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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?

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully some remnant of humanity will cast out among the stars with ultra-high density storage holding archives of most of human knowledge.

How is that going to repair anyone's kettle?

It may help if the kettle is somewhere between the Earth and Mars :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably

The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever. The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet will live on.

That's a variation on the Ship of Odysseus. Years pass, nternets come and go, gateways open and close. Does "the Internet" still exist? (Rhetorical question.)

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second part of your answer is hilarious and depressing.

Never underestimate the power of basic human needs over layers of abstractions. Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern society eventually collapses.

It always brings me joy to read doomsday prophecies from decades, centuries, and millenia past. They were legion -- so confident, yet so wrong.

I hope your predictions bring similar joy to future readers in the decades, centuries, and millenia to come.

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

#235
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something 500 years old is by definition worth keeping, alone for historians.

I'm emptying out a storage bin with 25+ year old stuff that begs to differ. Storing things has a cost, actually storing things so they last, far more so. Even historians curate and don't keep everything.

You're just 500 years too early with the emptying.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably

There's content from those BBS systems still available; so dunno if thats the argument (I think) you think it is.

Some (small) amount of content from those BBS systems has been archived elsewhere, but the BBS servers themselves are long dead and cannot be connected to.

By analogy, the contents of a few torrents might be archived somewhere 500 years from now, but nobody will be seeding the torrents themselves.

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

#237
My bet is that you only chance is making it a family history site. And by that I mean that each generation of your future family must contribute their story and at the same time update the site to a modern solution.

The base layer could be text files and image, even though jpeg might not exists in 200 year some other format does.

But you must leave it up to you grandchildren to update the solution to modern formats. Maybe set some inheritance up to support this.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never underestimate the power of basic human needs over layers of abstractions. Software's intangibility will be its downfall when our modern society eventually collapses.

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?

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

#239
post #38

If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations. Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page. So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.

There was a post here on hacker news of a service that would convert a static page and contain the entire page in a URL. That, in turn, could be converted to a QR code. I didn’t notice if it relied on something like bit.ly to store data, but it didn’t seem like it. Unfortunately, I can’t find it again at the moment.

You mean a Data URI?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_...

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

#240

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…

By the by, if you haven't seen the Coen brothers' film "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs", which features this poem, I highly recommend stopping everything, popping some corn, and watching it as soon as feasible.
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