YouTube blocks recording of public domain Schubert/Liszt composition - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPZUQqtVDmcjm4NY5FkzqLA/community?lb=UgwnsAnMT7NLWnGylUB4AaABCQ <comment><USER2> The big problem with classical music is that the compositions are all in public domain, however most performances are not. Given the subtle differences between performances, algorithms are not smart enough to figure out the difference. In fact, even humans would have a hard time to distinguish between two performances of certain classical pieces.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's so much that the algorithms aren't smart enough to tell, it's that Google have had to make the algorithm still match in the case of people altering music with filters/effects, time stretching, pitch shifting etc. - so it's been made deliberately a lot less sensitive to most of the factors that a musician brings into their interpretation.

That's fine - it's probably necessary for Google to not be constantly dragged into the courts by actual infringement slipping through with small alterations. The issue is that there is absolutely no recourse for an incorrect match. There's no option to say 'no, the algorithm is wrong' or 'the claimant has made a false claim' \- the nearest option is to claim fair use, and that kicks it back to the claimant to be able to lie again if it was fraudulent, with no fear of consequences.

There needs to be some process where it can be appealed to a human. I think the best way I have seen suggested is to stake a small amount of money on it to have somebody review it - say, $15 from each party, and then you lose it if it's ruled against you, or get a refund if you win. That should easily pay for half an hour of somebody's time, so they could hire staff to do it.

If the claimant lost and still didn't agree, it could be escalated to DMCA, where there are potential penalties for fraudulent claims (even if it doesn't happen much).

<comment><USER4> We don't necessarily disagree, but what bothers me is when people blame Google for this, as opposed to focusing on the draconian laws that have forced their hand.

<comment><USER5> poor Google, making billions of dollars out of other people's work with an automated system where it's impossible to talk to a real person. feel real bad for them

<comment><USER6> Poor me for the results our idiotic laws have produced. I do in fact feel real bad for me.

<comment><USER7> These laws didn't appear out of the blue, they're created and lobbied for by rich companies making money off copyright. Blaming Google for facilitating further abuse of copyright laws is a fair thing to do, and frankly, the unlikely event in which Google uses its money to put pressure towards fixing these laws is still more likely than the laws getting fixed because "we the people" somehow coordinated enough on the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's ironic that a system of rules (DMCA) that was designed to help performers not lose revenue is actually causing a performer to lose revenue. Rousseau is one of the most recognised pianists on YouTube. He works tirelessly to perform a new piece about every week. This must be incredibly tiring, and the skill required to be able to do that week in, week out, is absolutely breathtaking.

If anyone deserves to be made the poster child for the damage the DMCA and YouTube content ID is causing, it is Rousseau.

And how is it that an hour after this is reported, the problem still persists!? A million people are missing scheduled content. If this happened to a television station as often as it happens to YouTube there would be widespread, vocal, public complaints. Their competitors would also be having a field day.

<comment><USER9> Content ID is not the DMCA. Content ID got it wrong here, and that happens all the time. It's not a big deal for the claimer. Which is totally contrary to how DMCA works, if someone makes a wrong claim there it gets very expensive for them.

Youtube could easily copy that aspect of the DMCA and make it very expensive for mis-claimers, and easy to counteract automatic mis-classification. That they don't has nothing directly to do with laws, it's simply Youtube being a bad platform.

<comment><USER10> > Content ID is not the DMCA. Content ID got it wrong here, and that happens > all the time. It's not a big deal for the claimer. Which is totally contrary > to how DMCA works, if someone makes a wrong claim there it gets very > expensive for them.

That simply is not true. DMCA misclaims are pretty much not punished at all in practice.

<comment><USER9> The provisions are there. If they are not used it's either because the violated party does not sue or because the US justice system again is not working properly. But at least that's how the system ought to work. With Content ID there is no recourse at all against misuse, it all relies on Youtube to care. Which it doesn't seem to do at all.

<comment><USER11> The provisions don't protect against a wrong claim but a purposefully false claim. Unless you can come up with proof that the claimant knew they were filing a false claim you are out of luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If anyone is wondering, Schubert and Liszt didn't collaborate IRL on these. Schubert wrote the pieces, died, and then Liszt transcribed them for solo piano after they had posthumously been found in Schubert's belongings.

<comment><USER13> Thank you! The answer to _this_ question is why I even clicked on the link. (A collaboration like that would be awesome, though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> YouTube's filter is so sensitive it's scary. Music from cars driving past in vlogs, or even <2s of music is enough to trigger the filter. Dialling the sensitivity up so much is bound to have second order effects negatively impacting somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://twitter.com/hyperionrecords/status/11623845149849477...](https://twitter.com/hyperionrecords/status/1162384514984947712)

From @hyperionrecords regarding a recent unrelated incident. Hyperion's content is the one making the claim against Rousseau's video.

They seem aware that ContentID often misidentifies claims, but there doesn't seem to be a public statement on what they proactively can or will do to help fix it.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure what to fix.

Let's give the benefit of the doubt to Google and say they're constantly revising their algorithms; even then, due to the sheer amount of video uploaded to YouTube every day, there _will_ be some of them that are misidentified, it's simply unavoidable IMHO.

I think the improvement can be made on the smoothness and speed of disputing/reviewing these claim, though. This process should be as short and painless as possible, for sure.

In OP's case, considering it only seems to be a couple of hours, I think everything is still OK-ish _at this point_.

<comment><USER15> I didn't notice the timeline of the OP's post, but they could pressure Youtube to implement something that requires manual review before action is taken, instead of automatic action. Especially with a genre that typically has lots of similar recordings of out-of-copyright compositions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> YouTube seems to be taking the brunt of the criticism when it's the repercussions of copyright infringement lawsuits that are the problem.

I'm sure YouTube would love to be more lenient. If they could say "anything goes" they'd be thrilled, but we know they cannot because of the LAWS that are protecting IP owners.

IP should be protected, but to what extent?

And the bigger problem is the amount, and rate, of which content being produced threatens everyone's ability to do anything!

Try naming a business. NOTHING is available. If you want to run a competing business in a saturated market, the naming options are almost non-existent, especially if you want to name your company something that embodies what your business does.

Music is having this problem too. When you can take a few stanzas and say you OWN that music, could someone not just use a computer to generate every possible sequence of notes, slap a copyright on it, and own all future music?

Photography, video, games, puzzles, speeches, books..... it's all about to hit a brick wall if we can't be more lenient with IP.

In my opinion, complete works should be awarded a copyright, but sub-sections of works should not.

And software patents..... dear god.

<comment><USER10> Meanwhile, book publishers are suing Amazon because they added a captioning feature to make audiobooks accessbile for copyright infringement: [https://gizmodo.com/is-captioning-an-audiobook-illegal- major...](https://gizmodo.com/is-captioning-an-audiobook-illegal-major- publishers-sa-1837563008)

Reply All also has an interesting story about how impossible is it to have ANYONE accountable AT ALL for DMCA takedown machinery that harasses people: [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply- all/76h5ro](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h5ro) A person got strikes on his internet connection due to previous owner and there was noone in the insane chain of IP strike machinery that could be appealed to or own up to the mistake.

The current state of copyright is so broken that it's downright evil.

<comment><USER18> This is all historically bound up. Audiobooks and printed books used to be separate physical things. The publishing rights ecosystem was built assuming this.

Now that they're fungible, its not making much sense any more. But millions of publishing contracts exist, that enforce the distinction. What do we propose to do about it? Without dismantling fundamental contract definitions.

<comment><USER19> 20 years ago I made the observation that the whole intellectual property domain was fundamentally based around all of the individual aspects of intellectual property being cleanly and completely distinguishable from each other, e.g., this is a book, this is a song, this is a movie (which is made of this song and this script), etc. But even then it was becoming clear these categories were getting fuzzier and fuzzier and in many cases outright merging, and the categories weren't going to just go together nicely because of the various contradictory assumptions in them.

The worst then, and I think still today, is computer software, which is covered by both patents and copyright. Copyright has always covered them, in the last 20 years, patents have covered more and covered less at times, but still have always covered some of it.

I'm actually a bit surprised that I've still seen no hint of the legal system directly grappling with this problem. It just keeps getting worse. I've been keeping my eyes out but I haven't seen anything.

And this is another example; nobody wrote the copyright laws for the YouTube case. If you get down to it, you have this intricate interplay of video, audio, automated systems generating some content, automated systems checking them, an extra-judicial system for mediation where I will not say the incentives are 100% misaligned, but they are certainly nowhere near 100% aligned with what they should be, with a lot of mismatches between YouTube, the copyright holders, and the video producers in terms of powers and responsibility (that is, there are many places in the system where there is power without responsibility, and responsibility without power), and we're trying to adjudicate it on 20th century law that was already, at times, kinda cobbled together. (Don't look, but we're already 1/5th of the way into the 21st century.) It's madness.

<comment><USER20> >I've still seen no hint of the legal system directly grappling with this problem. It just keeps getting worse. I've been keeping my eyes out but I haven't seen anything.

IP is modern capitalism's goose that lays the golden eggs. I suspect that they are somewhat nervous to do the kind of root and branch reforms that would be neccessary to solve the problems you have outlined. Part of the genius of open source licences is that they are built out of some of the aspects of law that capital is most wary of breaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I used to use music from musopen.org that contains recordings that are either public domain or creative commons, typically from the Air Force band, or various small town orchestras or college or even high school orchestras for background music for my little space game videos, but dealing with the copyright claims became too much of a hassle, so now I just rapidly strum some chords on an acoustic guitar and run it through paulstretch and throw some reverb on it to get some ambient space music sound.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I do the same thing with my Korg Kaossilator. For ~$100 (I have the original, not the updated one), you get a phrase sequencer that just about anyone can learn enough in about an hour to be able to generate their own ambient music.

I feel like music education for children starting with pianos, guitars, and recorders is backwards. Get them playing music first. The interest in instruments will come.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This happens to me all the time. As an amateur pianist, whenever I sit down and play a piece and upload it, it nearly always gets a copyright flag -- even if it's 150 years old or more!

</comment><comment><USER24> Content ID is never going to be perfect (so there always needs to be an appeal mechanism).

But I'd always expected that false matches would be due to some kind of hash collision, not different recordings of the same piece.

Because YouTube doesn't know what the composition is, it only compares to other performances (which _are_ under copyright).

And the fact that two different pianists could interpret and perform a work identically enough to generate the same signature Content ID uses is... astonishing to me, from my classical music background. If I'd had to guess, two musicians normally probably couldn't achieve that even if they tried.

So this seems to just be a crazy statistical fluke? Otherwise classical performances would be getting blocked left and right, given the hundreds/thousands of different performances of the same underlying music? Or is something more advanced that audio fingerprinting going on?

<comment><USER25> Hash collisions? No, I don't think you understand how these content matching systems work.

<comment><USER26> well, that does not seem to be a very constructive answer. mind sharing some info/references on this specific one, or any others ? because I though it's a blackbox type of software

<comment><USER25> I mean how exactly they work isn't public knowledge. But we can be sure they don't just hash anything. It would be too easy to just add small amounts of noise and defeat them.

Here's a reference I googled for you [https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music- processing...](https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing- fingerprinting-and-recognition)

<comment><USER26> I think you misunderstood the parent comment ( or I misunderstood your reply to that). He talks about about a signature (which is pretty much what it comes down to), not a file hash as in here's a hash of the file contents. That would be meaningless.

As for the reference you provided I know how shazam works, they pretty much made a blog post about it. This is not that. Not by a long shot.

<comment><USER25> I can't think of a useful copyright matching technique that wouldn't flag different renditions of the same song. That's my point. The failures of these techniques wouldn't be hash collisions but songs that legitimately sound similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rousseau found a way around the block. He uploaded the video again in a way that caused it to be claimed, rather than blocked, by a different company. He'll still have to dispute it, but YouTube is not obliged by law to take down content that only received a claim. The video is no longer blocked.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a shame. I love Rousseau's performances of classical pieces. It really reminds me how little I am capable of playing the piano. ;)

On a slightly more serious note, this is what happens when you force a content host to bypass the normal flow of copyright claims.

</comment><comment><USER28> Youtube seems to have gone to a ridiculous extreme on filtering copyright material. They blocked a non-public video of my daughter's Irish step dance recital, because the live band played three traditional tunes in the same order as found on some commercial recording. It took months to get the "copyright holder" to grant us permission; ridiculous.

YT doesn't, and can't, have enough resources to correct every such situation, so they err on the side of the copyright holders. When they're receiving a billion submissions a day, the innocent ones caught in the net are just a rounding error.

I'm wondering whether Bitchute might take up the slack here.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a slightly tangential question: can someone link to articles and writeups that discuss how YouTube and other platforms efficiently disambiguate between a valid/allowable recording and a prohibited recording, when the content between valid/prohibited is very similar or near identical in the most obvious features (e.g. rhythm and key).

<comment><USER30> Answer: They don't, and you're guilty until painstakingly proven innocent.

<comment><USER29> I don't disagree with your cynicism about the flawed and slow disciplinary process. But it's still in their operational best interests to improve and iterate on their auto-classifier algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Another huge problem are the companies making money simply calling copy-right strikes.

</comment><comment><USER32> Rousseau is actually active on HN, curious to see what he says about it here. What a ridiculous DRM implementation by YT. I understand that with such a large volume of data, it's a difficult challenge. But it should _not_ be difficult for an algorithm to figure out that Schubert or Liszt are in the public domain.

<comment><USER33> They are but the recording is not: it's copyright belongs to the performer. Unfortunately YouTube can't figure out the subtle differences between performances that identify them.

<comment><USER34> The headline is slightly inflammatory in its reference to the "200 year old composition." Exactly to parent's point: a contemporary recording would be neither 200 years old not in the public domain.

<comment><USER35> I'm not sure I agree with inflammatory. It seems that the common attribute between the two materials is that it is based on the same 200 year old composition and not much else. Like if IT takes your keyboard and gives it to someone else because they are the same keyboard. Completely missing subtle differences like the serial number or the fact that on one the space is worn out and on the other the tab key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Where do you get that piano visualizer? Looks helpful for learning and playing.

</comment><comment><USER37> Have a look at Rick Beato on Youtube

<comment><USER38> Why?

<comment><USER39> Maybe he's referring to the video breaking down the bullshit Flame vs. Katy Perry lawsuit about Dark Horse,

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4MuhPqfIk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4MuhPqfIk4)

He also says one of his videos was de-monetized because Dark Horse was bleeding through someone's headphones in one of his videos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> DMCA, ain't it fun?

<comment><USER41> DMCA as intended would be better here. The person who thinks they found something infringing should have to proactively send a takedown, which should trigger a process that can be appealed. What Google has created is a proactive automated takedown system with minimal recourse.</comment></comment>


GitHub CLI is now in beta - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2020-02-12-supercharge-your-command-line-experience-github-cli-is-now-in-beta/ <comment><USER3> Were the GitHub devs doing _anything_ before Microsoft bought them? All that comes to mind is Atom. MS seems to have really been a shot in the arm for feature development at GH.

<comment><USER4> I was recently looking into CRDTs for text-editing, and was surprised to see that Github devs were working on an experimental text editor (Xray) [1] along with a finer-grained version control system for real-time collaborative editing (Memo) [2]. That project, however, seems to have been lost (and archived) in the Microsoft reshuffling of things.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525735)

[2] [https://github.com/atom- archive/xray/tree/master/memo_core](https://github.com/atom- archive/xray/tree/master/memo_core)

<comment><USER5> Yeah github seemed to also have some interesting innovations working with in the (programming) language classification domain.

There has been some work done by people from the ML@B over at Berkeley (?) to greatly improve github-linguist, the tool GitHub uses (I think) to identify programming languages in GitHub repositories. The project is named lexicon (used to be hosted at [https://lexicon.github.io/](https://lexicon.github.io/) but now it 404s...) and the results seemed very interesting.

Tried pinging github support about open-sourcing this work, but it seems it's not going to happen. I had very friendly and helpful people answering me, and I totally understand not wanting to open-source something. I just feel a bit sad for the lost opportunity.

<comment><USER4> I found this link [1], but nothing related to ML@B with it.

[1] [https://github.com/github/linguist](https://github.com/github/linguist)

<comment><USER5> Best I could locate right now is [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/demo-day- september-2016-2...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/demo-day- september-2016-252bcd8b395)

"Every day, millions of files are uploaded onto Github, a coding repository where users share code and collaborate on projects. But how do you tell what language those files are written in?

Identifying programming languages are surprisingly hard. Symbols used in one language often have different meanings in another. For example, '#' in python indicates a comment, while in C it indicates a preprocessor command. Even worse, code in one language can actually contain code in different languages, such as HTML, which can contain CSS and/or Javascript.

At the moment, Github uses a giant checklist to identify unique quirks in the language. For example, if the code contains ":- module", then it's probably"); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px);"> Mercury. However, most languages simply don't have enough unique quirks for this method to be accurate enough.

The current solution the Github team at ML@B came up with is to use a machine learning algorithm called a Naïve Bayes Classifier. To optimize the program, they used Github's checklist as a guideline for choosing the correct language rather than a hard-and-fast rule. Currently, the team is working on scraping Rosetta Code, a large repository of code in hundred of different programming languages, for data that they can use for training the program and testing its accuracy. Eventually, they will want to see if implementing other models, such as neural networks, can improve accuracy."

I'm certain I saw more advanced claims of success on this project and that github knows about it, since last time I asked they were 'still talking about it internally', but every link I had is dead...

WELL now that I googled seriously, I think I was too pessimistic, there seems to be some movement on this front at github : [https://github.blog/2019-07-02-c-or-java-typescript-or- javas...](https://github.blog/2019-07-02-c-or-java-typescript-or-javascript- machine-learning-based-classification-of-programming-languages/)

Excited to see what's coming out of this new endeavour... Just sent an email to github support, fingers crossed.

<comment><USER5> ... and github support doesn't take requests by e-mail anymore, so I resubmitted through the github support web page...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From hub's main developer Mislav's blog [0]

> Since I personally don't find it valuable to spend my time maintaining two > separate command-line clients for GitHub, I will gradually reduce my > involvement with hub to a point where it either goes into complete feature- > freeze mode or finds new maintainership.

So it sounds like gh will be the successor to hub.

[0] [https://mislav.net/2020/01/github- cli/](https://mislav.net/2020/01/github-cli/)

<comment><USER7> I switched long back, when I realised that gh was faster, easier to install, and there was no syntax change on the commands.

Edit: I sound very confused in this thread because I still call the old Golang version gh in my scripts. Thought it was the same codebase graduating till I read this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This pains me. They saw the "what" but not the "why".

The point of using a command line is not because a VT100 emulator is an ideal way to view data (it's not). It's so we can combine commands, using pipes and redirection. I don't want to learn special new filtering flags. I want to get raw data that I can pipe to grep or cut or any of the other dozens of tools I've been learning and using for the past 25 years.

The point of using a distributed version control system is so I can store it all locally. This new tool defaults to only 30 items, and cannot fetch more than 100. So even if you're willing to put up with the multi-second latency of hitting their servers for every command line operation (it feels like CVS all over again), you still can't say "give me everything and let me grep it". You have no choice but to use the 3 ways they give you to filter (assignee, label, state -- not title, comments, or date).

I've got a 50Mbps network connection, a 500GB SSD, 16GB of memory, and an 8-core CPU, and now instead of putting all that to work running JavaScript to access my bug reports, I'm fetching them as plain text at a maximum of about 5000 bytes at a time. (Net throughput is on par with an Apple II with a 14.4Kbps modem.) Is this an improvement?

I do not understand why GitHub Issues aren't git repos, like most other GitHub collections. Then we wouldn't _need_ a completely new (and slow/complex/limited) tool to read bug reports on the command line. Perlis had this figured out back in 1982: using common tools for disparate data is a killer feature. That's _why_ we're still using the command line in a way that looks nearly identical to how it worked in the 1980's, and a few generations of other interfaces have come and gone since then and failed to displace it.

<comment><USER9> The pessimist in me would say that Github doesn't have issues as git repos because it makes migrations off of their platform more difficult. Hence making vendor lock-in stronger.

The optimist would say limiting contributions to issues on web platform made the formatting ( markdown ) consistent. So that linking back to issues and commits was more standard, and therefore made Github Issues a nice tool to use over the competition at the time.

<comment><USER10>
        > formatting ( markdown ) consistent.

This actually is not a good argument because Markdown is specifically designed to be readable as plain text.

<comment><USER9> That's fair. I was really looking at the bottom of the barrel for reasons github would do this, other than vendor lock-in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's frustrating that they'd release a new CLI and nowhere address its relation to their existing 'hub' CLI.

Edit: found a note in their readme on github: [https://github.com/cli/cli#comparison-with- hub](https://github.com/cli/cli#comparison-with-hub)

> For many years, hub was the unofficial GitHub CLI tool. gh is a new project > for us to explore what an official GitHub CLI tool can look like with a > fundamentally different design. While both tools bring GitHub to the > terminal, hub behaves as a proxy to git and gh is a standalone tool.

<comment><USER12> > hub was the unofficial GitHub CLI tool.

'unofficial'... [https://hub.github.com/](https://hub.github.com/)

I officially despise how meaningless '[un]official' has become.

<comment><USER13> I love it. There being a spectrum between "blessed" and "work of a random" means that we get more software.

And in the end, since it's open source, it's up to me whether I derive value from it.

<comment><USER12> ? My point is that it wasn't 'work of a random'; it was in a repo under the `github` org; with a first-party GitHub website.

OSS is great, I agree, my issue is just with the weird description of GitHub's older similar tool.

<comment><USER13> That's _my_ point. If a company can release something without being on the hook for it, that's awesome. It encourages them to release half-baked stuff alongside their platinum stuff which is something I desire far more than having them only release stuff that's full-baked.

Simply put, I prioritize more software way more than I prioritize officialness etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish some people at github would address the bad mobile version of their website. It's impossible to do anything done with the current mobile UI without going through the desktop version:

\- see the language stats for this repo

\- see commit history in one tap

\- read the full readme

\- see all files at top level

\- etc.

If you're already hard at work on this, thanks in advance.

<comment><USER15> Hi! We're working on the mobile experience across the board. Here's a recent tweet highlighting improvements to the mobile web experience: [https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1227378615387443200?s...](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1227378615387443200?s=20)

And yes, we're also definitely investing in the mobile app as well and the reception from the beta has been really positive so I'm excited for when we're able to roll it out to everyone.

<comment><USER14> I've heard of the app, and it's great news. But I feel that with just a little push (well, not so little, but small at Github scale), the mobile website could be so much better, and everyone would benefit from it without installing an app (although with an Instant App one could have the best of both worlds… but just on Android).

The demo of Emily and Jon's work shown by Nat is great news and I hope it continues forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am glad they used Go to develop this command line tool.

Knowing how big GitHub is on Ruby and Node.js I was afraid they had used one of these two languages to bootstrap the program.

Being able to drop the binary in any computer and have it work without hundreds of files as dependencies is a bless when you write programs in Go.

<comment><USER17> > have it work without hundreds of files as dependencies is a bless when you > write programs in Go.

lots of languages have that lol

<comment><USER18> There aren't many things you could say you like about any language that couldn't be sneered at with "lots of languages have that lol".

It's what your parent likes about Go. Inventing a claim of uniqueness and then condescendingly dismissing it isn't a good look.

<comment><USER17> >There aren't many things you could say you like about any language that couldn't be sneered at with "lots of languages have that lol".

GHC has first-class support for laziness. Rust has affine types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using Hub[1] (though not aliased to `git`) for years now, and it's PR management capabilities have been invaluable working on larger projects. Hopefully GitHub CLI is as stable and reliable!

It looks like the main features I use from Hub are already well-supported in the GitHub CLI, and it looks like whether or not Hub will still be maintained is an open question[2].

Edit: Just noting that `brew install github` doesn't work, it's actually `brew install github/gh/gh` — that's a new format for brew packages I haven't seen before.

[1] [https://github.com/github/hub](https://github.com/github/hub)

[2] [https://github.com/github/hub/issues/2470](https://github.com/github/hub/issues/2470)

<comment><USER15> Hi! I'm on the team building GitHub CLI. We're definitely eager for your feedback on what things feel like they're missing, and especially if something is broken or doesn't feel stable or reliable. Feel free to open an issue if there's anything that stands out.

The different homebrew installation you referred to is because `gh` isn't part of homebrew/core yet as it's very new. So we'll be adding it in the coming months, but for now that's just a way for us to maintain our own tap and still provide an easy install/upgrade path.

<comment><USER20> I use "hub browse" a lot. It's a really quick way to open a local directory's Github repo.

Unfortunately, it's quite limited. No way to open a specific file, for example, or jump to a specific branch other than the current one.

I'd love to have something like "gh open".

<comment><USER15> It's on our roadmap! [https://github.com/cli/cli/issues/217](https://github.com/cli/cli/issues/217)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From [https://github.com/cli/cli#installation-and- upgrading](https://github.com/cli/cli#installation-and-upgrading)

> gh is available via scoop

And I've been using chocolatey the whole time :facepalm.

How does scoop compare to choco? (Except for the obvious "no admin permissions needed")

<comment><USER22> Scoop is more opinionated, in that there is a single, canonical version of each app. My experience with chocolately is very different, as there are often multiple different packaged versions of any given app, and you've no idea which is the "best" one.

<comment><USER21> I usually go for the one with the most downloads, but it's true that it can be confusing. Reminds me of the SUSE package web search back in the days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My cynical side wonders if this is a case of Embrace Extend Extinguish-move developer mindshare off of git (GitHub as commodity git hosting) and into vendor lock-in.

<comment><USER24> It sort of makes sense with MS being the owner. I definitely notice that a lot of the new grads don't really know about git. They think it's all Github.

<comment><USER25> I've had a lot of freelancers lately who when I ask for their ssh public key they send me their GitHub username. Like 10 in a row. Half of them had public keys even.

Yet at work no one has this issue with our ghe

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I don't get that. I use my github as a repository of my public keys - <USER2> least partially because Ubuntu will now ask for a github username to prefill authorized_keys, but I had a curl script set up before that - But I would not confuse "Here's where there's an updated list of my keys" for "Here's a key"; The response is, at best, `*[]key` rather than `key` (and assuming you know the github.com/$USER.keys syntax, which isn't exactly standard)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > [https://github.com/cli/cli](https://github.com/cli/cli)

Hmm, wonder why they felt the need to move it to its own org? What's wrong with `github/cli`? That's arguably clearer than the very generic `cli/cli`.

Looks like it used to be at github/gh-cli before January 24 [0]; I wonder what kind of compensation they gave to the previous owner of `cli`? [1]

0: [https://github.com/cli/cli/commit/a710893fc107c9a269d8654f08...](https://github.com/cli/cli/commit/a710893fc107c9a269d8654f0834d752a0b999f7)

1: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170331061435/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170331061435/https://github.com/cli)

<comment><USER28> Maybe to be able to use cli.github.com…

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Doesn't it bother anyone that in the first graphic they used typographically correct Unicode quotes, but these quotes won't work in shell? I initially thought that these were screenshots in an actual minimalistic terminal emulator but apparently these are just graphic designs.

</comment><comment><USER30> So is this like an improved version of git with an easier command line syntax?

As in, can you use it for local gittering, or does it really require a connection to github all the time?

Because I don't feel good about this tool if it's basically another trick at lock-in. Git the versioning system is currently pretty open; You can use your own local repos, host on gitlab or github or your own server, and you really do roughly get the same experience from the command line.

Like, is this going to prompt me to host my local git repos on github? Not whether it can, of course it can, will it nag me?

People used to call these worries FUD but they also put ads in the start menu and turned telemetry up to 11, for an OS. I think current day it's a legitimate worry to consider. I haven't really had the misfortune of having to deal with such attitude towards users on the command line. But we'll see.

Or do they see "developers" as an audience to be treated differently than "end users".

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how much this will impact or help forge ([https://github.com/magit/forge](https://github.com/magit/forge) ) , which i have, to my shame, never gotten to authenticate properly.

<comment><USER32> forge and github-review ([https://github.com/charignon/github- review](https://github.com/charignon/github-review)) have given me a near- immersion experience for bitesized code reviews in Emacs. They even work together, via github-review-forge-pr-at-point!

The only thing stopping me from using this with larger diffs is the lack of a good way to show more of the surrounding context in github-review. Wonder if there is any interest in making github-review a first-class part of forge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I personally use the git CLI for my day to day work needs, I think this was so unnecessary considering there are so many other things that Github could focus on. Microsoft is once again ignoring the mobile market, shittè mobile app, shittè mobile website, but hey, a redundant CLI FTW

</comment><comment><USER34> Tried to use it from a terminal...

% gh pr list

Notice: authentication required

Press Enter to open github.com in your browser...

/bin/xdg-open: line 881: www-browser: command not found

/bin/xdg-open: line 881: links2: command not found

^C

1) I would have expected it to be able to work with the installed ssh keys used with the associated repo, but no luck :-(

2) RPM is broken, as it does not include any dependencies, and

3) even after install links, it fails with:

[warn] Epoll ADD(1) on fd 0 failed. Old events were 0; read change was 1 (add); write change was 0 (none); close change was 0 (none): Operation not permitted

ERROR: event_add failed: Operation not permitted at select.c:415, handle 0

4) I don't think they're gonna be handling 2FA :-/

I guess that's gonna be a pass for now...

</comment><comment><USER35> Now open source GitHub! It is such a hypocritical stance to talk about how great FLOSS is while at the same time not producing the product itself as FLOSS.

</comment><comment><USER36> GitHub introducing a CLI is kinda like putting powered sugar on a glazed doughnut.

</comment><comment><USER37> Command line features I want for a hosted RCS/VCS: multi-repo add/remove user (support hire/fire employees), CI/CD features (set/check/pre-commit enforce tests and metrics, view state, get/set callbacks), create/config new repos.

The example commands shown support automatic creation of issues which is OK for CI/CD, but PRs are not something we use or care about. I understand it from marketing as a 'makes us different to raw git' sorta differentiating feature, but it's just not part of many company's workflow. I _love_ and miss from previous Gitlab repos strong pre-commit hooks and being able to reject commits that breach policy or break tests. Without this CI/CD needlessly chokes on issues, state and manual process.

<comment><USER38> It sounds like you're looking more for an administrative CLI for Github, rather than the usual "Github user" experience in the command-line.

What do you use instead of PRs? (Honestly, _not_ using PRs and paying for GHE sounds like a... less-than-ideal way to spend your money?)

The PR workflow + Checks are a good "equivalent" (IMO, nicer) experience to pre-commit hooks.

<comment><USER37> _looking more for an administrative CLI for Github, rather than the usual "Github user" experience_

Yes. Because I already have _git_ , which by definition already does 99% of what I need as a user. Issues + remote repo admin + CI/CD are the exceptions.

 _What do you use instead of PRs?_

Direct commit with no branching. IMHO PRs are an arguable misfeature of hosted RCS/VCS to keep people on those platforms. We have a high proportion of non software development projects/users.

<comment><USER38> Issues, CI/CD, and code review are a _huge_ part of the development process that git does not do.

Committing directly might work for a small team, but I can't imagine that scales.

I suppose we want fundamentally different things here, and sadly for you, I don't think you're a large enough portion of the audience that GitHub will ever create the tool you need.

Their APIs are open, though -- you can probably make one yourself.

<comment><USER37> No, I am actually the majority of the potential market and future growth for hosted RCS/VCS firms: a tech company with many non-tech employees that wants to utilize RCS/VCS to formalize internal process across disciplines.

You are the minority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Too bad this doesn't work with Github Enterprise :(

<comment><USER15> Sorry! We're hoping to get to it after gh is out of beta. It's definitely something we're hearing people want, and I'm excited for when we can say it just works. :)

<comment><USER39> I shared this in our #git internal slack channel and immediately had a dozen people bemoaning it not supporting our GHE. Thanks!

<comment><USER15> Absolutely, thanks for sharing and apologies that we're not quite there yet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Forgive me as I'm a bit of a noob but as it is I'm using git bash on windows.

Any reason I'd bother to switch to this?

<comment><USER41> This is not a "git" CLI since git already has a CLI. This is a CLI on top of a CLI that directly interfaces with Github (a VCS provider).

Basically, it's for the terminal geeks that don't want to bother with using the web interface of GH for daily tasks.

<comment><USER40> Oh I got it now, thanks. Two different ends of the workflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> With some extension even navigating issues can be done in cli through markdown viewer in console (I opened a suggestion[1] in Hub's repository).

[1] [https://github.com/github/hub/issues/2192](https://github.com/github/hub/issues/2192)

</comment><comment><USER43> Frustrating that the CLI is an "open" beta while the iOS and Android clients are not. I'd love to test the iOS beta but I have no idea where I am on the waiting list.

<comment><USER44> There's a maximum number of users allowed for a TestFlight test (I believe 10,000), so it's out of GitHub's control.

<comment><USER15> Yes, this! We'd love to open the beta up to more folks, but we're capped at that number for now. Excited to bring it to more people soon though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is there a way to install this without using Homebrew? I know that the author of it works at Github now, but that definitely shouldn't be the only option..

<comment><USER46> In this case, you can download the prebuilt binaries from the Github repo page itself under the 'Releases' tab. But as with anything in Brew, if you can't find the installable binary or tarball online yourself, you can simply look at the Brew formula to find the URL and download+install it manually.

[https://github.com/github/homebrew- gh/blob/19a5398d3c022e80f...](https://github.com/github/homebrew- gh/blob/19a5398d3c022e80fb0c7a388108781914dcf5bb/Formula/gh.rb#L9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Excited to try this out, but not sure how much use I'll actually get out of this. Might be a slightly faster way to look through issues for now.

</comment><comment><USER48> How does this work with internally hosted github server? When I tried a command on an existing clone folder, it wants to go to github.com to authenticate.

<comment><USER15> We don't have GitHub Enterprise Server support yet, but that's something we're planning to work on after gh is out of beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does checking out a pull request locally include pulling down all the comments? I assume not, but that would be a cool feature.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't - it's just the code on that PR, but you can also use a --preview flag on pr view to get render the body of the PR in your terminal. We may explore something around incorporating comments down the road as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Has anyone made a customizable URL bar CLI like Duckduckgo's shebangs (which is not customizable)?

This is the new CLI i want most

<comment><USER51> Firefox has the ability to customize shebangs. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/assign-shortcuts- search...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/assign-shortcuts-search- engines)

<comment><USER52> So does Chrome, and even Safari used to be able to do this via extensions until very recently.

I would assume the parent poster wants something richer than a single substitution though?

<comment><USER50> I didn't know this. I thank you both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Anything similar to this for gitlab?

<comment><USER54> [https://zaquestion.github.io/lab/](https://zaquestion.github.io/lab/) – Lab wraps Git or Hub, making it simple to clone, fork, and interact with repositories on GitLab

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Give me a way to easily clone a repo and I'm sold.

`gh clone nodebb/nodebb -https`

</comment><comment><USER56> How is this different from the hub command?

</comment><comment><USER57> Awesome, but I really wish GH would open source all of their own apps. I always find it hypocritical that they do not, given their OSS advancement.

<comment><USER58> gh is open source [https://github.com/cli/cli/](https://github.com/cli/cli/)</comment></comment>


React Native, Nativescript- trailer park approach to mobile software development - <AUTHOR> http://xn--ls8h.st/react.html <comment><USER2> Can someone confirm that punycode domain is legit. Those are a no click zone for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> As the author of the post, I can confirm it is legitimate (poop emoji dot st). I was hoping HN would allow it to come through as emoji instead of punycode, but tripped some kind of inapplicable server error.

It (an emoji domain) does pose a corner case of a problem for them (HN), so I haven't brought it to their attention yet.

<comment><USER2> no click zone confirmed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Emojis were a mistake.</comment>


Internet is losing its memory: Cerf - <AUTHOR> https://www.itnews.com.au/news/internet-is-losing-its-memory-cerf-495854 <comment><USER3> In many ways he's understating the problem. At least there used to be file formats to support, and files to lose. But how much of the data you interact with daily is even directly accessible to you? How much of it can you access when you're offline?

Take Slack. You can install it locally, but that doesn't matter, because it won't start without an internet connection, and its local storage is completely opaque. Compare this to a mail client, where everything is stored locally, indexed and searchable offline, and can be exported into a universal albeit messy MIME format, as well as imported into other accounts.

Of course this is necessary for the business model, the Slack free-plan event horizon wouldn't be effective if it only applied to which new data you can sync down... and if users only discovered this when e.g. moving to a new computer, they would quickly start to wonder why they can't just transfer the data they already have themselves.

With Google Drive, your 'docs' are just placeholders pointing to the cloud. You can export them individually to Word or print them to PDF, but it's a manual process, which you will likely only think of when it's too late.

For an example of how this can really matter: an acquaintance is embroiled in a legal dispute with an ex-employer. Thanks to Apple's sane implementation of IMAP Mail on iOS, she still has access to all her company communications there to use as evidence. Unlike on her PC, where she was just using webmail the entire time and has nothing.

The incentive in the cloud age is to create dysfunctional products that provide an illusion of permanence instead of the reality of tangibility. I expect this is only going to become a bigger problem over time.

<comment><USER4> > You can export them individually to Word or print them to PDF

Actually it's really really easy to do in bulk: [https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout?pli=1](https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout?pli=1)

Not invalidating the rest of what you said.

<comment><USER5> I think the rest of what they said matters, though. Its not "preservable by default". If you need access to that data in any situation where your connectivity to Google or that account is severed, you're shit out of luck. The best case example is if you don't have internet. The bad case is really that "legal dispute" argument, where you're dealing with a bad actor who has power over you and your Google account. The worst case: Google themselves severs your access.

<comment><USER4> I'm trying to not phrase this in a dick way, but what did you think I meant by "Not invalidating the rest of what you said"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People need to keep their own personal archives. While there are great projects like archive.org, it's becoming more clear that it's not enough. There's not enough resources for an organization(that isn't spying on everyone) to archive YouTube, or Slack history, etc., so it's up to you to back up that data if it's important to you. Culture can be easily lost to the void if we don't do this.

As I've mentioned in another HN thread, I've been using youtube-dl to back up YouTube videos that are important to me since it's increasingly obvious that YouTube is merely a profit machine that would delete all of its user's videos in one fell swoop if they made an extra buck off it. I've also begun to back up some blogs that have vast mounts of great content, but I've found that HTTrack is... well, terrible. That's not to say it doesn't technically do its job, but it's way too aggressive. I wan't something that's easier to configure and can do a better job of taking "snapshots" of blog entries while blocking ads, javascripts, being able to resume properly if my power goes out, etc.

<comment><USER7> I noticed old articles I had bookmarked were disappearing so I've started using a self-hosted Bookstack to save a copy of everything interesting I read. I enter reader mode and copy eveeything on the page, and then paste it into the WYSIWYG editor. Everything is formatted nicely and it even creates a menu using the head tags of the sections. The only problem is, while images copy correctly, they're still hosted on the original server so I have to replace them with an uploaded copy. Only takes a couple of minutes though. I could probably automate this with a script.

<comment><USER8> If you use Firefox, there have been several implementations of this add-on that I've used for ~10 years:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScrapBook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScrapBook)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Losing memory via attrition is certainly a concern. But I think the bigger concern is losing memory via censorship and copyright. For most people, the internet is now google search and a couple of social media companies. Google has been curating search results for a while now. We no longer see what is out there in the internet, but a narrow google approved view of the internet. For example, 10 years ago, google showed us the entire elephant ( more or less ), today, we only get to see the tail or the trunk or whichever part of the elephant google decides to frame. Now all of the social media companies are now curating. And with the loss of neutrality, ISPs will undoubtedly curate.

And then there is the copyright issues where archiving is getting more difficult. Kids today don't know what a great tool google cache was because it's gone. And archiving sites are being attack from news, media, politicians, etc.

In other words, the internet dark age isn't going to be a result of formats getting old ( though that is an issue ). It's going to be a result of us only being allowed to see through the frame that a handful of companies deem appropriate. The dark ages didn't happen because formats got old. The dark ages happened because the powerful decided that we should view the world within a certain narrow religious frame and censored everything else.

<comment><USER10> In the olden days, everyone was slapping together their own websites, rather than using the same old templated wordpress, hugo, etc, so there was far more character, and not everything was a blog. And so people surfed the web. These days the web is more purpose oriented, people looking for something, the "surfing" all within walls, wave pools.

<comment><USER11> The days of the web ring, which often as not was broken or took you through dozens of content-free sites but could occasionally drop you into something fantastic.

Browsing Internet Directories.

Just plain finding some guy's massive meticulously-maintained HTML-only site full of fascinating articles, bookmarking it, slowly working your way through it over the course of your evening browsing sessions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> By contrast, before the internet, most everything was routinely lost anyway.

Only papers from famous people were kept. Even so, for example, HP's historical archive was all on paper and placed in a single building. Which burned down.

The WTC collapse destroyed the unpublished archive of Kennedy pictures.

<comment><USER13> We still have receipts and tax records carved into ancient Babylonian clay tablets, and letters from the 18th and 19th century, so I believe it's not really true that only papers from famous people were kept, rather that artifacts of interest to elite classes (be they religious or scientific) tended to remain preserved or published.

Although it is interesting (and a bit depressing) that we can't really seem to escape that model for preserving knowledge over the long term. Physical media needs patronage, buildings, printing presses, etc, while digital media needs infrastructure, manufacturing, programmers, etc.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any letters, photos, tax records, etc., from your great grandparents? Do you know anything at all about your ancestors who came to America (if you're living in America)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm probably weird in that my philosophy doesn't jive well with the current societal norm, but I think it is important to come to terms with a simple truth: All things are ultimately lost. Physics tells that even the universe itself will end, even if different models disagree as to precisely how. Things begin, they exist, and then they end. That they are not eternal does not mean that their existence was meaningless. Which isn't to say that preservation is pointless or wrong, but I think it is unhealthy to try and hang on too firmly to the past.

<comment> IGI-111 It's the good kind of nihilism I suppose: accepting that ultimate futility doesn't spare you from having to strive for meaning, but it does help you relativize your losses.

That said on the topic of conservation, or more accurately History, I don't think you can convincingly argue for forgetting things as a society. The cost of repeating errors are as great as the benefits of safekeeping knowledge.

<comment><USER14> I'm advocating for the letting go of things. Certainly there are things that are valuable to preserve, but preservation for preservation's sake, I think, is unhealthy. Will society really benefit from preserving every geocities site, every newgrounds flash game, every scrap of poorly written slashfic? Probably not. Are there instances of each that are culturally relevant? Sure, and it might be worth keeping those around longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The comment about Archimedes and infinitesimals makes reminds me of something that has been bothering me for a long time: what brilliant ideas are there lurking in the world unknown to almost all of us that could change the course of history if only they were publicised?

<comment><USER16> I have a similar thought experiment (or Sci-Fi plot?) for a long time.

If an advanced alien civilization came to Earth, and helped ancient human civilizations to built and operate a computer system, which can share, store and translate scientific discoveries all across the globe (while they are not allowed to help humans besides operating the system) throughout 5000 years of history - how could it change the human history?

<comment><USER17> The ancient humans would then also (eventually) develop patents because someone somewhere would have thought about it even back then - and with worldwide distribution - it would catch on. Effectively, what I'm saying is - when faced with a common greater good that is a game changer for humanity, humanity then has to collectively want the greater good. And humans can be selfish - ancient or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [http://longbets.org/601/](http://longbets.org/601/)

[https://adactio.com/journal/11937](https://adactio.com/journal/11937)

"The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years."

This has been a known problem for a while, but it's always nice to see more voices crying out about it to the more general public.

</comment><comment><USER19> Due to the Curse of SaaS soon the web won't be about documents any more but about applications that have no obligation to preserve anything. The only thing you can be sure of is that your advertising profiles will be stored for the next 100 years or so.

</comment><comment><USER5> Frankly, its somewhat hilarious to hear all this coming from Cerf, who works for the worst offenders of data centralization of all time. Think of the data that gets lost on Drive every day due to their product decision around the SaaS model + proprietary document formats, or the data that was lost/hidden on Code, Wave, Plus, their shattered IM platforms, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> A large problem in archiving is actually the copyright law. Sites like sci-hub or Library Genesis do a great job in archiving scientific papers and books, but are illegal.

Also archive.org is sometimes on the brink of legal/illegal, e.g. not all material that can be found on archive.org is really legal; though for lots of the formally illegal archived content, the copyright holders do not care or do not want to cause an outcry.

</comment><comment><USER21> Slightly related to this article, I recommend this Tedx talk by Cerf himself: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV0A82TCrf0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV0A82TCrf0)

</comment><comment><USER22> Adobe Flash player (closed SWF format) death takes toll also with uncountable number of human artistic creations, games etc. I wonder if there is some way to preserve that relic of 2000s.

<comment><USER23> Seems like there are a few people still working on Shumway, the flash engine written in JavaScript.

<comment><USER24> I doubt anyone is working on Shumway. Its in the Firefox graveyard.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Firefox%20Graveyard)

<comment><USER23> From Mozilla yes, but there was some activity by others this year: [https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/pull/2442](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/pull/2442)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> At first I thought this was saying _all_ information on the internet should be preserved (which is a growing privacy concern), but after reading more carefully I think it's about having a way to preserve the information that is intended to be public and permanent from the beginning. We don't have any good ways yet to guarantee future access to public information.

I'd never heard of the Digital Object Architecture (DOA). The article itself makes light of the unfortunate acryonym with "History pronounced DOA". That actually left me confused about what they were talking about for a minute.

No idea if it's a good way to preserve academic papers on the internet, but the business model side of it is a pure open question. That makes me wonder whether it solves anything at all. The problem with information on the internet is that the people who publish eventually lose the interest or the ability to continue paying for storage and access.

"Economics/Business Model

While the Handle System has been used for many years in publishing and library systems, generalizing to other applications, e.g., Internet of Things, will likely generate economic concerns related to the business model of the system, especially at the Global Handle Registry. Will organizations be charged for each identifier? Will organizations that acquire a prefix be able to create unlimited sub-prefixes or will they be charged for each sub-prefix? How will these policies be developed? How will the money flow? What will be the impact on developing countries or small businesses?"

[https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2016/overview-...](https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2016/overview- of-the-digital-object-architecture-doa/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Think about it, we still have almost-complete versions of Usenet archives from the 70s to the late-90s, the whole network has been preserved as if it was a time capsule. You can visit [https://olduse.net](https://olduse.net) (maintained by a retired Debian developer), and see the heyday of hackers and early technological adopters as if it was just yesterday, the entire society is archived here.

Discussing about the 4-color theorem recently proved, latest version of C compiler, difference between a vacuum tube amplifier and a solid-state amplifier, where GNU Project and Linux kernel was launched, and early online culture and tons of colorful, hilarious, but forgotten and buried memes, and weird phenomena emerged from the collective (un)consensus... Sci-Fi fandom being an integral part of online and hacker culture, millions of lewd story written in alt.sex, _" Immediate Death of Usenet Predicted!"_, _" There is no cabal"_, _alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg_ , Coffee and Cat warning, The church of Kibology, Anti-spam Movement, creationism vs evolutionism debates at talk.origin, Meow Wars - the first meme war online, all the personal attacks, trolls, flame wars, and "cyber-stalking", etc.

Then centralized WWW replaced distributed Usenet, crappy HTML replaced perfect machine-readable data format. Would we have a similar archive for Reddit or Hacker News? Possibly not. _So Hacker News, just come and create one! You can make it!_ Anther unique challenge created by WWW is the inaccessibility of server-side software - exporting and preserving the data is NOT enough, unlike Usenet which you can just load any data. The user-interface and functionality of one website itself is also the collective memory that needs to be preserved - we need replicated software of a website, which has identical user- interface, which has all the functions from the original website: users to click an username and see the posts, karma of this user, etc. I don't think anyone even noticed the existence of this problem. Luckily, major websites online such as Reddit or 4chan, all use FLOSS software which would make the work easier, but still a huge challenge due to the inaccessibility of raw database. Also, to make some contents meaningful in the future, external resources such as hyperlinks to other websites and images should also be preserved, considering this, the chance of creating an authentic and complete archive is even lower.

\---

But even if we're still using a distributed network where data preservation is still technically possible, and there is no walled garden, it may still be difficult to implement. In the era of Usenet, you often attach your name, address and phone number - there was virtually no threats except for a few trolls - this is why archiving Usenet was possible in the first place. But the Internet is not the Net anymore, now not only humans - almost every piece of equipment involved on the route may be your enemy.

The ongoing security and privacy movement is a huge threat of historical records. From my observation, at least of infosec hackers community - <USER2> Snowden's revelation, public and open discussion is slowing being transformed into private, closed, encrypted and temporary activity, plus self-hosted platforms like ActivityPub, GNU/Social, Mastodon. This is indeed good from a security and privacy perspective and it is exactly what we need now.

But we are also creating a huge gap of knowledge, information and history on the Internet. After my death, none of my self-hosted code, or my blog, or my GNU/Social posts will survive. In conclusion, _" collect 'em all"_ is both an malicious NSA dragnet surveillance, and a glorified act of history preservation. This is where the contradiction lies.

I don't know what to do. For WWW, archive.org is a workaround and I think it needs more donation. But for all the other self-hosted things like Mastodon and git server, there is no solution at all.

<comment><USER26> How do I navigate this olduse.net site? Is this a forum? I can't make heads or tails of how to see all those articles you mentioned. I've clicked every link on the homepage.

<comment><USER16> Use your Usenet client to connect the server nntp.olduse.net. While the original news client rn by Larry Wall written in 1984 is probably not working today, other implementation, such as slrn is still here.

See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsreader_(Usenet)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsreader_\(Usenet\))

Note that olduse.net is a playback of Usenet, time-shifted 20 years back, some of the events I mentioned has yet to occurs, you can navigate the website, download the original archives, and load it by your own to explore.

If you don't have the setup yet, to get an quick idea of how it works, read these interesting articles.

* [http://olduse.net/blog/what_rms_saw/](http://olduse.net/blog/what_rms_saw/)

* [http://olduse.net/blog/Dennis_Ritchie/](http://olduse.net/blog/Dennis_Ritchie/)

* [http://olduse.net/blog/stargate_controversy/](http://olduse.net/blog/stargate_controversy/)

You can also just browse the old Usenet from Google Groups. It's the same contents anyway, but the experience is poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's worth noting that in complex systems, forgetting can be just as important as remembering. The ability to evolve and change is in part predicated on the ability to selectively forget some elements that are no longer helpful. As another commenter pointed out, some aspects of our society's cultural memory are, probably, best left in the past, if preserved at all.

<comment><USER28> Knowing what should be forgotten requires either foreknowledge of the future or relies on inaccurate predictions based on current assumptions. Thus the less information of uncertain usefulness that is retained, the more that those assumptions dictate what will be considered useful in the future without having to rediscover things entirely. That limits adaptability. Just try to imagine how many things were invented in the past that weren't seen as useful at the time and had to be rediscovered later. How many ideas were lost in the Dark Ages, for instance, because they offended religious sensibility at the time? If there is capacity to retain information in an organized way without undue cost, it should be retained as a hedge against future uncertainty. No single generation of humans should be trusted to make such decisions without being unduly influenced by the biases of their time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you're on Windows, [https://www.mailstore.com](https://www.mailstore.com) has a mature, free version that will backup all your local and cloud mail to a searchable offline archive. Uses standard formats. Can also move your mail between cloud providers.

</comment><comment><USER30> We have been forgetting things for thousands of years. Last I looked, we still don't know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete. People will reinvent the things they need and maybe never even know that it's a reinvention. I reinvented a couple fundamental graphics techniques because I needed them and didn't study computer graphics in school. I'm sure this happens all the time.

I'm all for making it easier to recover data and generally make it easier to store stuff. And I believe you have a right to your data (yay GDPR). But this isn't a catastrophe.

<comment><USER31> > we still don't know how to make Damascus steel or Roman concrete

That's an oft-repeated but ultimately meaningless statement.

We know how to make things better than Damascus steel or Roman concrete. Our processes have exceeded the ancients. The quality of Damascus steel is likely overrated, since it wasn't quite as absolute shit as what was being regularly traded at the time. Same with concrete.

We might not have exquisite written recipes and procedures for these materials, but they have been reverse-engineered, and it turns out, they weren't that great compared to modern chemical and material engineered products.

We don't need to 'rediscover' Damascus steel because it is obselete. A romantic idea, and poetic in how it was 'lost' to time, but consider that it was 'lost' to time, similar to Japanese steel-working, because nobody wanted to buy it anymore. It became economically and culturally irrelevant.

<comment><USER30> Exactly. We forgot how to do a thing and invented better. The "lost" knowledge isn't really worth much to us today.

And that will be true of essentially everything we forget in the future as well — the forgetting is the sign that it wasn't needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In case anyone hasn't already heard if it, IPFS([https://ipfs.io](https://ipfs.io)) is a really cool project that aims to help solve this problem

<comment><USER33> Glad someone else mentioned it. I haven't seen much news from them recently other than a picture-sync application.

Looking forward to the next few years and their (anticipated) growth

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The Archive Team has been doing this work for at least 10 years. If you'd like to help archive the internet, they have an easy-to-use tool you just run and let work in the background.

[https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior](https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior)</comment>


Ask HN:  Advice for building blog traffic - <AUTHOR>

I've been blogging at http://rawsyntax.com/ for a couple months now.  I've been submitting my articles here, reddit.com/r/programming, and dzone.com, and also tweeting them from my twitter.
The blog is also hosted on tumblr, I've been following people, others have reblogged my posts.  As far as I can tell, the content on my site is relatively SEO friendly (at least the basic stuff).
My question is what else can I do to increase traffic?  What other aggregators should I submit my articles to? <comment><USER2> What's your end goal? Are you trying to build this up to be a business in itself? Or just trying to make a name for yourself?

I think one key to building an audience in blogging is regular content. Last post appears to be Jun 10th. That's a really long stretch. More content also helps with bringing in traffic via search engines.

Of course, posting compelling content. Stuff that is shared with others.

And this may be my personal bias but I am having a really hard time with the theme. I find it very hard to read. The headings seem to be the same style as the story titles. The text is rather hard to focus on, etc. I honestly can't get through an article.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would suggest guest blogging on some blogs that you follow.

</comment><comment><USER4> Write compelling content. Marketing can only get you so far.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. But you have to know what compelling content is for that niche. Basically ask yourself the question "why would anyone follow my blog when there are 1000's of blogs for programmers?".

A few random comments:

\- In general, I find your posts are too short and not in-depth enough (although that might be personal preference). There are too many titles, paragraphs are very small. When I scan it, my brain goes "um, it's not worth to read something of 2 lines long."

\- the blog post title size is the same as the section title size, making it harder to scan the article.

\- adding images/video would increase engagement

\- write lists "10 reasons you should choose Git".

\- SEO friendliness: <http://rawsyntax.com/post/6384354589/why-i-love-git> should be <http://rawsyntax.com/why-i-love-git> \- if you're looking for Search engine traffic, write about what people are looking for: "git tutorial", "best git gui" etc. It might pay off to do some keyword research to find what people are looking for.

\- follow relevant people (e.g people who blog about git) and retweets them, when you have something of quality send them a PM about it

But, getting traffic for your blog is hard. There are just so many good blogs out there. Find your voice, and do the work :-)</comment></comment>


Get kubectl access to your private cluster from anywhere - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alexellis.io/get-private-kubectl-access-anywhere/ <comment><USER2> Very cool but I think the ~ $170 license for Inlets might be a deal killer for most.

<comment><AUTHOR> For a company, that's basically nothing :-) Where did you get your price from?</comment></comment>


A tour inside Cloudflare's G9 servers - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tour-inside-cloudflares-g9-servers/ <comment><USER2> The parent post quoted RPS is doubled on Gen9 at 1.74x power consumption resulting from doubling cores compared to Gen8. It did not say what RPS we're looking at, but from the previous post about Falkor [1] I guess it's safe to assume that we're talking about nginx.

Gen8 is the Skylake server with 16,311 RPS at 165W (99 RPS/W), while Falkor is 15,393 at 72W (214 RPS/W). Calculated Gen9 number is about 32,622 RPS at 287W (114 RPS/W). Please note that power numbers are not directly comparable because the parent post quoted CPU TDP but [1] used actual power readings from BMC. Take it with a huge grain of salt. It would be nice if Cloudflare could do a comparable benchmark though :)

With the numbers above, it means power efficiency increased by 15% from Skylake to the custom chip. Falkor is still 88% more efficient. But Intel remains the only option if you want best performance density.

The interesting question is now that Qualcomm quit ARM64 server market, how does Cloudflare plan to continue the migration to ARM64?

[1]: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes- wing/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/)</comment>


What Is the Definition of a Seed Round or an a Round? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2014/10/07/what-is-the-definition-of-a-seed-round-or-an-a-round/ <comment><AUTHOR> Related content from Pando - [http://pando.com/2014/10/07/what-you-label-your- funding-roun...](http://pando.com/2014/10/07/what-you-label-your-funding- round-matters-a-lot-less-than-how-much-you-raise-and-what-you-accomplish/)</comment>


Ask HN: Visiting for Work at a Startup Day - <AUTHOR>

I'm traveling from Atlanta, GA for the Work at A Startup day event and would like to get a good feel of the culture of the valley.<p>For those who know the area, what locations would you recommend I visit?  Are any startups that frequent HN open to having visitors? <comment><USER2> You should contact the startups themselves that you want to visit and see if they're interested. There's usually some time when they're more chill and open to having visitors.</comment>


Swiss Voters Narrowly Approve Curbs on Immigration - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/world/europe/swiss-voters-narrowly-approve-curbs-on-immigration.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting phenomenon indeed. There is a map of votes here [http://www.nzz.ch/#abstimmungskarte-app](http://www.nzz.ch/#abstimmungskarte- app) \- showing that the votes against came mostly from the German cantons. There might be a hidden message there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it's since years (maybe even decades) like this. French speaking cantons are usually much more open to immigrants or to less strict rules with asylum for example (it's a phenomen called "Röstigraben") ;).

In this vote it's even more visible that cantons who have a higher percentage of immigrants voted "no" (in favor of immigrants) while more or less all rural cantons (with less immigrants) voted "yes".. Speaks for itself I think.</comment></comment>


Delivery Drones Already Exist – And They're Way Bigger Than Amazon's - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/01/delivery-drones-already-exist/

<comment><USER2> I suspect it is a lot easier to start flying large drones in an area where you dont't care what the local population think about it, or if they get killed in the process.

Flying in the US would be a whole diffrent thing. Provin the concept to the public with small drones that won't break someones house if they crash would be a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> And what about something in between? Big cargo drones acting as "mother ships" to deliver the goods to the general area, and smaller drones to make the final step of the delivery right to your door...</comment>


Hosted Exchange - <AUTHOR> http://www.apps4rent.com/hostedexchange.htm Apps4Rent is a premium provider of hosted Exchange services and caters to small and medium businesses. Our plans have been designed in a way that you get the best of hosted Exchange technology at an affordable price. <comment><USER2> Whoever told you it was a great marketing strategy to post your site more than 3 times within 30 minutes needs to be fired.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

READ IT.</comment>


Potential Mechanisms for Cancer Resistance in Elephants - <AUTHOR> http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2456041 <comment><AUTHOR> Peto's Paradox is the very interesting background to this [1].

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox)</comment>


At Schools, Making Pizza a Vegetable - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/at-schools-making-pizza-a-vegetable/

<comment><USER2> Relevant Ted talk from Jamie Oliver discussing the nutritional problem in schools: <http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html>

tl;dr version (but please watch the entire talk - it's fascinating) - obesity- related illness kills more people than anything else at all. Doing this to children is wrong and must stop.</comment>