Earlier quoted context omitted.
We thought that about Usenet.
Wait, we lost it?
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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
661–670 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see no technical reason for why we can't create some e-reader that will keep your library much safer for much longer than paper. I see no reason why we can't make some that last for a millennium, if the power supply and storage aren't included and it's kept off in some dry place, out of the Sun's light and never overheat. But well, there is no demand for tech that will last for a millennium. In fact, people are pus…
Electronics aren't that sturdy. Hard drives demagnetize, solid-state storage decays, and there's always the chance that a stray cosmic ray will fry something. Even if we could construct something that sturdy: After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it? Would we include an instruction manual? Printed on what sort of paper? Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than electronics could…
A more accessible approach than the High-Density Rosetta might be the M-DISC.[0] It's essentially a DVD/Blu-Ray which materials engineered to last significantly longer than standard ones. I attended a chemistry lecture by Prof. Matthew Linford (BYU) and from the gist of his description,[1] the materials that they were using have a good shot at lasting 500 to 1000 years if properly stored.
[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
[1] : https://purl.pt/24107/1/iPres2013_PDF/Permanent%20Digital%20...
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#663Maybe a self-evolving computer virus, that continually propagates itself to new systems, with its only function to serve some personal web pages?
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#664The 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…
> Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish . . .
I think this is actually wrong. It certainly doesn't hurt to write on fired clay tablets, or to "store" your papyrus documents in an extremely low-humidity environment. That might enable accidental preservation. But at the of the day (or at the end of the millennium), things survive because lots of people care about them.
You mention Anglo Saxon. That's an interesting example, because the entire corpus of Anglo Saxon literature is easily anthologized in a single volume, and there is exactly one extant copy of what most scholars regard as the most important thing written in the language (Beowulf). But the truth is this: Most of it is gone, because people stopped caring about what was written in it.
But psalters? Bibles? Church histories? It's an embarrassment of riches. Why? Because people cared very deeply about those things.
And translation helps, but again, it's not quite enough. The instructions for my dehumidifier are in eight different languages. Where did I put that again?
To come at it from another angle: Finding a paper copy of a 1955 Seattle phonebook is extremely difficult. But why? It was written on paper, there were thousands and thousands of copies printed, none of them have actually disintegrated into dust, and yet . . .
So: My advice would be to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people. They'll do the rest.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
Program once memory is quite resistant, and of course, plain old ROM is a rock, literally. Transistors do not deteriorate unless you use them, just like resistors and a lot of the available capacitors. On how to operate it, it's an e-reader, you turn it on there's the manual there. There is the really difficult part of telling people "put 12V DC here, ground on the outside", but it's trivial compared to the problem o…
> ground on the outside A diode bridge ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_bridge ) can easily take care of polarity inversions. Voltage is a harder problem. Since we're going through flights of fancy in these threads, another option would be to add a built-in solar panel to your hypothetical e-reader. Expose it to enough light (and you can probably assume the lighting won't be much brighter than a tropical midday…
Yes, but then you would both incentive people into placing your device under sunlight and need some of the shortlived kind of capacitors.
It should still be possible to make a solar powered e-reader long-lived, but a replaceable power supply is a good idea even if your device has to last for a couple of years.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, occasionally those predictions have been right and society reverts to a state less advanced than it was for hundreds or thousands of years. A lot of the technology from Ancient Rome, building techniques, steam engine technology, etc. were lost for thousands of years. It’s totally conceivable to me that 500 years from now scientists have access to a wealth of electronic media, but haven’t invented the co…
They're starting to break the code on it, but there are concrete docks that Rome built 2000 years ago that still exist today - we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years. Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of volcanic ash in the concrete...
We've known for a good while how Roman concrete works. The reason that nobody uses it is that the economic incentives aren't there. Roman concrete is more annoying to work with and takes way, way longer to usefully solidify than cheap modern concrete. Yes, it will last longer, but almost nobody these days cares about paying through the nose for a building that will last more than 100 years when you could just force future generations to pay to rebuild it when it collapses.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#667Become (in)famous enough and I'm sure historians would host your website in perpetuity.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're starting to break the code on it, but there are concrete docks that Rome built 2000 years ago that still exist today - we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years. Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of volcanic ash in the concrete...
We've known for a good while how Roman concrete works. The reason that nobody uses it is that the economic incentives aren't there. Roman concrete is more annoying to work with and takes way, way longer to usefully solidify than cheap modern concrete. Yes, it will last longer, but almost nobody these days cares about paying through the nose for a building that will last more than 100 years when you could just force f…
It's a test of intergenerational commitment, because you are asking the generation that bears the cost of construction to build something that benefits many future generations. But the future generations, even though they enjoy all those beautiful old buildings provided to them by their ancestors, are tempted to go cheap for the building they need to build themselves.
So as people become disconnected from the great chain of being that connects your ancestors to you and you to your descendants, they start to build ugly, disposable buildings.
Perhaps one approach might be to provide lower interest rates to buildings based on the expected life and maintenance cost. So a building that is expected to last 500 years would have a much lower annual interest burden than a building expected to last 70 years. That would require some type of government guarantee for the 500 year bond.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in the time of Shakespeare? Forsooth!
I was going to say (as if that were the main objection) that the = there was apocryphal, but I had my centuries wrong: Recorde invented it in the mid-16th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#History I wonder when angle braces were introduced?
> apocryphal
I think you mean anachronistic there.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a little bit like the bird who avoids the cat for 3 days in a row using that as evidence that cats can't eat birds. Be careful extrapolating possible futures only by sampling past events. That's why we have physics, because we are notoriously bad at doing that with just our intuition. Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat i…
It's funny that there is a set of people who think we can't survive +2 degrees of heat but can easily be an interplanetary species surviving in Mars.
I see no reason to suspect there's much overlap there, and in any case this misrepresents both arguments. Climate change doesn't need to render the planet uninhabitable to all life in order to devastate human civilization; if we are forced to abandon the coasts, it will be the biggest refugee crisis in human history by orders of magnitude, and hundreds of millions will die in the resulting chaos and scramble for resources. Meanwhile, Mars is a barren tomb world, and, at best, living in a colony there will be a physically and psychologically exhausting prospect, and has no chance at exhibiting any real self-sufficiency for hundreds of years at best, let alone anything resembling civilization.