Paper.
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
151–160 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#152Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#153This is such a good interview question lol
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#154I would probably create some type of small self-contained unit, that's battery powered, and can recharge itself via solar panels. I'd have this device periodically try to fetch data from the internet. Once the internet goes down it goes down, and you'd have the local cached copy. I'd also have this mystical device print out the entire website in paper form every year or so, and then it would automatically shove the b…
How do you keep the battery from degrading after a few decades? Are there specific battery types that are long-term (hundreds of years?). Such as capacitors?
And the solar panels themselves would need maintenance, even if it is simply cleaning.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#155Print 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 relatively easy job for software archaeologists or historians to decode, assuming it's been periodically backed up to new media for all those years. The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#156I have thought of this; thought not unto 500 years but more like -- so my kids can just keep to somewhere to read. My thought process was to start with as much simplification as possible -- plain text. While you are still able to maintain that, perhaps write in something like Markdown -- plain text enough with the formatting enough to separate the sections/content.
Use a tool to convert those to HTML, which can be hosted anywhere or be just drag-n-drop in future once you are no longer maintaining/updating it.
My bet is that plain-text will survive any digital changes, so will HTML.
Just make sure there is someone to take to the next step after you. But it really fizzles out after that, well, individually we are not important enough to be of much trouble to anyone for this.
I started my journey recently and is, I would like to believe, just the beginning and I tried writing it down for my personal website which is 20+ years old and surviving -- https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#157Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.
do it with ethereum or some other blockchain in a single tx
I think Bitcoin is the safer option, since the history is more likely to be retained for historic reasons and it is smaller. Ethereum just has a lot more stuff running on it and the chain is much larger.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#158The only practical enough way I can think of is: (1) create static documents in the simplest and most standard lossless (as far as possible) format. (2) store them on a durable enough, yet simple enough medium. Today that would probably be something simple like an USB stick. (3) transfer to new medium periodically, and take the opportunity to convert obsolete media files to new formats, if needed (you could keep the…
wrt (2), I remember reading (watching? maybe it was a YouTube video), that the answer to long-term storage is optical media. There was even a brand of discs that advertised itself as being a 300-year data storage medium. The engineer in me wants to make some sort of metal etched disk medium to store data on and bury it somewhere with a marker on top. Preferably with instructions on how to retrieve the data.
That may be the answer for the durability of the medium but, I think, it is a red herring for the scenario described here and loses sight of crucial aspects:
(1) The data must be easily retrievable. Any custom solution will be too expensive to produce then read, and so will be any solution that does not evolve over time. It's already not simple to read a 40 year old obsolete medium...
(2) Once the data have been retrieved they must also be easily interpreted. I have no idea how easily it will be to interpret a 500 year old data format. For instance, anything can display a JPEG file today, but what about in 500, let alone 100 years? JPEG did not exist only 30 years ago, MP4 was released 20 years ago this year. This is a blip compared to 500 years.
So if the aim is archaeological and the intended recipients are a bunch of future PhDs in well-funded universities then maybe. But if they aim is to have the data readily available for an average person then both the medium and the data format must evolve over time and the most standard medium is probably the best choice for each technological generation. Even the instructions and the language they are written in must evolve over time.
You do need to hope that your descendants will keep at it over time.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#159Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.
How would people know to look for the messages though?
A webpage is discoverable
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#160Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.
do it with ethereum or some other blockchain in a single tx
I was curious what this would cost and found a thorough stackexchange post [0] that puts the price at 0.032 ETH per KB stored on-chain. Comes out to around 12,000 USD for a small 100kb static site.
I would guess this cost is competitive with carving binary data into stone, not bad for permenant storage, reading the data is free.
[0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...