Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died | Hacker News Reader

Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died

pgdp.net

652 pointsron_k105 comments

I'm shocked and saddened to hear this. Greg was a deep source of knowledge and support as I started and shepherded Standard Ebooks. He was generous with his time and experience, and unbelievably patient with me, some guy he had never heard of or met before who was just another cold-email in what must have been an endless stream in his inbox. We should all aspire to his high spirit of camaraderie, charity, and kindness. The world has lost a champion of both literature and the free web.

Why are there no unique numbers assigned to Standard Ebook's ebooks? I understand that there is a cost associated with ISBNs, but it's very irritating to not have something that identifies them uniquely. Most (all?) aren't even in Worldcat, so I can't use OCLC numbers for that purpose either.

> very irritating

I think it’s possible to express this in a less caustic way. Because Standard E-books is high quality and free of charge right?

the ebook identifier uniquely identifies every ebook. standard ebook ebooks use the url as their unique identifier

Those are poor identifiers. A numeric or short alphanumeric identifier that can be part of the filename is important... I have as many as 5 different editions of the same title so title+author doesn't do the trick. Nor am I putting a url into the filename, couldn't if I wanted to as there are disallowed characters in a url in every filesystem I've ever heard of. How difficult is it to keep a incrementing catalog number like Project Gutenberg does? Anything that doesn't have a proper unique just seems unprofessional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier

This isn't a solution either. Not sure why you think it is. Here's how I name files, just as an example:

    Meditationes de Prima Philosophia - GTNB•0023306 (2007) - Descartes, René (aut)

    Meditations on First Philosophy - 9780203417621 (2013) - Descartes, René (aut); Haldane, Elizabeth (trl); Ross, G. R. T. (trl) & Tweyman, Stanley (edt,wfw)

Where and how should I put a URI in there, especially considering that they at minimum need the colon (:), which is a problematic character in filenames on NTFS/HFS/APFS/XFS? They're not exactly disallowed, but they create a resource fork or some shit and so it doesn't behave as you would expect. If Standard Ebooks just started numbering their books, then I'd slap the STBK• in front of the number and use that. They're not in Worldcat, or I could use OCLC numbers (but it shouldn't be other people's job to keep the catalog of their own books).

choose your favorite hash

    hash(<dc:identifier>)

Hashes are too long, aren't human-recognizable as to meaning, etc. I don't want half-assed workarounds. They need to uniquely number their books.

- they don’t need to do anything to conform to your arbitrary organization choices

- hashes are as long or short as you need them to be

- publication timestamp is in every ebook’s metadata, is almost guaranteed to be unique, monotonically increases, and has actual semantic meaning compared to an isbn or oclc

>they don’t need to do anything to conform to your arbitrary organization choices

They don't need to. It'd be smart. It's not "arbitrary". It's fucking library science.

>hashes are as long or short as you need them to be

Hashes might uniquely identify a computer file, but they don't uniquely identify an edition/release of a published book. Some jackass on libgen decides to tweak a single byte, now it has a new hash... but it's not a new edition.

>publication timestamp is in every ebook’s metadata

As someone who takes a look at every internal opf file, no... they're not in every ebook.

You're suggesting I go to the extra trouble of doing a job they could do easily, when I can only do it poorly, and I don't know why... because the first person to respond was a dumbass and thought I was attacking him? I swear, 99% of humans are still monkeys.

You don't need to hash file contents (though that is often a useful thing to do). You can hash e.g. the URL that was earlier claimed to be the canonical identifier. Running it through your favorite hash function fixes your complaints about file names (choose your favorite hash function such that it is not too long and only outputs allowed characters).

Ah. The url, so I can substitute one difficult-for-human-readability with another difficult-for-human-readability, both of which are excessively long and opaque-by-design.

>choose your favorite hash function such that it is not too long

ISBN's 13 digits is about as long as is tolerable. Any time there is a list of authors six names long (academic titles) along with a subtitle, it's very easy to bump up against max filename size.

This isn't a problem I can solve on my own. Just trying to bring attention to it. My solution thus far is to just avoid publishers who are so unprofessional as to not provide numbers. It's not tough, Project Gutenberg does it. Anyone can do it. If you're some amateur whose entire catalog is 8 books published, you say "this book is 1, and this book is 2" etc, and it's a done deal. Again, I don't expect anyone to use ISBNs (in the US, you have to pay for them unless you're one of the big 5 publishing houses), but just use your own for god's sake.

Hashes are not excessively long unless you choose to make it so. They might be opaque/random if you want, or they might not. "Remove all special characters and keep only the first 5 characters with space padding" is a string hash function. "Keep only the first 5 vowels with space padding" is a string hash function.

Here's a friendly AI generated hash function to give you an opaque 13 digit number if you're into that:

echo -n "$URL" | sha1sum | awk '{print $1}' | xxd -r -p | od -An -t u8 | tr -d ' \n' | cut -c1-13

For example, for https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/denis-diderot/the-indiscre... you get the ID 4897562473051.

It looks like their ebook sources are all published in git repos online, so you could check out the repos, get the timestamp of the initial commits, and do a monotonic ID on that if you wanted. You could also contribute the change back to them if you think it's something others would benefit from.

Have a little respect, for fucks sake. This does not belong here.

> no unique numbers

This suggests a misunderstanding of the Standard Ebooks process, which allows continual incremental corrections to the authoritative source of individual books (in XHTML, on GitHub). So, a truly unique identifier would only be valid to the production output(s) from a particular state of the Git-repo sources.

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/report-errors

Recall also that final user content is made available in multiple formats, currently at least six. Example:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/geronimo/geronimos-story-o...

Asynchronous to the correction process, Standard Ebooks updates its own production tools. So if an individual book's content requires correction, should the "respin" be done with TOT tools, or with the versions available at time of first publication? Disclaimer: I don't actually know which is current practice -- but using the TOT tool suite is obviously vastly easier.

For most practical purposes, I'd suggest the git-commit date, along with short substrings of author name and title, would suffice.

>This suggests a misunderstanding of the Standard Ebooks process, which allows continual incremental corrections to the authoritative source of individual books (in XHTML, on GitHub). So, a truly unique identifier would only be valid to the production output(s) from a particular state of the Git-repo sources.

Well, one of us has a misunderstanding. Just because the printer strikes off the printing number from the colophon for each subsequent printing, they don't actually issue a new ISBN. That stays the same. If they wanted to also include a version number too, I wouldn't mind that as well, but it's not nearly as necessary as this. I use the year as a rough version number in the file names as well.

>Recall also that final user content is made available in multiple formats, currently at least six. Example:

I don't need them to issue a number per file format, but if they want to... that doesn't bother me. That's sort of self-evident which of the formats it is, after all.

>I'd suggest the git-commit date, along with short substrings of author name and title, would suffice.

It doesn't. A number of authors have at one time or another have released books with similar or identical titles that are not the same book. This is the trouble... someone who uses or would use the books is asking for something that is missing but easy to supply, and instead of a "well gee, we never considered that, let us think about it" I have a dozen assholes crawling out of the woodwork to say "no, you're doing it wrong".

I need unique identifiers that are human readable. I just do. The world discovered this need for books before you were born. They invented a global standard, even. There is an entire field of science out there about this, that you seem to be ignorant of even existing. I've been doing this for years, and I keep bumping up against it. But you think it can be solved because you used git and know about hashes or whatever, and it's just like what you deal with in your software development job!

RIP. Project Gutenberg and IMSLP are two of my favourite websites. Every January, when new works enter the public domain, I go and download a bunch of books and sheet music. HN readers, let's not forget to donate to these websites that keep the Internet worth surfing.

While new works do trickle into the public domain every year, it's worth noting that copyright status is not currently the main bottleneck to public domain cultural works being made widely available to the public under F.A.I.R. (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. There's a huge amount of extant literature and music in the public domain that someone has scanned and perhaps put up online as raw page images, but no one took the effort to transcribe/index/classify it yet and thus make it easily available for most uses - such that it might as well not exist as far as most people are concerned. This is where efforts like Project Gutenberg can be especially valuable.

That's true, but its framing sort of rests on an assumption of fungibility that doesn't really hold. There are many important cultural works whose copyright status is currently the main bottleneck to their being made widely available to the public.

Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube videos had zero views — not even the uploader had watched the video on the site. Most blogs have only one reader or a few readers. Most software projects have only one user.

Look at the things that someone has taken the effort to transcribe/index/classify, like the 9,785 books published in English in 01927 with full view available on the Hathi Trust website whose titles contain the word "A": https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&...

• The trustee and the A. L. A.

• The influence of hydrogen ion acitivity upon the stability of vitamin A

• The national cyclopedia of American biography : Current volumes A-

• A study of English drama on the stage / by Walter Prichard Eaton.

• The nations of the world : a pageant designed to show their contributions to civilization / prepared by the faculty of Public school 53, Buffalo, New York ; illustrated

• A book of shanties

• A book of prefaces / by H. L. Mencken

• A January birthday party / by Jack Bechdolt & George Illian

This last is a sort of instruction manual for throwing children's birthday parties. In January. It includes things like a cake recipe, suggested menus ("Hot Fricasseed Chicken. Hot Biscuits. Cranberry Sauce. Birthday Cake. Ice Cream. Chocolate Milk Shake. Candies. Nuts.") and tips for hanging crepe paper from plaster walls into which you cannot drive a nail or screw.

This kind of schlock, in aggregate, is immensely valuable as a window into how life has changed over the past century, but this particular book is extremely replaceable. If you were allocating limited resources to providing access to either A January Birthday Party or something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would be criminal to choose the former over the latter.

Yet that is what the current copyright laws require us to do.

This is not to deprecate Jack Bechdolt and George Illian; writing a schlocky easy-craft-tips newspaper column or book with cake recipes and unoriginal children's game ideas is a perfectly fine way to spend your time, much like baking a trout or unclogging a toilet. Surely publishing the book was, overall, beneficial to society, even if only slightly. Nothing suggests that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 was anything other than a perfectly decent person. But that doesn't mean that preservation of the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.

I'd say that about 90% of the items in the Hathi Trust query result I linked above are of similarly insignificant value.

Even cultural works that have some enduring value on their own (I suspect The national cyclopedia of American biography and A book of shanties fall in this category) are not fungible with unavailable ones—no quantity of books of 19th-century folk tales forms an adequate substitute for the second edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms¹, nor vice versa.

______

¹ I was dismayed to be unable to find the second edition when I was writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 the other day, and I believe that this problem is mostly a result of its copyright status.

> But that doesn't mean that ... the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.

Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.

For a couple of different reasons.

The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.

The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people.

If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter.

This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.

Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.

>Harry Potter('s)... influence will continue as long as there are people.

That was a fun sentence!

What do you see as being the predominant, near-universal metaphors and narratives supplied by Rambo? That's an absolutely fascinating point of view.

I haven't watched it, so I may not be the best person to answer that.

However, I remember in about 01990 seeing an episode of Alien Nation (also fictional) reference a famous scene from it as one of the extraterrestrial characters is struggling to assimilate into human culture and construct a gender identity for himself (https://subslikescript.com/series/Alien_Nation-96531/season-... https://youtu.be/AqiPbBxLpNU):

> Like some Newcomer men. They don't feel truly masculine until after they've given birth.

> I'm afraid, George, that giving birth doesn't quite cut it. You ever see movies? Remember Sylvester Stallone? That beefy fellow with the headband, always had a big gun? Remember that scene in First Blood when Stallone falls off a cliff? He has this huge gash in his arm and he sews himself up. See, that's considered being a man.

> Tell you the truth, Matt, I find his movies simplistic. Why does everything have to be so complicated with you?

Later in the script the extraterrestrial references this in an unintentionally hilarious way, provoking a concerned response from IIRC his wife:

> If I wanted I could fall off a cliff and sew myself up.

> George, have you had your lead supplements today?

Aside from its lampshaded effect on popular US conceptions of masculinity in general, the Rambo fantasy seems to have been so popular among, uh, boys who like to cosplay as soldiers, that the knife featured in the movie became the dominant form of cosplay knife for many years, if we believe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3QiP5LNDE. Some poorly-thought-out regulation here in Argentina has criminalized the possession of knives made to look similar, specifically having a sawblade on the back.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FirstBlood1982 discusses some of the popular literary tropes that appear in it, including "Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene" (which affected the popular perception of Vietnam veterans such as the fictional protagonist); "Affably Evil", in a context that some people think of whenever they hear about a police manhunt on the news; "Asshole Victim", in which the most unpleasant person coincidentally suffers great misfortune; "Break the Haughty", in which the arrogant sheriff turns out to be a coward; "Trauma Button", whose shallow depiction of PTSD was the pattern for the popular understanding of PTSD for many years; and of course "Invincible Hero".

A lot of these are not "near-universal" in the sense of "applicable in nearly every situation", but they are "near-universal" in the sense that everybody has either seen the movie, or seen other movies made by people who were influenced by the movie, or heard stories from people who were influenced by one of those movies, etc.

Some of them are applicable in nearly every situation. Whenever someone thinks that bad things won't happen to them because they're a nice person, for example, they're unconsciously believing in the puddle of ideas around "Asshole Victim", and Rambo's instance is just one drop of blood in that puddle. More insidiously, when people learn that someone has suffered misfortune, "Asshole Victim" subconsciously prompts them to search for reasons they deserved it.

Of course it's easiest for me to identify the thought-patterns that result from tropes I dissent from, not the ones that reflect (as I misunderstand it) Reality.

" Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves"

I did read the books, but I don't think I have really encountered the use of "Muggles, horcrux, mudblood" in every day life, nor do I personally feel they shaped my metaphors or narratives on how I see the world. Frankenstein is much more catchy for the metaphor of the man made monster for example. What does Harry Potter stands for?

i don’t have a strong view either way, but as a data point: I've heard the word “muggle” used in casual conversation and i don’t run in circles where harry potter is considered required reading.

The young woman I was standing behind at the bus stop tonight had the Deathly Hallows logo tattooed on her harm.

What does Harry Potter represent? You can't replace a book-length narrative with a short phrase.

Well, possibly I miss something, because I wouldn't recognize a Deathly Hallows logo if I see one. (I assume this is rather from the movies?). But there are occasional references to Harry Potter I have seen.

Apart from that, I would say Harry Porter represents some things.

The glass eyed bullied nerd, that steps into a magical realm to become a superhero. In general, the concept of a fantastic magical realm hidden besides this dull concrete reality. But those are old tropes I would think and unlike with Matrix(blue pill, red pill), Star Wars (may the force be with you, the dark side), Lord of the rings (The ring of power that corrupts), I don't see such strong concepts coming from Harry Porter that

"supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them"

Just my impression, I don't have a strong opinion here, rather curious what I might miss.

It's not the main thrust; it's the details.

I think you're right that the Deathly Hallows logo was introduced by the films.

On her arm!

No comment on the rest of the list, but anything by H. L. Mencken is likely to be a banger.

Yeah, it's probably more enjoyable than the rest of that list put together. Still, prefaces? Generally I try to avoid reading those.

Heh. That's why I'm intrigued by it! My bet is that it's some kind of satire based on that (almost universal) avoidance. Regardless, Mencken's wicked clever, and less-known than I think he deserves to be.

Comedy is often somewhat dependent on shared cultural assumptions, although that Sumerian fart joke is still kind of funny.

I find the no views on half of youtube videos to be difficult to accept unless counting non-public. If we filtered for a 5 seconds + perhaps that would fix that.

I would if youtube would prune anything without a view in the future.

Well, of course, you've never seen any of the videos that have zero views, and you're more than a million times less likely to see a video with one view than a video with a million views. Definitely the YouTube recommender will recommend it at least a million times less often, and I suspect much more than that.

This kind of selection bias pops up in a lot of contexts. When you ride the bus, for example, you're disproportionately more likely to be on a bus that's over half full than on a bus that's mostly empty. And most of your friends probably have more friends than you do. (Not just you. I'm not saying you're unfriendly or asocial. It's true for most people.)

The guy I was talking to, on the other hand, could just run a database query over all the videos, and he did.

It's possible that YouTube has pruned those zero-views videos since I talked to him.

You just opened my eyes to IMSLP and I would like to thank you for that. For years I have been chasing music scores that were just the right level for my kids.

If you are part of PG or closely related to Greg Newby I strongly encourage you to email info@rsync.net at your earliest convenience.

I will watch that inbox personally - please do be in touch as soon as possible.

Please also accept my condolences and best wishes - I've known Greg since the earliest HOPE conventions.

Thank you, rsync, from a community member.

Every year, Project Gutenberg becomes a little closer to giving us access to every book worth reading, often in multiple editions and languages. It’s a treasure.

Recently competed in ultramarathons and has now died from cancer at age 60. Very sad.

There are new tests coming that will catch cancer early so hopefully it’s not late stage, increasing one’s survival rates.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/grail-stock-price-cancer-st...

I’m about Greg’s age and I had colon cancer last year. Now I can’t unsee cancer in the media.

I'm at high risk for colon cancer & had my first screening last year after putting it off. For those who've not done it yet: it's really no big deal. The most challenging part is drinking the fluids. Please get screened: caught early, it's easily curable, but it definitely kills.

Ask about the Sutab pills instead of the fluids.

Yes, the colonoscopy is a breeze, especially compared to the surgery and chemotherapy. The chemotherapy was definitely harsh. Fortunately, I was a candidate for only 3 months of treatment.

My wife got this from her doctor as an alternative to a colonoscopy (in the US): https://www.cologuard.com/

It's an at-home collection stool test. It seems like a super easy and cheap first step before getting a colonoscopy.

What is the difference in accuracy or other tradeoffs with that compared to a proper colonoscopy? Wasn't clear from the landing page, but I'm guessing there is something, at least not as high accuracy.

Definitely get a colonoscopy. Colon cancer is the one cancer you can detect before it’s a problem. I felt a little dumb once I found out I waited a few years too long then needed surgery and chemo.

That liquid biopsy should be used to detect the numerous other cancers.

I took one of those. I was negative but definitely had a tumor. My doctor said you have to take the home test every year.

It’s no replacement for a colonoscopy. They’ll snip those polyps before they grow to become cancerous.

None of the cancer screening programs have been able to demonstrate an effect on life expectancy, neither colonoscopies nor mammographies.

From what I’ve seen, studies haven’t done a good job of actually testing for testing lifetime expectancy.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11047044/

“In conclusion, the statement that cancer screenings do not save lives cannot be properly drawn from the Bretthauer's et al. meta-analysis because lifetime gains are likely underestimated and based on uncertain all-cause mortality estimates.

…

Lifetime gains estimated for the screened group from all-cause mortality reduction is a misleading measure and should be avoided because it implies a benefit for all persons in the screening group, including those not affected by the target cancer.”

https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...

“Although gaps persist between the full potential benefit and benefits considering adherence, existing cancer screening technologies have offered significant value to the US population. Technologies and policy interventions that can improve adherence and/or expand the number of cancer types tested will provide significantly more value and save significantly more patient lives.”

Somewhat related: I met Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, many years ago:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2011/Sep/michael-hart-has-passe...

Genuinely saddened by this. I had Dr. Newby for a Linux admin class in college in the late 90s and it was one of the courses that got me interested in systems administration. I remember him as patient, kind, and enthusiastic about open-source and the possibilities Linux represented for changing the Internet.

I meet Greg when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University and he was earning his PhD. I helped out a bit with some of the graphics programming for his thesis. Greg was a class act, always patient and kind. It was super helpful to me when I went to UIUC for graduate schools and he showed up as a faculty member there; he knew how to get access to campus resources and was more willing to help me than faculty in my own department. He was a model RIP.

Met him at HAL 2001, volunteered together a bit there. I think he was heading the speakers herald team I was part of. First encounter with the hacker conference scene, he guided me wisely.

Patient and kind indeed.

He's the reason I kept going around European hacking / free software events. I owe him cultural discoveries, long lasting friendships and tech partnerships. Very saddened by this news.

So far the thread is full of similar interactions with him.

That person changed so many lives, by his contributions to culture and technology but more importantly (?) because he had tremendous impacts on the lives of many people he took time to interact with.

I know that these threads are always full of "this recently deceased people made the world a better place". I lived with him 4 days 24 years ago so I can't say I knew him...but I know I wouldn't be writing this about more "famous" people I interacted with.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

I am very sad to hear this. Greg was my mentor during my first internship at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks Alaska back in the very early 2000s.

Thank you to Mr Greg Newby for this project. RIP

Newby did an enormous amount to help Project Gutenberg, but he was not its CEO or founder. Probably if you want to thank one person for the project it should be Michael Hart (PBUH). As WP explains:

> Newby got involved with Project Gutenberg in 1991 or 1992, became friends with founder Michael S. Hart, and was "undoubtedly the most consequential volunteer", according to a scholar writing about the history of the project.[10][21] In 2000 or 2001, Newby formed the associated nonprofit organization, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, and became its director and CEO.[10][22][2] He also worked to integrate Distributed Proofreaders into the project.[21] He was a founding trustee of the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation at its formation in July 2006.[23][24] He led improvements to the technology platform underlying Project Gutenberg[25] and navigated challenges related to the copyright status of books in different countries.[26]

Your citation appears to directly contradict your argument. How did this happen?

Sad that my first thought was "AI".

My citation explains that Michael Hart was the founder of PG, and the foundation that Newby headed didn't even exist until 02000. Newby would never in his life have wanted people to think that he had founded PG!

I've edited my comment above to make it clearer what its central argument is, since you seem to have misunderstood either the argument or the quote.

Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.

I'm generally pretty good at figuring out even the most abstruse jokes, but not getting this one. Care to explain?

It wasn't that abstruse 15 years ago.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kanye-interrupts-imma-let-you...

The difference, in my view, is that Taylor Swift wasn't being incorrectly given credit for Beyoncé's video.

ok yeah I knew the reference I just wasn't getting how they thought it applied here.

At one point this morning, this thread was about 50% posts by someone repeatedly pointing out that it wasn't the founder of Project Gutenberg who had passed away and being maybe a little precious about writing their dates with a leading zero.

Imo, it was a valid criticism.

On the award of her Grammy, Kanye West grabbed the microphone and said this to Taylor Swift. I think Newby is Swift in this analogy.

Edit: MTV Video Music Award, not Grammy.

Wow I can’t believe this happened!

Just wait until you find out who won the US presidential election.

I can't tell if sarcasm, but he was very drunk, and it became one of his first big scandals. He's had so many more after that it pales in comparison.

I do not think that GP's comment was meant that way. GP simply wanted to clear up a misunderstanding that was apparently created by the renaming of this thread to "Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, has died", which has been undone since. I am sure GP did not mean to detract from Greg Newby's contributions to the project.

I will cherish his email response to me when I emailed PG about a donation issue a few years ago and he helped resolve the situation. I remain grateful to PG for their amazing work. RIP Greg.

I did some volunteer work with/for Greg a lifetime. He will be missed, and the world is a better place due to his work.

Greg Newby was also very actively involved in the production of the HOPE Conference. If there's a broadcast tonight, Off The Hook (AKA The Hacker Radio Show) show on WBAI (99.5 FM in NY) and wbai.org will almost certainly be in his honor.

RIP

Well that's a bummer, not even terribly old.

I never met the guy but I love Gutenberg. Back before I had any money it was always this constant force that would be guaranteed to provide something entertaining.

Is this the Greg Newby that worked at UNC in the late 90s? If so, I worked closely with him as a student and fellow traveler.

Sad. I grew up in Champaign-Urbana and remember attending a talk he was giving about Prairienet.

RIP. Thanks for making this world a tiny bit better

We need to open up all .pdf files. Free the world. I believe information is a human right. (I am not at all against payment for original work, mind you. My point is that information at the end of the day has to be accessible to every human being, without exception. Wikipedia ALL the things.)

Can we get a black bar for Dr. Newby?

Just to clarify, Greg Newby was not the CEO of Project Gutenberg, which was founded in 01971, but of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, which he founded in 02000 or 02001. It has contributed immensely to Project Gutenberg, but they are not the same thing. Newby would never have attempted to take credit for PG.

Edit: the post title has been fixed now.

You got me curious about the leading zero.

Oh, it's just a bit of fun: https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

You'd be amazed at how seriously people can take things like date formats sometimes.

I love how each HN post is a gateway to miscellaneous obscure knowledge with a technical point behind it

I find it improper that we count from 2025 years ago.

We should count from the beginning of time.

It's October 22, 14 billionish. Been that way for a while.

I've become an unironic proponent of HE, the Human Era. For CE dates, we just add 10000 (I'm writing this from 12025). But for BCE dates, they're subtracted and it makes things so much clearer when it comes to telling how long ago something was. E.g. the sundial was invented around 6000 HE, steel was developed around 9000 HE.

Kurtzgesagt has a really great video about the subject: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs

There's also a timeline in HE that covers many major historical events: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/71a711_295e365a6ec64d6ca7f87e...

It's better to call this Holocene Era even though Holocene didn't exactly start in 10,000 BCE, because modern humans were around for a long time prior to the 10,000 BCE epoch. Some people have proposed 8,000 BCE as an epoch, styling this "After the development of Agriculture". According to this epoch, we'd currently be in year 10025 A.D.A., which is neat.

An unfortunate suggestion of that nomenclature is that it suggests that "humanity" came into existence only 12025 years ago, which would mean that the creatures before that time were all non-human. This is especially unfortunate given that it strongly implies that, for example, either Khoisan people, Australian people, or European people are human, but not more than one of the three, since they diverged genetically before that date. While, on one level, this is merely a semantic issue about the definition of the word "human", on another level it mirrors the ideological justifications for mass enslavement and genocide that caused historically unprecedented atrocities in the 20th century (unsurpassed until Mao surpassed them), because most people's ethical systems accord special privileges to "humans", for example holding that killing any number of nonhumans is justifiable if it saves even one human's life, or, in most cases, even if it merely provides them with meat to eat.

While I don't believe the Kurzgesagt staff endorse genocide and cannibalism, I think they may not have clearly thought out the implications of their choice of terminology.

Premack's timeline that you link does not make the same error, calling it the "Holocene Era", as Emiliani did.

That just sounds like Anno Mundi with extra steps. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Mundi

1. Pick an epoch date so far in the past that nothing of interest could possibly have taken place before it.

2. ???

3. Profit!

The two problems with this idea are, first, that everyone argues about the exact value of the epoch; and second, that something always ends up having happened before that.

You can also invert the scheme, to get the Before Present system. This has the same two problems (s/before/after/).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present

My birthday was October 17th, 14000000005, but after some new physics estimates, it turns out it’s really October 13th, 14000000008.

The time we will collectively waste for the next 8k years typing that extra 0 will not weigh up against the benefit.

There's an xkcd in the making here, if it doesn't exist already.

Long term optimist perhaps

Are the years intended to be read in octal?

According to javascript, 01971 is just 1971. Meanwhile, 01671 is 953.

Man! JS never stops trolling you.

That’s a ZipCode.

It's one of these Long Now things. The goal is to get people to think in long term time frames.

They’re intended to derail every thread that includes them into discussions about this stupid date format, thus wasting lifetimes of person-hours.

It’s surely an effort by misanthropes who want the worst for humanity. If it’s coming from any benign motivation, then it’s totally misguided.

I'm sorry, but this reads somewhat misanthropical itself. Let people have some fun?

They’re trolls. They’ve been doing this for years. It’s just trolling.

Yes, the title has been changed. The one I posted clearly said "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation”.

Can you change it back? Currently it says "Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, has died," which seems to be misleading people.

I can’t, sorry, there’s no edit button, I guess because of low karma. Maybe the mods (or who changed it) can revert it to the old title.

They seem to have done so now.

NB: You can email mods with such requests after the edit window has expired, or for submissions by others.

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