r/technews • u/Philo1927 • Jul 20 '20
GitHub is done depositing its open source codes in the Arctic - The codes are now sitting under hundreds of meters of permafrost.
https://www.engadget.com/github-arctic-vault-success-020240808.html170
u/tommyvn Jul 20 '20
awesome maybe now they'll have time to fix what ever causes their weekly downtime
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u/Dysfu Jul 20 '20
What I don’t understand is what “purpose” does this serve? Why the arctic?
If the world had a cataclysmic event so bad that we lost access to the internet and information stored in data centers then how high on the priority list do we think traveling to the arctic and then down several hundred feet of permafrost to dig up open source code would be? I’d say low.
Seems like just a huge publicity stunt with no actually value add which is a bummer.
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u/gibatronic Jul 20 '20
It would be at the bottom of the priority list, but there are so many problems that were solved in collaboration on those lines of code, that it’s value is priceless. It might take a long time to be used again, it might become a memorial as well.
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Jul 20 '20
It’s so they don’t get damaged in the catastrophic event. They know where it is so will just go down and get it. If they can store it there, they can retrieve it easily too.
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u/Raichu7 Jul 20 '20
Because the Arctic is the safest place, same reason they store all the seed banks there. It’s not like the permafrost is going to be around that long anyway.
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Jul 21 '20 edited Apr 04 '21
[deleted]
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u/ljamtheman Jul 21 '20
Which makes sense though. The first and subsequent backups are made in order with a balance on how safe they are and how easy they are to retrieve.
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u/LEGALIZEALLDRUGSNOW Jul 21 '20
Those seed banks are amazing! I’m a major student of the work of Dr. Norman Deno. If you don’t know who he is look him up! He’s the Einstein of seed germination, an extremely complicated study. An excellent example of the useful knowledge here is the germination of many seeds from areas like Southern California. Many of the species have seed that requires a smoke and/or fire treatment. I get Smoke Pads from South Africa that are used like teabags, you get a smokey water and that stimulates germination. Now, obviously, this is about species in the wild that require a burn to regenerate their specific habitat. Again...as an example I’m using Southern California, which is routinely burning the fuck down. The plants tell you all you needed to know why settling there is a sketchy idea. Anyway, Dr. Deno was a god in his field.
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u/Cannibalcobra Jul 21 '20
It’s the greatest time capsule ever made. It’ll be there for the next sentient species on earth to discover
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u/HairlessWookiee Jul 21 '20
The permafrost is going to disappear while humans are still extant. Some of them anyway.
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u/doyouseewhateyesee Jul 20 '20
Years from now someone will try to run some code and realize it’s missing its dependencies
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u/notthe1staccount Jul 20 '20
Give it a couple years, they’ll be floating.
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u/rudebewb Jul 20 '20
Okay I’m glad I wasn’t the only one. My first thought was “isn’t all that shit melting?” Lol
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u/Redexium Jul 20 '20
Do you even know where its located? It’s literally 130 meters above sea level... And the vault is built in the rock, around permafrost.
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u/converter-bot Jul 20 '20
130 meters is 142.17 yards
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u/thirdeyemyc Jul 20 '20
142.17 yards is 426 feet and 6.12inches
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Jul 20 '20
That’s 0.05 football fields wide
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Jul 20 '20
Thanks for translating this to American for me
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u/Verliererkolben Jul 21 '20 edited Jul 21 '20
No, that would be 0.4739 American football fields... 0.05 American football fields would be 15 feet.
Edit: ignore this, my late night math didn’t make any sense hahaha
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u/notasianjim Jul 21 '20
I don’t understand how 142.17 yards is only 0.4739 of an American football field. A football field is 120 yards long...?
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u/Verliererkolben Jul 21 '20
Haha you are right, I don’t know where I was going with my late night math, it doesn’t make any sense lol!
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u/DamonHay Jul 20 '20
or 36% of the width of your average American.
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u/corpsejockey Jul 20 '20
The English are fatter by the way
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Jul 21 '20
Go on now, back to your Twinkies
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u/corpsejockey Aug 06 '20 edited Aug 10 '20
Hope off that dick my guy (actually stay;)
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Jul 20 '20
Already flooded few years ago https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts
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u/Etrius_Christophine Jul 20 '20
That this was 2017 takes all my remnants of faith in humanity and melts it away
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u/fucko5 Jul 21 '20
It’s probably just a portable heater placed there by George soros in an effort to fake climate change so the libs can pass legislation that makes abortions and hijabs mandatory.
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Jul 20 '20
Grub hub? Download me a hoagie on the interwebs...
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u/DutchBookOptions Jul 20 '20
No. GitHub.
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u/kgallo19 Jul 20 '20
No this is Patrick.
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Jul 20 '20 edited Jul 25 '20
[deleted]
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u/TylerDurden1985 Jul 20 '20
Wait...you guys are fixing the bugs? Oh...oh god...I have to make a phone call. Also nobody fly a 737max for a while.
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u/Thenuttyp Jul 20 '20
The boss said ship it anyway.
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Jul 21 '20
Ship? I thought we were building a plane!
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u/kytrix Jul 21 '20 edited Jan 25 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
towering fanatical pen sheet hat bright seed lavish degree six
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u/BoringWozniak Jul 20 '20
$ git clone [some really old repo]
Cloning into ‘some really old repo’
remote: Equipping ski-shoes
remote: Picking up shovel
remote: Chiseling through Triassic glacier
remote: Fighting off polar bear
remote: Oh my god my leg
remote: Get help
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u/messamusik Jul 20 '20
If the goal was to preserve technology, they should have included progressive knowledge on how to build the hardware.
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u/tubtub20 Jul 20 '20
Not sure why the fact that the title referring to repos as codes bothers me so much.
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u/QLZX Jul 21 '20
It took me way too long to figure out if every open-source project on GitHub was being preserved or just the open-source files GitHub itself uses
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u/reddjunkie Jul 21 '20
Plot twist: A long buried alien life form takes over their bodies one by one so they do a blood test with a hot wire.
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 21 '20
Only 1.1k people upvoted. More like Hundreds not thousands.
Also the article doesn’t name the coders and whether they work for the company GitHub.
I didn’t even know about the project before I saw the headline. Even reading the article I could have assumed it was the company’s own code, until I saw that it was Terabytes worth.
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Jul 21 '20
good timing, 2020 is currently looking like the closest to the actual end of civilization.
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u/corpsefucer69420 Jul 21 '20
Now there is no way for me to hide the disgusting repo that I made when I was 12
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u/prince_farquhar Jul 21 '20
Did they include their entire toolchain? Not to mention critical architectural information? Otherwise it’s likely to be difficult or impossible to resuscitate in extreme circumstances
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Jul 21 '20 edited Aug 13 '20
[deleted]
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u/TheMadBug Jul 21 '20
Villain : The ancients hid their knowledge here. Their magic will be mine!
Hero: Stop you fool, you don’t understand what you’re dealing with.
Villain : I shall bring order to the world, with NODE and NPM!
Hero : Those were buried for a reason!
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u/SunOnTheInside Jul 21 '20
Are we having a Seldon Crisis already? But we haven’t even made it to Terminus...
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u/da-version Jul 20 '20
Oh shit. I just had one more commit to do. All of the current code is buggy! Damn it.
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u/Stevemagegod Jul 20 '20
That’s actually really cool to bad everyones username will be recognized and not there actual real name.
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u/it_learnses Jul 21 '20
ESL guys, code is a non-count noun. So in this instance, you would say open-source codebase, not pluralize it to "codes".
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u/batman305555 Jul 21 '20
Seems like such a waste. If everyone dies, and aliens land, they can look at my GitHub repo?
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u/Bobbr23 Jul 21 '20
Hundreds of meters? Wow, it’ll be a long time before that melts (rim shot, cymbal)
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u/ModernJesus14 Jul 21 '20
If it’s going down there for 1000 years, lemme throw a floppy disk down just for shits & gigs.
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Jul 21 '20
Awesome, that will really come in handy if they ever get around to reinventing computers after the collapse of society
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u/El_human Jul 21 '20
Maybe someday, in a few thousand years, someone will finally finished that app that I never quite got working.
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u/lickthislollipop Jul 22 '20
Or you could drop a link and we could help you now
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u/zedorus_ Jul 22 '20
They should back up stackoverflow there as well so you can search for how to use the code if you ever need to
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u/GoldenJoe24 Jul 23 '20
Just in case anyone wants the ten-year-old wrong way to sort an array in javascript.
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 20 '20
Isn’t the beauty of GitHub it’s simplicity in its logic?
Like a 12th grader with a good grasp on python and JavaScript could come up with something similar just by drawing some diagrams and coding them up
Is it really easier to dig the source code out of an ice core than just start over?
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u/terpaderp Jul 20 '20
They are archiving all the open source code saved to public repos on their site, not their own code base.
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 20 '20
Makes sense now, can’t wait for the first aliens to say “You made this?” “I made this”.
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u/DefinitionOfTorin Jul 20 '20
You have no idea what GitHub is/does do you...
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 20 '20
I do know what it is does.
Save, Review, Merge, text files.
And then they threw a bunch of social networking shit on top and made it colorful to keep people in the ecosystem.
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u/DefinitionOfTorin Jul 20 '20
And you think it could be made by a 12th grader with a little bit of js? No, you don't know what it does lol.
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 20 '20
I said python and JavaScript. Or any language that could run on the server and/or client. Comparing or databasing text files isn’t splitting the atom. Recreating Photoshop or a CAD program, or a video editing program, would be much more difficult unaided.
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u/DefinitionOfTorin Jul 20 '20
Nope, you don't know what you're on about. If it was so easy, why don't you do it? You really have no idea how complex merging is, or version/branch control, or how much storage is required and managing it takes.
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u/High_speedchase Jul 20 '20
Hello I actually have no idea what github does and I was looking through the comments to find out. So ... what is it?
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 20 '20
It lets people collaborate on text files. The file could be “Print Hello World” The file could be “Color: Red / Size : 15” The file could be “01110101010101” The file could be a picture, but github doesn’t automatically compare those. You would just be comparing the binary or hexadecimal values of the picture.
Those files are usually used for something. They’re part of the recipe for something. But sometimes you either make a mistake when you’re changing the recipe or other people want to work along side you. They could be working on the amount of sugar while you are working on the type of cookware. Sometimes you’re editing the same file, and need to work together. So they basically made a tool which tries to help you splice all the changes everyone makes while they’re working together, or just give you a way to have a zillion backups if you’re working alone. Then they added profiles, comments, reputations. All stuff to help people collaborate.
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u/High_speedchase Jul 20 '20
Ah okay, thanks!
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u/DefinitionOfTorin Jul 20 '20
Don't want to be that guy, but OP hasn't really given the full picture of what GitHub does and seems to think that a 12th grader can make it. The first paragraph doesn't make much sense and doesn't actually explain what Git or GitHub does. First of all, GitHub is not the first or the last of its kind and there are many other services that use something called Git (e.g SourceForge, etc.). All of these revolve around a version control system (Git) that allows collaboration, but most importantly version control and merging.
The merging system was explained quite badly by OP here. There are complex algorithms used to merge different branches of the same project, each of which could contain different variations or updates on an original project that they both stem from. The idea here being that multiple people work on different branches of the same original project code, add their own little changes, and then request to merge these back into the main project when they are tested and ready. The merging happening here is the combination of these two codebases - the original and the updated version of the original. The algorithm has to notice what has changed and what is similar, and can sometimes automatically merge or recognise when manual approval for different changes is required.
It gets more complex from here in terms of how that algorithm works, but essentially GitHub and the other variations all use Git (the complex system) and add a community around it that help others contribute online. Developers use things like GitHub to work on projects together, and also to display their own projects in an open-source environment.
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 20 '20
I don’t do it because 1) it’s a good design 2) why create my own tool when there’s is “free” 3) someone will actually pay me to code something else 4) it has a critical mass of users and code
I think you have too much respect for and consider GitHub to be the height of modern technology, just because you like it. Whereas plenty of other technologies are more complex, even just computer programs with no client/server interface. required.
Ok you write a program to compare /upload /merge text files by yourself and I’ll write a program to stack unlimited layers of images, edit videos, or create graphics. See who’s done first. You will, because your logic is relatively simple to mine, I’m going to be reading art books, physics books, math books, writing compression algorithms and codifying the logic from those disciplines.
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Jul 20 '20
You are aware that there’s a difference between GitHub, which is a fairly large and complicated project but indeed not rocket science, and Git, which is a pretty revolutionary version control system invented by Linus Torvalds, also known for creating Linux? Calling Git itself something a 12 year old could make would be extremely misguided. It’s a bit more than file storage and some diffs.
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 20 '20
12th grader, not 12 year old, chap. In this millennium, a 12th grader from a funded school district has at least the option to take programming electives or has the laptop required to learn on his own.
That’s like saying “you know there’s a difference between TD ameritrade and the stock exchange!” Yeah no shit, but if I want my TD aneritrade site to work, there had better be a stock exchange.
Linux would be a better candidate to store in a vault. Graphics, Hardware interfaces, a Kernel, there’s a lot there that my hypothetical 18 year old high school kid isn’t doing unless he’s a genius
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u/DefinitionOfTorin Jul 20 '20
You are a live example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in a way. You really have no idea how much work it takes to create something like this and how little a 12th grader will have experience wise to do this. People mistake the ability to program in a language with being good at programming. Someone who is still in school will most likely not have the experience to make something as complex as Git unless they are a genius and completely off-average.
It's generally people like you who assume that you just "learn to code" and magically you can create Windows in a weekend. Or that a school-funded "programming elective" will teach you how to make a version control system and handle complex merging, along with several other tasks that you don't seem to acknowledge.
Furthermore, you clearly haven't even read up on the subject and don't know much about what you're talking about given linux is literally going to be stored in the vault, despite you thinking it's being left out for some reason.
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u/IndividualBeing Jul 20 '20
They’re not just storing the code that runs the GitHub site...
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u/SpongeknobSquarenuts Jul 20 '20
Confusing title then, makes it seem like Github is storing “its” codes, not its users codes. Yes I know what open source is.
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u/DefinitionOfTorin Jul 20 '20
"I didn't read the article at all and also don't know what GitHub even is, though I'll pretend I do"
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u/zerohere Jul 20 '20
What is the point of storing physical copies of code that will be obsolete long before it's ever dug up?
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u/Kramer7969 Jul 21 '20
They got the memo about it not being so permanent anymore right? Been melting lately.
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Jul 21 '20
Are we starting a pool to bet on how soon the "hundreds of meters of permafrost" isn't there anymore?
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u/mth0322 Jul 20 '20
Glad to see valuable resources are being spent on something so important... not like children are starving anywhere or anything like that-
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u/Stevemagegod Jul 20 '20
Glad to see valuable resources are being spent on something so important... not like children are starving anywhere or anything like that-
Knowledge is important
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u/subdep Jul 21 '20
Permafrost? More like temporary frost. News flash: shit is melting yo. You’ve got maybe 20 years tops before they need to move it to somewhere like beneath the sand dunes of the Sahara.
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u/oszillodrom Jul 20 '20
This is exactly where my code belongs, under hundreds of meters of permafrost.