6 comments

  • firefoxd 8 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 15 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)
  • JoshTriplett 1 hour ago
    > 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 27 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 12 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 50 minutes 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.

  • vvoyer 17 minutes ago
    Amazing that Disqus comments are still live for this page. More impressive even than the website itself being live.
  • mike_d 9 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 21 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/