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Comment by neuronexmachina | Hacker News Reader

> a century from now when all of us are dead who cares if our confidential info gets released to the public then?

I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's far-future scifi "A Deepness in the Sky," where "programmer-archaeologist" is one of the occupations. (along with "programmer-at-arms")

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As I keep saying. Some people chuckle about Warhammer 40k Techno Priests. The only people in the warhammer universe with some chance to understand the centuries old compuer systems and machines. Other people work with legacy systems.

It's pretty genius how they've turned ancient maintenance routines into prayers and rituals in order to preserve the knowledge and scale out the work force

We do it too. I hold my breath every time I kick over an old server that it comes back again. They just formalized it.

it might lead to cargo culting though, already hoards of programmers are chanting refrains of "_ considered harmful" and "_ is the root of all evil" ... ;)

It's deliberately _worse_ than cargo culting in Warhammer 40k. That universe is deliberately set up to be as bleak and cynical as possible. Partly just for fun, partly to serve the game a justification why any faction would get into a skirmish with any other faction (including itself).

The oldest occurence of this idea that I know of is in Asimov's Foundation series, where a class of priests preserves knowledge about nuclear technology and robots.

knowledge is a priesthood

The Tau might be able to reverse engineer?

I’ve just been listening to that. It’s remarkable how much AI can already do, compared to the limits assumed in the story.

And how technology starts hijacking people' minds. From HN, one year ago and a few days ago:

https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peop...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphon...

those are more to 'reading' source codes to find the functionality you want, but I do get what you mean

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