Top all-time · #5249
Brewster Kahle
Personal blog · brewster.kahle.orgeconomicsphilosophy
Brewster Kahle's personal blog at brewster.kahle.org covers economics and philosophy. Since 2011, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link Brewster Kahle's blog as an About page for his contact details and Internet Archive background. Comments also point to his posts on the Wayback Machine and locking the web open.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-08-17
- /about/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-12-03
What Hacker News says?
The largest active project doing this (to my knowledge) is the Inter-Planetary Wayback Machine: https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb There have been many other attempts though, including internetarchive.bak on IPFS, which ended up failing because it was too much data. http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/i... http://brewster.kahle.org/2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-...
Comment linking /2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web-2/
on “Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content”Submitted Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web as a story · 221 points
HN discussionThere's a forum here: https://archive.org/post/406632/why-does-the-wayback-machine... Maybe if it gets enough attention, and/or the Internet Archive people get enough e-mails about this problem (Wayback Machine obeying robots.txt) then they'll change their mind. https://archive.org/about/bios.php Here's a link with the director's email: http://brewster.kahle.org/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Donate to the Internet Archive”Submitted Approaches to providing affordable housing for non-profit workers as a story · 58 points
HN discussionSpecifically, Brewster Kahle! He's awesome. You can find his email address here: http://brewster.kahle.org/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Ask HN: I have 89,830 sound clips of rare records. What should I do?”Submitted The Game of Oligarchy as a story · 5 points
HN discussionBrewster isn't considered forward thinking because he's from San Francisco and worked on a startup. He's considered forward thinking because he's selflessly and tirelessly spent an enormous amount of time and money working to prevent a Lost Decade for human knowledge, while the rest of us (including me) were sitting around letting it erode away. I've met web researchers that have told me they sometimes spend 80% of…
Comment linking /2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web-2/
on “Brewster Kahle Should Be the Next Librarian of Congress”Submitted Brewster Kahle: 'Bitcoin is the “local currency” of the Internet' as a story · 4 points
HN discussionRight! I'm not interested in breaking the Internet Archive, and I'd expect it to move to IPFS [1] eventually (content addressable web) [2]. If/when/how that happens, I'd expect traditional http tooling to still work (curl, wget, etc), which is why I went looking for a status code that indicates an alternate path for the resource/content. That's why my above comment kept getting edited as I did some more research. 50…
Comment linking /2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web-2/
on “Usenet Archives”Submitted Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Decentralized Web (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web." In years to come, people will read these pages at the Internet Archive and thank Brewster Kahle [0] rather than the likes of Steve, Larry and Mark. [0] http://brewster.kahle.org/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Never Trust a Corporation to Do a Library's Job”Submitted Creating Free and Open Societies as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Content Addressing is Magic as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Facebook Building Apartments for Employees as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Brewster Khale and Ted Nelson eat sushi paid for with Bitcoin as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Custom Schools with a Class Size of 1 or 4 – Brewster Kahle's Blog as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg Passes as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
