Be A Man, Run As The Root Account - <AUTHOR> http://www.garyshood.com/root/

<comment><USER2> This is easily the lamest thing I've seen in the top ten of Hacker News.

EDIT: My mistake, it turns out Sarah Palin's emails are also in the top ten right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a single-user machine, screwing up as root and screwing up in your unprivileged account is pretty much the same, since the most valuable you're going to loose isn't that 20 minute Ubuntu install, but your files. And the user you use, privileged or not, will have the power to wipe your files out.

Only other benefit (apart from all those programs that will complain or actually refuse to run as root) is if you run something questionable, it won't be able to install a root-kit, open a backdoor and hide the process.

<comment><USER4> This isn't exactly true. A vigilant user will run normal backups, and those backups will not be in a location that is writeable by the unprivileged user. In this way, it will not be possible for you (or an attacker) to completely wipe out your important files, only those changes from the last hour or so.

Based on an rsync-backup article that I bookmarked a long time ago (<http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/>), I run backups of my important files (/home/, /etc/, /usr/local/, some directories in /var/, and so on) every hour to a /backups/ directory that is only writeable by root. Every day, I copy a backup over to another machine using the same rsync process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And, of course, taking advice from a Web page with a giant, obnoxious interstitial ad is always a good idea..

</comment><comment><USER4> The article is probably a link-baiting joke, but assuming for a moment that it is not, you can get the same benefits without the requirement to run as root.

I don't use sudo to run just any command as root. Making the ability to run a root command as easy as tacking a "sudo" on the front is barely safer that running as root. Especially considering that if someone breaks your user password and you use sudo for everything, they may as well have broken root. Instead, I simply use "su", enter the root password, and have a root terminal. When I'm done, I log back out of the root shell. I also disallow logging in as root over SSH (for whatever reason, this is not the default behavior). Thus, to break root, someone has to break both my user (knowing both the username and the password) and my root password.

This gets old, so I do have sudo installed. You can use sudo to allow a non- root user to run certain commands with root privileges (just be sure NOT to include the

      %wheel ALL = (ALL) ALL

line, which is how most people use sudo). For common commands that don't pose much of a security risk, you can add a line as follows to /etc/sudoers:

      username ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/emerge, /usr/sbin/hibernate, [etc.]

Then, in my ~username/.bashrc, I have:

      alias emerge="sudo /usr/bin/emerge"
      alias hibernate="sudo /usr/sbin/hibernate"
      [etc.]

(Note: emerge is basically Gentoo's apt-get, but vastly different, of course.) Thus, from the point of view of a standard user, I can run my most common root commands (with root privileges) as my unprivileged user, transparently. I can be careful to only allow commands that will not compromise my entire machine in the event that someone gains access with my username or I find myself drunk at the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is great humor - I ran as root while I was learning how to use slackware waaay back. Now I use Fedora because I'm lazy but don't worry behind the PECL and LIVNA libraries I still do a make && make install from time to time.

I think for a noob, running as root is probably wise, understanding chmod, and chown right off the bat is a tough one - and often people get so frustrated from the inability to change settings they give up.

Either way - Batman runs as root... thats good enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know about other people, but when I click on this link I see the article for about three seconds, then the page fades to an advertisement that has no apparent way to get back to the article.

I assume they didn't test it against Firefox 3 with popular extensions, because it's otherwise the worst thought-out advertising service I've seen online.

<comment><USER8> adblock isn't perfect.

<comment><USER9> worked for me, ff3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry, this is silly. You're (almost) always better off running as a regular user and using sudo. In the worst case you can sudo su. Suggesting that linux newbies run as root is poor advice.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be a joke article.

<comment><USER11> I'm worried some kid will read this and will be "enlightened".

<comment><USER7> Probably the same kid who uses ed because they heard that "ed is the standard text editor". :)

<comment><USER12> ?

<comment><USER7> <http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html>

<comment><USER13> Hahaha!

      Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
      message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
      and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> in default install, OpenBSD never asks you to create user

The first-ever boot you can only log in as root

This 'reckless (read: diff from linux distro)' installation practice made OpenBSD got 1 point deducted from a linux review article

Despite the root thingy, OpenBSD is "Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!"

<comment><USER12> Well, yeah, but in the afterboot(8) (<http://www.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/man.cgi?query=afterboot>) man page, the first two points after how to use man and find installation errata are how to deny remote root ssh logins and a note essentially saying, "Make a non-root user and add it to the group 'wheel' for sudo, see below.".

Of course, having daemons run as non-root and chrooted/jailed (hello, apache) is just as important.

(And yeah, I know this article is supposed to be a joke.)

<comment><USER14> love afterboot(8)

i also changed default ssh port to non-22 to prevent most brute force attacks

i can't stand GNU/linux folks bashing OpenBSD over trivialities like the root only first-ever boot

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is probably the best advice for linux/unix nubs; you will never learn what a computer is really for until you meet the machine face-to-face via a terminal. I don't know how many times it took me to corrupt my package-manager or butcher some config file until I realized the advantages of running a VM, but, yes, the article is spot-on because all learning, or understanding for that matter, is iterating failure.

<comment><USER16> I have to disagree. This article gives very dangerous advice for the noobs.

It encourages shaving.

How are they supposed to attain competence if they can't even grow out a guru beard?

<comment><USER15> I like your shaving metaphor, but how is a new user coming from a Windows XP ever going to respect what an admin account can really do w/o ever test- driving what root can really do, given that I'm sure most Windows users are running as an Administrator. I guess my point is, given all the times I've screwed myself w/ root, is that root is only dangerous in context of somebody else, while the only cost of seeing what something does in Linux is your time and your file-system. Otherwise, how can one ever appreciate how delicate and fragile a system really is w/o a loving system administrator to cradle her in his key-strokes. ;)

<comment><USER12> Well, they could read the documentation.

Or, they could get hit by script kiddies that keep looking for old vulnerabilities in some daemon they ran as root.

      $ cat /var/log/authlog
      ...
      Sep 13 16:57:31 lucien sshd[16283]: Invalid user webmaster from 18.104.22.168
      Sep 13 16:57:31 lucien sshd[290]: input_userauth_request: invalid user webmaster
      Sep 13 16:57:31 lucien sshd[16283]: Failed password for invalid user webmaster from 22.214.171.124 port 56992 ssh2
      Sep 13 16:57:31 lucien sshd[290]: Received disconnect from 18.104.22.168: 11: Bye Bye
      Sep 13 16:57:34 lucien sshd[12747]: User root from 18.104.22.168 not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers
      Sep 13 16:57:34 lucien sshd[2144]: input_userauth_request: invalid user root
      Sep 13 16:57:34 lucien sshd[12747]: Failed password for invalid user root from 184.108.40.206 port 57162 ssh2
      Sep 13 16:57:34 lucien sshd[2144]: Received disconnect from 184.108.40.206: 11: Bye Bye
      Sep 13 16:57:36 lucien sshd[20586]: Invalid user ftp from 18.104.22.168
      Sep 13 16:57:36 lucien sshd[3604]: input_userauth_request: invalid user ftp
      Sep 13 16:57:36 lucien sshd[20586]: Failed password for invalid user ftp from 188.8.131.52 port 57344 ssh2
      Sep 13 16:57:37 lucien sshd[3604]: Received disconnect from 220.127.116.11: 11: Bye Bye
      Sep 13 16:57:39 lucien sshd[14276]: Invalid user sales from 126.96.36.199
      Sep 13 16:57:39 lucien sshd[25572]: input_userauth_request: invalid user sales
      Sep 13 16:57:39 lucien sshd[14276]: Failed password for invalid user sales from 18.104.22.168 port 57514 ssh2
      Sep 13 16:57:40 lucien sshd[25572]: Received disconnect from 18.104.22.168: 11: Bye Bye
      ...

(My firewall blocks these losers after two minutes and I _still_ have endless logs like this.)

Learning the first way sucks less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is irresponsible. For the same reason why one drives the speed limit, and only exceeds them when one has to, like, for example, if Rosemary is about to birth the anti-Christ in the back seat of your new Jag,so to does one not run as super user unless one has to. Both practices are dangerous.</comment>


Ask HN: Why aren't we asking NSA for contact traces? - <AUTHOR> Don't they already know who I've talked to? <comment><USER2> NSA data can only be used for military and anti-terrorism purposes; any other use would be an unacceptable invasion of privacy.</comment>


Show HN: Python Fire v0.2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/python-fire/releases/tag/v0.2.0 <comment> git-pull Used fire before and find it works quite well. Especially after dealing with click and having difficulties with it.

The neat thing about fire it maps a python file directly to a CLI. If you're in a pinch and want to be able to test a script easily (without having to wire in tests), this tool can help.

The docstring parsing will be very helpful. Especially since fire works by reading through a file.

Also nice work on the NamedTuple support ([https://github.com/google/python- fire/pull/161](https://github.com/google/python-fire/pull/161))

I never knew fire had support for completion. Nice!</comment>


Downloading SSH Keys via DNS - <AUTHOR> https://0day.work/downloading-ssh-keys-via-dns/ <comment><USER2> this is a horrible idea. there is no case where you're able to generate an ssh key and can't take the public key with you. you have a clipboard, and an email address.</comment>


Second Careers of the Healthy Elderly - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/retiring-retirement <comment><USER2> I think if we really want to get more seniors into the workforce, we have to get rid of the notion that wages should be monotonically increasing with age.

In Austria, for most professions, there are contracts that explicitely require wages to increase with experience (number of years worked). This means that older employees are automatically more expensive. It's especially bad for many "public" positions; for example, a teacher's salary automatically increases every two years or so. A 65 year old teacher earns twice the salary of a 25 year old teacher. Sure, the older teacher has more experience, but it's hard to argue that experience is worth more than TWO young teachers.

Also, often retirement is just a convenient way to get rid of people. If everyone's goal is to keep climbing the ladder, we have to get rid of the people at the top at some point. There's only so much space up there. And since the people at the top probably don't want to switch to roles with less responsibility, the only place left is retirement.

And last but not least, willingness to change is also necessary. Now, I don't think that a 60 year old is per se more reluctant to change than a 30 year old. I think that senior people can adapt to changes just as well as young people; given the right motivation. However, a 30 year old has a lot more extrinsic motivation to change than a 60 year old: when you are young, you have to adapt, or you will end up poor. When you are old, you have the option to refuse to adapt and just retire...

<comment><USER3> I've seen it here on HN many times as an excuse for ageism - we can't hire older people, they want more money and more time off.

<comment><USER4> Kind of surprised it is more money AND more time off. I am an Australian in my mid 30s and most of my social circle is mid 30s through mid 40s. There is a bit of a trend to specifically request less money but more time off ie for a new job "that is a generous offer. I propose we reduce the salary by X dollars and increase my annual leave by Y days/weeks" or for an existing job "keep your raise, give me an extra week of annual leave instead."

Perhaps it is something related to this specific stage of life but lots of people have young children. Also, the appeal of their career has really worn thin after 10-15 years of full-time work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am 57 and have no interest whatsoever in retiring. Fortunately, since I work on open source projects, nobody can fire me :-)

After about 10 days of "vacation", I'm always itching to get back to work.

<comment><USER6> Walter not that anyone would do this to you, but you can get kicked off an open source project which is equivalent to being fired. I guess you could always fork if you wanted to keep working on the code.

<comment><USER5> I'm not doing anything that any motivated programmer couldn't do.

<comment><USER7> It is awesome that you are still going on.

Do you make a living on open source or it is something to keep you engaged.

<comment><USER5> Many companies are happy to pay for support and training, which is how to make money with open source. Sort of like a musician giving away the CDs and making money from the live concerts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Odd that this article doesn't mention a key reason that US workers are staying working into their "retirement" years: access to health insurance.

(also, B&Q is a British company, not based in New York like the article states).

<comment><USER9> I thought once one reaches a retirement age in the US, the only option is medicare?

<comment><USER10> "Medicare doesn't cover most dental care, dental procedures, or supplies, like cleanings, fillings, tooth extractions, dentures, dental plates, or other dental devices. Medicare Part A (Hospital Insurance) will pay for certain dental services that you get when you're in a hospital"

Source: [https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/dental- services.html](https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/dental-services.html)

Also, they won't cover glasses.

[https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/eyeglasses-contact- lenses....](https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/eyeglasses-contact-lenses.html)

Brutal. A good reason to keep working though. Those two items are pretty glaring omissions from Medicare, and relevant for most people, but especially so for otherwise healthy seniors. Having glasses that work and functional teeth is the difference between an active, healthy life and being a shut-in.

<comment><USER11> That's often the case in other countries as well, I believe. Why not pay out of pocket? Those don't seem like the kind of things you'd need insurance for. Even the most expensive operations won't exceed $10.000 which should be more than affordable for any retiree.

<comment><USER12> > _Even the most expensive operations won 't exceed $10.000 which should be > more than affordable for any retiree._

Should, but not necessarily is. $10k is a large amount of money!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple has patented technology to automatically scan songs and remove swear words - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-patented-technology-to-scan-songs-and-remove-swear-words-2016-3?r=UK&IR=T <comment><AUTHOR> Methinks the walls of the garden have gotten just a bit taller with this development.</comment>


When freedom isn't free (software) - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10293886-16.html

<comment><USER2> I find Matt Assay's columns pretty weird. This one, like many others, comes close to being stream of consciousness yet I always feel there is some coherent, yet alien to me, worldview in which it all makes sense.

I mean it's all very well to say that the licence isn't everything and achieving your goals of "freedom" requires a more holistic approach, but to follow that up with using Microsoft as an example of someone who can attract developers? It's a mind-bogglingly obtuse _non sequitur_.

His closing line:

"So long as it's the customer that takes center stage in the debate, I'm convinced we won't go wrong."

The key word here is "customer".

<comment><USER3> I think I get it. He's not a dev & he's working with "cloud" apps so he very understandably doesn't care about source code availability. To him freedom/openness/etc is windows app development vs iphone app development. And something about more features means you're more free to do what you want.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I post this not to fan the recent flames but rather to point out that there is often a lot of press about FSF extremism and ideology that is somewhat overstated. I was recently referred to "why the GPL rocketed Linux to success" ( <http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2006/09/01/#gpl-bsd> ), that makes a plausible argument that Linux would not be successful were it not for the GPL.

How many programmers are attracted to more "liberal" licenses because they hope to profit from their efforts in some commercial setting and find those licenses more conducive to that? In fact I believe the GPL bests protects the interests of programmers/hackers. For example anyone who invests time and energy learning and hacking Linux can be assured of finding employment doing that precisely because it it GPL code. It creates a level playing field for all.

Freedom is never free, it always has costs. Linus Torvalds can smugly opine and comment about not being so anti-MS and so forth, yet he chose GPL for Linux and did so again for Git. He made the right choice.

<comment><USER4> I don't think the article was saying that the GPL is the wrong choice, but that focusing completely on the license misses the point. The article was more about the dogmatic stand that certain people within the free software community have taken. Is identi.ca "better" because it uses the GPL but has a closed platform while Twitter uses closed source but has an open platform?

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point. I'm not familiar with identi.ca, presumably a Twitter competitor, but I'd say the answer is no if by open platform one means the ability for programmers to interact with the service and build value on it. I don't think the GPL had this usage in mind when it was written.

<comment><USER5> "I don't think the GPL had this usage in mind when it was written."

I think that's the author's point: freedom and openness are not the same thing. The GPL makes software _free_ in the sense that any programmer can see, use and modify the code and must also make their own use free as well.

Twitter, by contrast, makes its application _open_ in that it offers a simple, powerful and permissive API to third party developers. They understand the positive network externality in allowing others to enhance and build on their own product, which makes it more valuable to everyone.

That openness is also a kind of freedom, but it's not the freedom that Stallman has in mind. Of course, as Torvalds has shown with his shepherding of the Linux project, freedom and openness can certainly coexist and reinforce each other.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Putin's Media Struggle to Deal with HBO's Chernobyl - <AUTHOR> https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/06/04/putins-media-struggle-to-deal-with-hbos-chernobyl-a65866 <comment><USER4> One thing I found really eye-opening about this show is that it really showed both the bad side as well as the good side of Soviet culture.

It is unquestionably the case that Soviet authoritarianism and disregard for safety is to blame for what happened. But one thing that is often forgotten, but I think the show highlights, is how well the aftermath was handled.

Yes, Pripyat should have been evacuated earlier, and yes, they should probably have notified the rest of the world sooner. But think of this: the Soviet Union mobilized 500,000-750,000 people to clean up the enormous exclusion zone. They got thousands of men to don full lead suits (that could only be used once) to run out on a roof for 90 seconds each to throw off radioactive rocks one at a time. They built the enormous containment structure in just a few months, arguably the greatest feat of civil engineering in history. One of my favorite scenes in the show is when Legasov says he immediately needs 5,000 tons of sand and boron to cover the core, and Scherbina basically just walks off and gets it for him (along with a full fleet of helicopters to drop it).

All of this was necessary, and they did all of it, no matter the cost. This was unquestionably a real strength of the Soviet Union. Can you imagine that the US would have been able to respond like this? Either today or in the 80s? I can't. With the exception of wartime mobilization, I can think of almost nothing else that even compares. There are few (if any) societies in history that could have done what the Soviet Union did in response to Chernobyl. In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else.

<comment><USER5> USSR in 1986 was not autharitarian as depicted in the series.

There were no inspections at gunpoint - people went to certain death to save lives of others. Knowingly. This is Cold War's 80s, even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation, including symptoms of radiation sickness etc.

Evacuation started as soon as disaster recovery team got evidence of dangerous levels of radiation, there were sanitary norms and pre-planned measures for any kind of problem at the station.

<comment><USER6> So by comment history, there is a pretty good chance this is someone working for the famed "Russian troll farms". Should we allow this kind of poster on HN?

<comment><USER7> I just read the comment history. Clearly a patriotic Russian, but I wouldn't feel comfortable making this accusation.

I find it more fascinating to presume the comments are made by someone in good faith, who simply may be misinformed on some topics due to persistent exposure to their State's propaganda.

I particularly liked the comment about not needing permission to protest. No, no, in Russia you do not need permission, but if your chosen time and place is not _available_ the State will kindly select a suitable alternative for you!

Reminds me of some college campuses.

<comment><USER6> Hang around reddit enough and you see the pattern.

Comments only ever on one side of the issue. Lots of magical upvotes for any post. Any dissenting posts gets mass reported to the mods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I came across this yesterday but wasn't sure what to make of it.

I have no prior for themoscowtimes.com. When I googled for corroboration (as a non-Russian speaker) all I found was blogspam citing this article.

It gives me pause because, as reported, it seems almost comically reactionary. "We're going to make our own Chernobyl show but with CIA saboteurs because some historians don't say it didn't happen." From the article:

> Still, an attempt will be made to put an entirely different spin on those > events. Russia's NTV channel has already announced that it is shooting its > own "Chernobyl" series based on the premise that the CIA sent an agent to > the Chernobyl zone to carry out acts of sabotage.

Can someone with access to Russian media corroborate this or provide insight?

<comment><USER9> While it doesn't look like anyone else interviewed Alexei Muradov, number of reputable western publications (not blogspam) seem to have taken this source seriously and are citing it. Washington Post did verify by way of Hollywood Reporter that it seems to be happening.

"The series was commissioned by NTV, a top free-to-air network, owned by Gazprom Media, the media arm of the natural gas giant Gazprom. It was partially financed by the culture ministry, which provided 30 million rubles ($460,000). The total budget has not been made public."

That number is not something the Moscow Times reported on, so it looks like corroboration: [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/russia-making-own- tv-...](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/russia-making-own-tv-series- chernobyl-nuclear-disaster-1216383)

Additionally, this claim makes it seem they hurried to catch up - "Principal photography was done last year in neighboring Belarus and the series is currently in postproduction."

<comment><USER10> _number of reputable western publications (not blogspam) seem to have taken this source seriously and are citing it_

These days, I don't think that's enough of a guarantee.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. We can't tell if this is genuine because while it is sadly plausible it might also be a troll, and we don't have a media competent enough to detect the difference or credible enough to believe either way.

Thankfully it doesn't matter; if there really is going to be a Russian version of Chernobyl it will be awful and everyone except the inveterate whataboutists will point and laugh. That is a metaphysical certitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How ironic. The main theme of the Chernobyl mini-series is that lies do not only not make things better, they exacerbate them. Now, in order to fix PR "fallout" there's another "lie" emanating from almost the same source - Kremlin and surroundings. As the lessons of history teach us - this does not work. This "blockbuster" will obviously not be seen at a level comparable to HBO's mini-series. But even those who might see, will most likely see it for what it is - attempt to cover-up and put up a good facade in front of a disaster. It is almost unbelievable that Craig Mazin captured this essence - "the nation that is scared of humiliation will humiliate itself".

I know that it's most likely a PR stunt, and there's probably not going to be any movie made, and the money grant from the government will be gone and not accounted for, and yet. And yet. How ironic that in attempt to whitewash the national disaster portrayed in this mini-series, Russia is doing what has been presented in this show as a main cause of the Chernobyl incident.

</comment><comment><USER13> I loved the show but in case you missed it this was a very eye opening take that seems genuine.

[https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos- cher...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl- got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong)

<comment><USER14> Just read this a few hours ago, is there any other published information for corroboration?

From what I gather from the New Yorker piece, this mini-series is ok as long as one takes into consideration that it's a historical drama, not documentary?

<comment><USER15> There is a long series of photos and text after the final episode that explains most of the fictionalized parts of the series and the real life outcome for most of the major players. IMHO the New Yorker piece has the perspective of a Soviet history expert who is extremely unhappy that their version of what is important to be shown was not shown or not accurately portrayed, watch Chernobyl for entertainment and a little enlightenment, but not for 100% fidelity to history. I can give a small example of what people complained about (spoiler like New Yorker piece). A helicopter crash in the TV series for which one can also view the historical footage - the historical footage is inexplicable - there's no obvious reason for it to happen but the TV show changes it so it has visible, plausible reasons to the viewer.

<comment><USER16> In each case the helicopter crashes when a rotor blade strikes a heavy crane cable.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but an attempt at brevity in my post and to not spoil too much - <USER3> history shows the copter in clear skies and strikes, to an outside observer ignorant of all the facts, easily avoidable (crane with ) cable, where the show introduces a smoke cloud and talks about the radiation danger and has the comm equipment start to fail as the copter gets closer to the smoke, telling a slightly different but more complete story than just viewing the historical footage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought the show was brilliant. Nightmarish, and hard to stop thinking about. One of my first jobs was working on presentation materials for a book on Chernobyl. This was quite some time ago, but the photos and the story have always stuck with me. What I didn't really grasp until watching the show was how strong a case could be made that (despite the common narratives) Chernobyl was the real catalyst for the fall of the USSR. Epic, expensive, embarrassing, disaster only a short time before the fall.

I was fine with the creative liberties the show takes. You have to. Otherwise you should just have people read five books on the subject. But books don't reach as many people and television is a strong medium in its own right. A lot of the criticism feels like "the book was better than the movie" arguments. For the most well rounded impression of actual events, do both! Read the books, and watch the drama.

But keep in mind that humans are driven by stories and narrative. The "official" events are a narrative, as is the reporting, the opinion columns, and yes, the show too.

<comment><USER18> I watched episode 1 out of curiosity. The first minutes tapped into my half life nostalgia so I was happy. But then I couldn't bear the fact that this is no novel, people did have to deal with these events for real.

<comment> a-nikolaev Yeah right. I think, it also has an atmosphere of the Alien movie. Yet, it is a depiction of real events, and that reality is so overwhelming.. I think, I wish they make a similar movie about people in World War II.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One thing that surprised me as I watched the show, is that it really didn't have a single antagonist, or a consciously evil act by anyone depicted - <USER3> evil that lead to the accident was always in the design of the system itself, not in any particular person. Everyone making decisions, even the worst ones, was working with information he had on hand, with assumptions and logic he was taught as gospel from very young age.

It's very unusual to see a western show that would so truthfully depict a societal story, instead of slipping to the usual level of character-driven drama.

<comment><USER20> >It's very unusual to see a western show that would so truthfully depict a societal story

You will love The Wire

<comment><USER19> I did. As first seasons of Game of Thrones. But usually the hollywood screenwriters put too much emphasis on the characters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The point is well made in the article, and I feel the same would happen with stories connected with India. Indian TV is such a clusteref __k of bad content and lazy work that when the west would inevitably make a season on any of the countless things which happened in India, it 'll be heads and shoulders above anything we could ever make today. And then the same "Oh, this is not the correct story" propoganda will be touted by people, gloriously oblivious to the great opportunity which they wasted by making mediocre me-too drama.

Also, Chernobyl is a great show!

</comment><comment><USER22> this might be unrelated, but i drew a number of comparisons between the kremlin and the Fukushima incident in terms of intractable bureaucracy. The sheer number of mistakes made at Daiichi really struck me as impossible. I guess it didnt hit home for me until the 12 mile exclusion zone was imposed and irradiated garbage began showing up on US and Canadian coasts.

It was nowhere near as dire or blatant as Chernobyl, but some issues were definitely things I felt like we had learned about these types of disaster by 2011.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Poor_communication_and_delays)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_Fukush...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster)

<comment><USER23> I noticed some parallels when Daiichi meltdowns were ongoing and "everything was fine" \- I guess it's the initial shock that unthinkable has happened and paralyzing disbelief leading to lies and cover ups. I even remember how shocked Japanese PM looked like on TV after the first real info came out of TEPCO, not mentioning strange movements of US army ships likely detecting meltdown right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Regardless of the actual truth, I think it's important for people everywhere to be skeptical and to probe their governments. I'm glad this has the Russian people asking questions and discussing the undeniable tragedy at Chernobyl, this is how we prevent ourselves from repeating history. I hope the people of Russia can shake the authority's trees enough that the truth falls out.

It's also important to remember that the rest of the world is one unfortunate incident away from nuclear disaster, you only need to look at Japan's Fukushima [1]. There was also the plutonium rods picture near disaster [2]. We _all_ need to learn from these lessons.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster)

[2] [https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/near- dis...](https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/near-disaster/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Funny, I didn't realize there was an HBO TV show, but that article sure reads like some stereotypical Soviet propaganda, albeit from "our" side.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow. The article's author has no Russian accent whatsoever. (Unless it was translated by an English speaker). Wish I had the same command of English. Somehow I doubt multilingual Ukranian newspapers are that much unaccented in their English. I had no temptation to open the Russian version of the article because the English text was not awkward to read.

<comment><USER27> It's intended for an English speaking audience.

<comment><USER26> Yes, but it was certainly written by a Russian and possibly even written in Russian and translated after the fact. Not every journalist from around here I know can write articles in such flawless English that has no traces of a Russian accent. It's a thing I can only envy.

<comment><USER27> As a native English speaker who's learning Russian, I can certainly relate (Russian is quite difficult for me).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't feel I understand why Putin would have anything to deal with here. It's not like he's some huge USSR booster or hater. That Russia didn't produce a prestige TV program about it before the west is not exactly a pressing issue, and Russia isn't particularly known for its prestige TV exports.

All criticism or compliment about anyone Russian, dead or alive, doesn't have to be contextualized into a salvo of a propaganda war that imperils or emboldens Putin. Or maybe it does, for clicks.

<comment> a-nikolaev I think, according to the official Russian government position, USA is the enemy, and is responsible for anything bad that happens. Russian propaganda is very unambiguous about its message: Russia is doing the right thing for the world, our Soviet history was great, and, by the way, look, we have new uber- weapons against possible American interventions.

The fact that HBO was able to create such a believable depiction of the Soviet reality, shatters the simplistic propaganda message of "We are good, they are bad". It shows that UK and US people can tell a story that hits so close to home for every Russian person, and no official historical Russian movie of recent time was able to do anything remotely close. People who are tired of the propaganda message, seek the truth, and the contrast between Chernobyl and propaganda movies is striking.

It is hard to demonize the West, if the West tells you such a realistic story of your own past.

<comment><USER29> You can believe that if the Russians make a film about the segregation of blacks in America, you too will be mad and say that Americans have never been so evil and stupid (and it will be true partly).

<comment> a-nikolaev Do you imply that I should be also mad at the depiction of heroic Soviet firefighters in Chernobyl? I think, to the contrary, they are like the most brave and heroic Soviet characters I've ever seen in a western movie.

My point is that the West was able to make a more humane and relatable movie about USSR than what all modern Russian propaganda tried and failed to do. This series is shattering the "us vs them" mentality the Russian media tries to instill.

<comment><USER29> Film is fine. I say that someone else's view of your problems always not fair in some sense. This is the reason why the film annoys many Russians. My two uncles worked at Chernoble. One died after. The second one said us without a doubt that he would also go to the active zone if ordered. No soldiers with guns took part in it or ever existed. My aunt lived at Pripyat and she was pregnant. She lived in our flat in Minsk temporary after evacuation. She's daugther fine today because of the timely evacuation of the city. Ect..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Radiation Dose Chart.

[https://xkcd.com/radiation/](https://xkcd.com/radiation/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Personally, i found the series on HBO to have been poorly researched and even more poorly delivered in execution.

A whole part of dealing with Russians as well as a large part of how their policies are shaped can be understood through culture. The characteristic bent in mannerisms that value "honor", "masculinity", less emphasis on the exact and more on "estimates" while working through problems etc. Most people who've dealt with the Russians will agree, that this series came across as British propaganda, badly inserting their societal structures to communicate the events flowing in another, completely different structure. The main character looked like a poor Austin Powers impersonator playing a Russian.

As an example, the Female Scientist, Ulana . . i have no problem with the producers exercising creative freedom to designate her character as the substitute for the hundreds of other scientists who worked on the project, but in doing so, wildly misrepresented the role of women in Russian society during those times.

The choice of English as a language itself . . fine. What the producers can't seem to grasp is the delivery of Russian is aggressive. You don't make statements in tense situations with the British smooth tongue. That does not serve the understanding of the situations during those times very well.

I could go on about the sheer lack of patriotism displayed by any of the main characters to the point where it felt as though it was forbidden when in reality, anyone who's lived through those times and interacted informally with these people knows the opposite is true, but i repeat myself.

<comment><USER32> You keep repeating "Russian". It happened in USSR. Chernobyl is in Ukraine. USSR was not only Russia, but 14 more republics that are more or less independent countries now.

<comment><USER33> Ukrainian culture and Russian culture are mostly the same (at least anywhere east of Galicia and west of Siberia), so it's not as if his points are suddenly moot.

This is splitting hairs, especially considering Ukraine still wasn't a country yet.

<comment><USER34> Do you need a country to be a different culture? I guess Tibet has no different culture than Han Chinese since they don't have their own country, eh?

<comment><USER33> Except the cultures are almost identical. Same religion, same food, same social norms and customs, same naming conventions, the two languages are mutually intelligible, most Ukrainians also speak Russian, hell even genetically they're almost the same (like I said, east of Galicia and west of Siberia).

I grew up in a Ukrainian-Canadian family, there was no animosity towards Russians whatsoever until the Orange Revolution and the fallout from that... They literally went to the same churches, did all the same things, it was objectively speaking the same culture.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ⋯ = -1/12 - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%8B%AF

<comment><USER2> The better to understand the ideas behind this, first it's useful to understand why, using the same reasoning, we have:

      1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + ... = -1

You can read about that here[0], and I've submitted that as a separate link here[1].

It's interesting that under twos-complement arithmetic it is, in fact, also true.

[0] [http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/BeyondTheBoundary.html?HN20150...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/BeyondTheBoundary.html?HN20150106)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8843372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8843372)

</comment><comment><USER3> No! Just NO!

For the love of God and everything holy, it does not _equal_ -1/12, it is just a value we use in place of its divergent value.

<comment><USER2> It's more than "... value we use in place of its divergent value." It's the value at _s=-1_ of the analytic continuation of the series:

        \zeta(s) = sum_{n=0}_{oo} n^-s

In other words, we take a series that converges for some values, and then see if it has an analytic continuation. In this case it does, so we look at the value of the analytic continuation at places where the original series is not defined.

As a simpler example, consider 1+x+x^2+x^3+x^4+... This is not defined outside of the disk |z|<1\. However, when |z|<1 we have:

       1/(1-x) = 1+x+x^2+x^3+x^4+...

So for x=2 we can evaluate 1/(1-x), but we can't evaluate the infinite series. When x=2 the value of 1/(1-x) is -1, does that mean we can say that 1+2+2^2+2^3+2^4+2^8+... is -1? Well, no, but sort of.

Playing fast and loose with these things is almost guaranteed to go wrong, but when you _really_ understand what's happening, saying things like:

        1+2+3+4+5+6+... = -1/12

... is a useful shorthand, and justifiable.</comment></comment>


Goodbye, Password. Banks Opt to Scan Fingers and Faces Instead - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/dealbook/goodbye-password-banks-opt-to-scan-fingers-and-faces-instead.html <comment><USER2> So what exactly happened to the username/password analogy I've read here. That is, a fingerprint is an effective username, not an effective password.</comment>


Does (startup) Location Really Matter? - <AUTHOR> http://regulargeek.com/2009/02/18/does-location-really-matter/

<comment><USER2> I'm also in the midst of creating a startup, but in canada and i can tell you location does matter. Whether its finding like minded people to partner with or finding good programmers or finding investors that know what the internet is, location is key.

If you were to go out to Calgary for example (huge oil producing town, for those that dont know it - everyone's there for oil) and tried to find someone that wanted to invest in a startup instead of oil, you'd be there forever and chances are you wouldn't find 1 person with any kind of relevant experience or knowledge. You'd be pitching to rich people without useful backgrounds. They would be expecting immaculate pro formas (which very few startups have) and would laugh you out of the room when you asked them for 100k to seed anything. 100k isnt worth their time, it costs them 400k to simply do a background check and due diligence on you.

so in short, location dictates the people that are around you and yes, that matters more than anything.

<comment><USER3> Then ask for $500k for an oil-related software startup. If location dictates the people around you, then you have to adapt your ideas to the people around you.

If the mountain won't come to Mahomet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have yet to use a programming language that throws CodeWasWrittenInTheWrongCityException. Its a good thing, too, because I am certainly in the wrong city.

</comment><comment><USER5> Being the guy who spent 4 years in Wyoming doing a startup before moving to Chicago last year, I'd say yes.

Not so much about the location, as much as it's about the support system you have in place and accessibility of people who you can have around to help you at the different phases of what you're doing that's critical.

<comment><USER6> What support system have you found in Chicago?

<comment><USER5> Nil, really. It's just related to my "day" job really and using that + the web as a surrogate. It's much too big a place and too decentralize to really work for me like I think it would for me on the east coast (Where I'm from)

But it's just stuff that I discovered here that if someone had told me YEARS ago in Wyoming, would've helped us be a lot more successful a lot sooner. But it's stuff that no one knew to tell me, because there's no one on the ground who has the experience to be able to say anything.

And yeah that place is an anomaly but still. Sometimes just being connected to a larger place can raise your profile and make what you do 'seem' more legit.

It's strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How's Atlanta look? I know <http://www.firethornmobile.com/> started here (I interviewed with them) and was bought by Qualcomm for about 240 million.

I am about to try my second startup and am looking to try for angel money this time. Any ATL resources anyone knows about are appreciated.

<comment><USER8> I quite like Atlanta. In the last 4 years the community around startups has grown nicely, from the Goog moving into town to ATLhack growing from 4 guys to ... 20 guys! And with GaTech, lots of great potential hires.

Angle money is a different thing though. It definitely exists, it just is just as that interested in internet startups as hardware / biotech.</comment></comment>


Too Clever by Half - <AUTHOR> http://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/ <comment><USER2> I think this article has been posted here 3 times in the last few months:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079369)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062790)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16333020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16333020)</comment>


Annotated source is not documentation - <AUTHOR> http://jehaisleprintemps.net/blog/en/2013/03/20/annotated-source/

<comment><USER2> Tutorials are good for beginners, but with experience a developer should be able to follow the annotated (auto- generated) documentation.

I use ruby, and for many gems there are no real tutorials, except for a short introduction on their usage. And I think even then it is pretty easy to follow the annotated-docs.</comment>


Show HN: Debugging-Friendly Tracebacks for Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cknd/stackprinter/ <comment><USER2> There was a related, but not identical, utility posted to Hacker News a few days ago, PySnooper. Discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717786)

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be nice to integrate the context functionality into [https://github.com/Qix-/better-exceptions](https://github.com/Qix-/better- exceptions)

<comment><AUTHOR> I always liked how this automatically hooks into the python installation via pip, but preferred another text format. Hm. So if you want to _permanently_ replace python's crash message, you could put a file `sitecustomize.py` into your python path, with these contents for example:

        # in site-packages/sitecustomize.py:
        print('hello!')
        import sys; sys.excepthook = lambda a,b,c: print('<bomb emoji>')
        # or also:
        import stackprinter
        stackprinter.set_excepthook(style='darkbg')

(you can find the path by `python -c "import site; print(site.PREFIXES)" `)

It felt bit much to do that automatically on installation, but maybe it would be a good option to have

<comment><USER4> In case you're looking for opinions there: I pretty much like libraries like this for development but prefer manual activation, e.g. only when my system is running with a debug flag, over libraries messing with the environment itself.

Thanks for making it available, the output looks neat, looking forward to try it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> pytest also has helpful tracebacks; though only for test runs.

With nose-progressive, you can specify --progressive-editor or update the .noserc so that traceback filepaths are prefixed with your preferred editor command.

vim-unstack parses paths from stack traces / tracebacks (for a number of languages including Python) and opens each in a split at that line number. [https://github.com/mattboehm/vim-unstack](https://github.com/mattboehm/vim- unstack)

Here's the Python regex from my hackish pytb2paths.sh script:

      '\s+File "(?P<file>.*)", line (?P<lineno>\d+), in (?P<modulestr>.*)$'

[https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/p...](https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/pytb2paths.sh)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're building a server application, you should be aware of the kinds of information you're writing to your application log. The first obvious issue is that of possibly disclosing information if the traceback is returned to the client instead of saved in the server log. The second, less obvious question is what kinds of statutory requirements you are under regarding retention of PII in your logs. And in the worst case scenario, you could end up writing out things like plaintext passwords and unrelated PII from the environment.

I bring this up because this looks like it discloses variable values into the log that would not be printed in a standard traceback under most normal circumstances.

<comment><USER7> +1 to this. We have some middleware that scrubs our database exceptions for precisely this reason. You need to think about this any time you're logging the value of any variable, if your company handles any PII or other sensitive information whatsoever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The built-in module cgitb does this.

<comment><USER9> wow... who knew!

well, not me anyway

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While this is a cool project I kinda wondering if they tried submitting a PIP. I think such debugging enhancements to Cpython would be great. Is Python communities considering any improvements on traceback information?

<comment><USER11> I assume you mean PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) :)

A PEP has a lot more to consider than a standalone, third-party projects. They also need to support most (of not all) usages of Python, which is extremely involved. E.g. zip import might be a problem, from the top of my head.

It is always worth considering proposing a PEP, of course. But don't expect people to have interests in proposing, or (if they do propose) the proposal to get anywhere without significant efforts (and compromises).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would anyone know what the Ruby equivalent would be?</comment>


Scott Adams: How to be Successful - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579121813075903866

<comment><USER2> "The field he chose... allows him to sell a service that almost always auto- renews." \- could be referring to insurance sales?

<comment><USER3> Likely. Or perhaps he is a Salesforce.com salesman.

<comment><USER2> That would be one recursive sales-man.</comment></comment></comment>


Some documents on AM and EURISKO - <AUTHOR> http://blog.funcall.org//lisp/2018/11/03/am-eurisko-lenat-documents/ <comment><USER2> For those unaware of the context...

I was around and actually following AI at the time. After some early success with expert systems, the field had fallen into a trough of disillusionment. Even chess was still "unsolved" in the sense that computers had barely reached master level and were still several years before they'd become truly world class (let alone dominant). The very possibility of accurate speech or image recognition was being called into question. At that time, in sharp contrast to today, AI was a specialty most ambitious people in CS were running away from.

Thus, it was a bit of a shock when Eurisko won the Traveller "Trillion Credit Squadron" tournament. Traveller was a space-themed RPG, and TCS was a very detailed space-combat outgrowth of that. That a new kind of AI (what we now know as genetic programming was far from the AI mainstream) would excel at such an open-ended task was surprising. That it would do so at such an obviously military-relevant task in what was still the Cold War was a little scary. I for one was a bit relieved when Lenat turned his and his creations' attention to more benign tasks instead of disappearing into the military- industrial complex.

Lenat, whose ideas were initially viewed with skepticism and worse, did quite possibly more than anyone else at the time to keep AI interesting and relevant. If you're working on AI/ML and don't know the story, I highly recommend digging into it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This bit about EURISKO exploiting its own heuristic scoring mechanism is cute:

 _> One of the first heuristics that EURISKO synthesized (H59) quickly attained nearly the highest Worth possible (999). Quite excitedly, we examined it and could not understand at first what it was doing that was so terrific. We monitored it carefully, and finally realized how it worked: whenever a new conjecture was made with high worth, this rule put its own name down as one of the discoverers! It turned out to be particularly difficult to prevent this generic type of finessing of EURISKO'S evaluation mechanism. Since the rules had full access to EURISKO'S code, they would have access to any safeguards we might try to implement. We finally opted for having a small 'meta-level' of protected code that the rest of the system could not modify._

<comment><USER4> It's not just cute, it's an open problem in the theory of recursively self- modifying AI design--there's no general solution to an AI hijacking its own reward channel, so far. [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/upLot6eG8cbXdKiFS/reward- fun...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/upLot6eG8cbXdKiFS/reward-function- learning-the-learning-process) is the most recent thing I know of in the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I find most incredible about EURISKO is it did all that on what, by today's standards, is a very small amount of computational power.

Just as outstanding is that, in all these years, in terms of open-ended problem solving, nothing has truly managed to surpass it.

The conjunction of those two things is a bit scary because it suggests to me that current methods are probably not making the most effective use of compute. What happens when that is corrected?

<comment><USER6> There is no credible documentation of EURISKO's achievements. No one has every actually seen EURISKO's source code except for Lenat.

Despite huge advances in technology, in computational power, and in the amount of engineers and grad students thrown at these problems, the magical reasoning feats have never been reproduced by anyone else - not even by Lenat's much more expensive project Cyc.

What's more, Lenat did not give a consistent account of the Traveler tournament. One time he claimed "ninety-six ships in Eurisko's fleet, most of which were slow and clumsy because of their heavy armor", other times he would claim the winning strategy was "astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility".

The most probable explanation is that there's more myth than truth in the stories about EURISKO.

(on a less serious note, the jargon file entry for "bogosity" references Lenat; see [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003515.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003515.html))

<comment><USER7> IIRC there were two different Traveler entries in different years, and they changed the rules in between to fix the problems the first win had revealed. After the second win they said they'd cancel the tournament if he entered again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are more documents in this archive: [http://nosuchlabs.com/pub/lenat- leaks.tar.gz](http://nosuchlabs.com/pub/lenat-leaks.tar.gz)

</comment><comment><USER9> I hoped some source code would surface.

<comment><USER10> There is a link to a basic AM clone, "Pythagoras" by Steven L. Tanimoto. [http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_ROBOTICS/LISP/tanimo...](http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_ROBOTICS/LISP/tanimoto/PYTHAG.CL)

<comment><USER7> It's really basic. When I read the code I felt disappointed, though maybe someone else will feel energized to expand it.

I thought I had seen another recreation, in Bratko's book on Prolog programming for AI, but if it is there then it got dropped in the second edition. Maybe my memory got confused between that book and Tanimoto's.</comment></comment></comment>