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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?

#271

Post by kevinmchugh »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #96
trinovantes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact that human language will also change over the course of 500 years 500 year old English is nothing like English today

Five hundred years ago is Shakespeare, roughly. Still readily understandable for the most part. Now if we go back a thousand years…

Shakespeare and the KJV are both closer to 400 years old. Shakespeare wanted to be accessible, though modern readers still need annotations to understand some of the words and most of the references. The KJV was intentionally somewhat archaic. There's a big difference in how accessible KJV is vs Shakespeare

But otherwise yeah, the Norman Conquest did a number on the language

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

#272

Post by david38 »

Create a foundation that ensures it is always copied to the latest media.

It should verify it’s on hosted on multiple sites and the current offline media is working.

Every few years this will have to change.

Every 20 years, annotations might have to be added as language drifts.

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

#273

Post by 999900000999 »

dhritzkiv wrote: post #203
999900000999 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we print the book copies of the book. Once people stop caring to fix the machine, eventually they can still find the books.

Where/how is the book being printed? Locally? What's powering the printer? How do you ensure that the materials (paper, ink, lubricant, etc.) last all those years? What about binding/collating those pages? Or is the printing occurring once (since the site is static)?

Ideally the printer would only run a few times, I imagine when the internet finally goes down there's no reason to keep printing new copies of the book.

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

#275

Post by __turbobrew__ »

politician wrote: post #105

This type of question is asked semi-frequently and the answers tend to be around physical preservation. So here's a thought. Why not build a "Computational Knowledge Bootloader" that contained enough information to build a sequence of computational devices of increasing complexity starting with the absolute basics of math and language. If we had that, then all of these types of questions of digital preservation could…

A foundation of sorts?

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

#276

Post by franky47 »

LadyCailin wrote: post #260
jjoonathan wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was very young at the time, but I was absolutely convinced that the world would end at 2020. It didn’t, and that deeply ingrained in me a very substantial amount of skepticism from doomsdaysayers. The only doomsday I believe in now for absolute certainty is the heat death of the universe, but no one reading this will be around for that.

Society as we knew it definitely took a hit in 2020 though.

Collapse is not a singular event at a fixed point in time like the start of a war would be, it's a process.

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

#277

Post by grey-area »

kadoban wrote: post #243
grey-area wrote: post #193

Etch it onto a metal disk like this[1] inside a capsule that can survive reentry, pay to have it shot into space with a slowly decaying orbit. Then perhaps arrange to have the reentry hit a pond near your ancestral home in about 500 years time. 1. https://longnow.org/artifacts/rosetta-wearable-disk

That's got to be ~impossible by today's engineering. Hitting a specific place or even decaying at a specific time in 500 years is just never going to happen. It'd have to be an active process, which means you need a machine that's still running in 500 years. Even then I bet it's still a hard problem. IIRC NASA aims for like, an ocean and they're happy if they hit the right one.

Yes the last bit was just a little joke - orbital decay is subject to too much uncertainty.

Although I guess if you had propulsion you could deorbit in a specific place at a specific time. SpaceX and icbms deorbit precisely so we have the technology nowadays to do so. Maybe an ion drive could last that long?

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

#279

Post by sillysaurusx »

metalliqaz wrote: post #266
sillysaurusx wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

not sure I share your sentiment about companies hosting the data, considering what happened to Geocities and others.

Mm, you're right, but Geocities might be less interesting to historians than an archive of all internet history.

Also, as someone who has trained a few large GPT models, I think ML has a chance of preserving a lot of this data. Training datasets are only growing larger and larger, and although those aren't updated (yet), there's no reason to think they won't last for a long time.

I imagine that in 500 years, imagenet2012 might still be around as a historical curiosity, at least somewhere.

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

#280

Post by bombcar »

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 weak link is the children - would you take out and read your great-grandfather's book every year? Now take it further yet and eventually it gets boring and not done anymore.
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