14 ms·

The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

237 points by jseliger 4y ago

nonameking2026 4y ago
Interesting article until: "Use snopes.com to check if the shocking thing you just read is real." Mind baffling that this article could end with this.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Well, if you read something surprising, then you should probably check it somewhere, unless it's trivial. Snopes might be a reasonable first check.
  - nonameking2026 4y ago
    Who fact checks the fact checkers ? Once you read something totally unreasonable in a fact check, why should you go there as a source of truth anymore? Wikipedia is probably a better bet - at least you have history of edits and sources.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      Agreed - I'd personally check out Wikipedia first. But it takes time to go through the edit histories, talk pages and sources. I'm retired, so I have time; but for a quick sanity check, Snopes isn't a dreadful choice.
      - nonameking2026 4y ago
        Can you fact check snopes in your spare time :)
eimrine 4y ago
I use to ask people about the thing exposed in your photo (why the seasons change, what the moon phases means) to make a quick test about random interlocutor's intelligence to see is it worth to keep discussion. Your father passed this test in absentia.
- istinetz 4y ago
  nowadays, you can just ask about astrology. It's both obviously wrong and socially acceptable to believe in. It filters a solid 30% of the population, at least in my country.
  - dazc 4y ago
    Typical Virgo
  - eimrine 4y ago
    Too obvious if an interlocutor is an engineer. Too severe if an interlocutor is a woman.
  - Lammy 4y ago
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Historically, I bet you could find trends based on which seasons certain developmental landmarks were hit. I'm sure it isn't a coincidence that Leos are attributed all the heroic traits, when they are mostly gestating in the Summer, and get their first couple months of life in the Fall harvest season. Nowadays I guess it would line up to school seasons. If you are born in August your parents can arrange for you to be among the oldest kids in the class. First couple grades, that extra year of development helps out, and then you get the reputation as the smart kid, it snowballs... Baseball player? Bet he's a Leo.
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        > when they are mostly gestating in the Summer Leos gestate throughout the year, depending on where they are located. Perhaps that remark was US-centric?
        bee_rider 4y ago
mellavora 4y ago
Your father's books are real treasures. Were it my library, they would have a place of honor. I want to put your post in the context of yesterday's HN front-page post lambasting the EU for trying to build a better search engine. The bulk of the comments suggested that a government effort could never be as good as a commercial effort. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32915263#32916945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32915263#32916945 Your post is a strong counter-argument. All of the points you mention on the massive decline in quality of web content are due to the web being driven by commercial efforts. Likewise, comments on this current HN front-page post "Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32945858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32945858 also seem to explain the poor state of the web as being due to commercialization of everything (even the comments about the need for cookie banners-- the logic behind the cookie consent is to regulate the commercial collection of user data). Google started as a DARPA project, and was a great engine while it stayed true to that ethos. It was the need to commercialize it, thus setting perverse business incentives, which has destroyed it. Your post praises libraries. Which are seldom commercial ventures. The economics are simple. I don't know why this even continues to be a debate on HN. - A socially created entity (corporation, government, "charitable" organization, ...) needs money to function. - Money comes from capturing a portion of the value created by the organization. - The most efficient organizational structure depends on the relationship between value creation and value capture. Thus: if the product/service generates immediate and focused value, the value capture can be directly linked to the product and a business is optimal. Think: a hamburger. If the product/service generates long-term and diffuse value, the value capture also needs to be diffused, i.e. taxes. Thus a government. Think: the road network which allows the raw materials and the customers to get to the hamburger store. I leave the case for charitable orgs as an exercise for the reader :) disclaimer: strongly pro-business, have founded 2 personally, assisted several others.
- Eleison23 4y ago
  >Google started as a DARPA project, and was a great engine while it stayed true to that ethos. It was the need to commercialize it, thus setting perverse business incentives, which has destroyed it. Google started as a what now? This is an interesting thing to say during a discussion of access to information. I'd be happy to read your explanation of Google's "DARPA roots", and your citations to sources explaining how that came about and how they were "destroyed" when they "strayed" from DARPA... that should be a fascinating read.
nicbou 4y ago
It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great. But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few minutes later I was watching a documentary about it, then a variety of videos about that man. My information binge extended to other African dictators, and will probably last a few days longer. If I'm curious about something, I can go really deep. I'm not constrained to a few paragraphs in whatever book my local library carries. You could argue that the web is in a sorry state, but if that's the cost of giving everyone, everywhere access to all this knowledge, then it's a deal worth making. This might be more obvious to someone who did not have access to a well-stocked library. The problem is not availability, but curation. The sum of all knowledge back then was a well-curated book. Now it's literally all of it, unfiltered.
- imiric 4y ago
  > It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. It's also never been easier to share disinformation, and pollute the vast sea of actual knowledge that exists on the internet. Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. The one exception is Wikipedia, though it also struggles with keeping factual information, and has its own set of issues.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Add in the rising tide of ML generated content that is able to get itself well placed in search results, diluting information with real value. It's really irritating to start reading something that starts out seeming legit and then you get in a few sentences or paragraphs before it becomes incoherent nonsense.
  - 4y ago
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
IMO the worst side effect of current web of knowledge is what I'd call the illusion of knowledge. When it was more difficult to access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed. These days, people watch a 10-minute YouTube video or read a reddit comment or twitter thread and believe (perhaps unconsciously) that makes them knowledgeable in said topic. They will then, in an absolutely confident tone, display their expertise by answering questions and stating their opinion as if it was a fact. More people read this, and the cycle begins. You see it all the time on HN and other forums. If you're an actual expert in a specific (usually scientific) subfield and you read comments about an article in that field, you find that a large percentage are not just factually wrong, but also written in an extremely confident tone by people who have probably studied the topic for about 10 minutes. By having easy access to all this information people have stopped being humble about what they don't know.
- sandruso 4y ago
  Its good to remind myself this . Not once I thought I know something after watching a summary video. When I tried to explain the topic to somebody else I struggled. If you can’t explain you know nothing. Simple as that.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > If you can’t explain you know nothing. Strongly agree. And I'll raise you: if you can't explain in simple, plain language that a 12-year-old could understand, then you are not enlightened. I concede that some subjects are intrinsically complex; e.g. the cosmological history of the Universe. But a large part of the reason that topic is complex is because it's not settled; we haven't got to the bottom of it, so there are loads of unanswered questions. How can you explain cosmological inflation in language a 12-year-old could understand? Well, I can't explain it to myself, so I sure as hell can't explain it to a 12-year-old.
  - vsareto 4y ago
    >If you can’t explain you know nothing. Simple as that. This is still a pretty good bar, but if I just repeat what the video said, it seems like I'm explaining it, and then I can give the impression I do know something. I shouldn't get credibility for just repeating a video. The US has devolved into somewhat of a reputation-driven expertise market, and there are plenty of ways to gain reputation without the expertise. There's still plenty of real experts, but I don't blame them if they want to focus on their work instead of fighting the endless tide of easily produced misinformation.
cm2187 4y ago
On the other hand the digital assets that people make a personal copy of never age, so chances are higher that we will find some old writing that we thought was lost when the server shut down. Of course that's in a world where we still have personal computers, not apple style locked down devices.
marcinzm 4y ago
>Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago? Internet Archive which is a lot easier to search in than going manually through microfilm.
- izacus 4y ago
  Except that people on this very sight are fighting very very hard to ban scraping from sites like Internet Archive and keep propping up IP laws that make such libraries illegal.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  One reason Archive.Today is far more frequently used and referenced on HN and elsewhere, including by myself, is that it provides actual useful site access in many, many cases where the Internet Archive does not. I'm a big fan of the Internet Archive and its mission. I'm concerned over Archive Today's severe lack of transparency (I've had a few exchanges with the site's operators, I've no idea who they are or what their motives are). I find the site useful but troubling. I've also conducted microfilm (and -fiche) searches, as well as cataloguing of same. One affordance of a microform archive is that it is indexed, in ways that many online archives, including The Internet Archive ... aren't, usefully. The exchange is one of access-from-anywhere (yes, useful) against usable search and curation. It's ... an uncomfortable trade-off. (The history of usefully cataloguing and indexing archives is itself a very old one. The US Librarian of Congress's annual letters to Congress, available through the otherwise almost wholly useless Hathi Trust, though, come to think of it, downloads of the entire letter rather than one single page at a time require using a different service ... are one interesting view to that process and the creation of the Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings.)
johnchristopher 4y ago
I love old books like this ! I managed to salvage this one when my grand parents went away https://imgur.com/a/AFmTQv7 https://imgur.com/a/AFmTQv7 I don't think it's worth much but it's old and smells nice and feels good to handle.
masa331 4y ago
I don't get how the author can value all the things in the article and yet work at Microsoft on a bloatware like Edge which is not possible to remove, is pushed hard by Windows against other browsers and used as a part of a giant ads engine in itself
- legrande 4y ago
  I don't see the unique selling point of Edge. It's just a re-skin of Chromium with Microsoft tracking added. It's largely a data grab by M$.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
Tells a touching story and how that motivated the author to work on browsers, standards and CMS. Wonderful. But the rest is awful. Whining about ads and paywalls without suggesting any better way for websites to make money. Telling people to check snopes.com after they read something. Well, I have a better idea: Just don't read anything other then snopes in the first place. If you accept snopes as the ultimate arbiter of human knowledge, there's no point in poisoning your brain with anything else.
AshleysBrain 4y ago
Blogs are still an underrated goldmine of knowledge, especially in tech. I find academic papers often too abstract or opaque, textbooks are good but generalized, and documentation is reference-like. Stumbling across a tech blog where someone explains some fairly specific and difficult problem they had, and an interesting solution they found, can be exactly what you needed to solve a problem. The web has its problems for sure, but don't forget there are still gems out there which the web has made possible. I'd love to see a comeback of blogging culture, but I guess a lot of that has been sucked in to social networks now.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Blogs are wonderful and still there - they’re just much harder to find because there is so much OTHER content now. The web used to be almost nothing but blogs. For example, this blog is pertinent to what I’m doing and I didn’t find it for weeks: https://www.northernbuilt.pro/ https://www.northernbuilt.pro/ and only found it by a link to a YouTube video from another one from another one.
- saperyton 4y ago
  A great resource to find new blogs is the Thinking About Things newsletter. Been getting it for a while and it's a great way to find new blogs to read.
- deleted 4y ago
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trinsic2 4y ago
I appreciate your personal account about where society is heading related to the Internet. I avoid for-profit social networking websites because for the free flow of information because I realize that these sites only represent a small portion of what the web is about. I know the Internet is really best when I read from people that self-publish. I also publish articles on interpersonal work and the state of technology myself. As a "principal product manager in Microsoft working on tooling to enable people to do more on the web." I wonder what you think about Microsoft and Apple creating walled gardens in there respective OS's? I recently switched to Linux and [wrote](https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transition-windows-to-linux/ https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...) about why I think the biggest threat to the free flowing information of the net has to do with how we allow our technology that connects to the net to become restricted.
abitnegative 4y ago
I think the author misses the magic feeling of the early internet and is trying to rationalize their feelings, but hasn't quite figured out the real explanation. I really doubt that their inability to find old news is the source of their troubles; in fact, I doubt that they've struggled to find old news at all. It's not very hard to find. More likely, the author is facing the same issue as everyone else; it's harder to find or create something on the internet that feels really special, because everyone's already seen it all.
mikewarot 4y ago
If we all had the Memex that Vannevar Bush proposed[1,1*], many of the losses we all discuss in these threads may have been avoided. We now have massive local storage, and should be able to freely share data by hosting our own stuff on our own machines. We could have done what the editor of the magazine implored us to do: "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR" We don't have that, and it makes me sad. We should fix this inadequacy, but there are now so many interests in the entrenched model that I think they would squash something that freely allows copying like a bug. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... [1*] https://web.archive.org/web/20220301051333/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220301051333/https://www.theat... [edits - quoted editor's introduction, revised/extended]
- arcbyte 4y ago
  Is it ironic that I can read the article you posted because it's behind a paywall?
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    I was lazy... thanks for prodding me to do better.
_gabe_ 4y ago
> and I now work on the browser that comes out of the box with any Windows machine (working on a Mac most of the time). Is this why Microsoft products are getting progressively worse every year? How can you work on a product and then never use it natively and expect other people to enjoy using it? Or worse, like with windows 11, it leads to the product morphing into something the users never wanted. Because developers want to conform it to what they're used to using. I don't know, it kind of baffles me the way most developers view the products they make.
seydor 4y ago
> The web we have these days is in a sorry state The web is one of humanities greatest inventions, right up there with Gutenberg or even more. It's a shame that people focus on politics and miss the rest of the web. There are two webs, one is a medium of mass manipulation, just like all media before it, the other is the library of all human knowledge, ever, everywhere. The printing press precipitated major societal changes, but the internet has yet to. We still follow the rules set 400 years ago, voting some humans to rule us every 4 years, and have not questioned the system under the current situation , where everyone can create and access information everywhere, instantly. The internet will take us to new politics , we just have to invent it.
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llaolleh 4y ago
Part of why the web is shit is low barrier to entry. More often than not, if you read classics or older books, it's information dense. Every prose and sentence constructed had some economy baked in. Now everyone and their mom, as well as bots and marketers,can spam right on over. We either need a search portal with aligned incentives, or perhaps a new internet with none of this crap.
- MMS21 4y ago
  Check out Gopher/ Gemini protocol
closedloop129 4y ago
The social web is no problem. We can choose what we visit like the author's father chose to buy those books. What is missing is a beacon of light in the desert of choice. There is no lack of knowledge anymore but a lack of orientation. The author's father knew that he could buy knowledge in a bookstore. Where do we go to find orientation on the web? People don't know. That's why they are stuck in the social net with its memes.
vmoore 4y ago
Just going to leave this gem of a video[0] here. Whilst I agree the web has been walled gardened into various silos like social media, and people think Facebook and Twitter are the Internet, it's still read/write. The blogosphere is still ticking along nicely and last time I checked it's thriving. Yes, people have gamified Google and search to get traffic and the blogosphere of old has largely been co-opted by profiteering gluttons, but there's still hope. Surf Hackernews enough and you'll find little gem posts that don't have an ulterior motive and are not 'monetizing' their content and sprinkling it with affiliate links and ADs. They just want to vent, exchange techne, and share knowledge. Then there's Wikipedia which has remained AD-free for as long as I can remember (apart from their donation banners which I don't mind). Wikipedia is the coolest thing ever and my IQ has probably gone up a few notches over the years because of it. It is the closest thing to getting home-schooled without going through formal education, and you can verify all the claims made in its entries by going to the footer section and reading various citations usually written by esteemed scholars. The web is in a sorry state due to the commercialization and walled garden silos, and also because of the proliferation of smartphones which are mere consumption devices IMHO and not designed for producing any meaningful or substantial content, apart from maybe uploading photos/videos to Instagram or writing tweets etc I can't write a blogpost on a phone because I have bad dexterity, and I typically have to have 100+ tabs open to verify claims, provide sources, do cross-referencing, find relevant images etc...all something done best on a workstation PC or laptop. Some context: I have professionally blogged for more than five years but due to reasons I won't go into here, I have stopped. I'm thinking of jumping back in, only this time armed with the wisdom of my previous blogging shenanigans. Failure is an opportunity to start again more intelligently! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
- trinsic2 4y ago
  Good point about smart photos being hooked into the web, and trying to use them to create some well thought out then is really difficult. And as far as the web goes it's really up to us how that plays out, so I think yea, there will always people that choose the quick way around the net using mobile, but I think that is a by product of living out of touch with the world anyway.
BrainVirus 4y ago
>Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago? I have a better one for you. Ever wondered why it's so hard? Why web protocols have nothing related to archiving? Why web browsers are a hellscape for aggregating information over time in a meaningful way? Why this continues to be true, despite countless Microsoft and Google engineers writing all these heartfelt posts about knowledge? If your answer is "because it's hard to implement" than you understand nothing.
- doliveira 4y ago
  From my admittedly limited understanding, the failure of the semantic web is one of mankind's biggest missed opportunities. Now the knowledge graph is just locked behind Google's neural network layers and only being used for ads.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    The idea behind semantic web was inspiring and great, however it required considerable work on the part of people creating stuff for the web and that was never going to happen. Maybe it could have happened in some things like academia based or knowledge based websites, but on the larger scale it was doomed.
    - hobofan 4y ago
      (Warning: Personal plug incoming) I fully agree, especially when it comes to the "semantic" part of the semantic web. Reusing and publishing ontologies that define those semantics always seemed like an afterthought of the semantic web, when it should be part of the foundation that things on the semantic web are built on. In most other parts that make up a website (JS and HTML) we figured out how to make reuse (mostly) work by replacing flimsy web references with package management. Ontologies never had something like that, and thus were stuck in an early 00s era of software/ontology development. Where I work, we are building Plow, a package manager for ontologies (https://github.com/field33/plow https://github.com/field33/plow) as part of our tech stack to improve that situation and allow people to build applications with large-scale stable semantics at the core. As part of building Plow we are aiming to make the process of creating and sharing ontologies easier and with that also lowering the barrier of entry to that domain.
vt85 4y ago
molasses 4y ago
I was reading some tech article the other day. Something like 10 best Foos or something. And there was no date on it. A commenter said, great article but no date, and the author replied that the page was refreshed with evergreen content. You'd have had to be a mind reader to know that. But I guess at least I got my answer via a little Q and A on the page.
molasses 4y ago
I wonder if we could make a more semantic web by enforcing some meta data standards and having more piecemeal content.
crazygringo 4y ago
> Except, it isn’t any longer. The web we have these days is in a sorry state. The web is in a better state than it's ever been. Just between Wikipedia, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub alone, let alone things like Google Search, Google Scholar, or all the content put online from various museums/libraries/etc. > On top of that drowning in memes, reposts and funny things you already read in newsgroups in 1998. None of that takes away from all the good parts. I honestly don't get any of these posts about how the web is so bad or so much worse than it used to be. The absolute amount of quality content has grown, seemingly exponentially. Even if the relative amount of quality has decreased... who even cares?! You don't have to visit the parts of the web you don't like. And if you're complaining about reposts...? I have zero sympathy for you. Lots of people are seeing things for the first time. And it's nice to be reminded of things too.
fatneckbeardz 4y ago
i think to change this, you have to start with a basic, fundamental respect for the liberal arts, the humanities, and for human beings in general. and that means you have to pay people in money for the emotional and mental labor of organizing information. and stop trying to replace them with algorithms to maximize clicks and watchtime.
antonymy 4y ago
I definitely worry about the future of scholarship as our print media becomes more and more fragmented and hidden. It's not necessarily about ensuring essential knowledge is carried forward, but rather a "sense of the past". In researching history, the further back you go the more fragmented and unreliable your sources usually become. So it becomes harder and harder to figure out the broad sweep of these past cultures, what life was like, the things they believed, and so on. And I think we're doing that to our present historical moment by deleting the recent past and creating a continuous present. We have the Internet Archive, we have Wikipedia page histories, but everything else is ephemeral. If Archive.org ever goes the way of the Library of Alexandria, we'll have lost irreplaceable knowledge of the web itself, and the cultures that existed on it. It will live on only in living memory, but this is also transient, and soon nobody will live who remembers what this time period was like. Wikipedia will not reflect it, you'd have to dig through page histories to find fragments, like historians and archaeologists sifting through ancient manuscripts and ruins for clues. A potential dark age is forming, and avoiding it right now hinges entirely on the continued efforts of two donation-funded organizations, one of which makes it increasingly harder to view the past, the other facing legal disputes that could see it shut down. I think we need to make archiving the present important, so it does not become a mysterious, inscrutable past for our descendants.
- Beached 4y ago
  while I have the same general concerns, both wikipedia and archive.org have offline backup and running options for free. and, they are surprisingly small. all one has to do is write a simple script to auto download these backups daily/weekly/whatever and you can access all that info of your solar powered raspberry pi. while I think there could be a short period where this info is largely unavailable, I don't believe it will be lost forever. if the Internet goes away, once some new Internet like technology comes around to replace it, these data repos will likely get out back up very quickly. just a matter of how long that blip is
- cxr 4y ago
  Technologists and those in an adjacent professional class (which should account for a lot here on HN) should also do their part to help make sure that the present is easily archivable.
QuasarOne 4y ago
I'm all for openness. Open standards for example. But 'open information' never worked; and never will. Powerful interests want to control information. They did it in Communist states. They do it in Capitalist states. They even do it on 'Anarchist' Wikipedia. That doesn't mean to say I favour closed off information. I just think people need to understand that - in opening up information and discourse - we are up against powerful interests = other people. Many of them are fithy rich and they desire to tell us what to think, read and say - because they "care" about us and "know what's best" for us.
ram4jesus 4y ago
What I would give to live in the universe where Ted Nelson's Xanadu was the default way to interact with the Internet. I bet that world has more rainbows and sunshine :)
8bitsrule 4y ago
When it comes to the web, I found this Robert Heinlein quote the other day that applies to much of what's online: "Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers."
chrstphrknwtn 4y ago
The web can never be the "sum of all knowledge". It's simply impossible. It always irks me when people refer to the web as 'all human knowledge', because it's woefully incomplete if that is the goal.

237 points by jseliger 4y ago

nonameking2026 4y ago

Interesting article until: "Use snopes.com to check if the shocking thing you just read is real." Mind baffling that this article could end with this.

denton-scratch 4y ago
Well, if you read something surprising, then you should probably check it somewhere, unless it's trivial. Snopes might be a reasonable first check.
- nonameking2026 4y ago
  Who fact checks the fact checkers ? Once you read something totally unreasonable in a fact check, why should you go there as a source of truth anymore? Wikipedia is probably a better bet - at least you have history of edits and sources.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    Agreed - I'd personally check out Wikipedia first. But it takes time to go through the edit histories, talk pages and sources. I'm retired, so I have time; but for a quick sanity check, Snopes isn't a dreadful choice.
    - nonameking2026 4y ago
      Can you fact check snopes in your spare time :)

eimrine 4y ago

I use to ask people about the thing exposed in your photo (why the seasons change, what the moon phases means) to make a quick test about random interlocutor's intelligence to see is it worth to keep discussion. Your father passed this test in absentia.

istinetz 4y ago
nowadays, you can just ask about astrology. It's both obviously wrong and socially acceptable to believe in. It filters a solid 30% of the population, at least in my country.
- dazc 4y ago
  Typical Virgo
- eimrine 4y ago
  Too obvious if an interlocutor is an engineer. Too severe if an interlocutor is a woman.
- Lammy 4y ago
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Historically, I bet you could find trends based on which seasons certain developmental landmarks were hit. I'm sure it isn't a coincidence that Leos are attributed all the heroic traits, when they are mostly gestating in the Summer, and get their first couple months of life in the Fall harvest season. Nowadays I guess it would line up to school seasons. If you are born in August your parents can arrange for you to be among the oldest kids in the class. First couple grades, that extra year of development helps out, and then you get the reputation as the smart kid, it snowballs... Baseball player? Bet he's a Leo.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      > when they are mostly gestating in the Summer Leos gestate throughout the year, depending on where they are located. Perhaps that remark was US-centric?
      - bee_rider 4y ago

mellavora 4y ago

Your father's books are real treasures. Were it my library, they would have a place of honor. I want to put your post in the context of yesterday's HN front-page post lambasting the EU for trying to build a better search engine. The bulk of the comments suggested that a government effort could never be as good as a commercial effort. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32915263#32916945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32915263#32916945 Your post is a strong counter-argument. All of the points you mention on the massive decline in quality of web content are due to the web being driven by commercial efforts. Likewise, comments on this current HN front-page post "Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32945858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32945858 also seem to explain the poor state of the web as being due to commercialization of everything (even the comments about the need for cookie banners-- the logic behind the cookie consent is to regulate the commercial collection of user data). Google started as a DARPA project, and was a great engine while it stayed true to that ethos. It was the need to commercialize it, thus setting perverse business incentives, which has destroyed it. Your post praises libraries. Which are seldom commercial ventures. The economics are simple. I don't know why this even continues to be a debate on HN. - A socially created entity (corporation, government, "charitable" organization, ...) needs money to function. - Money comes from capturing a portion of the value created by the organization. - The most efficient organizational structure depends on the relationship between value creation and value capture. Thus: if the product/service generates immediate and focused value, the value capture can be directly linked to the product and a business is optimal. Think: a hamburger. If the product/service generates long-term and diffuse value, the value capture also needs to be diffused, i.e. taxes. Thus a government. Think: the road network which allows the raw materials and the customers to get to the hamburger store. I leave the case for charitable orgs as an exercise for the reader :) disclaimer: strongly pro-business, have founded 2 personally, assisted several others.

Eleison23 4y ago
>Google started as a DARPA project, and was a great engine while it stayed true to that ethos. It was the need to commercialize it, thus setting perverse business incentives, which has destroyed it. Google started as a what now? This is an interesting thing to say during a discussion of access to information. I'd be happy to read your explanation of Google's "DARPA roots", and your citations to sources explaining how that came about and how they were "destroyed" when they "strayed" from DARPA... that should be a fascinating read.

nicbou 4y ago

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great. But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few minutes later I was watching a documentary about it, then a variety of videos about that man. My information binge extended to other African dictators, and will probably last a few days longer. If I'm curious about something, I can go really deep. I'm not constrained to a few paragraphs in whatever book my local library carries. You could argue that the web is in a sorry state, but if that's the cost of giving everyone, everywhere access to all this knowledge, then it's a deal worth making. This might be more obvious to someone who did not have access to a well-stocked library. The problem is not availability, but curation. The sum of all knowledge back then was a well-curated book. Now it's literally all of it, unfiltered.

imiric 4y ago
> It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. It's also never been easier to share disinformation, and pollute the vast sea of actual knowledge that exists on the internet. Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. The one exception is Wikipedia, though it also struggles with keeping factual information, and has its own set of issues.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Add in the rising tide of ML generated content that is able to get itself well placed in search results, diluting information with real value. It's really irritating to start reading something that starts out seeming legit and then you get in a few sentences or paragraphs before it becomes incoherent nonsense.
- 4y ago

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

IMO the worst side effect of current web of knowledge is what I'd call the illusion of knowledge. When it was more difficult to access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed. These days, people watch a 10-minute YouTube video or read a reddit comment or twitter thread and believe (perhaps unconsciously) that makes them knowledgeable in said topic. They will then, in an absolutely confident tone, display their expertise by answering questions and stating their opinion as if it was a fact. More people read this, and the cycle begins. You see it all the time on HN and other forums. If you're an actual expert in a specific (usually scientific) subfield and you read comments about an article in that field, you find that a large percentage are not just factually wrong, but also written in an extremely confident tone by people who have probably studied the topic for about 10 minutes. By having easy access to all this information people have stopped being humble about what they don't know.

sandruso 4y ago
Its good to remind myself this . Not once I thought I know something after watching a summary video. When I tried to explain the topic to somebody else I struggled. If you can’t explain you know nothing. Simple as that.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > If you can’t explain you know nothing. Strongly agree. And I'll raise you: if you can't explain in simple, plain language that a 12-year-old could understand, then you are not enlightened. I concede that some subjects are intrinsically complex; e.g. the cosmological history of the Universe. But a large part of the reason that topic is complex is because it's not settled; we haven't got to the bottom of it, so there are loads of unanswered questions. How can you explain cosmological inflation in language a 12-year-old could understand? Well, I can't explain it to myself, so I sure as hell can't explain it to a 12-year-old.
- vsareto 4y ago
  >If you can’t explain you know nothing. Simple as that. This is still a pretty good bar, but if I just repeat what the video said, it seems like I'm explaining it, and then I can give the impression I do know something. I shouldn't get credibility for just repeating a video. The US has devolved into somewhat of a reputation-driven expertise market, and there are plenty of ways to gain reputation without the expertise. There's still plenty of real experts, but I don't blame them if they want to focus on their work instead of fighting the endless tide of easily produced misinformation.

cm2187 4y ago

On the other hand the digital assets that people make a personal copy of never age, so chances are higher that we will find some old writing that we thought was lost when the server shut down. Of course that's in a world where we still have personal computers, not apple style locked down devices.

marcinzm 4y ago

>Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago? Internet Archive which is a lot easier to search in than going manually through microfilm.

izacus 4y ago
Except that people on this very sight are fighting very very hard to ban scraping from sites like Internet Archive and keep propping up IP laws that make such libraries illegal.
dredmorbius 4y ago
One reason Archive.Today is far more frequently used and referenced on HN and elsewhere, including by myself, is that it provides actual useful site access in many, many cases where the Internet Archive does not. I'm a big fan of the Internet Archive and its mission. I'm concerned over Archive Today's severe lack of transparency (I've had a few exchanges with the site's operators, I've no idea who they are or what their motives are). I find the site useful but troubling. I've also conducted microfilm (and -fiche) searches, as well as cataloguing of same. One affordance of a microform archive is that it is indexed, in ways that many online archives, including The Internet Archive ... aren't, usefully. The exchange is one of access-from-anywhere (yes, useful) against usable search and curation. It's ... an uncomfortable trade-off. (The history of usefully cataloguing and indexing archives is itself a very old one. The US Librarian of Congress's annual letters to Congress, available through the otherwise almost wholly useless Hathi Trust, though, come to think of it, downloads of the entire letter rather than one single page at a time require using a different service ... are one interesting view to that process and the creation of the Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings.)

johnchristopher 4y ago

I love old books like this ! I managed to salvage this one when my grand parents went away https://imgur.com/a/AFmTQv7 https://imgur.com/a/AFmTQv7 I don't think it's worth much but it's old and smells nice and feels good to handle.

masa331 4y ago

I don't get how the author can value all the things in the article and yet work at Microsoft on a bloatware like Edge which is not possible to remove, is pushed hard by Windows against other browsers and used as a part of a giant ads engine in itself

legrande 4y ago
I don't see the unique selling point of Edge. It's just a re-skin of Chromium with Microsoft tracking added. It's largely a data grab by M$.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

Tells a touching story and how that motivated the author to work on browsers, standards and CMS. Wonderful. But the rest is awful. Whining about ads and paywalls without suggesting any better way for websites to make money. Telling people to check snopes.com after they read something. Well, I have a better idea: Just don't read anything other then snopes in the first place. If you accept snopes as the ultimate arbiter of human knowledge, there's no point in poisoning your brain with anything else.

AshleysBrain 4y ago

Blogs are still an underrated goldmine of knowledge, especially in tech. I find academic papers often too abstract or opaque, textbooks are good but generalized, and documentation is reference-like. Stumbling across a tech blog where someone explains some fairly specific and difficult problem they had, and an interesting solution they found, can be exactly what you needed to solve a problem. The web has its problems for sure, but don't forget there are still gems out there which the web has made possible. I'd love to see a comeback of blogging culture, but I guess a lot of that has been sucked in to social networks now.

bombcar 4y ago
Blogs are wonderful and still there - they’re just much harder to find because there is so much OTHER content now. The web used to be almost nothing but blogs. For example, this blog is pertinent to what I’m doing and I didn’t find it for weeks: https://www.northernbuilt.pro/ https://www.northernbuilt.pro/ and only found it by a link to a YouTube video from another one from another one.
saperyton 4y ago
A great resource to find new blogs is the Thinking About Things newsletter. Been getting it for a while and it's a great way to find new blogs to read.
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trinsic2 4y ago

I appreciate your personal account about where society is heading related to the Internet. I avoid for-profit social networking websites because for the free flow of information because I realize that these sites only represent a small portion of what the web is about. I know the Internet is really best when I read from people that self-publish. I also publish articles on interpersonal work and the state of technology myself. As a "principal product manager in Microsoft working on tooling to enable people to do more on the web." I wonder what you think about Microsoft and Apple creating walled gardens in there respective OS's? I recently switched to Linux and [wrote](https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transition-windows-to-linux/ https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...) about why I think the biggest threat to the free flowing information of the net has to do with how we allow our technology that connects to the net to become restricted.

abitnegative 4y ago

I think the author misses the magic feeling of the early internet and is trying to rationalize their feelings, but hasn't quite figured out the real explanation. I really doubt that their inability to find old news is the source of their troubles; in fact, I doubt that they've struggled to find old news at all. It's not very hard to find. More likely, the author is facing the same issue as everyone else; it's harder to find or create something on the internet that feels really special, because everyone's already seen it all.

mikewarot 4y ago

If we all had the Memex that Vannevar Bush proposed[1,1*], many of the losses we all discuss in these threads may have been avoided. We now have massive local storage, and should be able to freely share data by hosting our own stuff on our own machines. We could have done what the editor of the magazine implored us to do: "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR" We don't have that, and it makes me sad. We should fix this inadequacy, but there are now so many interests in the entrenched model that I think they would squash something that freely allows copying like a bug. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... [1*] https://web.archive.org/web/20220301051333/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220301051333/https://www.theat... [edits - quoted editor's introduction, revised/extended]

arcbyte 4y ago
Is it ironic that I can read the article you posted because it's behind a paywall?
- mikewarot 4y ago
  I was lazy... thanks for prodding me to do better.

_gabe_ 4y ago

> and I now work on the browser that comes out of the box with any Windows machine (working on a Mac most of the time). Is this why Microsoft products are getting progressively worse every year? How can you work on a product and then never use it natively and expect other people to enjoy using it? Or worse, like with windows 11, it leads to the product morphing into something the users never wanted. Because developers want to conform it to what they're used to using. I don't know, it kind of baffles me the way most developers view the products they make.

seydor 4y ago

> The web we have these days is in a sorry state The web is one of humanities greatest inventions, right up there with Gutenberg or even more. It's a shame that people focus on politics and miss the rest of the web. There are two webs, one is a medium of mass manipulation, just like all media before it, the other is the library of all human knowledge, ever, everywhere. The printing press precipitated major societal changes, but the internet has yet to. We still follow the rules set 400 years ago, voting some humans to rule us every 4 years, and have not questioned the system under the current situation , where everyone can create and access information everywhere, instantly. The internet will take us to new politics , we just have to invent it.

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llaolleh 4y ago

Part of why the web is shit is low barrier to entry. More often than not, if you read classics or older books, it's information dense. Every prose and sentence constructed had some economy baked in. Now everyone and their mom, as well as bots and marketers,can spam right on over. We either need a search portal with aligned incentives, or perhaps a new internet with none of this crap.

MMS21 4y ago
Check out Gopher/ Gemini protocol

closedloop129 4y ago

The social web is no problem. We can choose what we visit like the author's father chose to buy those books. What is missing is a beacon of light in the desert of choice. There is no lack of knowledge anymore but a lack of orientation. The author's father knew that he could buy knowledge in a bookstore. Where do we go to find orientation on the web? People don't know. That's why they are stuck in the social net with its memes.

vmoore 4y ago

Just going to leave this gem of a video[0] here. Whilst I agree the web has been walled gardened into various silos like social media, and people think Facebook and Twitter are the Internet, it's still read/write. The blogosphere is still ticking along nicely and last time I checked it's thriving. Yes, people have gamified Google and search to get traffic and the blogosphere of old has largely been co-opted by profiteering gluttons, but there's still hope. Surf Hackernews enough and you'll find little gem posts that don't have an ulterior motive and are not 'monetizing' their content and sprinkling it with affiliate links and ADs. They just want to vent, exchange techne, and share knowledge. Then there's Wikipedia which has remained AD-free for as long as I can remember (apart from their donation banners which I don't mind). Wikipedia is the coolest thing ever and my IQ has probably gone up a few notches over the years because of it. It is the closest thing to getting home-schooled without going through formal education, and you can verify all the claims made in its entries by going to the footer section and reading various citations usually written by esteemed scholars. The web is in a sorry state due to the commercialization and walled garden silos, and also because of the proliferation of smartphones which are mere consumption devices IMHO and not designed for producing any meaningful or substantial content, apart from maybe uploading photos/videos to Instagram or writing tweets etc I can't write a blogpost on a phone because I have bad dexterity, and I typically have to have 100+ tabs open to verify claims, provide sources, do cross-referencing, find relevant images etc...all something done best on a workstation PC or laptop. Some context: I have professionally blogged for more than five years but due to reasons I won't go into here, I have stopped. I'm thinking of jumping back in, only this time armed with the wisdom of my previous blogging shenanigans. Failure is an opportunity to start again more intelligently! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

trinsic2 4y ago
Good point about smart photos being hooked into the web, and trying to use them to create some well thought out then is really difficult. And as far as the web goes it's really up to us how that plays out, so I think yea, there will always people that choose the quick way around the net using mobile, but I think that is a by product of living out of touch with the world anyway.

BrainVirus 4y ago

>Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago? I have a better one for you. Ever wondered why it's so hard? Why web protocols have nothing related to archiving? Why web browsers are a hellscape for aggregating information over time in a meaningful way? Why this continues to be true, despite countless Microsoft and Google engineers writing all these heartfelt posts about knowledge? If your answer is "because it's hard to implement" than you understand nothing.

doliveira 4y ago
From my admittedly limited understanding, the failure of the semantic web is one of mankind's biggest missed opportunities. Now the knowledge graph is just locked behind Google's neural network layers and only being used for ads.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  The idea behind semantic web was inspiring and great, however it required considerable work on the part of people creating stuff for the web and that was never going to happen. Maybe it could have happened in some things like academia based or knowledge based websites, but on the larger scale it was doomed.
  - hobofan 4y ago
    (Warning: Personal plug incoming) I fully agree, especially when it comes to the "semantic" part of the semantic web. Reusing and publishing ontologies that define those semantics always seemed like an afterthought of the semantic web, when it should be part of the foundation that things on the semantic web are built on. In most other parts that make up a website (JS and HTML) we figured out how to make reuse (mostly) work by replacing flimsy web references with package management. Ontologies never had something like that, and thus were stuck in an early 00s era of software/ontology development. Where I work, we are building Plow, a package manager for ontologies (https://github.com/field33/plow https://github.com/field33/plow) as part of our tech stack to improve that situation and allow people to build applications with large-scale stable semantics at the core. As part of building Plow we are aiming to make the process of creating and sharing ontologies easier and with that also lowering the barrier of entry to that domain.

vt85 4y ago

molasses 4y ago

I was reading some tech article the other day. Something like 10 best Foos or something. And there was no date on it. A commenter said, great article but no date, and the author replied that the page was refreshed with evergreen content. You'd have had to be a mind reader to know that. But I guess at least I got my answer via a little Q and A on the page.

molasses 4y ago

I wonder if we could make a more semantic web by enforcing some meta data standards and having more piecemeal content.

crazygringo 4y ago

> Except, it isn’t any longer. The web we have these days is in a sorry state. The web is in a better state than it's ever been. Just between Wikipedia, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub alone, let alone things like Google Search, Google Scholar, or all the content put online from various museums/libraries/etc. > On top of that drowning in memes, reposts and funny things you already read in newsgroups in 1998. None of that takes away from all the good parts. I honestly don't get any of these posts about how the web is so bad or so much worse than it used to be. The absolute amount of quality content has grown, seemingly exponentially. Even if the relative amount of quality has decreased... who even cares?! You don't have to visit the parts of the web you don't like. And if you're complaining about reposts...? I have zero sympathy for you. Lots of people are seeing things for the first time. And it's nice to be reminded of things too.

fatneckbeardz 4y ago

i think to change this, you have to start with a basic, fundamental respect for the liberal arts, the humanities, and for human beings in general. and that means you have to pay people in money for the emotional and mental labor of organizing information. and stop trying to replace them with algorithms to maximize clicks and watchtime.

antonymy 4y ago

I definitely worry about the future of scholarship as our print media becomes more and more fragmented and hidden. It's not necessarily about ensuring essential knowledge is carried forward, but rather a "sense of the past". In researching history, the further back you go the more fragmented and unreliable your sources usually become. So it becomes harder and harder to figure out the broad sweep of these past cultures, what life was like, the things they believed, and so on. And I think we're doing that to our present historical moment by deleting the recent past and creating a continuous present. We have the Internet Archive, we have Wikipedia page histories, but everything else is ephemeral. If Archive.org ever goes the way of the Library of Alexandria, we'll have lost irreplaceable knowledge of the web itself, and the cultures that existed on it. It will live on only in living memory, but this is also transient, and soon nobody will live who remembers what this time period was like. Wikipedia will not reflect it, you'd have to dig through page histories to find fragments, like historians and archaeologists sifting through ancient manuscripts and ruins for clues. A potential dark age is forming, and avoiding it right now hinges entirely on the continued efforts of two donation-funded organizations, one of which makes it increasingly harder to view the past, the other facing legal disputes that could see it shut down. I think we need to make archiving the present important, so it does not become a mysterious, inscrutable past for our descendants.

Beached 4y ago
while I have the same general concerns, both wikipedia and archive.org have offline backup and running options for free. and, they are surprisingly small. all one has to do is write a simple script to auto download these backups daily/weekly/whatever and you can access all that info of your solar powered raspberry pi. while I think there could be a short period where this info is largely unavailable, I don't believe it will be lost forever. if the Internet goes away, once some new Internet like technology comes around to replace it, these data repos will likely get out back up very quickly. just a matter of how long that blip is
cxr 4y ago
Technologists and those in an adjacent professional class (which should account for a lot here on HN) should also do their part to help make sure that the present is easily archivable.

QuasarOne 4y ago

I'm all for openness. Open standards for example. But 'open information' never worked; and never will. Powerful interests want to control information. They did it in Communist states. They do it in Capitalist states. They even do it on 'Anarchist' Wikipedia. That doesn't mean to say I favour closed off information. I just think people need to understand that - in opening up information and discourse - we are up against powerful interests = other people. Many of them are fithy rich and they desire to tell us what to think, read and say - because they "care" about us and "know what's best" for us.

ram4jesus 4y ago

What I would give to live in the universe where Ted Nelson's Xanadu was the default way to interact with the Internet. I bet that world has more rainbows and sunshine :)

8bitsrule 4y ago

When it comes to the web, I found this Robert Heinlein quote the other day that applies to much of what's online: "Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers."

chrstphrknwtn 4y ago

The web can never be the "sum of all knowledge". It's simply impossible. It always irks me when people refer to the web as 'all human knowledge', because it's woefully incomplete if that is the goal.