> On the other hand, an IPFS version will continue to exist at the same address for as long as anyone is seeding it.
I wonder how that would work, a naive direct translation seems impractical. An address identifies an exact piece of content, so a hacker news article gets a new adress every time a comment is added?
If the HTML differs, it would get a different address; just like the Wayback Machine, but the addresses are based on content rather than timestamp, and it's distributed. Anyone can do that right now, without any changes by (or permission from) the site operator (YCombinator in this case).
You couldn't host the "live" version of Hacker News (with user accounts, new comments, etc.) unless YCombinator open up their databases, and re-architect the system to work in a distributed-friendly way.
The latter is an interesting idea, but isn't required to fix HTTP issues like link rot.
pulling things out the ether my guess is that during normal operation news.ycombinator.com constantly creates and propagates new content ids as new comments are added (the front page simply fetches the newest ids, and there is a system for querying for updated ids which simulate how browser refresh works now), if news.ycombinator.com dies it becomes impossible to create new ids or post comments, but all already propagated pieces of contents are still accessible (possibly refresh still works on outdated content).
I wonder how that would work, a naive direct translation seems impractical. An address identifies an exact piece of content, so a hacker news article gets a new adress every time a comment is added?