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Comment by garethsprice | Hacker News Reader

I Bought a Book of Restaurant Recommendations from 1957 and None of them would Serve Me Dinner Any More

There are plenty of restaurants that are older than 1957. So, you would probably find at least one that was still open. I think the oldest in the US is Fraunces Tavern. New York, NY. 1762.

But, worldwide several predate that. Botin Restaurant dates back it 1725... Oldest I could find was Stiftskeller St. Peter. Salzburg, Austria is still in the same building from ~803.

I bought a book from 1850, and I could still look up all the references in a university library, or even find most of them on Google Book Search.

Not all information on the Internet is created equal and not all information needs to be available in perpetuity.

"Free $tuff From the Internet" from 23 years ago is closer to a restaurant guide than a book containing literary or academic references. I'd imagine most of the references in an 1850s coupon book or almanac would also be long dead.

This. I'm really excited about projects like IPFS but I'm not totally comfortable with the "everything persists forever" philosophy as it stands now. Preventing link rot is a very worthwhile cause, but content creators should have control over what persists and for how long (see: "Right to Be Forgotten").

> content creators should have control over what persists and for how long (see: "Right to Be Forgotten").

Strange idea.

The "Right to Be Forgotten" in EU law refers to personal data not to works that you have published, it is about privacy not copyright. See the Commision's factsheet on the subject: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

True, it's not exactly the same thing. But I think there is room for a conversation about "published" content as well. The internet covers a much broader scope of content than say print media. I think it is interesting to consider what should be considered "published works" online. Some people think it's fair to say anything you put online is fair game to persist forever. Others like myself think maybe we need a bit more of a fine-grained definition of what constitutes "works" and what persistence properties they should have

I think this is a best (but not perfect) analogy for hyperlinks.

I bought a telephone book from 1942 and none of the phone numbers work

The phone numbers accompanying the phat 90s slang scrawled across my 1996 yearbook no longer are a way of contacting my old classmates.

Pennsylvania-6-5000 still works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEnnsylvania_6-5000

Hopefully, one of the advantages of having better technology is to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past.

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