A Suicide Cult's Surviving Members Still Maintain Its 90s Website (2016) | Hacker News Reader

A Suicide Cult's Surviving Members Still Maintain Its 90s Website (2016)

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37 pointsjameslk19 comments

One of my earliest jobs in tech required driving southward into Sunnyvale for a 5AM shift. Seeing Hale-Bopp each morning for weeks on that commute was amazing. All of the images I can find fail to capture the visible confirmation that we're all on a rock floating in a vast universe with myriad amazing things nearby.

We’ve gone too long without a major celestial event, I feel. We need one.

Giant meteor impact would be nice.

> The members of Heaven’s Gate, which had existed since the 70s, believed they were exiting their Earthly bodies to board a UFO that was hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet as it made its closest approach to Earth.

Wait. Wasn't this kind of the plot of Lifeforce??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film)

Also this Key and Peele sketch https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5JFSjAs4Qxc

> I asked the the admins if they resented this task at all: being left behind to play caretaker to a forgotten corner of the internet, missing their chance to “evolve” to this Next Level. They told me they weren’t resentful at all.

> “We didn’t have any of those feelings. That would be a very human response,” they wrote. “Don’t worry, we will be taken care of.”

At the end of the article the realization hit me that it's just standard cultist behavior: if they suddenly gave up the faith they'd be unmoored, not having anything to hope for, so it's more comforting to believe in the "lie".

Behavior that too many people in the world exhibit of course, suuure America will be great again, it's not racism, it's fighting against thugs! What grift? Oh all politicians do it, so it's fine if the ones I support do it!

[This paragraph redacted, sigh, triggering people's emotions won't get my message across]

This is possible because the website is made of .html and other multi-media files in directories. There are no moving parts. As long as there's a webserver it's immortal and probably the closest any of those in Heavens Gate will get to the concept.

We really need more websites that are .html and files in directories. Making everything an executable (either server or client side) leads to very short lifetimes.

If they had built it in PHP they might wish they had died and gone wherever.

In that case they don’t even need the webserver if it’s archived in the Internet Archive.

It’s also blazing fast. Which is so much different from how most websites feel these days. Reminds me of the html classes I had back when I was a kid.

Such sites can exists on things like S3 forever probably. The only things to care about are domain name and certificates.

domain name being arguably the most difficult thing here as it requires some interaction for at least payment. Certificates you can fully automate nowadays with LetsEncrypt and certbot or even managed by AWS no problem

Nah, LE and ACME only hides the enormous complexity of CA TLS certs. And if they'd set it up when LE came out then it'd have stopped working by now because acme protocol doesn't work with LE anymore. Only acme2 protocol works. This is just one example. There's also the 4 times the LE root certs have expired in the last ~7 years. Not even thinking about all the certbot or acme client issues that can happen.

Unmantained HTTPS with CA TLS only has a lifetime of a couple years at best. Sometimes just a few months. Not that it'd be bad to have, but for a long living website you have to do HTTP+HTTPS. Not just fragile CA TLS HTTPS only.

I guess that’s the ultimate hit-by-a-bus problem…

I've been on a X-Files binge lately and it feels so eerily something that could have come out of the show.

(2016)

Some other discussion in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954025

One of my favourite YouTubers, Matt Orchard, did a video on cults that included Heaven's Gate. He interviews a surviving member. If this article interested you, it's worth a watch (the beginning is a bit silly):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9F-vb7s3DE

During the whole Heaven’s Gate thing, I worked with a guy who was in the group and lived at the house but had “grown out” of the cult.

The mass suicide happened and he was still deeply loyal to the group, the people, and even Marshall.

We had a bunch of deep conversations while on shift. He seemed to have profound regret he wasn’t amongst them when they went to the level beyond or whatever they called it. He just disappeared one day and I never saw him again.

Just say "Heaven's Gate" and quit the clickbait.

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