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> Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to research something could go and look through those archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but it's the only one with its breadth and age.

Newspapers very frequently maintain and provide public access to their own online archives now. That's also not a function the IA is even especially good at--its coverage is spotty, and unless you have an old URL, it's very hard to find stuff in the IA.

The one unique thing the IA does is have is a broad and deep collection of internet ephemera.

> Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

Isn't that kind of mundane? The web was well-established by 1999, and the hardware of that era was literally designed and built to serve websites like this.

Because they were mostly scams and people (and regulators) got wise?

> But this gratified my intellectual curiosity.

How so, exactly?

Also, what's your definition of "intellectual curiosity"?

> It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.

I do think the label applies to researchers. And except for the case of "tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore," researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods (which may be a harder, but still easy enough, especially if it's your job).

I'm not saying it's not valuable, I'm saying not that many people would even notice, let alone care, if it disappeared.

You may personally be one of the people who cares about the IA, or know a lot of people who care, but if you go to a shopping mall six months after the IA shuts down and ask people about it at random, you'd find that level of knowledge and caring is unusual. It's not the kind of too-big-to-fail that the government would take interest in.

> I'd extend this to say, if we don't abolish (c)opywrong, we're screwed.

Then consider us "screwed," because what you propose has a snowball's chance in hell of actually happening.

Also, too many software engineers overreact to some reformable problems with the IP system with burn-it-all down radicalism. I think your proposals would cause more harm than good. They'd likely stop most media creation that you're used to*, and what's left with either be cheap (think fanfiction) or under tighter lockdown than any DRM you've ever seen.

* Tell me, who's going to invest 10-200 million dollars to make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without copyright?

What people need to be working on is to create a peer/successor organization that can take a copy of its archive and carry on its core functions, not just a static archive on a server somewhere.

>> You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture".

> The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.

Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture that makes a lot of money.

I think what the GP is referring to as "culture" is high culture--the kind of stuff that is not popular and requires subsidies and special effort to sustain.

> I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so.

> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.

If there is, the Internet Archive isn't it.

Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.

> In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.

> Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.

Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.

Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains, for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet Archive, but the it's the IA that fucked up here. They imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK'd the "Emergency Library" or the leaders that refused to listen to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.

> His wife was messaging the chief of staff trying to pressure him to overthrow the election.

Exactly! Husbands are responsible for the actions of their wives, so he should be impeached for them; especially since it will help us flip the court.

> People do this every day without ChatGPT

Commit libel and defamation? Sure, but that doesn't excuse this in the slightest.

It also speaks to the reliability of ChatGPT.

>> But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here.

> We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days.

Exactly. Many software engineers have this weird misunderstanding of law that seems to come from misapplying mathematical standards to the legal system. A law isn't a fucking proof, it doesn't have to be 100% airtight, completely preventing all cases of the undesired behavior to work and be valuable.

I can't reply to your other comment because it's dead. However, I wanted to respond to this:

> And FWIW, every single small city I checked around 2 hours outside of Chicago has property crime rates worse than Chicago! Isn't that amazing? No, it isn't, unless you're deluded enough to believe their nonsense.

There's a lot of Midwest outside of that region. Even if what you say is true*, it's a skewed sample that can't reasonably be assumed to represent the whole.

* Which I doubt, especially there can be confounding effects in whatever statistics you're looking at, like differing reporting rates (which was already called out in this thread or a similar one, w.r.t San Francisco).

> Using what they had on hand vs buying a 2nd thermometer for a one time use. Hacker News of all places should embrace option 1.

Why? Time is valuable too. If I had to do the same thing and was more interested in getting the job done than building a Rube Goldberg machine, I'd totally buy a second thermometer that's suited to what I'm trying to do.

This is an odd approach. Very Rube Goldberg.

I suppose they might have just wanted to whip something up using the equipment they had at hand, but you could easily solve the same problem with and off-the shelf device:

https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Prime-4-Channel-Thermometer-T...

Which isn't any more expensive than the thermometer they used:

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-K-type-Thermocouple-Thermomet...

> It's pretty new, but AFAIK only works for Show HNs.

Seems like it would be a great feature for too-long titles, too.

> Do you really believe that this public discourse occurred on a public train after a theft? Do you think they had a lively debate in the commons about how to solve crime?

> I'm a bit surprised people are seriously believing this. This is someone's shower thoughts six hours later when they strawmanned some ridiculous positions to caricaturize "opponents".

You're trying to portray the story as fabricated, but that's likely wrong. IMHO, it's more likely exaggerated (e.g. there probably wasn't a "lively debate in the commons," more likely comments directed at no one in particular morphing two opinionated randos getting mad at each other).

>> So if you are an immigrant & safety is a priority, yeah there are many towns in the midwest southwest etc. where you can be very safe. Houses are quite cheap & I was able to buy my house with straight cash, but ironically that cash was earned in SF!

> Like, where is this low-income "suburb" (two hours from a major center...) that has no crime? As someone who grew up in a smaller town in the rust belt, I find their claim hysterical.

He didn't say it was "low-income," just cheaper compared to SF. I grew up in a smaller city in the Midwest (four hours from a major center), and his account rings true to me. There's more to the Midwest than the rust belt.

>> We need to be way tougher on crime. Immediate life sentences without parole for murder, ending catch+release for property theft.

> If you want there to be less crime you have to treat it as the social class problem it is and find ways to get people access to other ways of living, or if they're ill (mentally or otherwise) get them care and shelter.

IMHO, you probably have to do both. There do exist people who are just antisocial, who don't have the self-control to stop themselves from committing crimes or who lack the moral framework to avoid crime if it would otherwise satisfy a goal. And even with crime was driven by "social class problems," even if you solve all those there's still the problem of transitioning from one regime to the other, and dealing with people who's habits and mindset from the old regime keep them committing crimes in the new one.

> Capital punishment for murder. You take a life, yours is gone. On top of justice, you don’t stick the taxpayer with lifelong care of a murderer.

One problem with that idea is that even murder convictions are not even close to 100% accurate, so you'd end up killing lots of innocent people.

I had no idea you could submit a post with a link and body-text. Is that new, or did I just never notice?

> Or... maybe it's not about you! Maybe it's about the fact that people in the US and Canada who do want a suburban lifestyle already have a continent full of car-centric developments to choose from, whereas people who would prefer a "car-less urban paradise", if they could find one

Sorry, not really. If they limited themselves to advocating for areas designed so car ownership wasn't so necessary in accordance with local preferences, and were willing to let others live-and-let-live, that would be fine. Unfortunately, that's rarely the case. Those ideas are frequently coupled with dripping disdain for suburbs and anyone who prefers that lifestyle, and/or an attitude that views personal car ownership as some kind of moral affront that in time must snuffed out, etc.

> Zoning requirements are why so many businesses are "a box in a parking lot". When you see a sign in a restaurant that says "Maximum Occupancy X" - that occupancy limit is set by how many parking spaces they have.

That's completely and totally wrong. Maximum Occupancy is set by fire codes, based on how many exists there are and how quickly people can evacuate in case of fire.

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/08/maximum-occ...

> I guess if I lived in NY or London I might get rid of the car. But to be honest that's never entered my head here. I need the car to get to work. And yeah, there's parking there. But if there was no parking there, I'd still need car for everything else.

Those types seem to want you to endure whatever hardship is necessary to use public transit and/or a bike for everything, or at least loudly head disdain on the suburbs wish you could join them in some car-less urbanist paradise. They're not really interested in you maintaining whatever lifestyle you have that requires a car, because they disdain cars and the lifestyles that need them.

> If the owners of dpreview and Book Depository wouldn't have sold their business to amazon, then maybe both would be still around for a long time. Don't blame Amazon, blame the former owners.

That's a bizarre and kinda awful sentiment. If we're going to focus on absolving Amazon, we might as well just reach for the standard cop-out of blaming consumers.

Amazon continuing to operate Abebooks lets them keep substantial control over the online used book market in the US. I'm not familiar with Book Depository, but if they close Abebooks I think it would open up space for a new competitor in the book space.

> Garages that have 20% empty spaces pretty much all the time ,give me the confidence to rely on them. I plan around it being available (and am happy to pay for it). By contrast if it's full 20% of the time then that feeds me with doubt.

My impression the that people who complain about "too much parking," actually don't want to you have the "confidence to rely on" parking being available. They want to "feed you with doubt" until you get rid of your car.

> Violent crime went down during Boudin’s tenure. Don’t base opinions on media propaganda.

So are SF residents propagandized sheeple and recalled him for no good reason, or is there more to the story than your first sentence?

>> SF has become so unsafe. Why aren't the democrats in charge voted out of office for other people who will do something about it? Do people just not vote in that city?

> If you’re outside of a situation looking in and wondering why people aren’t voting the way you think they should it almost certainly means you’re misreading the situation.

Didn't SF recall its local prosecutor recently over crime issues? It sounds like people may actually be trying (somewhat) to vote the way the GP thinks they should.

I would hazard a guess that the answer to the GP's question is something along the lines that SF residents hate Republicans, but Democrats only come in so many flavors nowadays (and not even all of those are available in the Bay Area).

> So. Much. Ads. And this is despite the 1/4th at the end is ads only.

They sucked at the time, but they're great now.

Old ads are the best.