Library of Congress Blogs (blogs.loc.gov)

What HN people wrote when they linked it

acdhaOct 2022
> EDIT: I just searched the Library of Congress for “god” and was told I was viewing results 1-25 of 324,782. Sure enough when I asked for page 10,000 I was rebuffed. I really don’t think this is a Google thing
This is a common problem called deep pagination, and it basically stems down to how most search systems work. When you make that search request on loc.gov, it eventually turns into a complex request for Apache Solr. Answering that request requires Solr to find all of the matching documents which match the query and any other active filters (e.g. document type, date, etc.), and calculate their rank in the search result set so it can determine which specific results are numbers 10,000-10,050. Solr/Lucene are really mature and well-tuned but when you think about how many millions of documents there are in that index, this is still calculating a pretty large temporary set only to serve 50 records, throw away the other 324k, and go on to the next query. Your next request might arrive a second later but get routed to a different replica so it’s a cold cache there, too. Click one facet on the filter list, and the search engine has to recalculate the matching documents again.
Don’t forget that you’re often seeing the results of more than just the metadata. You often get the best search results by treating entire books, newspapers, etc. as a single group for the purposes of ranking and then displaying it as a single entry on the top-level search. I wrote about this a while…
belterAug 2021
But besides the money collection there are also the tax exemptions right? It looks lovely...
"The foundation deed specified that the housing complex was to exist “in perpetuity” and to be “further developed.” The philosophy behind it can be summarized as being to “provide assistance, not charity, to people in need so they can help themselves.” There are a total of nine foundations established by the Fugger family in Augsburg that have been in continuous existence since the 16th century. In addition to the Fuggerei, there are medical facilities, an infirmary, and a foundation to contribute to the salvation of the Fugger family, among others. According to an inscription on a tablet displayed at the Fuggerei, the Fugger family established the foundation to “reimburse God the money that he has generously bestowed upon the family.”
"Paupers or beggars are not eligible. A person that has been accepted for residence is required to say three daily prayers for the Fugger family"
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/08/500-year-anniversary-of-the-fuggerei-the-oldest-social-housing-complex-in-the-world/
Its going for a long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger_family
And many foundations:
https://www.fugger.de/en/foundations
I am sorry ...the business man in me...every time I see
the word foundation I see only one thing. Only business
vehicle where you are tax exempt... while at the same time
still benefiting from the foundation assets.
"Forget about the Gates Foundation. The…
freejazzAug 2023
>All I'm doing here is turning the knobs and testing the variables here. I realize it might be crude, I apologize for that. You're probably a lawyer, and you probably hate this.
I understand what you are doing. Lawyers have been doing it for over 100 years litigating copyright, and it's reflected in the caselaw, which has much deeper answers for the questions you are poking at.
>The line I'm trying to understand is this: Mockey has three buttons and was generated by an AI, and looks similar to Mickey. I can copy that art and become the human owner of it (my hands are the 'spark of creativity' mentioned in our Wikipedia article), then sell it. Disney will claim that selling this art can infringe on its copyright, but nobody earns copyright to the AI-generated art itself. I own copyright to my physical, hand drawn copy of it. Okay;
The question you are asking is what's a copy. That's a really complicated answer, that is dependent upon numerous factors, which as I mentioned before, is best answered through the caselaw on the subject. There is no clear line. There never was a clear line. By the way, you didn't respond to my hypothetical!
>Taking that apart: Disney's copyright is infringed when? The sale? The second I drew Mockey? Or the second the AI created it? Or is it when the AI was trained?
Take a copyright class somewhere! I'm sure there's some free ones online. I work with the VLA and we provide such classes to member artists. There are numerous rights associated…
doodlebuggingSep 2023
It's good that they have agreed to rename this popular peak to recognize the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who lived in that region. As usual, a little history lesson may help people understand what happened and why it was so contemptible to name this peak for someone who instigated such a heinous massacre of peaceful people.
First I will post a first-hand account of the massacre from a letter written by a courageous officer who held his men back and did not participate in the slaughter, Captain Silas Soule [0].
As noted in the post above, Capt. Soule was murdered a few months after giving testimony against Col Chivington and others involved in the massacre. His murderer(s) though known, were never punished.
One name you see mentioned in his letter is George Bent. George was the mixed race (Cheyenne mother/Anglo father) son of William Bent who along with his brother Charles and a French-Canadian trapper Ceran St. Vrain established Bent's Fort on the Santa Fe trail. [1] These men established a trading empire where anyone could procure supplies to outfit their expeditions whether they were Anglo, Mexican, or Native American. It was a frontier hub and the Bents were well-known all over the region. A little of George Bent's life is related in this link [2]. You can visit Bent's Fort today if you are in the area and it is worth the effort.
Black Kettle, [3] the Southern Cheyenne chief who thought that he had negotiated a plan for his people to live in peace, escaped this…
MirioronJan 2020
I would agree with you if our legal systems were built for that, but our legal systems are built to deal with a society that has privacy. People unknowingly commit crimes, or implicate themselves in crimes, all the time, because there are too many ways to do that. No reasonable person can be expected to avoid committing crimes when the government itself can't even keep track of the number of criminal laws there are.[0] You're supposed to follow rules that the government itself can't even keep count of. This works reasonably well as long as the government doesn't have evidence about everything you've done, but the moment that they can track a large chunk of your life is when this system stops working.
With data from Google they can prosecute you for all the things you've done wrong or seem to have done wrong. It just takes an ambitious prosecutor to do it. This pretty much destroys the point of the fifth amendment. The "Don't Talk to the Police" lecture [1] is still relevant today, but if the state has this much evidence of what you do, then I'm not sure that will protect people. It is a nightmare scenario if this sets a precedent on law enforcement being able to vacuum up all of your data about your life.
I agree that Smollett seemingly getting a slap on the wrist was outrageous, but I think that this is Pandora's Box that they're playing with.
[0] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-question-how-many-federal-laws-are-there/
[1]…
godelskiJul 2022
> Like, all the knowledge ever.
Go to your local library. There is actually a lot more there than books. There are videos and audio records too. There are news paper clippings too.
Worse, data is being generated very fast. Let's look[0]
> [In 2012], CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes.
> MAST is currently home to an estimated *200 terabytes of data*, which… is nearly the same amount of information contained in *the U.S. Library of Congress.*
But that said, a few petabytes is going to only cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars and max in the low 100s. So this is well within the budget of even every modestly sized city and definitely every university. It would be even easier if this was done with torrenting.
I think the real question is^: why are we not, as a species, creating this system? It seems very reasonable that we could back up all data. (There is also a dark side to this too! So let's not forget about that) At least, why aren't we creating a full access world library for all scholarly data, which is probably something that could be housed for a few grand. Should we do this on our own given the relatively low cost? Books + sci-hub + arxiv + *xiv?
[0] https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of-data-its-all-in-how-you-define-it/
^ maybe it is already being done and I don't know, please inform me if it is. (Other than the NSA)

What HN people wrote when they linked it

acdhaOct 2022
> EDIT: I just searched the Library of Congress for “god” and was told I was viewing results 1-25 of 324,782. Sure enough when I asked for page 10,000 I was rebuffed. I really don’t think this is a Google thing
This is a common problem called deep pagination, and it basically stems down to how most search systems work. When you make that search request on loc.gov, it eventually turns into a complex request for Apache Solr. Answering that request requires Solr to find all of the matching documents which match the query and any other active filters (e.g. document type, date, etc.), and calculate their rank in the search result set so it can determine which specific results are numbers 10,000-10,050. Solr/Lucene are really mature and well-tuned but when you think about how many millions of documents there are in that index, this is still calculating a pretty large temporary set only to serve 50 records, throw away the other 324k, and go on to the next query. Your next request might arrive a second later but get routed to a different replica so it’s a cold cache there, too. Click one facet on the filter list, and the search engine has to recalculate the matching documents again.
Don’t forget that you’re often seeing the results of more than just the metadata. You often get the best search results by treating entire books, newspapers, etc. as a single group for the purposes of ranking and then displaying it as a single entry on the top-level search. I wrote about this a while…
belterAug 2021
But besides the money collection there are also the tax exemptions right? It looks lovely...
"The foundation deed specified that the housing complex was to exist “in perpetuity” and to be “further developed.” The philosophy behind it can be summarized as being to “provide assistance, not charity, to people in need so they can help themselves.” There are a total of nine foundations established by the Fugger family in Augsburg that have been in continuous existence since the 16th century. In addition to the Fuggerei, there are medical facilities, an infirmary, and a foundation to contribute to the salvation of the Fugger family, among others. According to an inscription on a tablet displayed at the Fuggerei, the Fugger family established the foundation to “reimburse God the money that he has generously bestowed upon the family.”
"Paupers or beggars are not eligible. A person that has been accepted for residence is required to say three daily prayers for the Fugger family"
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/08/500-year-anniversary-of-the-fuggerei-the-oldest-social-housing-complex-in-the-world/
Its going for a long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger_family
And many foundations:
https://www.fugger.de/en/foundations
I am sorry ...the business man in me...every time I see
the word foundation I see only one thing. Only business
vehicle where you are tax exempt... while at the same time
still benefiting from the foundation assets.
"Forget about the Gates Foundation. The…
freejazzAug 2023
>All I'm doing here is turning the knobs and testing the variables here. I realize it might be crude, I apologize for that. You're probably a lawyer, and you probably hate this.
I understand what you are doing. Lawyers have been doing it for over 100 years litigating copyright, and it's reflected in the caselaw, which has much deeper answers for the questions you are poking at.
>The line I'm trying to understand is this: Mockey has three buttons and was generated by an AI, and looks similar to Mickey. I can copy that art and become the human owner of it (my hands are the 'spark of creativity' mentioned in our Wikipedia article), then sell it. Disney will claim that selling this art can infringe on its copyright, but nobody earns copyright to the AI-generated art itself. I own copyright to my physical, hand drawn copy of it. Okay;
The question you are asking is what's a copy. That's a really complicated answer, that is dependent upon numerous factors, which as I mentioned before, is best answered through the caselaw on the subject. There is no clear line. There never was a clear line. By the way, you didn't respond to my hypothetical!
>Taking that apart: Disney's copyright is infringed when? The sale? The second I drew Mockey? Or the second the AI created it? Or is it when the AI was trained?
Take a copyright class somewhere! I'm sure there's some free ones online. I work with the VLA and we provide such classes to member artists. There are numerous rights associated…
doodlebuggingSep 2023
It's good that they have agreed to rename this popular peak to recognize the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who lived in that region. As usual, a little history lesson may help people understand what happened and why it was so contemptible to name this peak for someone who instigated such a heinous massacre of peaceful people.
First I will post a first-hand account of the massacre from a letter written by a courageous officer who held his men back and did not participate in the slaughter, Captain Silas Soule [0].
As noted in the post above, Capt. Soule was murdered a few months after giving testimony against Col Chivington and others involved in the massacre. His murderer(s) though known, were never punished.
One name you see mentioned in his letter is George Bent. George was the mixed race (Cheyenne mother/Anglo father) son of William Bent who along with his brother Charles and a French-Canadian trapper Ceran St. Vrain established Bent's Fort on the Santa Fe trail. [1] These men established a trading empire where anyone could procure supplies to outfit their expeditions whether they were Anglo, Mexican, or Native American. It was a frontier hub and the Bents were well-known all over the region. A little of George Bent's life is related in this link [2]. You can visit Bent's Fort today if you are in the area and it is worth the effort.
Black Kettle, [3] the Southern Cheyenne chief who thought that he had negotiated a plan for his people to live in peace, escaped this…
MirioronJan 2020
I would agree with you if our legal systems were built for that, but our legal systems are built to deal with a society that has privacy. People unknowingly commit crimes, or implicate themselves in crimes, all the time, because there are too many ways to do that. No reasonable person can be expected to avoid committing crimes when the government itself can't even keep track of the number of criminal laws there are.[0] You're supposed to follow rules that the government itself can't even keep count of. This works reasonably well as long as the government doesn't have evidence about everything you've done, but the moment that they can track a large chunk of your life is when this system stops working.
With data from Google they can prosecute you for all the things you've done wrong or seem to have done wrong. It just takes an ambitious prosecutor to do it. This pretty much destroys the point of the fifth amendment. The "Don't Talk to the Police" lecture [1] is still relevant today, but if the state has this much evidence of what you do, then I'm not sure that will protect people. It is a nightmare scenario if this sets a precedent on law enforcement being able to vacuum up all of your data about your life.
I agree that Smollett seemingly getting a slap on the wrist was outrageous, but I think that this is Pandora's Box that they're playing with.
[0] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-question-how-many-federal-laws-are-there/
[1]…
godelskiJul 2022
> Like, all the knowledge ever.
Go to your local library. There is actually a lot more there than books. There are videos and audio records too. There are news paper clippings too.
Worse, data is being generated very fast. Let's look[0]
> [In 2012], CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes.
> MAST is currently home to an estimated *200 terabytes of data*, which… is nearly the same amount of information contained in *the U.S. Library of Congress.*
But that said, a few petabytes is going to only cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars and max in the low 100s. So this is well within the budget of even every modestly sized city and definitely every university. It would be even easier if this was done with torrenting.
I think the real question is^: why are we not, as a species, creating this system? It seems very reasonable that we could back up all data. (There is also a dark side to this too! So let's not forget about that) At least, why aren't we creating a full access world library for all scholarly data, which is probably something that could be housed for a few grand. Should we do this on our own given the relatively low cost? Books + sci-hub + arxiv + *xiv?
[0] https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of-data-its-all-in-how-you-define-it/
^ maybe it is already being done and I don't know, please inform me if it is. (Other than the NSA)

Library of Congress Blogs

Top posts on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

Library of Congress Blogs

Top posts on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

Top posts on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

Related

British Library has released over a million images onto Flickr Commons

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"Nothing like this will be built again"

Archive.is owner on “continuity of his project”

Some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub

Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?

Top posts on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

Related

British Library has released over a million images onto Flickr Commons

Medieval Desktops

How to cook a medieval feast: recipes from the Middle Ages

Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

"Nothing like this will be built again"

Archive.is owner on “continuity of his project”

Some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub

Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?