For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.

For example https://webarchiveweb.bac-lac.canada.ca/ (the Government of Canada's own Internet Archive) is actually outsourced to ADS within Internet Archive.

On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.

The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!

This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.

Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.

IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.

I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?

It's a weird kind of guilt because it's not like we individually created these economic conditions; we were just there at the right time to take advantage of them before they were gone. I tend to think of this as "useless guilt" (vs. guilt about taking a transatlantic flight or other high-impact activity -- which I still do, but I think that guilt is societally useful)

This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.

(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?

It is frustrating for security to act like you’re a total idiot for following a process another terminal says is fine (like leaving very small electronics like Kindles in your bag).

Oh, well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46770279

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46685174

Points: 4

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If you left comments, it was generally possible to figure out who said what based on idioms etc. but they were kept separate from the scores anyway.

I thought it was a good system but I'm pretty sure it was gone by the time I left in 2023. If nothing else, I don't think a system based on that kind of radical candor can survive the first or second round of layoffs at any company.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39664044

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There were remote employees before (especially in Production Engineering and much of Support), but R&D was almost all in person.

(Source: I miss the productivity of the Elgin Street office ...)

I originally thought maybe he was from Slovakia (I have occasionally made jokes or generalisations about Irish people, as I am one) -- but then the footnotes make it clear it's not self deprecation. It's just prejudice.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10696919

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