probably as a static page hosted on arweave
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
621–630 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#622Earlier 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?
This table on Wikipedia says the inequality symbols were first used in 1631[1]. However guillemets (« ») date to the mid sixteenth century[2] and are still used as quotation marks in many languages. Although according to the page about brackets[3], chevrons were the earliest form of brackets, however I couldn’t find a year.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols_...
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#623The 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…
> 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, someone looking back at a website from today will find something far more intelligible than when we look back 500 years. The language will be closer and they will have a lot of detailed context to place it in.
I know this goes against the strangely attractive premise that civilisations rise and fall and we are ants running around thinking we are important in the moment and nothing we do will last... but the world really has become a more interconnected and stable place and it seems far more probable that it will remain that way. If there is an empire that could fall today and spell the end, it's communication technology.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#624Just use the philosopher's stone, stay alive and host it yourself in 500 years old.
Look up Nicolas Flamel, his house is now the oldest in Paris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Nicolas_Flamel
Create an artifact, surround it with mystery, and in 500 years it will be either an artifact exposed in the museum, or a relic people will be looking for even in generations.
Some people like to pretend that the philosopher's stone isn't real, but if you visit the catacombs with a radio-isotope detector and locate his remains, you will be convinced it is.
Presumably it was a hot to the touch radioactive meteorite passed down through generations that had been wrapped in lead. When he melted the lead, the transmuted gold fell at the bottom. It was a technology that wouldn't be discovered until Becquerel 500 years later.
Inside this meteorite, which until it was shielded properly, whose path you could back-trace via following the traces of radioactivity, it was discovered by x-ray imagery that it contained a perfect metallic disk with engraved features in its core. The rest is classified, but if you can store your website in a box there, you can rest assured that it will be preserved too.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#625Earlier 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?
Actually, as an assignment operator it dates back thousands of years:
let there = light # fix dark issueRe: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#626The 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…
You can walk the street of Rome and read inscriptions that are 2000 years old, they will either be close enough to any latin language or you may have some notions of latin yourself. My point being that english is probably much more significant culturally today than latin ever was. The chances that it will be some sort of forgotten language are pretty slim (though I am sure it will have evolved).
Now the real question is whether that website will have more significance than a XVI century grocery list, and be really worth preserving to your descendants…
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#627chisel it into stone and protect it from erosion
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#628At this point, your best bet would be to put it on archive.org.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#629Print 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…
I once had an email service which dismantled its servers one day after it stopped flowing email.
I lost a lot of email.
They had sent a couple of warnings, which I had cleverly filtered into a special folder. And missed.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#630AWS S3 static page, and a well-funded savings account.