Growing Up in "404 Not Found" (Part II): The Vanishing Nuclear City • Hacker News Board

Re: Growing Up in "404 Not Found" (Part II): The Vanishing Nuclear City

#11

Post by avhception » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 8:16 AM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #10

avhception wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, that's a point of view that I didn't consider so far. Growing up in Europe, even the local church often dates back quite a few centuries. My small hometown has residential buildings that are multiple centuries old, still inhabited today. The town itself dates back to 1072. The attitude towards the buildings and history is very different here.

But there are also hometowns of the mind that disappear, e.g. someone who grew up in East Germany would lament that the cartoons and foods they grew up with no longer exists...

As a "West-German", I'd argue that's also true over here. The 80s and 90s are gone. I even sometimes use the construct "Bonner Republik" to refer to the time before unification.

Re: Growing Up in "404 Not Found" (Part II): The Vanishing Nuclear City

#12

Post by the_af » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

> When I was a child, there used to be a black bear in the zoo, pacing back and forth in its cage all day long. Then came the accident involving a little girl named Yanzi (meaning ‘Swallow’). She had gotten too close to the railings. The bear licked her leg through the bars. A bear’s tongue is covered in backward-facing barbs. That lick tearing off a chunk of flesh and severing her tendons instantly.Yanzi ended up in a wheelchair, never able to stand again.

Bear tongues don't work like this. While they are rough, much like a cat's or a dog's, they don't have barbs large enough to "tear off a chunk of flesh" or "sever tendons".

If this anecdote is not an embellishment, it must have been the bear biting the girl's leg, which is not at all unheard of from bears in zoos (we had such a case in Argentina in '88, a bear tore off a boy's arm through the cage bars in "Cutini's Zoo". The zoo was shut down as a result. I don't know what happened to the bear, but maybe it was put down like in your story).

Re: Growing Up in "404 Not Found" (Part II): The Vanishing Nuclear City

#13

Post by eastbound » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 4:49 PM UTC

Vincent_Yan404 wrote: post #4

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #2

Related: Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408988

Thanks for linking the first part. I really appreciate the support from this community.

There will be fewer comments because most people have already commented in story 1, but it is nonetheless beloved and I can’t wait for part 3. I hope I won’t miss it (but I don’t want to give my email).