Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

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" far larger "

... 'size' is really not that important. What matters is the content, it's uniqueness and relative importance.

Libraries, even books (let alone literacy) during antiquity were rare and generally unique, remember, this is before the printed press.

The Library at Alexandria was a 'first-order' source of knowledge and wisdom, a place where 'intellectual luminaries' (i.e. big rabbis of the day) would have studied. Possibly every single book represented a unique bit of knowledge, and each one a historical artifact.

Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like losing 15% of all Universities, professors, all of their papers, textbooks, 15% of authors, playwrights, all of their works, 15% of all written history - basically most or all copies of their works, vanished into thin air, for all of time.

If the Library continued to exist in its fullest form, we may very well have much more of our history pieced together.

The Internet Archive is not even a 'second-order' resource. It's nice to have, and useful particularly for some historical reasons, but if it were to evaporate tomorrow, civilization wouldn't skip a beat.

There is no specialized, arcane knowledge there. Parts of the IA are of course really nice to have, particularly the news which forms a kind of historical record. But old copies of 'HomeDepot.com' and 'McDonalds.com' are just not that important.

We don't use the IA as a source of science, physics, fiction, students don't go to the IA to access authors' works or textbooks on orbital physics.

If the contents of IA were seriously valuable, then quite a number of parties would be interested in maintaining it, first of all, the parties being documented (if HomeDepot.com doesn't care about their 2006 web-site, then maybe it's not so important).

I support the IA and I would hope that it was even a kind of government-sponsored agency, but it's not an 'intellectual foundation'.

(Edit: changed from 25% to 15%, it's just a number obviously, but my point being 'it's some material share of the compendium of knowledge')

That’s a fairly inaccurate understanding of the Library of Alexandria that most historians disagree with. See https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/making-myth-li... for example.

My comment is consistent with the more nuanced understanding of what Alexandria really was.

You should start or join a modern day effort like it if you have such passion for it.

They don't necessarily fit the definition of "arcane", but there's certainly specialized knowledge that at this point exists primarily on the Internet Archive.

At this point in time, there have been lots of niche websites and forums and many have shut down. In some cases, those websites housed actual practical knowledge. Example: I drive a Mazdaspeed3. There was a forum dedicated (partly) to that car, and it went down. Now that it's gone, a lot of information on how to work on it is also gone or much more difficult to come by.

HathiTrust is more along the lines of what you are getting at

The internet archive is a universal archive of the internet rather than just what is exposed trough their wayback machine. You are comparing a quantifiable well indexed archive of any online with one which is not quantifiable due to being lost to history. There are similarities between the efforts of the Library at Alexandria and the internet archive which make them comparable, so lets.

>'size' is really not that important. [...] each one a historical artifact.

The uniqueness of content in the internet archive is significantly greater by virtue of there simply being more unique knowledge at this point. Knowledge which would be lost (often intentionally) if not for efforts such as the internet archive, or that of the Library at Alexandria.

The library made copies of the knowledge for the original owners rather than having the only copy. making every copy most likely non-unique. The value in its indexing is immense especially when you realize that useful information is only useful within a context where it can be applied and cannot be valued outside of it.

>Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ...

This did not happen.

>If the Library continued to exist in its fullest form, we may very well have much more of our history [...] orbital physics.

Imagine if a similar effort to archive exists today and in a few thousand years we would be able to use it, this is how I see the internet archive. The archive and efforts like it are used as a first source of knowledge by wikipedia, students, developers, researchers, anyone needing to verify a business existing prior to the investor call. If there was not an archive of the Feynman lectures I would know nothing about orbital physics now, if the current hosts are lost I am very very glad that the internet archive has a copy.

>If the contents of IA [...] important).

Personally I would like to know if homedepot existed 14 years ago if I wanted to do business with them and they claimed so, or if they tried to censor anything (that case of the US government having honeypot sites archives with code comes to mind). Things which would be lost if not for the specific functionality you are mentioning. Also there are many many other efforts, unlike you seem to state (e.g. archive.is, ipfs, the-eye.eu).

Perhaps the most powerful argument: https://web.archive.org/web/*/news.ycombinator.com

edit: I have archived our comments for historical context for anyone studying internet discussion in the year 3020 https://web.archive.org/web/20200611105240/https://news.ycom... https://web.archive.org/web/20200611105414/https://news.ycom...

1) "virtue of there simply being more unique knowledge at this point."

>>>>>>> the IA is not 'knowledge' it's 'information' and most of it is irrelevant to anything - more importantly: All of the important information in the IA is well documented elsewhere. We don't need the IA for much at all.

2) Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ... This did not happen.

>>>>>>> Of course it did! Lucio Russo / "Forgotten revolution" argues that a large part of the scientific knowledge of the Hellenistic era was lost.

3) "Personally I would like to know if homedepot existed 14 years ago if I wanted to do business with them and they claimed so, or if they tried to censor anything (that case of the US government having honeypot sites archives with code comes to mind)."

>>>>>>> If that's a good example use case - then you've proven my point because there are exactly 0 people in this world using IA to see if 'some business existed 10 years ago in order that they might do business with them due to concerns of honey potting'.

4) "Imagine if a similar effort to archive exists today and in a few thousand years we would be able to use it, this is how I see the internet archive."

>>>>>> Some contents IA might be a little bit useful to a few historians, but beyond that, it will have no meaning.

The IA could be cut down to 1/1000000 it's size, and still, maintain it's historical relevance.

If the IA were vaporized today, it wouldn't really matter that much, there's nothing in there we need, and the important content is saved elsewhere. The NYT has a great archive.

The internet is mostly noise and babble, most of it is not important at all. Some of it is.

1. All of the important information at Library at Alexandria is documented elsewhere by definition.

2. Sure, 15% of all academics going poof is the exact same thing as the Library at Alexandria burning down.

3. Those are two separate examples

4. You are replying in a thread about how the internet archive making copies of books and allow people access to those is getting them shut down, would you then argue that the Library at Alexandria is also largely meaningless?

We can’t judge what is important and what is not. This is a job for the future historians in a millenium.

What historians really need is accounts of how regular people went about their business, without a filter applied by the one recording that account. The internet archive is an excellent resource for this, but only if it is preserved.

Previous ages failed to record what was needed to properly understand that age, not because they lacked the capacity to do so, but because they didn’t consider mundane things worth recording.

Seriously. It runs contrary to people's intuition, but things we think of as boring now are what historians will care about more than famous, well-preserved, and widely-replicated materials.

The Stoics were always going to survive into the 21st century, but the graffiti on walls would tell you a lot more about the politics and culture of the time than one well-off scholar's view. All those long-gone personal sites are the graffiti on the wall, and we have a copy of a lot of it.

I learn a lot about things I was only vaguely aware of in the '90s from random magazine clippings/media people like Jason Scott and Anatoly Shashkin share.

https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic

https://twitter.com/textfiles

So much of this is in the Internet Archive. Think of what it means to someone 100 years from now trying to piece together an understanding of this era. How much could you find from just 5-10 years ago without it? Most of those websites are offline, the magazines long gone, the companies absorbed into another with no interest in history.

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