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The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)
- vvoyer 1mo agoAmazing that Disqus comments are still live for this page. More impressive even than the website itself being live.
- DonHopkins 1mo agoI'm grateful the comments are still there, since they reminded me to get back in touch with my old friend Craig Hubley!
- jamiek88 1mo agoI really liked disqus back in the day. When I was in my kinda cringey singularity phase, Kurzweil and all that. Tracking comments across similar blogs with the same people was handy.
- phil-pickering 1mo agoSome nice posts about his prediction on Jeremy Keith's blog: https://adactio.com/journal/tags/longbets https://adactio.com/journal/tags/longbets
- doubletwoyou 1mo agoWow, that could be a post of it’s own
- EGreg 1mo agoIt'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ I wrote about it for years: https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-and-other-digital-content-in-2022/2326 https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-... And recently I built Safecloud to be different: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud/ https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud/
- hypfer 1mo agoOn HN, a TLDR would be helpful, because just clicking your links would potentially mean falling for shilling of ones own side-hustle. I bet there's complexity to the topic, but I am sure you could put it into a few words instead of just leaving a hook for others to click on.
- tredre3 1mo agoI know nothing of Safecloud, but freenet failed for a very valid reasons: 1. Data retention isn't infinite. If the source disappears from the network, peers will prune it shortly. This is exponentially true in our multimedia-heavy world. 2. Despite 1, if you actually want to delete something you published, you can't. Absolutists will see this as a good thing. Normal people will see this as a problem. 3. Peer-to-peer doesn't work in a mobile-first world, and not enough people will host nodes as a hobby. If all website publishers/hosters have to host a node, then we're just back to the current model but with extra steps.
- bblb 1mo agoClosed-garden mobile-first tech feudalism lobotimized the Internet. I remember trying out the Freenets, I2Ps, and whatnot in the 90's. Too cumbersome nerdy tools to use for anything actually worthwhile. It was born in the idealized world village of the 90's Internet. Maybe real life doesn't work like that, and the lobotimized centralized tech will eventually win.
- 9dev 1mo agoIs the p2p problem really still one in our world that is mobile first, but also has ubiquitous internet connectivity pretty much everywhere? I’m almost sure I could host my website from my phone and have at least 99.5% percent of uptime.
- tsimionescu 1mo agoGive that it's impossible to even listen on port 443 on a phone, as that would require root privileges, I don't think you can host your website on your phone at all, at least not if you want it to accessible in a normal way. And that's not even going into all of the problems with running background apps on a phone, especially on iOS.
- matsemann 1mo agoAt 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)
- 9dev 1mo agoSomeone should do a long bet on the continuous existence of longbets.com
- firefoxd 1mo agoOne 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139686
- latexr 1mo agoI was expecting some kind of system that would follow the pages automatically without you having to do extra work when changing the URL (“continue to work even when I change them and forget them”) but it looks like you still add the redirects manually? That’s more than most will do, sure, but it doesn’t seem like it saves you from a broken link if you forget to add a specific redirect or miss it during a mass format change. Am I missing something?
- mike_d 1mo agoI'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 http://www.longbets.org/601" does in fact result in a 301 redirect to "https://longbets.org/601/ https://longbets.org/601/". I suspected they might have used a 302.
- mg 1mo agoIt is actually pretty easy to keep alive URLs if there is a will to do so. Just have tests in place so you can't mess them up accidentally. And convert things that are not changing anymore to static html. One of my first web projects involved a music forum and I have been keeping the URLs alive for 24 years now: https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/ https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/ I feel like I owe it to the people who participated to keep it online forever. Also as a document of history.
- stevekemp 1mo agoCool URIs don't change, as we should all remember: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
- vasco 1mo agoIt's not easy. Part of the instructions would need to contain things like "how to convince your boss to not just delete the old thing" and "what to do when the startup you worked for went bankrupt" among others. Most URLs don't disappear by mistake.
- fragmede 1mo agoWell, and pay registrar and hosting fees for 100 years, and then just hope the hosting company doesn't fold in the interim after your passing. The problem isn't "can you make sure it stays up while you're alive", the problem is, after you're gone, you're no longer there to keep the flame alive and there are no guarantees anyone else picks up the torch.
- iansmith_hn 1mo agoDoes this suggest a subscription(ish) business where you pay the hosting company for N years and then they ensure your website stays up and unchanged for N years after you die? Quality control issue? Given how many things want me to pay a subscription while I'm alive, surely somebody will start charging me when I'm dead. It is the logical conclusion of SaaS. I wanted to create an acronym for this, but death as a service didn't seem like the best choice.
- sucuri2 1mo agoAnyway to find all bets expiring this year? it will be interesting to see. Could not find a way to search for it there.
- CSMastermind 1mo agoIt's worth noting that some prediction URLs, for instance: https://longbets.org/6/ https://longbets.org/6/ are offline. The original long bet was whether or not computers could pass the turing test by 2029: https://longbets.org/1/ https://longbets.org/1/ You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities. https://longbets.org/9/ https://longbets.org/9/ is another interesting one depending on whether you think covid leaked from a lab or not.
- sublinear 1mo ago> You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities. You don't even have to be that clever. We've all tried using it for work. They fail. In the first place, the Turing test was always a loosely defined thought experiment. I suppose it's still serving that purpose, but at least half of HN takes it way too seriously. It's absolutely not proof of <engagementbait> endorsed by Alan Turing himself.
- nxpnsv 1mo agoMannerisms aside, they are easy to spot from having inhuman amounts of trivia knowledge
- msdz 1mo agoCouldn’t you instruct them to not display as much knowledge for a test situation…?
- logicallee 1mo agoHumanity is taking an interesting technological arc. Terminator (1984 film) had a scene showing that in a future 2009, humans would use dogs to try to sniff out whether a robot passing for a human is secretly a machine.[1] In our real world 2026, there are no humanoid machines that can complete basic generic tasks, like carrying a tray across the stage and holding it for 30 seconds.[2] They move slowly and badly (probably from an LLM like neural network doing very few frames per second of correction and analysis), and are nowhere near lifelike. When they don't need a body to pass for a human, such as typing online, they do a bit better. We can tell them apart from humans. As you say, they have stylistic quirks. And you mention that they're easy to spot because they come trained with inhuman amounts of trivial knowledge. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/s/0qUCVPYgjt https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/s/0qUCVPYgjt [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/s/t6ZV0yhgEe https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/s/t6ZV0yhgEe
- cortesoft 1mo agoThis is basically a bet on if you think longbets is going to be around.
- RinatNabiev 1mo ago[dead]
- RinatNabiev 1mo ago[dead]
- rowanadeyemi 1mo ago[flagged]
- predictsoft 1mo agoI like the comment on the site about blockchains replacing HTML links (from 4 years ago).
- mikewarot 1mo agoUgh, I really hate SSL. This is a simple text page, why couldn't it live where it was? C:\Users\User>curl -i http://longbets.org/601/ HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:49:33 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 178 Connection: keep-alive Server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu) Location: https://longbets.org/601/ X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)</center> </body> </html> Yes, I'm an old fart, yelling at the internet clouds. You'll get here some day too, if you're lucky. I am quite impressed that the bet included above redirection as part of the terms.
- JoshTriplett 1mo ago> entering the characters http://www.longbets.org/601 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://".
- ywain 1mo agoThe 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 1mo agoI 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 try to be a little too clever with HTTPS upgrades. In particular, the automatic upgrade feature in modern browsers is based on several heuristics rather than explicit configuration like HSTS, 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 host/port or make some changes to the path.
- tredre3 1mo ago> Or they might try to be a little too clever with HTTPS upgrades. They're not going to get any cleverer than they are now. In October we'll finally be done with heuristics or central databses of https-first websites used by the various browsers or the half a dozen of headers that you must dance around to get the upgrade to work securely and reliably. They will just default to https first. https://blog.google/security/https-by-defau/ https://blog.google/security/https-by-defau/ Yes this is about Chrome, but all others will follow.
- JoshTriplett 1mo agoPersonally, if I were interpreting the bet, and that browser behavior had been changed before the day of the bet, I'd interpret that as failure, because the browser didn't show an HTML page, it showed a warning dialogue. And in any case, at some point after browsers start doing that, I will be unsurprised if some further conditions prevail that provide reason for web servers to stop listening on http at all.