The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)(longbets.org)

68 points by doubletwoyou 1 hour ago | 12 comments

> entering the characters http://www.longbets.org/601 into the address bar of a web browser or command line tool (like curl)

The part of this that's most likely to fail at some point is the "http://".

ludwik 52 minutes ago | |

In my mind, the part that is most likely to fail is "return an HTML document that still contains the following text." Nowadays, more and more "HTML documents" do not contain any content at all, just some JavaScript that is responsible for then fetching and displaying the content.

bombcar 37 minutes ago | | |

I used to be someone, man, I was a dreamer, a programmer, a man!

Now I'm a human slave copying text from web browsers to chat windows to get around JS rendering bullshit.

ywain 1 hour ago | |

The detailed terms of the bet include this:

> A 301 redirect from www.longbets.org/601 to a different URL containing that text would also fulfill those conditions.

I assume this would cover the HTTP->HTTPS redirect scenario.

kijin 8 minutes ago | | |

I think the parent is referring to the possibility that one day, browsers might put up a blanket security warning for HTTP URLs instead of following redirects. Or they might implement a policy change that tries to be a little too clever with automatic upgrades to HTTPS.

In particular, the automatic upgrade feature in modern browsers is based on several heuristics rather than explicit configuration, so there's always a bit of room for breakage there. For example, they don't even check if the server returns a 301 redirect, which can be problematic if the server wants to redirect to HTTPS on a different hostname or make some changes to the path.

oofbey 7 minutes ago | | |

Yeah that was a clever bit of foresight there.

firefoxd 33 minutes ago |

One thing I've done is include my redirect rules with the web application. So my links continue to work even when I change them and forget them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139686

matsemann 40 minutes ago |

At a certain bet size it would almost be self-fulfilling, heh, as one side would be very incentivized to keep at least that url working (buying the domain + hosting it if the page were to die)

vvoyer 42 minutes ago |

Amazing that Disqus comments are still live for this page. More impressive even than the website itself being live.

mike_d 33 minutes ago |

I'm not sure how it played out in 2011, but as of now it looks like the win condition hinges on the redirect.

For the heck of it I confirmed "http://www.longbets.org/601" does in fact result in a 301 redirect to "https://longbets.org/601/". I suspected they might have used a 302.

EGreg 45 minutes ago |

It's all a matter of whether someone is willing to pay for the hosting.

Which is not, in my opinion, how things should be hosted on the Web.

Freenet had a different approach, even back in the early days (two decades ago). I interviewed Ian Clarke about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

I wrote about it for years: https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-...

And recently I built Safecloud to be different: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud/