Harvard LIL Blog
lil.law.harvard.edu · Company blog · on HN since 2016
Harvard's Library Innovation Lab writes about web archiving, legal data, digital preservation and open-source tools, and posts job openings.
What HN saysHN links it for its job postings and projects such as DuckDB-WASM for querying large datasets in the browser and the WARC-GPT archive tool.
18HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
12stories submitted
1.3Kstory points
8 months agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Homepage3 people · first shared 2016
- 2Jobs3 people · first shared 2016
- 3The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact2 people · 447 points · first shared 2017 · 151 comments on HN
- 4Century Scale Storage2 people · 56 points · first shared 2024 · 9 comments on HN
- 5Announcing the data.gov archive1 people · 382 points · first shared 2025 · 132 comments on HN
- 6Use DuckDB-WASM to query TB of data in browser1 people · 237 points · first shared 2025 · 62 comments on HN
- 7WARC-GPT: An open-source tool for exploring web archives using AI1 people · 195 points · first shared 2024 · 17 comments on HN
- 8Using Machine Learning to Extract Nuremberg Trials Transcript Document Citations1 people · 3 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 9Towards “deep fake” web archives? Trying to forge WARC files using ChatGPT1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 10ChatGPT: Poems and Secrets1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 11AI Book Bans: Testing LLMs Against the Freedom to Read1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 12LLMs Are Universal Translators1 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 13Launching the Agent Protocols Tech Tree1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 14Caselaw access project cap launches api and bulk data service1 people · first shared 2018
- 15H2o developer1 people · first shared 2019
What HN people wrote when they linked it
JackC · 2024-03-12
Harvard Library Innovation Lab | Engineering Director | ONSITE (hybrid) | Full-Time
The Harvard Library Innovation Lab is hiring an Engineering Director, in-person/hybrid in Boston. This role leads six engineers and works with LIL leadership (including me) to bring library principles to technological frontiers. This is a great chance to lead a team building cool, mission driven stuff. We’re looking for someone with a mix of deep technical skill, particularly with user-facing web software, and people/organizational skills to support a wide range of people and projects. https://lil.law.harvard.edu/jobs/#ed
dannyobrien · 2023-12-15
I don't have favorites, but Spritely is definitely an equal favorite for the projects we support at the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. Others HNers may also be interested in include:
* Internet Archive's Democracy's Library https://blog.archive.org/2022/10/19/announcing-democracys-library/
* Distributed Press
https://distributed.press/
* Guardian Project
https://guardianproject.info/
* MuckRack Document Cloud
https://muckrack.com/
* Harvard Library Innovation Lab
https://lil.law.harvard.edu/
* Human Rights Data Analysis Group
https://hrdag.org/data-publication/
Longer list here: https://ffdweb.org/explore/#partners
christiansmith · 2025-01-03
Harvard Library Innovation Lab | Senior Software Engineer - Full Stack | Remote (some US states) or hybrid | Full-Time | https://lil.law.harvard.edu/
The Harvard Library Innovation Lab is a software product studio and research lab embedded in the Harvard Law School Library, with a mission of bringing library principles to tech. We are currently working on projects including web archiving, remixable education resources, and AI as a new way of accessing knowledge. As a member of our engineering team, the Senior Software Engineer will work across our various tools, applications, and experiments. The ideal candidate will have experience building performant, testable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant products and tools at scale, for audiences both technical and non-technical.
You can apply here: https://lil.law.harvard.edu/jobs/#sse-fs. Please include a short cover letter explaining how your career trajectory and interests align with our work and mission.
Harvard eligibility is weird: we can hire hybrid near Cambridge, MA, or remote only if you live in the states of CA, CT, GA, IL, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, RI, VA, VT and WA.
simonw · 2025-12-30
One interesting feature of DuckDB is that it can run queries against HTTP ranges of a static file hosted via HTTPS, and there's an official WebAssembly build of it that can do that same trick.
So you can dump e.g. all of Hacker News in a single multi-GB Parquet file somewhere and build a client-side JavaScript application that can run queries against that without having to fetch the whole thing.
You can run searches on https://lil.law.harvard.edu/data-gov-archive/ and watch the network panel to see DuckDB in action.
toomuchtodo · 2024-08-03
Could you support ingesting WARC files?
https://github.com/harvard-lil/warc-gpt
https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2024/02/12/warc-gpt-an-open-source-to…
leppert · 2023-05-01
Harvard's Library Innovation Lab | Senior Product Designer | Full-time & remote friendly | Cambridge, MA | https://lil.law.harvard.edu/jobs/#uxd
Harvard's Library Innovation Lab is a product studio building open-source tools and services for open knowledge, available to everyone and in the public interest.
We're looking for a Senior Product Designer to join our product team and help lead the brand and visual development of our lab and its products. Promising candidates will have a strong visual design portfolio and experience in user research, brainstorming, and wireframing products from inception to high fidelity. This is an opportunity for a design lead to utilize their craft toward helping positive ideas travel further and faster.
Apply at the link above or feel free to send us questions at [email protected]
lennylemony · 2018-10-29
Here's the release! https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2018/10/29/caselaw-access-project-cap…
_kst_ · 2017-07-23
I can still access http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
I can't currently access the article at https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2017/07/21/a-million-squandered-the-m…
[Insert joke about irony here.]