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Comment by CameronBanga | Hacker News Reader

10,000 years from now, society has been destroyed. And people come across a glass plate with laser etchings. How bummed will they be when they go through all of the effort of decoding it, only to learn it's like some python library for managing drivers on a 2014 Dell laptop running linux?

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Only to find a packages.json file without a packages-lock.json file checked in, to make it impossible to restore the node_modules directory.

Don't worry npm and cockroaches will be the only things to survive a nuclear war

Pretty sure the universe is running on some advanced version of Erlang. Erlang VM would survive until heat death of the universe, when it finally crashes the heartbeat program will kick in and we'll have a new big bang

Obligatory XKCD citing: https://xkcd.com/224/

And Java and Keith Richards. But only one of these four things will still be interesting.

What’s the diff?

> Cockroaches

CockroachDB

The real problem is that NPM wouldn’t be around.

Better check in your node_modules directory the night before archive day so it’s included.

> The real problem is that NPM wouldn’t be around.

I wouldn't call that a problem.

I don't think there would be enough storage capability to store that many node_module directories.

Assuming they are deduping based on content hash it shouldn’t be that big a deal. Worst case it’s the size of npm itself.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/#arctic-code-vault

> The snapshot will consist of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size. Each repository will be packaged as a single TAR file.

100KB is a very low limit, many repos will be useless

Well yeah, but at that point you should just be cloning NPM on 2/2/20 as well.

I don't know if finding both JSON files but having to download leftPad would be any better...

"Python 2.7 only??!"

I'm sure in 12019 there will still be some Python 2 users.

Despite having the ability to directly access memory via neural interface, thus rendering the concept of output obsolete, I still don't want to give up the Python2 print syntax.

Don't worry we will build a PC simulator on neuralOS, with a backport of linux, docker and Windows 95. That way you can run python2 in linux in docker in PCSim in neuralOS and i can play minesweeper in windows95 in PCSim in neuralOS.

Imagine what a BSOD would do to you if it was running on your brain tissue--not sure I'd be brave enough to run win95 on my neurons.

> Despite having the ability to directly access memory via neural interface

Someone will write a GNU Emacs mode for that

How else are you going to mod your IRC client!?

For some calendars, that's this year.

I'd consider Linux to be the culmination of some of humanity's greatest achievements. Certainly I'd prefer they found that instead of the average website on the internet.

Unless that website is Wikipedia. Another great achievement.

I really hope people that are burying physical copies of the entire Wikipedia are archiving the entire edit history and not just a snapshot that hides all the ongoing edit wars. It's a much larger dataset (terabytes) so they probably aren't.

Linux would be a tiny drop in the bucket relative to the rest of GitHub. I wonder if they'll mark certain parts of the archive as more important or interesting.

Yet just a vehicle for either running browsers or serving them content.

It's surprising how apparently-useless information can give people a lot of insight. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" for instance, there were people who dug through the latrines of ancient societies to determine that the early Easter Islanders' diet consisted of 25% porpoises; and that the Greenland Norse colony didn't eat any fish. Looking at the receipts of medicines bought in the court of Henry VIII allowed people to conclude fairly conclusively that he did not have syphilis.

The thing is, it's really impossible to predict what information will and will not be a critical key to unlocking understanding of future generations. Just keeping it all, history, comments, and all, will be a huge boon to future historiographers trying to figure out what developing in the early 21st century was like.

I'm pretty sure Henry was cagey enough to have those receipts burned, also the doctors when it didn't work.

Well, the Rosetta Stone was just a mundane tax decree and that does not take anything away from it's significance.

It has significance but practical use not really.

Maybe using tabs instead of spaces will be punishable by death in 10,000 years and a number of people will be held accountable for accidentally having git repos on their computing devices that contain primarily tabs (Makefiles get an exception of course!).

I think you’re mistaken. We’ll be smarter in the future, which means we won’t slap the space bar like primates anymore...

Tab will be a printable shape.

There will be different skintone, multi-gender, tab emoji.

You mean once get the past the ads and the popup form asking for their email address?

Look on the bright side: in 10,000 years Python dependency management will be in a better shape and they'll have a fighting chance of running your software.

future generation that will rebuild civilization will find enough code to enjoy teledildonics once again

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