Unfortunately HN locks the comments after a while. Mods: we need a way to fix deadlinks Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140283 redirects to wrong place. Correct new link is https://lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/tamarack.htm
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Hacker News Classics (2018)
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#12That's fantastic.
"Linux is obsolete (1992)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8942175
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#13> the web is the greatest library in the history of the world I think this is web-boosterism. Consider another candidate for greatest library in history of the world: the British Library. 200 million items, most of them available to read at 45 minutes notice, centrally located in one of the worlds most important cities. I'm bet that 99% of what is on this page is in the BL. Is 99% of what is in the BL on the web? EDI…
How do I access the British Library from India? Or perhaps from Australia? New Zealand? What about Canada?
The Internet offers a unique value proposition the British Library does not: it's globally available, for free, and in the case of Wikipedia might even come in your native tongue. It also offers video content, live or otherwise, on any Internet connected device you happen to own.
The British Library doesn't compare, but it sure is an exceptional resource.
a lot of the time
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#14> the web is the greatest library in the history of the world I think this is web-boosterism. Consider another candidate for greatest library in history of the world: the British Library. 200 million items, most of them available to read at 45 minutes notice, centrally located in one of the worlds most important cities. I'm bet that 99% of what is on this page is in the BL. Is 99% of what is in the BL on the web? EDI…
> centrally located
That's not necessarily a good thing. Think of a fire.
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#15> the web is the greatest library in the history of the world I think this is web-boosterism. Consider another candidate for greatest library in history of the world: the British Library. 200 million items, most of them available to read at 45 minutes notice, centrally located in one of the worlds most important cities. I'm bet that 99% of what is on this page is in the BL. Is 99% of what is in the BL on the web? EDI…
How do I access the British Library from India? Or perhaps from Australia? New Zealand? What about Canada? The Internet offers a unique value proposition the British Library does not: it's globally available, for free , and in the case of Wikipedia might even come in your native tongue. It also offers video content, live or otherwise, on any Internet connected device you happen to own. The British Library doesn't com…
> How do I access the British Library from India?
You clearly can't (though India no special shortage of excellent libraries). But how important is access? Is the chip shop down the road from you the Worlds Greatest Restaurant just because it's the easiest to get to? Or is that place in Paris with 3 Michelin stars better?
The web-as-a-library relies on people creating good stuff and paying for it to be on the web for free. It just doesn't happen that often and Wikipedia is, I'm afraid, not the last word on human knowledge.
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#16Half-OT:
HN could optimize the layout for mobile a bit. I'm mostly reading on my smartphone and the links are all sooo small, I can barely hit them with my thumb.
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#17Unfortunately some dead links, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6512288
Would be cool if HN had its own web archive after 100 comments or so.
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#18> the web is the greatest library in the history of the world I think this is web-boosterism. Consider another candidate for greatest library in history of the world: the British Library. 200 million items, most of them available to read at 45 minutes notice, centrally located in one of the worlds most important cities. I'm bet that 99% of what is on this page is in the BL. Is 99% of what is in the BL on the web? EDI…
Well, the web has some obvious advantages over mostly-paper libraries.
I'm sure a certain library in Alexandria would have appreciated off-site backups :)
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#19Unfortunately some dead links, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6512288 Would be cool if HN had its own web archive after 100 comments or so.
Or a bot that browses discussions and if any recent ones have > 100 comments automatically sends the link to archive.org to be archived and then add a comment with the link of the archived copy
Re: Hacker News Classics (2018)
#20I've long had this notion that there are two kinds of content on a site like HN: - temporal, like news, announcements, analysis and discussion on current events. It's usually irrelevant after a while, it gets stale fast. - atemporal, like essays, history, theory, articles, knowledge in general that while it may get superseded, expanded or invalidated over time, it's interesting content that you learn from, from a cur…
Agree, and while the former might best be represented on a dated "timeline", esp as an ongoing thing of related events; The latter is maybe best as a "slow journalist"/"community wiki" style of aggregating useful comments.