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Comment by aosaigh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised this post opens with a link to /r/DataHoarder. Hot take ... I understand the sentiment that you can't trust content on the web to be there forever, but there is also the other side of the argument which is: compulsively saving data is a waste of time and it introduces a cognitive overhead that you'd be better off without.

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> If it's worth saving

Idk, I think if it's worth saving it's worth saving and the only person who can determine if it's "worth it" is me.

I agree that some people have an obsession where they save data that isn't worth it, but r/DataHoarder is a great place with a lot of information on building and maintaining large data systems for hobbyists, regardless of what you actually store.

Actually, “future you” will know even better in many cases.

Also, some people other than yourself might turn out to be a better predictor of “future you” than “current you”.

So many people are hyper individualistic and forget just how predictable individuals can be to others!

When I find a blog post/article I'm interested in, I save it to my laptop with the SingleFile extension and I take quick notes as well I write my thoughts about it in org-mode. It has a very low cognitive threshold and I can always read it back in the browser. I'm find if not all the outbound links are still working, I'd just like to read back sometimes.

This is almost exactly what I do too, though I also throw the link in the wayback machine so it's easier to share with others should the source go down (and to be courteous to any like-minded fellows who also wanted to see the content, but unfortunately came too late)

I'd disagree a bit there. I do something similar, saving interesting webpages, and it's really really nice being able to quickly search for something that I halfway remember a few months down the line.

I'm not saving everything, and it just gets stuffed unedited into a folder that I can search. Not too much in the cognitive overhead department.

Until run you out of space and/or storage bill is too expensive.

if you're storing text that is realistically not going to be a problem.

If I read something and then remember it 5 years later because it becomes relevant, I want to be able to find it. It's not even that I will look at it, I just want to have the option if I want to.

> I understand the sentiment that you can't trust content on the web to be there forever

The thing is, people say this, and I am sure for some amount of content it's true. However I eventually realised I have never had a single issue if required, in retrieving literally any piece of software or digital content after the fact from somewhere on the internet.

It's pretty much why I care so little about what happens to my steam library when Gaben kicks it. If I get the urge to replay something in twenty years that I paid $3 dollars for and its suddenly gone, i'll just go find it elsewhere.

Once I had gotten pretty much everything I wanted from running a large scale storage system (largely to learn the in's and outs of linux/general storage concepts) I pretty much just gave it up. Its a lot of money to hold onto things that at this point, I pretty much know i'll always be able to recover elsewhere. I'd rather someone else pay the electricity/drive cost for me.

That’s only possible because some people are hoarders who save this data or software and put it out there..

> That’s only possible because some people are hoarders who save this data or software and put it out there..

Sure. And I appreciate it. Like I appreciate the internet archive etc.

There is no comparable alternative to the Internet Archive though. They've gotten involved in several lawsuits and their future is far from guaranteed. They're an incredibly important organization, but I think it's too important of a project to be limited to one organization, or even one country or region of the earth. A solar flare could destroy a lot of history.

I don't know that the economics of having multiple Internet Archive-like organizations is currently feasible (I imagine getting funding for one of them is hard enough), but even a partial offline mirror hosted someplace else would be nice. Maybe to save space they could take the oldest version of a page, the newest, and the midmost version timewise, discarding all other versions. They could also heavily compress images, video and audio to save storage space (would increase processing costs, but if willing to throw out quality, could compress quickly and still save a bunch of space. E.g. downscale all videos to 480p and use veryfast preset and CRF 28 with ffmpeg. Even 240p is a lot better than nothing. A pixelated form of history is better than no history.)

I have the opposite and sadly accelerating experience.

Information is removed or altered constantly and usually, I cannot find anything on the Internet Archive either. For whatever reason WayBackMachine, for my use cases, is nearly always blank.

But I look for semi-obscure publications and statements from (nation)states and organizations.

An archivist saves everything, because it's impossible to anticipate what future historians will need or want; they are working from a context you cannot access. You can winnow down a large dataset to it's relevant subset, but you can't study what wasn't preserved.

I agree, but I also think that data hoarding is similar to regular hoarding. All of this content and information seems like it could be useful, invaluable even. It's a problem in a world where we have excess to sort through all that information and only focus on what's important right now.

Nobody is taking their data hoard and feeding it into a personal AI ?

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