Set up a trust with Berenberg Bank (Joh. Berenberg, Gossler & Co. KG). The bank was founded in 1590, and has been in continuous operation since then without a change of control. "We advise wealthy private investors and families, often across generations." They have 18 locations, so they're not too big and not too small.
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
731–740 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#732Earlier quoted context omitted.
Create nuclear blasts that encode the information in short microbursts. Info will be available in the carbon record and in tree rings around the world .... profit?
At that rate, just make sure it's part of the human genome :)
like in ST:TNG where it turns out there's a piece of code in the DNA of all the humanoid species that together form a message from the civilization that seeded them
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#733Create some kind of annuity/trust that pays a large legal firm to translate and publish your personal page every decade or so.
Below is a poem written in English 500 years ago (Speke, Parrot by John Skelton). The 'web' is less than 30 years old and any I think it's fair to assume that HTML and browsers won't exist in anything like the current form and English will have transmogrified into something unintelligible from current day English.
A cage curyously carven, with sylver pyn,
Properly paynted, to be my covertowre;
A myrrour of glasse, that I may toote therin;
These maidens ful mekely with many a divers flowre
Freshly they dresse, and make swete my bowre,
With, ‘Speke, Parrot, I pray you,’ full curtesly they say; ‘Parrot is a goodly byrd, a prety popagey.’
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#734Other comments have given ways to physically archive the webpage. Continually hosting it is a much trickier endeavor. Beyond just keeping the servers up, technologies will shift such that eventually html webpages, servers that talk using tcp/ip, datacenters that connect via fiber cables, etc will all be deprecated. That said, if we have a very liberal definition of the word "website" to include any successor technolo…
Get rich, leave an endowment large enough that interest will fund some institution to maintain your pages.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#735Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be a balance between readability, findability and integrity. I would not bet on the btc blockchain for it. Its relativly complex to use, its very niche, it is already 360gb big and there might be a time were it either disappears or gets optimized and your information will be gone.
I wrote my name in the Bitcoin blockchain 6 years ago, I barely knew Javascript. For a blockchain like Bitcoin to fit all of its transactions in only 420GB is an engineering feat that should be admired The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear" Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificating
> The blockchain data will never be "optimized" or "disappear"
The former may or may not happen depending on how widely it is used, certainly not everyone will have the full blockchain on their devices due to storage requirements. The latter is a social issue not a technical one.
> Please take the time to learn how Bitcoin works before pontificating
One can definitely make an argument that Bitcoin will lose its social relevance in 100 years. Or 500 years. Or 1000 years. Do you see where i'm going with this?
Most of the OSes currently in use might not be relevant in a century. Most of HDDs or SSDs in use currently won't be around in a century, unless they're a part of an abstracted and clustered storage pool, which would take constant effort to maintain. Even short of the technical concerns, there is still need for social relevance - if and when it eventually ceases to be relevant, no one will care much about maintaining copies of the full blockchain, except for maybe in some museum archive.
Using a globally distributed store like that is a good idea, but it's definitely not foolproof. One of the better ways, perhaps, but maybe there are even better ones, that you or a foundation in your name controls, with properly sourced funding and preservation of data being its sole and primary concern.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've said nothing about what "deserves" preservation, but only what sort of things tend to be preserved over periods on the scale of centuries. And yes: My contention is that unless a substantial community of people voluntarily commit to preserving something, it likely will not survive (or will do so accidentally). I'm not quite following why this is not relevant to the OP's question. I suppose I'm saying that it's n…
I think those are orthogonal. Sure, you have the biggest chance of having something preserved if enough people care about it. This is a case where, as you rightly point out, technology matters not. But we can still discuss technologies of preservation, especially in the light of non-physical creations like works presented on a digital machine.
And the very fact it survives makes it noteworthy - if archeologists found a collection of well preserved shitposts from 2500 BC it would be valuable - even if worthless when recorded.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#737The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…
> vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anything we'd understand. The world was also a very different place, I suspect language will evolve far slower over the next 500 years due to the vast new interconnectedness that society has never experienced before. I think in 500 years, some…
We can understand Shakespeare with a bit of work ( mainly sound things out ) but Shakespeare himself would have had difficulty understanding his great grandfather.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re onto something here. Organized religions are some of the very few institutions that survived for thousands of years with little change.
> Organized religions are some of the very few institutions that survived for thousands of years with little change. Which organized religion are you referring to here? All the big ones have changed immensely.
The Dead Sea scrolls can be compared to the “oral” tradition (mostly actually written) to see how far it shifted.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a book from the 1700s on my bedside table I can read just fine... My lived experience is I can read texts from hundreds of years ago just fine. Old mate is struggling with 50s tv. The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak is. I think whoever is interested in a 500 year old website is going to be ok.
> The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak is. Stuff like that can easily be looked up though, there are a number of "youth/hipster speak" dictionaires, pages like KnowYourMeme...
Or picked up pretty easily. P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle use some anachronistic language but it’s still 99% understandable without a dictionary.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adding money might help. We have a small scale investment in our cap table from a German family who have kept their money together for 650 years…
Seems like the greater feat would be keeping your family size small over 650 years. Most any level of wealth will start to fade if you have to split it amongst 1,000 heirs.
Hence the effective disinheriting of second or third sons of noble houses (the old saying was something like heir, army, priest).