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GitHub buries 21 TB open-source code in Arctic vault for 1k years
- bori 6y agoVikings bury axes in Arctic ice for 1k years
- aabhay 6y agoApes bury coconuts in arctic ice for 1k years
- pizza 6y agoHope there'll be plentiful decent microfilm readers in the future post-civilizational collapse
- noir_lord 6y agoThe technlogy to read microfilm is relatively primitive (I mean you still require lenses and a bright light source but you don't require a computer or advanced electronics).
- mamon 6y agoHow do I create a mirror of Github?
- sdesol 6y agoYou can't, unless your question is "how do I mirror a github repo?" I'm currently indexing thousands of GitHub repos for analytics reasons, and if you don't play nice (fetch infrequently), GitHub will throttle/terminate your connection.
- threeseed 6y agoGitHub isn't the first company to do this. You just need to use one of the many scraping proxy services which will give you a HTTP proxy that cycles through millions of IP addresses. It's impossible to block since they are largely residential IPs controlled by malware. It definitely works but you are encouraging them which isn't a nice feeling.
- timsally 6y agoGithub's site for this has much more detail on the technical aspects of this: https://archiveprogram.github.com/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/. Their data archival goals are even more ambitious than burying it in the Arctic. The GitHub Archive Program is partnering with Microsoft’s Project Silica to ultimately archive all active public repositories for over 10,000 years, by writing them into quartz glass platters using a femtosecond laser. Worth considering swapping the submitted link out for the original source, per the HN guidelines. I would suggest the original blog post: https://github.blog/2020-07-16-github-archive-program-the-journey-of-the-worlds-open-source-code-to-the-arctic/ https://github.blog/2020-07-16-github-archive-program-the-jo....
- seesawtron 6y agohow does one swap the link in HN? one can only edit the title text.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoAdmins (dang, for example) will occasionally notice a request like this and make the change.
- seesawtron 6y agogreat. thanks for sharing.
- timsally 6y agoThe moderators will do it when they see the post. I haven't submitted a link in a really long time, but I don't think the submitter can change it. Makes sense to reserve it for the mods, given the implications of a regular user swapping out the link of a highly visible post.
- detaro 6y agoone e-mails the moderators (contact link in the footer) and asks them to do it.
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- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jarmitage 6y agoInteresting to think about this alongside Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay's paper "The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015" (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510649 http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf
- rejschaap 6y agoTaking cold storage to another level. Short video about the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzI9FNjXQ0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzI9FNjXQ0o
- m0zg 6y agoYou can actually see if the code you contributed made it there. I have an "Arctic Code Vault Contributor" badge in my profile now.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amelius 6y agoDid they include all dependencies?
- seesawtron 6y agoIt's a "snapshot". In python one has to import a module during run time but for example, in matlab code, the modules and their classes/functions should already exists within the snapshot directories as submodules. I am not sure about other languages how this works.
- gkoberger 6y agoHere's the original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-13/microsoft-apocalypse-proofs-open-source-code-in-an-arctic-cave https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-13/microsoft... One of the fascinating parts of this, to me, was this whole thing was about permanence... and at the same time, Nat's home burnt down.
- seesawtron 6y agoDoes anyone know if they archived gitlab code as well? Edit: It wasn't because Github and Gitlab have different management.
- coold 6y agonode_modules should keep ice together what about water chips?
- seesawtron 6y agoWould future generations be able to run this code on future hardware or future development softwares or programming languages? That would be a challenging test of backward compatibility.
- jalk 6y agoWe emulate a lot of old hardware today, so the future can hopefully do so too. The future might however be astonished over just how many web-frameworks were “needed”
- seangrogg 6y agoBy then they'll wonder how we did anything useful online in under 8 petabytes, given their state of affairs now involves all sites registered within the multiverse-DNS to include mandated state surveillance payloads. And because ads.
- supernova87a 6y agoI would love to know what kind of plastic film medium they tested and used to make sure it wouldn't delaminate/deplasticize/etc over 1000 years...
- runj__ 6y agoThe testing done for the ISO standard seems to be based on irradiation(1). Seems fairly straight forward although I'm not sure it's tested for all kinds of radiation etc., but with a specific temperature and light it looks like very few other things would matter. (1) https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jpol/2016/8547524/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jpol/2016/8547524/
- blocked_again 6y agoWhat happens if someone file a DMCA takedown of one of the repositories in the vault?
- HenryKissinger 6y agoThe polar bears will keep the lawyers away.
- elongatedMusku 6y agoNot if it all melts first.
- umvi 6y agoOr right to be forgotten?
- aaaxyz 6y agoYou could argue that the works will be in the public domain by the time the vault opens up. Although considering how regular copyright extension acts have been signed into law, that's unlikely.
- orbital-decay 6y agoThis is a bit more than a simple PR move as I initially thought after reading the article submitted in OP. They take steps to ensure redundancy, recoverability, durability, and much more. They work with the experts who know the problem by heart. Still, the main question remains. Computer programs are extremely volatile by nature, they are written for the constantly changing media, and need huge amounts of context to be useful for future generations. Will a snapshot of the Linux kernel be useful in 100 years? 1000 years? After some global disaster? Even if you don't intend to run it (which requires archiving the current state of the supported platforms and much more), how much additional work will be needed to simply read it for studying? >After the Challenger disaster, a hunt for the blueprints of the abandoned Saturn V rocket ensued. They were largely recovered, thanks to the work of archivists. Yet nobody can build another Saturn V today with these blueprints. Any complex product is much more than just a set of blueprints. It's an organized process that depends on a certain team of people, supply chain, existing infrastructure, and much much more. Useful products only exist when they are supported.
- ben0x539 6y agoidk about you but if I were a hyper-advanced singularity hive mind entity from the year 12,020, I'd get a huge kick out of scrolling through some archive of those adorable entry-level not-even-sapient programs our ancestors wrote in antiquity.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI bet in 12,020, we'll still be waiting for Ruby 3.
- nurettin 6y agoDon't know what features you're looking for, but the roadmap in their issue tracker says it is due in about 5 months. https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-master/roadmap#3.0 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-master/roadmap#3.0
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- boarnoah 6y agoSomewhat unrelated but I've always had this concept of documenting everyday life down to the most mundane of details (by today's standards). Archived for a few hundred years that could be pretty interesting for future historians. Even with how digitized everything is, there is definitely a lot of things that are undocumented (at least consistently in one place) or left out as too obvious.
- freehunter 6y agoAgreed. Far too often in history books/podcasts/shows you see guesses as to what normal life was like, but they’re just guesses. Because no one bothered writing down exactly what the average Roman went to war wearing or how they lined up or what their tactics were, because the contemporary audience already knew. It would be considered boring and too much information. But 2000 years later, we’re still guessing what the Gallic Wars looked like, sounded like, smelled like. Because it wasn’t important enough to write down. We still have some of these same issues today, but given the rate of change in technology, we’re talking years instead of centuries or millennia. What was the average life like for a startup employee during the Dotcom era (1995-2001)? I have no idea because I was too young to experience it and I’ve never been able to find any books or accounts of the average daily work life even 20 years ago.
- reaperducer 6y agoFar too often in history books/podcasts/shows you see guesses as to what normal life was like The problem is that history books/podcasts/shows are not intended to reveal that level of granularity about life. They exist to provide a summary within a specific set of boundaries (printed pages, run time, etc...). If you want to know the nitty-gritty, you need to start with the source material. There's more source material on daily life available in the world's museums and university archives than you could ever digest in a lifetime. That's why it's summarized in the above-mentioned forms.
- freehunter 6y agoNot true at all. Listen to History of Rome and you’ll hear historian Mike Duncan constantly saying “we don’t know how this happened because no one ever wrote it down”. Dan Carlin says the same thing a lot in Hardcore History. If was just a matter of too much details they would have said “this detail doesn’t matter” or just bypassed it. It’s not that the medium isn’t granular enough, it’s legitimately that no one wrote this stuff down so it’s just gone forever. There is no source material to start with.
- annadane 6y ago"Ha! Microsoft will embrace open-source when hell freezes over"
- mbostleman 6y agoSo something on the order of 1000 js front end frameworks from now.
- akerro 6y agoThis archive contains JHipster and openapi, but I'm failing to understand one thing. Does it also contains OS, dependencies, compilers, linkers etc? What's a point of just storing the jhipster without its node and maven dependencies? Why store the code you won't be able to compile and execute?
- herogreen 6y agoAnd the recipes to build the hardware required to run the program.
- ebg13 6y ago> Why store the code you won't be able to compile and execute? The code itself is a manifestation of human creative expression and part of our cultural heritage even without executing it. > Does it also contains OS, dependencies, compilers, linkers etc? If they are free/open-source software (in this specific case on GitHub), then yes. See also their partner https://www.softwareheritage.org/mission/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/mission/ which archives more than just GitHub.
- blocked_again 6y agoIt contains all the repositories with atleast 1 star. So yeah.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoIt's better than nothing. The rosetta stone is missing the first 15 lines or so-- still immensely valuable.
- dutch3000 6y agowaste of time
- tra3 6y agoWhole of GitHub is only 21tb? Wild. I now have permanent, inaccessible backup of my code. Also wild.
- fit2rule 6y agoYeah, that's kind of a rub. What if I don't want to be remembered in the future? This sort of seems cynical on Google's part. The right to be forgotten has just been irreversibly denied to some of us. I know for a fact that a recently deceased friend wanted his repo's nuked. I wonder if this is going to be taken into account somehow. One can assume that laser can be used to burn nulls where needed, too ..
- threeseed 6y agoSounds like a great project. I hope in the year 3020 they have invented the advanced technology that allows a company like Github to sort their repositories by name.
- tapatio 6y agoPlease don't store my garbage code from my teens for 1000 years.
- fortran77 6y agoWhy not 2,000 years?
- aeyes 6y agoThis is the guide to read the data: https://github.com/github/archive-program/blob/master/GUIDE.md https://github.com/github/archive-program/blob/master/GUIDE.... You need to know how tar, lzma, utf-8 and git work. Judging by how hard it is to decipher ancient texts, I'd be surprised if anybody was able to read code without additional information on these subjects. Especially storing the binary git repo as-is will make it very hard.
- sebazzz 6y agoFor good order they should have archived npmjs, NuGet, and popular SDKs as well. My source code is worthless without it.