4 ms·

The argument that I hear often is that people in 200/300 years would precisely love that kind of thing. My history book in high school was filled with things li

by Zababa 5y ago

The argument that I hear often is that people in 200/300 years would precisely love that kind of thing. My history book in high school was filled with things like that. Articles from journals, letters from soldiers sent to their families. I think we don't need to keep every single high school newspaper, but I wouldn't know where to start if I had to choose which ones to keep.

WalterBright 5y ago
I.e. "scan it all and let god sort it out" :-)
ghaff 5y ago
I love this quote from here: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments." That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits. -------- One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I agree, it will take a lot of time and energy to sift through this data to find things of value. But on the other hand, it's not even a fraction of what would be necessary if the data was lost.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    But whose time and energy? I'm not personally going to spend hundreds of hours scanning and organizing stuff because someone someday might get some value out of it. Maybe a few things I find especially noteworthy or that I myself might want a digital copy of. But not in general.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      Researchers mostly. They are the one currently going through stuff from the Roman Empire through the 80's to try to understand history better. You can see a thread on HN that is about what people ate in the Roman Empire https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179. I also remember a youtube channel called "Depression Cooking" where an old lady explained what they ate and how they lived during the great depression. You can argue about the value of knowing what romans or people during the great depression ate, but our society seems to value knowing the past.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        My point is that future historians and researchers can spend however much time and energy they want. But I mostly will not go out of my way to assist them. Not out of any active desire not to help them but because I'm mostly not willing to put a lot of time/effort into it.
throwawayboise 5y ago
This is perilously close to the mental illness that results in hoarding behavior. A friend of my mom's saved every bank statement, utility bill, and cancelled check (this was when you actually got your cancelled checks back from the bank every month). She thought her kids "might be interested in looking at it" some day. Of course they weren't and when she died they threw it all in a dumpster. Newspapers and books are one thing. Every random photo on your phone and piece of paper that comes through your home is quite another. Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I don't understand your comment. We were precisely talking about "newspapers and books" which can have an historical value, and you present an anecdote about a friend of your mom that was a hoarder, while calling data preservation "perilously close to the mental illness that results in hoarding behavior.". Do you not understand the difference between keeping newspaper, books, photos and "every random [...] piece of paper that comes through your house"? > Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away. How about you focus on how to live your life and I'll handle how to live mine?

by Zababa 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

I.e. "scan it all and let god sort it out" :-)

ghaff 5y ago

I love this quote from here: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments." That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits. -------- One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.

Zababa 5y ago
I agree, it will take a lot of time and energy to sift through this data to find things of value. But on the other hand, it's not even a fraction of what would be necessary if the data was lost.
- ghaff 5y ago
  But whose time and energy? I'm not personally going to spend hundreds of hours scanning and organizing stuff because someone someday might get some value out of it. Maybe a few things I find especially noteworthy or that I myself might want a digital copy of. But not in general.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Researchers mostly. They are the one currently going through stuff from the Roman Empire through the 80's to try to understand history better. You can see a thread on HN that is about what people ate in the Roman Empire https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27310179. I also remember a youtube channel called "Depression Cooking" where an old lady explained what they ate and how they lived during the great depression. You can argue about the value of knowing what romans or people during the great depression ate, but our society seems to value knowing the past.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      My point is that future historians and researchers can spend however much time and energy they want. But I mostly will not go out of my way to assist them. Not out of any active desire not to help them but because I'm mostly not willing to put a lot of time/effort into it.

throwawayboise 5y ago

This is perilously close to the mental illness that results in hoarding behavior. A friend of my mom's saved every bank statement, utility bill, and cancelled check (this was when you actually got your cancelled checks back from the bank every month). She thought her kids "might be interested in looking at it" some day. Of course they weren't and when she died they threw it all in a dumpster. Newspapers and books are one thing. Every random photo on your phone and piece of paper that comes through your home is quite another. Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.

Zababa 5y ago
I don't understand your comment. We were precisely talking about "newspapers and books" which can have an historical value, and you present an anecdote about a friend of your mom that was a hoarder, while calling data preservation "perilously close to the mental illness that results in hoarding behavior.". Do you not understand the difference between keeping newspaper, books, photos and "every random [...] piece of paper that comes through your house"? > Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away. How about you focus on how to live your life and I'll handle how to live mine?