>This suggests a misunderstanding of the Standard Ebooks process, which allows continual incremental corrections to the authoritative source of individual books (in XHTML, on GitHub). So, a truly unique identifier would only be valid to the production output(s) from a particular state of the Git-repo sources.

Well, one of us has a misunderstanding. Just because the printer strikes off the printing number from the colophon for each subsequent printing, they don't actually issue a new ISBN. That stays the same. If they wanted to also include a version number too, I wouldn't mind that as well, but it's not nearly as necessary as this. I use the year as a rough version number in the file names as well.

>Recall also that final user content is made available in multiple formats, currently at least six. Example:

I don't need them to issue a number per file format, but if they want to... that doesn't bother me. That's sort of self-evident which of the formats it is, after all.

>I'd suggest the git-commit date, along with short substrings of author name and title, would suffice.

It doesn't. A number of authors have at one time or another have released books with similar or identical titles that are not the same book. This is the trouble... someone who uses or would use the books is asking for something that is missing but easy to supply, and instead of a "well gee, we never considered that, let us think about it" I have a dozen assholes crawling out of the woodwork to say "no, you're doing it wrong".

I need unique identifiers that are human readable. I just do. The world discovered this need for books before you were born. They invented a global standard, even. There is an entire field of science out there about this, that you seem to be ignorant of even existing. I've been doing this for years, and I keep bumping up against it. But you think it can be solved because you used git and know about hashes or whatever, and it's just like what you deal with in your software development job!

Those are poor identifiers. A numeric or short alphanumeric identifier that can be part of the filename is important... I have as many as 5 different editions of the same title so title+author doesn't do the trick. Nor am I putting a url into the filename, couldn't if I wanted to as there are disallowed characters in a url in every filesystem I've ever heard of. How difficult is it to keep a incrementing catalog number like Project Gutenberg does? Anything that doesn't have a proper unique just seems unprofessional.

> But that doesn't mean that ... the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.

Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.

No comment on the rest of the list, but anything by H. L. Mencken is likely to be a banger.

I find the no views on half of youtube videos to be difficult to accept unless counting non-public. If we filtered for a 5 seconds + perhaps that would fix that.

I would if youtube would prune anything without a view in the future.

I took one of those. I was negative but definitely had a tumor. My doctor said you have to take the home test every year.

It’s no replacement for a colonoscopy. They’ll snip those polyps before they grow to become cancerous.

What is the difference in accuracy or other tradeoffs with that compared to a proper colonoscopy? Wasn't clear from the landing page, but I'm guessing there is something, at least not as high accuracy.

From what I’ve seen, studies haven’t done a good job of actually testing for testing lifetime expectancy.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11047044/

“In conclusion, the statement that cancer screenings do not save lives cannot be properly drawn from the Bretthauer's et al. meta-analysis because lifetime gains are likely underestimated and based on uncertain all-cause mortality estimates.

…

Lifetime gains estimated for the screened group from all-cause mortality reduction is a misleading measure and should be avoided because it implies a benefit for all persons in the screening group, including those not affected by the target cancer.”

https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...

“Although gaps persist between the full potential benefit and benefits considering adherence, existing cancer screening technologies have offered significant value to the US population. Technologies and policy interventions that can improve adherence and/or expand the number of cancer types tested will provide significantly more value and save significantly more patient lives.”

My citation explains that Michael Hart was the founder of PG, and the foundation that Newby headed didn't even exist until 02000. Newby would never in his life have wanted people to think that he had founded PG!

I've edited my comment above to make it clearer what its central argument is, since you seem to have misunderstood either the argument or the quote.

Sad that my first thought was "AI".

I do not think that GP's comment was meant that way. GP simply wanted to clear up a misunderstanding that was apparently created by the renaming of this thread to "Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, has died", which has been undone since. I am sure GP did not mean to detract from Greg Newby's contributions to the project.

I'm generally pretty good at figuring out even the most abstruse jokes, but not getting this one. Care to explain?

I can’t, sorry, there’s no edit button, I guess because of low karma. Maybe the mods (or who changed it) can revert it to the old title.

Man! JS never stops trolling you.

I'm sorry, but this reads somewhat misanthropical itself. Let people have some fun?

The time we will collectively waste for the next 8k years typing that extra 0 will not weigh up against the benefit.

I love how each HN post is a gateway to miscellaneous obscure knowledge with a technical point behind it

I find it improper that we count from 2025 years ago.

We should count from the beginning of time.

There's an xkcd in the making here, if it doesn't exist already.