Top all-time · #433
David Rosenthal
Personal blog · blog.dshr.orgsecurityeconomicsscience
David Rosenthal writes DSHR's Blog, a personal blog at blog.dshr.org about security, economics and science. Since 2011, 129 different Hacker News readers have linked it 224 times, most often “The death of corporate research labs”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Rosenthal's blog for digital preservation, storage economics and long-term archiving, and for his critiques of crypto, Big Tech and academic research labs. Commenters cite it as a source for those claims.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.
Most-linked posts?
- The death of corporate research labs8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-05-20
- X Window System at 404 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-07-02
- History Of Window Systems (2021)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-08
- Cryptocurrency Collapse3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-11-27
- /2023/08/optical-media-durability-update.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-23
- Cloud for Data Preservation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-02-12
- David Rosenthal on cryptocurrencies3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-02-11
- /2022/02/ee380-talk.html?m=13 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-02-14
- Crypto: My Part in Its Downfall3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-30
- The gaslit asset class2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-10-01
What Hacker News says?
> something is rotten in the state of academia. Oddly it's academia doing incremental improvements to existing methods but industry making novel leaps and bounds... The other major case in point being NLP You have to realize that corporate research labs had a high level of recognition back in the 20th century. Labs like the Bell Labs, the RCA Laboratories, or the IBM Research, privately-funded, had a reputation that…
Comment linking /2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-research-labs.html
on “AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology”Submitted The death of corporate research labs as a story · 445 points
HN discussionThe Internet Archive can store data in perpetuity for ~$3/GB one time (estimated based on recent AI driven hardware inflation, used to be $2/GB). https://blog.dshr.org/2026/01/internet-archives-storage.html https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/internet-archive-storage.html https://archive-it.org/vault/
Comment linking /2021/03/internet-archive-storage.html
on “Keep Our Servers Running”Submitted Archival Storage as a story · 362 points
HN discussionHere was Dave Rosenthal's take two years ago: https://blog.dshr.org/2020/02/more-on-ad-bubble.html Disclosure he and I agree on what is going on here :-)
Comment linking /2020/02/more-on-ad-bubble.html
on “For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads”Submitted The Death of Corporate Research Labs as a story · 355 points
HN discussionThe blockchain is an excellent distributed storage system for anything that should be immutable, such as contract hashes like notarial deeds, vehicle sales, and digital identities, which are not controlled by any central authority (if the blockchain is truly distributed) and are verifiable and tamper-proof. NFTs are the toy experiment that demonstrates this path. It is therefore also usable as a currency, with fungi…
Comment linking /2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html
on “I wasted years of my life in crypto”Submitted Ethereum Has Issues as a story · 352 points
HN discussionSomeone had to say it: DSHR's Blog I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation. Tuesday, June 30, 2026 Coprophagia Is Bad For You https://blog.dshr.org/2026/06/coprophagia-is-bad-for-you.htm...
Comment linking /2026/06/coprophagia-is-bad-for-you.html
on “There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability”Submitted The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different” as a story · 230 points
HN discussionThey are trying to fix the problem, but the number of scammers dwarfs the number of Amazon employees: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/04/what-is-amazon.html That said, Amazon could buy Fakespot or one of its competitors with small change from Jeff Bezos' sofa, and they are clearly doing a better job than Amazon at rooting out fraudulent reviews. Ironically, Amazon's enforcement was turned against them. Unscrupulous merch…
Comment linking /2019/04/what-is-amazon.html
on “Amazon ‘flooded by fake five-star reviews’ – report”Submitted David Rosenthal on cryptocurrencies as a story · 227 points
HN discussionBitcoin rates worse than North Korea in terms of wealth distribution as measured by the Gini coefficient. [1] [1] https://blog.dshr.org/2018/10/gini-coefficients-of-cryptocur...
Comment linking /2018/10/gini-coefficients-of-cryptocurrencies.html
on “Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency”Submitted Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated as a story · 192 points
HN discussionIf you are interested in cost modeling for long-term digital preservation, check out this blog series: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/02/economic-models-of-long-term-s...
Comment linking /2019/02/economic-models-of-long-term-storage.html
on “Internet Archive Infrastructure”Submitted The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology as a story · 190 points
HN discussionThat's what I've read, about $150-200k: https://blog.dshr.org/2023/11/robotaxi-economics.html
Comment linking /2023/11/robotaxi-economics.html
on “Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco”Submitted Unreliability at Scale as a story · 175 points
HN discussionI'm confused then, are you in support of cryptocurrency? Because what you're describing (the "system") sounds an awful lot like reinventing banks from first principles but much less efficiently. If that is how it's intended to function then why are we bothering with this at all? And aside from KYC issues, another recently posted article pointed out that when a single individual tried to unload around a 1500 BTC (%0.…
Comment linking /2022/02/ee380-talk.html?m=1
on “Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH”Submitted The gaslit asset class as a story · 163 points
HN discussionhttps://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ and first hand conversations with their engineering team > We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault/ > Vault offers a low-cost pricing model based on a one-time price per-gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress cost…
Comment linking /2017/08/economic-model-of-long-term-storage.html
on “US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]”Submitted Helium as a story · 150 points
HN discussionShould be a mandatory read for anyone who shills for big tech here: "Lack Of Anti-Trust Enforcement" https://blog.dshr.org/2020/08/lack-of-anti-trust-enforcement...
Comment linking /2020/08/lack-of-anti-trust-enforcement.html
on “U.S. House's antitrust report hints at break-up of big tech firms: lawmaker”Submitted Unstoppable Code? as a story · 72 points
HN discussionThat's true, but I think on one hand these are fairly rare cases compared to the whole industry while on the other there is also the point that these divisions might not be as stable and long-lasting as one might expect. Related, discussed on HN a while ago: https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-researc... Previous discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764 and https://news.ycombinator.…
Comment linking /2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-research-labs.html
on “Why I left my tenured academic job”Submitted AI's Affordability Crisis as a story · 69 points
HN discussionThat little note half way through this that said "The Svalbard archipelago is where I spent the summer of 1969 doing a geological survey" made me want to know more about the author - and WOW they have had a fascinating career: https://blog.dshr.org/p/blog-page.html See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal
Comment linking /p/blog-page.html
on “Archival Storage”Submitted Preserving Flash: why emulation is better than migration as a story · 63 points
HN discussionNon-mobile link: https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-researc...
Comment linking /2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-research-labs.html
on “The Death of Corporate Research Labs”Submitted History Of Window Systems (2021) as a story · 55 points
HN discussion
