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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?

#641

Post by jokethrowaway »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #67
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This DNA writing idea is premised on the concept that most of our DNA is "junk", which is an increasingly unlikely idea. Most of it does not code for proteins, that's true. We are slowly uncovering more and more functions for the rest.

Who said anything about modifying our existing genome? Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to add extra biologically inert genetic material solely for the purpose of permanently storing information, passed from generation to generation.

Nothing can go wrong when turning our children's genetic material into node_modules

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

#642

Post by _tom_ »

SoylentOrange wrote: post #340
novaRom wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt any commercial/legal entity will live through the upcoming societal transformations. It is naive to believe our current political and economic systems will not change too much even in the next 20-30 years.

There are plenty of Italian and Swiss banks that are over 300 years old. They’ve survived reformations, wars including World Wars, plagues, purges, and the transition from feudal monarchies to empire and to democracy. For example, the British banking giant Barclays was founded in 1690. Here’s a partial list of other ancient banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin... I think it’s more reaso…

And Bearings Bank was founded in 1762. And made it to 1995 before imploding. Likely to survive, yes. But at least one is likely to fail over any reasonable period.

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

#643

Post by brian_herman »

chrisweekly wrote: post #549
zarmin wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in the time of Shakespeare? Forsooth!

Haha, reminds me of "If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript" https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Wrote-JavaScript-Angus-Crol... which is actually kind of amusing and creative.

This is awesome.

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

#644

Post by RugnirViking »

tough wrote: post #466
SynasterBeiter wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who will administer the site after you pass? It's much harder to justify the administering effort, when you never even knew the original guy.

In where I live, there's a sweet wine made from a grape from greece, which recipe and genetics has been conserved for a few hundred years because one rich guy stated so in his will, so he gave away a building (was an hospital, now a museum), and in exchange, their heirs must recieve 2 boxes of 6 bottles of such wine each year, or otherwise the building lease is off. Something like that might work

Super interesting, encoding information inside of a lease contract. It's almost blockchain-esque!

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

#645

Post by wrycoder »

cstross wrote: post #336

The 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…

And then someone forgets to renew the domain.

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

#647

Post by wrycoder »

WorldMaker wrote: post #419
mlinsey wrote: post #330

Other 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…

Another benefit to Universities is that they have some of the oldest, most culturally focused DNS zones. EDU is the most likely of just about any root TLD today to avoid succumbing to for-profit pressure and is one of the stablest managed TLDs, so an address on an EDU domain perhaps has the highest likelihood of not changing deep into the future (assuming properly managed by the University itself). (There's still sig…

I’ll bet Wirth’s web pages vanish from ETH’s domain within ten years of his passing.

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

#648

Post by HighPlainsDrftr »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #279
metalliqaz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, imagenet…

Well, everyone was hyped on perl at the turn of the millennium. Yet not many people write it anymore. I keep waiting for the re-surge, but it just doesn't look like it is going to happen.

At nuclear waste sites, even the feds have come up with a few ways of saying "Don't enter. It is bad" with different languages, pictorial signs, and such.

It is really tough to figure out what the next few hundred years looks like. And to be a bit political, I don't think anyone saw the invasion of the capitol building in January.

It isn't easy to predict the future. With the original poster in mind, I think the best bet would to be with archive.org.

Maybe archive.org should provide this service. It could be a way to generate revenue - say "here is a thousand bucks, keep it for eternity."

I'm not sure I would want my thoughts to last that long though.

(And I'm still not sure that it would survive for more than a few hundred years.) Maybe the right thing to do is do something so great for society that they want to write books on you (eg: George Washington).

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

#649

Post by gorbachev »

rm445 wrote: post #511
mlinsey wrote: post #330

Other 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…

Ah, someone beat me to it. I was going to suggest one of the ancient universities with 800+ year traditions, on the grounds that even once the money dried up they might continue to host the website out of sheer force of habit.

Just maybe not choose one that's close to an ocean, lake or river.
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