Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years? • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by AnonC » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 3:28 AM UTC

iamcurious wrote: post #638

tomxor wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anything we'd understand. The world was also a very different place, I suspect language will evolve far slower over the next 500 years due to the vast new interconnectedness that society has never experienced before. I think in 500 years, some…

We went from fotolog to Facebook to Instagram to tiktok in a decade or so. In a few years more it will be something 3d we can't completely envision, who knows in a few decades. In each iteration language changes faster, cause memes are language. In 500 years this will be gibberish. Who knows if people will even know how to read?

We already seem to be going to hieroglyphics, except that it’s with emoji and has dialects depending on where and by whom its used. I’ve seen adults unable to understand the emoji lingo that teens used to communicate a lot of things, and this developed in the span of a decade (or lesser) with the widespread availability of emojis. I can only shudder to think of how complex and divergent things from now would seem even 50 years from now.

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

#692

Post by snvzz » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 3:33 AM UTC

You could try and increase the chances you're alive in 500 years, by donating to efforts such as the SENS Foundation.

Then you can keep it up yourself.

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

#693

Post by sramsay » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #681

sramsay wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abo…

> to make that web page pertain to something of epochal importance to millions of people which is a hard task. and irrelevant to the OP's question. There are many things that people would want to preserve, but is of no importance to the grand scheme of humanity. You're basically saying that unless your works is of such importance that millions of people generations to come would voluntarily preserve it, the works do…

I've said nothing about what "deserves" preservation, but only what sort of things tend to be preserved over periods on the scale of centuries. And yes: My contention is that unless a substantial community of people voluntarily commit to preserving something, it likely will not survive (or will do so accidentally).

I'm not quite following why this is not relevant to the OP's question. I suppose I'm saying that it's not just a hard task, but an almost impossible one. Lots of people (2000 years ago, say) thought that what they were writing was of world-historical significance; today, we barely know their names. Others dashed off dictated letters to small, fragile communities of early followers and just happened to have created among the most well preserved texts of all time.

All I'm really saying here is that among the titanic forces determining which is which, the type of ink used seems not to be a matter of much importance.

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

#694

Post by lioeters » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #635

mleonhard wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting spoilers without a warning is extremely rude.

Worse, the past tense of "begot" is "begat."

> Past tense of beget is begot or begat

https://pasttenses.com/beget-past-tense

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

#695

Post by bryananderson » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 3:57 AM UTC

sramsay wrote: post #664

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…

> 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 abo…

The tricky part is that it’s hard to be sure that people will keep caring about the same things for a long time to come. As you said, most of what was written in Anglo-Saxon is gone, even though some of it besides Beowulf probably had “epochal importance” to those who lived at the time. Similarly, many works that were highly esteemed in the Greco-Roman world were eventually lost. Cultures change, religions change, languages change. And they all do so unpredictably.

The hardest part isn’t writing something that millions of people find critically important—it’s ensuring that society will continue to find the same things important for centuries. A temporal value-alignment problem.

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

#696

Post by SerCe » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:01 AM UTC

A year ago, GitHub attempted to preserve a snapshot of all public repositories in permafrost in Svalbard [0]. It's hard to say whether the data stored in a public repository on GitHub is going to remain accessible. Still, as far as preservation goes, personal pages stored on GitHub at the time of taking the snapshot might be saved for many generations ahead.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

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

#697

Post by OOPMan » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:02 AM UTC

Stupid question

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

#698

Post by deeblering4 » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:08 AM UTC

Print it, laminate it, seal it in water tight container.

There is no permanence on the web, everything thats there takes constant maintenance to keep in place.

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

#699

Post by aprinsen » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:24 AM UTC

I'd recommend checking out zen meditation as a moderately effective approach to confronting the terror of death and oblivion .

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

#700

Post by titzer » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 4:26 AM UTC

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…

Agree and disagree. For one, English and other languages are evolving faster now than before, due to the speed of communication, so spoken language in 500 years (even barring something weird like brain implants) is probably going to be even more different than modern English compared to Shakespeare.

However, there are examples of languages and documents that have been preserved, e.g. a Latin bible. Because of its status as a holy document and the vast power of the Catholic church, its tradition of teaching Latin, not just to read the bible, but conduct business and masses, the Latin in which the bible was written was very well preserved.