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Comment by baldeagle | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: because the law says he has to announce some stock changes in a print paper. Lol, how vintage is that law.

You have to do the same thing to get a Fictitious Business Name in California:

"Within 30 days of filing the Fictitious Business Statement, you are required to have the DBA statement published once a week for four (4) successive weeks in a paper of general circulation in the county where the business is operating."

There are services you can pay $30 that will print your statement in some random paper that no one reads to satisfy the requirement. It's a racket for sure.

Not just for business names! If you're a company that wants to sponsor an employee for a green card as part of the certification process you must advertise for the job in two Sunday newspapers of general circulation in the area of intended employment.

You can bet the local newspapers in Cupertino / Mountain View / Palo Alto etc have a lot of tech job ads on a Sunday.

In the UK (no idea about elsewhere) it's a requirement of planning law that certain changes to your property are advertised publicly. This means laminated A4 printouts are cable-tied to lampposts if your neighbour is planning building works. It's outdated but I quite enjoy the quaintness -- provided that I can enquire about things by current technology , not laminated notices, or faxes or postcards.

It occurs to me that I actually mean "whatever is convenient to me". Of course, what is convenient for one person might be ridiculous to someone else.

Where do you put a notice that will be reliably available 20-30 years from now?

Does the internet archive not suffice? That's the most coordinated, well known long-term preservation effort I know of.

You can upload media, the foundation isn't just for archiving websites.

I read in the Economist a while back that some historians speculate that the constant format changes of Information Age media could mean that historians of the 22nd century would have more primary and secondary source material from the early 20th century than the early 21st.

How much will we be able to trust archived digital materials? If I find a set of 100 year old handwritten letters, it's unlikely that anyone has tampered with them to change the message, although possible with a lot of effort. Digital messages could be compromised undetectably by some archiver.

Is it still "primary" if it has been downloaded from the internet, converted between formats, copied across various storage media...

IPFS https://ipfs.io/

I know some Hacker News users really like IPFS, but that seems bad advice. IPFS is a very young technology with practically no adoption, chances that some information stored in it will still be available in two or three decades are at least hard to estimate and probably slim.

Betting on something like archive.org or just printing it out and placing it in a bank vault or at a notary seems a much better idea. There are also companies and organization dedicated to long term storage, they are most likely a better choice, too. Even printing it out and placing it in a shoe box in the attic may have a better chance for still being around in a couple of decades, though it may be more likely to be discovered by accident than reliably retrieved at some point in time.

Vintage !== Broken

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