principles.
I was regularly posting to several groups as late as 2014. But setting up access is no different than configuring a mail client.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It shouldn't matter whether or not it's hilarious. Attempts at humor often fall flat on the internet and are somewhat frowned on per HN guidelines. You're objectively wrong and anyone who agrees should chime in to say so. Disagree? Fine, but come to this thread to tell us why. #s
Re humor on HN: not a problem in the guidelines or in practice. HN just has higher standards for humor, and that's a good thing.
The same thing happened last July to comp.lang.forth and comp.lang.lisp. https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913
Eventually they calmed down and now everyone seem to be genuinely nice. I personally just had to live through a later period, where they didn't scream at you, but instead just constantly implied they were smarter than you in every way because you wrote in "Blub" or "Javascript".
Google should be made to review and justify every ban since they have have the majority of world power at this point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why the sociologist’s desires should take precedence over the original posters’.
When pompeii was discovered we saw into homes 1,000 years ago. Without any regard to privancy for those covered in rock we broadcast their lives around the globe. I don't think we give a lot of weight to what the original publishing intent was for anything published 100, 200 years ago, why would the change in the future?
Some fun comp.lang.c history: Dennis Ritchie posted, sharing an extremely early version of a C compiler. Richard Heathfield (well known C book author) jokingly chided Ritchie for posting something off-topic, as it was not part of ANSI C. In typical Usenet fashion, this triggered a huge thread, arguing over the appropriateness of the joke. Even Linus Torvalds got involved. Apparently Heathfield emailed Ritchie private…
Actually the annoying thing here is, that the pointless discussion is achieved, while the link to the source code doesn't work (maybe temporarily overloaded from HN? Maybe dead)
http://web.archive.org/web/20070223091507/http://www.cs.bell...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " ... complete archive of ... Usenet " sotto voce > Usenet postings were never meant to be permanent. I was there in its heyday and nobody expected their postings to live beyond the spool expiration lifetime.
Yup. I've met a number of old farts like me who were not thrilled when what we assumed was transient had been archived. I'm not a big fan of the opt-out model of archiving where archivers just assume that they have implied consent to grab anything and everyone from everyone who hasn't explicitly said no.
If you looked at how data is lost online, you'd find out that by far the most obvious and immediate cause of data loss was third-party intermediaries shutting down old sites. For example, when Yahoo! decided to burn down Geocities - and shittons of early Internet history - on the basis of saving some hosting and storage costs. A second cause is neglect; say, you move your blog to a new platform, but you don't bother redirecting the old URLs, so now you've just carved a hundred or so new dead links into other people's content. In both of those cases, data wasn't being deliberately removed because it needed to go - it just happened by accident.
Furthermore, we don't usually know when these accidents happen. Yes, occasionally some intermediary announces it in advance, but often times linked sites just die. This is a phenomenon known as link rot, and it can happen for a whole host of accidental reasons. Try going to a 10 year old news article and clicking on any of the links, or going to a decades-old forum thread and looking at any of the images. Count how many of them still work. It's depressingly low.
Now, try to imagine getting consent to archive in advance from people who do not know or care about the problems I've just mentioned. You won't get very far - not because the archiving is harmful to them but because most people do not understand the problem. People don't backup their own shit until after they've already lost heaps of data. Even in situations like the Geocities shutdown, the logistics of actually asking for permission to archive on top of running a bunch of scrapers to actually do the archival is... complicated. You could do it, but the vast majority of data would go unarchived purely due to an inability to locate the owner of the data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It shouldn't matter whether or not it's hilarious. Attempts at humor often fall flat on the internet and are somewhat frowned on per HN guidelines. You're objectively wrong and anyone who agrees should chime in to say so. Disagree? Fine, but come to this thread to tell us why. #s
Humor is an integral part of the human experience and connecting with someone else. Saying “ban humor” leaves the community very sterile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'll know they're done when this happens: "google.com has been identified as containing spam, malware, or other malicious content."
We're not that far. I've had emails sent by google classified as spam by gmail.
Was it wrong, though? (I'm... actually, I meant it as humor but depending on how much you've opted out of it's probably true)