Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail.
Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. By definition, this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible, that's pure speculation and there are infinite other scenarios we could imagine, but we don't need to ask them as StackOverflow questions.
On a practical note, it's worth banning just to prevent a thousand viral marketers and recruiters falling over themselves to compose the most attention-grabbing fake questions in the next month.
its not so much "Not a real programming question", its more "Not able to be answered objectively". Stack Overflow is meant to be a wiki of questions and answers, and like a wiki, it wants to only present facts and not opinions.
if one wants subjective questions and answers, there are other sites in stackexchange for that
You should read the Italian news coverage. Marco Marsala points out that the problem is fake, that (as several people also noted on Hacker News) the command mentioned has been benign since 2006, and that Ansible doesn't permit this anyway. He observes that "serious administrators" would know this, but apparently there were no such people at ServerFault answering his question because otherwise they'd have spotted such a blatant error ("altrimenti saprebbero che quanto ho descritto non può accadere").
Banning the account will have no effect. In the future people will just use throwaway or sockpuppet accounts, so who cares?
Also, I don't see who benefits from this hoax. Who is going to use him as a hosting provider whether the problem was real or fake. Both indicate that he's not a reliable provider.
It shouldn't matter whether the question was based on a real situation, or if the story was just made up for "motivating" the question [1]. I often (> 50% of the time) make up or change the backstory for my SO posts, to prevent people from asking "But what is your real problem", "What have you tried", and so on, and because I want just a simple answer to my question goddamnit.
([1] Even if it is a hoax, or a joke, the question has merit. Just close as duplicate without getting all worked up about it.)
As noted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497590 , the author of the question has since stated that he was attempting to see whether there were any "serious administrators" at ServerFault who would know that what he had claimed he had done could not have happened as stated.
I wonder what he's making of all of the people now conflating Stack Overflow with Server Fault. Server Fault says its blurb, is a question and answer site for system and network administrators.
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.
ServerFault appears to complaining that the question is generating traffic --- to ServerFault!?
If we look at the user's account, it's clean. Only through a LinkedIn reference do we see that "bleemboy" is Marco Marsala. Like, what fraction of visitors are clicking through all that?
> 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
Here's a great article that describes these options and some tips for using them:
I think it has affected a lot of people. hundred of thousands read that question. friends who are not programmers sent me links to that question and asked me to not do the same. people lost their time answering and finding solutions.
it was a hoax. a troll. not very far away from screaming bomb on an train.
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.
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.
Once again proves, you have to A) look at what your scripts are actually doing and B) test them manually at least couple times somehow, otherwise this is plain unprofessional (in one of the many ways sadly and funnily possible).
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 because everyone is looking for a reason to close the question. The higher principle behind the community gets lost in a sea of technicalities.
Stack Exchange could improve their guidance and closure templates to help curb the habit of closing useful stuff all the time, so part of it is an identity issue that SE sites have within themselves, but it's compounded and exacerbated by a lot of fresh faces looking for a reason to stop the discussion so they can click their brand-new "lock thread" button.
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 process on SE is significantly more transparent than almost any sites out there. And because of this transparency, people find it easier to point blame at these users.
The transparency part I hope is obvious - when a post get moderated on other sites, the full edit history and name of the moderators involved are almost never revealed. The close reasons are in general decided upon by the users themselves. Individual moderation decisions can be contested and debated on the Meta sites, and there are checks on almost every level.
In other words, the moderation process is already fairer than most other sites, where the moderation process is essentially a black box with no means of appeal. But people don't like it because the content which elsewhere would have been swept quietly under the rug is still visible and indexable.
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 just want to click buttons; there is little or no incentive to ask about the macro-level effects a moderation action may have on the site.
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...
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.
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.
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.
All rules are arbitrary, though, and if you want to participate in a community you have to abide by the rules. If the rules are stupid enough, anybody can splinter off and say they're starting their own community, especially on the internet!
I mean, look at HN here. I'm on my third account: the first, I have no idea why I got hellbanned; the second, I know exactly why; the third, I don't really care about. But it's interesting to read the stories and ideas I fundamentally disagree with, and occasionally I post something detrimental to my fully participating in this community. Those are the rules.
You are allowed to criticize the rules. Rules can be stupid. And if no one complains, then they will never change.
I don't agree with many of HN's policies, but they are nowhere near as bad as stack overflow. At least on censoring actually useful discussions, whereas HN mostly censors flame wars and political stuff.
It was originally closed as a duplicate, the other question had more detail and mentioned the --no-preserve-root flag.
Now it has also been merged with this question. The helpful replies are still there, but the incentive to use the Stack Exchange sites for other purposes is reduced. I think this was a nice solution in this case.
Apart 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.
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.
My guess is because there's already a question about accidentally your whole system, which makes it a "dup". Not to mention, it _was_ a "viral" marketing campaign, and I'm sure the community isn't too happy about advertising disguised as legitimate questions.
I guess part of the reason the hoax is annoying is that it usually couldn't happen. Recent versions of GNU coreutils rm will refuse to delete /, in order to avoid this kind of bug [1]. So if he was on a linux system like he described, his bug should not have had that effect. The question spreads misinformation (although a fairly harmless kind).
(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 actually {{foo}} not {foo}, so {foo} in bash prints a literal foo
So this triply couldn't happen. Finally, most people should probably be using the file module to delete files, though if people want to call out to the shell they can with any config tool.
I hate this was even posted because it reflects poorly on me and was in exceptionally bad taste to imply ansible would let it happen.
But can you shoot yourself in the foot with any config tool? If you want to, yes. Can you be bitten by a bug? Yes. Do tool authors make mistakes? Yes.
But it was a mean thing to do, and it's not something the tool would even allow, and it hurts when tech journalists (arguably some of the worst reporters in existance) blindly parrot the article without fake checking (just like they'll also do fake comparisons that just recycle blog posts).
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!
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.
Basically a backup script that was supposedly run via Ansible on all servers, which mounted remote backup drives and then instead of pulling a fresh backup deleted everything including the mounted backup.
> 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.
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?
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.
The linked article says they already determined "What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question". What the article is asking is what to do with the fake internet points.
It's not against the rules to answer your own question, as far as I'm aware. If the question is one that other users may ask, and you have an answer, I don't see what's wrong with posting questions and immediately answering them.
Yes! Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions. If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you would like to document that knowledge in public so that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.
Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail.
Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. By definition, this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible, that's pure speculation and there are infinite other scenarios we could imagine, but we don't need to ask them as StackOverflow questions.
On a practical note, it's worth banning just to prevent a thousand viral marketers and recruiters falling over themselves to compose the most attention-grabbing fake questions in the next month.
its not so much "Not a real programming question", its more "Not able to be answered objectively". Stack Overflow is meant to be a wiki of questions and answers, and like a wiki, it wants to only present facts and not opinions.
if one wants subjective questions and answers, there are other sites in stackexchange for that
"this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible"
Having done rm -fr / on a box before, I think it should stay. The incident was fake, the problem is real, it elicited real responses and has value.
You should read the Italian news coverage. Marco Marsala points out that the problem is fake, that (as several people also noted on Hacker News) the command mentioned has been benign since 2006, and that Ansible doesn't permit this anyway. He observes that "serious administrators" would know this, but apparently there were no such people at ServerFault answering his question because otherwise they'd have spotted such a blatant error ("altrimenti saprebbero che quanto ho descritto non può accadere").
* http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/15/news/cancella...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500711
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497590
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11514666
Banning the account will have no effect. In the future people will just use throwaway or sockpuppet accounts, so who cares?
Also, I don't see who benefits from this hoax. Who is going to use him as a hosting provider whether the problem was real or fake. Both indicate that he's not a reliable provider.
They say questions should be "about real problems people face" but that's not quite true.
- You can post questions out of simple curiosity. - You can post rhetoric questions where you already now the answer ( http://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer ).
It shouldn't matter whether the question was based on a real situation, or if the story was just made up for "motivating" the question [1]. I often (> 50% of the time) make up or change the backstory for my SO posts, to prevent people from asking "But what is your real problem", "What have you tried", and so on, and because I want just a simple answer to my question goddamnit.
([1] Even if it is a hoax, or a joke, the question has merit. Just close as duplicate without getting all worked up about it.)
As noted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497590 , the author of the question has since stated that he was attempting to see whether there were any "serious administrators" at ServerFault who would know that what he had claimed he had done could not have happened as stated.
I wonder what he's making of all of the people now conflating Stack Overflow with Server Fault. Server Fault says its blurb, is a question and answer site for system and network administrators.
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.
ServerFault appears to complaining that the question is generating traffic --- to ServerFault!?
If we look at the user's account, it's clean. Only through a LinkedIn reference do we see that "bleemboy" is Marco Marsala. Like, what fraction of visitors are clicking through all that?
> 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:
Here's a great article that describes these options and some tips for using them:
http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/
Yes; that was around the time I started using "set -u" with religious devotion.
That is a great article. I just strictified the cheeky shell scripts that automate deployment of my current project.
But make sure you read up on the problems with `set -e` before you rely on it!
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105
I think it has affected a lot of people. hundred of thousands read that question. friends who are not programmers sent me links to that question and asked me to not do the same. people lost their time answering and finding solutions.
it was a hoax. a troll. not very far away from screaming bomb on an train.
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.
>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.
Once again proves, you have to A) look at what your scripts are actually doing and B) test them manually at least couple times somehow, otherwise this is plain unprofessional (in one of the many ways sadly and funnily possible).
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 because everyone is looking for a reason to close the question. The higher principle behind the community gets lost in a sea of technicalities.
Stack Exchange could improve their guidance and closure templates to help curb the habit of closing useful stuff all the time, so part of it is an identity issue that SE sites have within themselves, but it's compounded and exacerbated by a lot of fresh faces looking for a reason to stop the discussion so they can click their brand-new "lock thread" button.
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 process on SE is significantly more transparent than almost any sites out there. And because of this transparency, people find it easier to point blame at these users.
The transparency part I hope is obvious - when a post get moderated on other sites, the full edit history and name of the moderators involved are almost never revealed. The close reasons are in general decided upon by the users themselves. Individual moderation decisions can be contested and debated on the Meta sites, and there are checks on almost every level.
In other words, the moderation process is already fairer than most other sites, where the moderation process is essentially a black box with no means of appeal. But people don't like it because the content which elsewhere would have been swept quietly under the rug is still visible and indexable.
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 just want to click buttons; there is little or no incentive to ask about the macro-level effects a moderation action may have on the site.
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...
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.
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...
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.
All rules are arbitrary, though, and if you want to participate in a community you have to abide by the rules. If the rules are stupid enough, anybody can splinter off and say they're starting their own community, especially on the internet!
I mean, look at HN here. I'm on my third account: the first, I have no idea why I got hellbanned; the second, I know exactly why; the third, I don't really care about. But it's interesting to read the stories and ideas I fundamentally disagree with, and occasionally I post something detrimental to my fully participating in this community. Those are the rules.
You are allowed to criticize the rules. Rules can be stupid. And if no one complains, then they will never change.
I don't agree with many of HN's policies, but they are nowhere near as bad as stack overflow. At least on censoring actually useful discussions, whereas HN mostly censors flame wars and political stuff.
A 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.
It was originally closed as a duplicate, the other question had more detail and mentioned the --no-preserve-root flag.
Now it has also been merged with this question. The helpful replies are still there, but the incentive to use the Stack Exchange sites for other purposes is reduced. I think this was a nice solution in this case.
Apart 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.
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.
It's been known for a long time that X is a dangerous virus that causes cancer. [1]
[1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/danger...
probably because the original guy submitted it to the media
This 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)
Does it matter that it didn't happen, if it could happen? Sounds like a serious issue.
My guess is because there's already a question about accidentally your whole system, which makes it a "dup". Not to mention, it _was_ a "viral" marketing campaign, and I'm sure the community isn't too happy about advertising disguised as legitimate questions.
I guess part of the reason the hoax is annoying is that it usually couldn't happen. Recent versions of GNU coreutils rm will refuse to delete /, in order to avoid this kind of bug [1]. So if he was on a linux system like he described, his bug should not have had that effect. The question spreads misinformation (although a fairly harmless kind).
[1] This was added in 2006, apparently: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=af...
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 actually {{foo}} not {foo}, so {foo} in bash prints a literal foo
So this triply couldn't happen. Finally, most people should probably be using the file module to delete files, though if people want to call out to the shell they can with any config tool.
I hate this was even posted because it reflects poorly on me and was in exceptionally bad taste to imply ansible would let it happen.
But can you shoot yourself in the foot with any config tool? If you want to, yes. Can you be bitten by a bug? Yes. Do tool authors make mistakes? Yes.
But it was a mean thing to do, and it's not something the tool would even allow, and it hurts when tech journalists (arguably some of the worst reporters in existance) blindly parrot the article without fake checking (just like they'll also do fake comparisons that just recycle blog posts).
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!
> I wrote Ansible
I know this doesn't add to the conversation, but: thank you for writing ansible!
You are welcome! Thanks!
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.
What was the hoax exactly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496947
Basically a backup script that was supposedly run via Ansible on all servers, which mounted remote backup drives and then instead of pulling a fresh backup deleted everything including the mounted backup.
Question was then about recovery advice.
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 deceptive marketing platform.
> 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.
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?
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.
So were they trying to promote the hosting platform or what? I doubt Ubuntu 12.04 needs marketing at this point.
@simula67, that's not the correct question that is the hoax.
If you're curious what the hoax post was (the answers have since been merged onto a different question) -
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6y3HTYv...
The linked article says they already determined "What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question". What the article is asking is what to do with the fake internet points.
Reminds me of this post. Poster created a question and immediately answered it with his own link.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9751207/how-can-i-use-got...
It's not against the rules to answer your own question, as far as I'm aware. If the question is one that other users may ask, and you have an answer, I don't see what's wrong with posting questions and immediately answering them.
To expand, I don't see anything wrong with the joke question, I just think they both fall in the same category.
The user created the question and answered it immediately with a link to his goto library.
The issue is not answering your own question, but more about posting your own question to answer.
Suppose everyone who creates a startup, posts a question & answer to advertise their own project.
There's even a badge for answering your own question ("self learner"), if your answer is a good one. http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/12519
It's encouraged, even
Can I answer my own question?
Yes! Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions. If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you would like to document that knowledge in public so that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.
http://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer
That's funny. I'm pleasantly surprised the stackoverflow mods didn't close it.
So the Wikipedia-Delete-Nazis spread to StackExchange?
How come that such user-generated-content communities always end like that?!