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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

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Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#381

Post by thruway516 »

t-writescode wrote: post #346
thruway516 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming anyone is still speaking English, and not say Mandarin or even some obscure African language no one has even heard about yet.

This is interesting because your go to was an existing, but non-English language, rather than a completely different language that is an amalgamation of other, existing languages, gone through several generations of memes, in-jokes, meaning reversals, etc, to the point of being unintelligible from the former.

Maybe we won't even have languages at all. We'll just communicate through gifs. My point is who knows. *Wow Someone really took offense at Mandarin

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#382

Post by iszomer »

titzer wrote: post #175
taftster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly thought you were being silly. Wow! https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

I noticed that Virgil got the arctic code vault badge, and thought it was funny, but I never checked what the conditions or criteria were. So I looked. > The snapshot consists of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size. (Repos with 250+ stars retained their binaries.) Each was packaged as a single TAR file. Virgil bootstraps from compiler binaries checked into t…

What's potentially amusing is how GitHub might handle code revisions if they were possibly stored on a WORM medium. Several past companies[1] have attempted to engineer storage that might outlast us all and even Elon Musk snuck in one such repository[2] when he launched his Tesla Roadster into space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InPhase_Technologies

[2] https://medium.com/arch-mission-foundation/arch-mission-foun...

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#383

Post by mitchellst »

jamesdf wrote: post #250
NoGravitas wrote: post #155

Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions. If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a…

> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant…

These were such legit books. This description, in context, being like... the 5000th reason why.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#384

Post by dylan604 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #225
dylan604 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, but why?

I think it's a historically significant dataset. We've seen other datasets be preserved, such as GitHub arctic vault. I agree that it's tenuous. I would give it 20% odds of hitting the 500 year mark at best. And I don't think all of the data will survive. But if archive.org ever becomes unsustainable to run, the existing data will likely be preserved. Lots of companies will be incentivized to continue hosting the dat…

It's less about the "getting it done" aspect. It's more about are they going to be around in 50/100/500 years. Will the tech be around that long? Will they keep up with the conversion of old tech into new tech? In my opinion, any kind of digital archive is just not a sound way to go about it. Analog all the way for long term archival.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#386

Post by ironmagma »

pc86 wrote: post #238
ironmagma wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When society collapses, software of any kind will probably be among the least of our concerns.

Wait so I shouldn't be spending all this time learning vi?

I guess there’s always the chance that society is collapsing because not enough people are trained with software to fix whatever the problem is.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#387

Post by foopod »

mcculley wrote: post #249
jazzyjackson wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious what this would cost and found a thorough stackexchange post [0] that puts the price at 0.032 ETH per KB stored on-chain. Comes out to around 12,000 USD for a small 100kb static site. I would guess this cost is competitive with carving binary data into stone, not bad for permenant storage, reading the data is free. [0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...

Hmm. Putting 1 gigabyte in S3 for 500 years at today's most expensive price ($0.023 per gigabyte month) would be $138. Prices are certain to decrease over time. This says something about the cost of using the Ethereum blockchain for storage.

S3 and blockchain have very different use cases right?

Blockchain being for small quantities of data made immutable, used in a p2p manner with as many copies as there are peers.

S3 generally being purpose built for short term (relative to blockchain) storage and price.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#388

Post by pugworthy »

j-bos wrote: post #242
pugworthy wrote: post #161

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appe…

I'm partial to the remix: https://twitter.com/PateraQuetzaI/status/1156300892733243392... Link to a thread of Percy Shelley's "Ozimandias" in the rhythm of Smash Mouth's All Star

That's quite good

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#389

Post by rsj_hn »

markstos wrote: post #362
NoGravitas wrote: post #155

Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions. If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a…

The United States government studied this question and came to the conclusion of... acid free paper. So it's now law that "permanent" documents in the US are to be stored on acid free paper: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/permpapr.... Some of us who remember the 5.25" floppy disks, the 3" "floppy" disks, the HUGE Zipdisks, the 5.25" spinning platter drives, the 2.5" spinning platter drives, then t…

Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years.

Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents.

But then you have to worry about ink. Normal ink will break down as well in 1-200 years, so you need archival ink. This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light.

In the end, light, heat, water, will destroy everything.

The way to make something last is social in nature -- building long lasting institutions and cultures that value your website and archive it. These must be able to preserve themselves, which means traditions that forcefully apply to successive generations.

It is not a technological problem, but a social problem. However liberalism is completely unequipped to solve this problem, because in order to create something that outlives you, you must bind future generations to some course of action they haven't agreed upon yet. So a liberal society cannot have long lasting institutions or traditions, it always eats itself -- there is another trending hackernews topic about Jefferson being cancelled. Well, of course Jefferson will be cancelled. So will Martin Luther King. So will everyone else. Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible -- e.g. that children can be more moral than their grandparents. If you look at durable societies of the past, they all believed that the grandparents were wiser and more moral than they. That allowed them to preserve traditions and texts. The contingent that believes the opposite does not preserve texts, they burn them/cancel them/or otherwise try to erase them.

So once you stop thinking in terms of "what is the best way to do X" to "what is the best way to make sure my mechanisms of doing X will last", then you end up with completely different solutions for the same problem, because the social technologies of preservation are often the exact opposite of the social technologies of progress and improvement.

So no, your website is not going to last 500 years.

[1] https://www.archivalmethods.com/product/archival-paper

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