Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

github.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#21

Post by Wowfunhappy »

tw4l wrote: post #18

As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html That said, the rest of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is qui…

>> They drag the 200 platters out into the 24hr sunshine, plug the solar panel into the Raspberry Pi, point its camera through a magnifying glass at the first frame, and let the QR app they happen to have on the Pi's micro--SD card do its thing. A couple of seconds later they have the first 2,900 bytes on the USB drive. It takes another couple of seconds to move to the next frame by hand. So they sit there for 383 days scanning a frame every 4 seconds to decode the entire archive. Except there's only sunshine enough for the Pi half the year, so it takes rather more than two years. Then they need to start the Pi building all that code...

>> Of course, this is ridiculous. No-one will decode this archive in the foreseeable future.

Yes, no one will be digging code out of Github right after the apocalypse. But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed? I could see the archive being of immense historical value.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#22

Post by awb »

cmrx64 wrote: post #11
dakiol wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I can't believe they are spending so much money and effort to preserve code I don't give a damn now and once I pushed to GitHub. And like me, 99% of the devs I know personally.

it's probably less effort to just archive the whole damn thing and let the future figure it out than to decide important things to archive and leaving everything else to disappear someday

I wonder how much space you'd save if you excluded repos with only 1 star or only 1 commit.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#23

Post by atonse »

This is so awesome, but the most surprising to me is that all the public source code on GitHub only totals 21 TB.

I forget that they do fundamentally host text, and not video etc.

I somehow thought it would be petabytes. The private repos might be more than that but those are historically paid.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#25

Post by helldritch »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #17
Gollapalli wrote: post #6

Beautiful. Honestly, nothing scares me more than losing all the code and all the technology we've developed in the past 70 or so years. There's been so much advancement, but it's also transferred in such a way (institutional knowledge, propietary software, proprietary hardware, etc.) that it's super easy to lose. If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline an…

> If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline and the accompanying knowledge loss ...can we? I'm sometimes a little concerned about how complicated chip fabs are. They feel like something that could take generations to rebuild, even if we had all the knowledge on what to do.

Home photo-lithography and chemical etching setups aren't common, but have been done by several people. We wouldn't be able to jump straight to 14NM, but we would probably be able to get to the 500-300nm size relatively quickly (a year or two, maybe, if starting from scratch) and shrink down from there.

Devices would be much bigger and less efficient, but we would be able to run code and pump out 8086 processors within 6 months.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#28

Post by rwky »

This means that after the apocalypse people will be able to reclaim the Linux source code but not Windows. I find it poetic that open source may one day be the norm.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#29

Post by rob-olmos »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #16

It looks like the code is actually stored in plain text, and that this is basically microfilm?

I don't think so. Project Silica talks about storing the data in droplet-looking voxels rather than etching language symbols. Cool video of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzHsibqpIs
Post reply on HN