What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question • Hacker News Board

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#41

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

nraynaud wrote: post #9

simula67 wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

> Server fault community is now indignant about using their community ( which is for answering real questions ) as a deceptive marketing platform. ...for someone else's gain. Remember that the majority of employees at SO are selling advertisement. It is a huge marketing platform (that I use heavily, don't get me wrong)

While technically true, I don't think it is in any way comparable. SO ads are the extinction-level rare breed of ads that are a) unobtrusive and b) actually relevant.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#42

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

richardwhiuk wrote: post #36

cookiecaper wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't think so. SO/SE have won because they've always been honest - they provided Q&A service without upselling you bullshit, spamming you with ads or forcing you into paid plans. That eventually led them to #1 spot in Google for everything programming. I don't see how heavy-handed moderation could help here; if anything, half of the questions I search for are marked as duplicate / not relevant / etc. Basically, I can't imagine what question can be relevant to SO anymore...

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#43

Post by Houshalter » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

I don't think they should delete it. Just ban the user for abuse, and edit the post to explain the situation. People spent time answering that question, and it's plausible someone might find it helpful.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#44

Post by Houshalter » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

mediumdeviation wrote: post #24

cookiecaper wrote: post #21

This 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…

I don't think the moderation itself is the problem, it's the rules. There are certain kinds of questions that are interesting and useful, and get shut down. That of course makes people upset. The moderators are perfectly fair and consistent in enforcing the rules, but the rules are stupid.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#45

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

skewart wrote: post #35

gruez wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Funny thing about this "viral" metaphor - you can only pull off any given stunt once (at least in the period of several year). Internet has a sort of immune system that doesn't like copycats.

RE strategy, I think it might have been just exactly what happened - first post a story, then wait for it to go viral, then admit to faking it, thus putting yourself in the spotlight.

It is a risky strategy though. Personally, if he was running this business in my country, I'd immediately put him on my personal blacklist ("never ever do business with this person or company") and I'd be urging anyone I know who uses his services to change the provider.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#46

Post by detaro » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42

richardwhiuk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet StackExchange has survived to rule all over programming forums. Probably largely because the moderation is extremely heavy and kept heavily on topic...

I don't think so. SO/SE have won because they've always been honest - they provided Q&A service without upselling you bullshit, spamming you with ads or forcing you into paid plans. That eventually led them to #1 spot in Google for everything programming. I don't see how heavy-handed moderation could help here; if anything, half of the questions I search for are marked as duplicate / not relevant / etc. Basically, I…

The ones you are looking up in the documentation yourself?

At least that's what I've noticed: I had a similar impression (everything interesting is closed) until I had to work with stuff where I didn't know the structure of the docs. Suddenly checking SO was quicker and had tons of relevant content.

But yes, it is annoying that there isn't an easy to find place to go for questions that require some discussion/debate and don't survive on SO.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#47

Post by kazinator » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

Stratoscope wrote: post #39

kazinator wrote: post #27

It'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 inst…

Yes; that was around the time I started using "set -u" with religious devotion.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#48

Post by rcurry » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

I actually witnessed a funny incident, similar to this, when I worked at a National Laboratory some years back. A team I was working with had a big project that formed the core of a larger system, so they created a directory named "core" and spent the next N months happily churning out code. Meanwhile, the system administrator had a set of backup scripts that he'd configured to ignore core dump files (yeah, you can guess where this is going), but the scripts that he wrote didn't differentiate between files or directories that had "core" in their name, so nothing got backed up for almost a year. Over the Christmas break, the system administrator decided to install a new version of Solaris, and wiped all the drives as well. I came in to work after the break, and everyone was freaking out because all their code was gone. They managed to recover some of it, because some developers had separate copies of parts of the system, but it was still a disaster.

Every once in a while, at one job or another, someone will suggest we name a source code folder "core" and I get to relate that story all over again.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#49

Post by wildmusings » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:51 PM UTC

rcurry wrote: post #48

I actually witnessed a funny incident, similar to this, when I worked at a National Laboratory some years back. A team I was working with had a big project that formed the core of a larger system, so they created a directory named "core" and spent the next N months happily churning out code. Meanwhile, the system administrator had a set of backup scripts that he'd configured to ignore core dump files (yeah, you can g…

>I came in to work after the break, and everyone was freaking out because all their code was gone.

What happened next? This cliffhanger is killing me.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#50

Post by rcurry » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:57 PM UTC

wildmusings wrote: post #49

rcurry wrote: post #48

I actually witnessed a funny incident, similar to this, when I worked at a National Laboratory some years back. A team I was working with had a big project that formed the core of a larger system, so they created a directory named "core" and spent the next N months happily churning out code. Meanwhile, the system administrator had a set of backup scripts that he'd configured to ignore core dump files (yeah, you can g…

> I came in to work after the break, and everyone was freaking out because all their code was gone. What happened next? This cliffhanger is killing me.

I honestly don't know how they recovered from it all. I think they were able to recover parts of it from some people's workstations, but still had to rewrite an awful lot of their code.