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A comment on HN 15 Years ago. Parent comment

Re:HN 15 Years ago by MisterBiggs on Saturday October 09, 2021 @08:54PM (#28814793)
As someone who uses the search function on HN regularly I have to agree its pretty jarring to see how many webpages totally disappear. Thankfully the wayback machine exists.
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Re:HN 15 Years ago by omn1 on Saturday October 09, 2021 @09:10PM (#28814869)
I maintain a couple of bigger Github repos and blogs and was shocked at how many links break on a regular basis, so I wrote my own link checker in Rust [1] and started donating to the Wayback Machine. Please consider doing so, too as the web would be a worse place without them. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/lycheeverse/lychee [2]: https://archive.org/donate/

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Re:HN 15 Years ago by yen223 on Saturday October 09, 2021 @09:06PM (#28814858)
One day, the wayback machine will start returning 404s too
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Re:HN 15 Years ago by dotancohen on Sunday October 10, 2021 @02:35AM (#28816282)
I think that the Wayback machine supports either an HTTP status code or meta tag that causes it to not serve previously-cached contents.

Therefore I try to save webpages that I care about, but it's getting harder and harder. Not to mention the space it takes - is it really worth the hundreds of GiB of personal archives when I'll likely want - not need - maybe a few KiBs of it decades down the line. And even then, will I be able to find it?

Sometimes I think about just archiving a screenshot and the text of websites, instead of markup and related files.

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Re:HN 15 Years ago by AnimalMuppet on Saturday October 09, 2021 @09:55PM (#28815106)
That's... a bit sobering. At that point, we will really have lost a lot of history.
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Re:HN 15 Years ago by twodai on Saturday October 09, 2021 @10:02PM (#28815141)
It's possible some other group will buy the data, or they will make it easily download able
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Re:HN 15 Years ago by metagame on Sunday October 10, 2021 @12:55AM (#28815855)
Actually, archive.org is already easily downloadable, in that you can already help host the dweb copy.

archive.org, available via webtorrent: https://dweb.archive.org/

It's pretty slow, though.

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Re:HN 15 Years ago by jlokier on Saturday October 09, 2021 @10:36PM (#28815301)
Like the way Google did with the Usenet archive. Make it available via a searchable interface, then gradually degrade the archive until old posts can't be found any more.
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Re:HN 15 Years ago by squarefoot on Sunday October 10, 2021 @12:47AM (#28815821)
They also degraded the interface so that the posts that once would be found via normal searching now aren't anymore. After the removal of the discussion filter, searches for X started returning more sites selling X than forums talking about X.

https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/2b54ux/google_compl...

There was a thread on Google forums about that, and I recall many upset users asking for the option to be reactivated, but (the irony) that discussion was removed as well.

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Re:HN 15 Years ago by dredmorbius on Sunday October 10, 2021 @02:46AM (#28816321)
One day there will be no more 404s or 200s.
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