Ask HN: What code should be included in humanity's Foundation?

2 points by respectthepeace 4 years ago | 2 comments

I've been watching the Foundation recently and got me thinking. What code or project should make it in humanity's Foundation?

If you're not familiar here is a short summary of what the Foundation is:

Foundation is set in the future, when the world is barely remembered, and humans have colonized the galaxy. The book introduces Hari Seldon, a brilliant visionary and psychohistorian whose job is to use mathematics and probability to predict the future. Seldon does not have the ability to prevent the decline of humanity that he predicts. Instead, he gathers together the galaxy’s top scientists and scholars on a bleak outer planet and sets out to preserve the accumulated knowledge of humankind, and begin a new civilization based on art, science, and technology. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation and designs it to withstand a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare he predicts will last for 30,000 years.

MrWiffles 4 years ago |

I’d definitely want to see all the code and utilities created over the years as a result of the Human Genome Project as part of that, as well as everything created since. Would prove invaluable in diagnosing new diseases and figuring out cures, tracking evolutionary drift, etc.

mtmail 4 years ago |

Github's Arctic Code Vault has a similar goal

"On 02/02/2020 GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository. Those millions of repos were then archived to hardened film designed to last for 1,000 years, and stored in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault in a decommissioned coal mine deep beneath an Arctic mountain in Svalbard, Norway." https://archiveprogram.github.com/