Hacker News: man8alexd

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:20:12 +0000

Internet at its best - explaining how it was in the USSR to a former soviet citizen.

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:12:04 +0000

For the rundown test, after the valve cut-off, it is irrelevant whether the reactor was shut down or not. The working plan for the test only specified that it was supposed to run before a planned maintenance period, so the shutdown was implied. During previous tests, the AZ-5 signal was wired to the valve cut-off signal and was sent automatically at the same moment. It is not clear why this changed in 1986, but the outcome would have been the same if AZ-5 had been pressed 35 seconds earlier.

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:52:15 +0000

Easy but boring. Realistically, the workers would be gathered in a hall and their immediate boss would give a speech: "The party and the government want you to serve the Motherland at this heroic moment and volunteer for a hard job. Whoever goes gets apartments ahead of the waiting list".

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:13:43 +0000

The AZ-5 button was pushed as normal shutdown procedure as the test had been completed, not as a reaction to some event.

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:06:29 +0000

I worked in the soviet nuclear industry (Sredmash) in the 1980s.

The dialogs and characters are completely unrealistic and made me cringe. Everyone looks overemotional and infantile.

The hierarchical interactions are comical - a minister would never go to talk to miners, he would just phone a subordinate and tell them to organize people, they don't need armed soldiers present to enforce something, it is not the Wild West. The authors have no clue about the soviet mentality and how soviet society operated.

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:03:13 +0000

"Verbal abuse" isn't a concept that existed in the Soviet Union. Giving or receiving instructions with as many "suka blyat" inserted between each word as possible wasn't abnormal.

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:16:34 +0000

Quote from INSAG-7 https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...

> neither the reactor power nor the other parameters (pressure and water level in the steam separator drums, coolant and feedwater flow rates, etc.) required any intervention by the personnel or by the engineered safety features from the beginning of the tests until the EPS-5 button was pressed. The Commission did not detect any events or dynamic processes, such as hidden reactor runaway, which could have been the event which initiated the accident. “

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:11:53 +0000

The TV show pretends to be historically accurate, and many people believe that it is true. I would suspect that the majority of people have no other sources of information about Chernobyl other than this TV show.

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:19:31 +0000

Higginbotham uses Medvedev's book as a source. Medvedev worked in the Ministry of Energy and he was their special representative in Chernobyl after the incident. His task was to cover the asses of the ministry and the reactor designers, so this book invented a lot of "facts" to put the blame on the operators, Dyatlov and Fomin.

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:34:47 +0000

There is a real interview with Dyatlov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8__v9EswN4

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

man8alexd — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:12:34 +0000

No, the show is not accurate. The last episode repeats the lies that Legasov told at the IAEA meeting in 1986, that were published as INSAG-1, and the show completely ignores INSAG-7. There was no drama in the control room, no indications that anything was wrong with the reactor, no power spike before AZ-5 was pressed.

New comment by man8alexd in "Chernobyl's last wedding"

man8alexd — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:56:24 +0000

In the USSR, you usually don't have a spare guest room. An unmarried young man would be lucky to live in a separate apartment; otherwise, it is usually just a bed in a dormitory. At best, it is a one-room (12-20 m2) apartment with a kitchen (10 m2). A hotel is too expensive, so you put your guests into your bed, a folding chair, or a folding cot and go to the kitchen to sleep on a mattress. There were families of 4-5 people who lived in such apartments permanently.

New comment by man8alexd in "Sudo for Windows (2024)"

man8alexd — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:17:58 +0000

There is an old practice of having an alternative `toor` user with UID=0, with a different shell and password, in case someone screws the primary `root` account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toor_(Unix)

New comment by man8alexd in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)"

man8alexd — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:07:55 +0000

Location: Tbilisi, Georgia (UTC+4)

Remote: yes (working exclusively remotely for the past 20 years)

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: AWS, Kubernetes, Nomad, Docker, podman, Hashicorp Consul, Vault, Packer, Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, ELK stack, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Flux, GitLab, Postfix, HAProxy, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Python, bash, C

Résumé/CV: https://alexeydemidov.com/cv

Email: in the resume

GitHub: https://github.com/AlexeyDemidov

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alekseydemidov/

ServerFault: https://serverfault.com/users/23022/alexd

New comment by man8alexd in "Parallel Perl – Autoparallelizing interpreter with JIT"

man8alexd — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:31:07 +0000

Codex for some reason sometimes runs Perl instead of Python to work with local files

New comment by man8alexd in "Aquasecurity/Trivy GitHub Repository and Homebrew Cask Compromised (again)"

man8alexd — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:31:12 +0000

Grype, Clair

New comment by man8alexd in "Aquasecurity/Trivy GitHub Repository and Homebrew Cask Compromised (again)"

man8alexd — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:58:59 +0000

More details here: https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/trivy-compromised-a-second-...

Current GitHub discussion (the old discussion was removed by the attacker): https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/discussions/10420

New comment by man8alexd in "Modernizing swapping: virtual swap spaces"

man8alexd — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:58:05 +0000

There are some mistakes in these blog posts, especially the one about overcommit.

New comment by man8alexd in "Modernizing swapping: virtual swap spaces"

man8alexd — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:56:48 +0000

systemd allows setting cgroup memory limits.

New comment by man8alexd in "Modernizing swapping: virtual swap spaces"

man8alexd — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:44:28 +0000

Just tune the kernel watermarks - vm.min_free_kbytes and vm.watermark_scale_factor