4 ms·

> Can we talk about how cool the Wayback Machine Compare feature is? I consider myself an Internet Archive power-user; I spend hours playing with CDX queries,

by bshipp 5y ago

> Can we talk about how cool the Wayback Machine Compare feature is? I consider myself an Internet Archive power-user; I spend hours playing with CDX queries, t̶r̶o̶l̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ trawling the archive for interesting tidbits that have been lost to time. I have spent countless evenings building scripts based on the internetarchive (https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive) and iamine (https://github.com/jjjake/iamine https://github.com/jjjake/iamine) tools (along with a host of others). I am utterly ashamed I had never heard of the /diff/ feature between pages until I read your article. Thank you for bringing this to my attention! I am continuously impressed by the work they do at IA.

irthomasthomas 5y ago
Did you mean trawling the archive?
- bshipp 5y ago
  Yes, yes I did. I'm not even sure I can blame that on autocorrect. EDIT: As an aside, I didn't realize there's no strikethrough option for text on HN. For anyone else who wants to hide their shame without ninja editing, I found this site which does the same in unicode: https://yaytext.com/strike/ https://yaytext.com/strike/
  - kbelder 5y ago
    "Trolling: Carefully and systematically search an area for something." I think your subconscious did just fine.
    - bshipp 5y ago
      It's polite, pedantic, and incredibly useful digressions like this which keep me coming back to HN. I had no idea this homonym could describe two separate actions (i.e. casting a broad net to grab whatever is in the path vs. a systematic search covering a specified area) that both still work perfectly to describe how I interact with the Internet Archive. I'd say it was intentional, but that'd be a bald-faced lie.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  While trawling is more idiomatic, trolling is also a verb, and actually quite similar: it's fishing with a moving vessel except that it uses lines rather than nets. In my headcanon, trolling is a slower, less directed process. So I might idly troll for bugs to fix on a bug tracker, rather than a trawl which would aim to gather everything matching some criteria.

by bshipp 5y ago

irthomasthomas 5y ago

Did you mean trawling the archive?

bshipp 5y ago
Yes, yes I did. I'm not even sure I can blame that on autocorrect. EDIT: As an aside, I didn't realize there's no strikethrough option for text on HN. For anyone else who wants to hide their shame without ninja editing, I found this site which does the same in unicode: https://yaytext.com/strike/ https://yaytext.com/strike/
- kbelder 5y ago
  "Trolling: Carefully and systematically search an area for something." I think your subconscious did just fine.
  - bshipp 5y ago
    It's polite, pedantic, and incredibly useful digressions like this which keep me coming back to HN. I had no idea this homonym could describe two separate actions (i.e. casting a broad net to grab whatever is in the path vs. a systematic search covering a specified area) that both still work perfectly to describe how I interact with the Internet Archive. I'd say it was intentional, but that'd be a bald-faced lie.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
While trawling is more idiomatic, trolling is also a verb, and actually quite similar: it's fishing with a moving vessel except that it uses lines rather than nets. In my headcanon, trolling is a slower, less directed process. So I might idly troll for bugs to fix on a bug tracker, rather than a trawl which would aim to gather everything matching some criteria.