This reminded me of an old story from The Daily WTF:
What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so easily. I wrote Ansible, but no longer work on it. There are numerous problems with the hoax. (A) the user skipped --no-preserve-root to the command, if he really wanted to delete /, he would need to try harder on a modern distro, because the rm command would stop the attempt (B) ansible by default fails on undefined variables, meaning it would never execute the command (C) Jinja template variables are actuall…
Hey Michael, weird to see another ININ guy on HN. We never met but I was happy to hear we hired you. Good luck.
Thanks! Yeah not there anymore but good group of folks! Not too many people pushing immutable systems and continuous deployment so well either, which was nice to see!
Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#33Apart from the SO moderation question, I'm quite bugged by a bigger one: How the hell this ended up in mainstream media?
Can't we just ban every online buzz outlet from talking about programming, hardware or computers until they actually understand what they are talking about? I know what I'm asking is beyond impossible, but I'm really annoyed by the amount of buzz-impinged-naiveté blossoming everywhere each time someone makes headlines of something IT related.
Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#34This reminded me of an old story from The Daily WTF: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Bourne-Into-Oblivion
I like the classic one from 1986 (!) a bit better:
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html
HN discussion:
Unix Recovery Legend (1986): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10160417 (143 points, 228 days ago, 60 comments)
Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
This question http://serverfault.com/questions/587102/monday-morning-mista... was posted to server fault. It has since shown to be a marketing tactic ( http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/15/news/cancella... ). The author did not delete his server, merely claimed to do so to get attention. Server fault community is now indignant about using their community ( which is for answering real questions ) as a decept…
Can you elaborate on what the marketing tactic was supposed to promote?
I'm wondering the same thing. Presumably the question asker was trying to promote his hosting company. It seems like a pretty risky way to promote your business though. I mean, maybe the old saying that any publicity is good publicity holds true. But I don't remember seeing the actual name of the company anywhere in the Independent article. (Maybe there was more or different coverage in Italy). It seems like most prospective customers would, at best, see this guy acting like a clown, which wouldn't inspire confidence.
Or, maybe the whole thing was created by some kind of creative marketing agency trying to show off how they can "make things go viral" and get press?
Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an extremely popular narrative that seems to pop up every time a Stack Exchange post geta onto the HN or proggit front page. The problem with this narrative is that it is almost never substantiated. So instead, let me posit an alternative hypothesis, as someone who has gotten his hands dirty on the various Meta sites: The reason most people feel that SE has a moderation problem is because the moderation proce…
I disagree. Most other forums do not lock or hide useful threads that are popular, gaining substantive replies, and generating meaningful discussion. In the more traditional moderation perspective, moderators have incentive to keep active discussions alive, because they're usually considered staff and they want to generate traffic. With StackExchange, there is no vested interest from the moderating audience, they jus…
And yet StackExchange has survived to rule all over programming forums. Probably largely because the moderation is extremely heavy and kept heavily on topic...
Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#37This shows the problem with the way Stack Exchange doles out moderation abilities (automatic once you hit a certain karma threshold). You get a lot of people who want to use these newfound powers. That's understandable, for sure. The issue is that in their eagerness to be a good mod and help clean up and get to do some cool moderatory stuff, they get overzealous and it results in hamfisted, overbroad moderation becau…
This is an extremely popular narrative that seems to pop up every time a Stack Exchange post geta onto the HN or proggit front page. The problem with this narrative is that it is almost never substantiated. So instead, let me posit an alternative hypothesis, as someone who has gotten his hands dirty on the various Meta sites: The reason most people feel that SE has a moderation problem is because the moderation proce…
The majority of message boards have few people with message-editing powers, and using them (as opposed to just deleting a message) is a rare event. I've only moderated very small message boards, but we strictly avoided editing users' posts for content, because it would erode user trust if we made it appear that people had said things they hadn't said, for example.
That's in stark contrast to something like a wiki, where it's expected that people will edit one another's content. Of course, most wikis don't attribute editable content to named individuals!
If you look at a high-profile question in Stack Overflow, often the proportion of replies that have been edited by someone other than the author would be shocking on a typical message board - 18 out of 27 answers, for example [1]. I'm quite sure my posts on this site are edited far less well below 66% of the time - in fact I haven't noticed any being edited at all.
In other words, I would say stackoverflow has positioned itself between conventional message boards and wikis in terms of message-editing convention. It's unusual, but it seems to work for them.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9329446/for-each-over-an...
Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#38A question was asked, a problem was posed, and it got helpful replies and answers for someone looking for a solution. It's origin should not matter.
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Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#39It's not a "hoax" in any sense. Just a plain lie. A hoax has to be fairly large-scale and affect a lot of people (negatively). The original question contained no hyper-links at all. (Ironically, one was inserted by subsequent editors). The question is plausible. I once deleted a /lib directory due to a misspelled variable in a script! Recovery consisted of copying libs from another installation of the same OS. Server…
> I once deleted a /lib directory due to a misspelled variable in a script!
Ah yes, the old "rm -rf $TEMPBASEEDIR/lib" bug. It is so easy to have that happen.
Or like I did, write a script that assumes a certain environment variable is set outside the script... and then forget to set the variable before running it!
To prevent these problems, use "set -u" at the top of your bash scripts. This will halt the script instead of silently inserting an empty string if you use an undefined variable.
"set -e" (halt on nonzero return code) and "set -o pipefail" (propagate error returns through a pipe) are also useful options, or combine them with:
set -euo pipefail
Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question
#40Apart from the SO moderation question, I'm quite bugged by a bigger one: How the hell this ended up in mainstream media? Can't we just ban every online buzz outlet from talking about programming, hardware or computers until they actually understand what they are talking about? I know what I'm asking is beyond impossible, but I'm really annoyed by the amount of buzz-impinged-naiveté blossoming everywhere each time som…
And then please let's ban them from talking about science and anything science-related too. Exaggerated IT stories are annoying, exaggerated science and scaremongering with "scientists prove X causes cancer!!111" is socially damaging and actually kills people.