A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
It's quite amazing that some one at 72 who grew up malnourished and without access to modern medicine can still be in a good enough shape to survive in one of the harshest environments man has ever lived.
That's why life expectancy is so high now in the western world, it's not that people are growing far older than they did in the past or elsewhere, children just die very rarely and don't pull down the average.
However I'm not sure whether this is because what she's doing is an incredible accomplishment or I just treat my body horribly. She has probably more than 60 years of experience doing these things and kept in perfect shape her whole life. Just imagine what we might be capable, if we kept our bodies equally well in shape, now and in the future.
Maybe I should feel less impressed and more ashamed at myself or equal parts of both.
She gets regular help from others, and she hasn't been shy to ask for help. Also, she made several trips to nearby towns when she needed medical help.
Bottom line: people have lived just fine for thousands of years in much harsher climates, for example, a thousand miles north from where she lives.
The largest is from when the article was published: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5134023.
This summary written by an anonymous in the imdb site: "The story follows an underground weapons manufacturer in Belgrade during WWII and evolves into fairly surreal situations. A black marketeer who smuggles the weapons to partisans doesn't mention to the workers that the war is over, and they keep producing. Years later, they break out of their underground "shelter" --- only to convince themselves that the war is still going on."
I was actually listening to the sound-track for the last week (Thanks to Goran Bregovic)
> She claims that the air and water outside of the Taiga makes her sick. She also said that she finds the busy roads frightening.
It has more of a natural feel to the documentary style.
Documentary crew travels 300 kilometers by boat to meet two hermits living alone in the taiga. These two neighbours have a long history in harsh enviroment but they seem to live pretty normal life in the woods. Documentary crew soon realises they have a boring story to tell so they start asking awkward questions about sexual relationships in the past.
Both neighbours have a different story to tell. Incest and rape is mentioned. Old wounds are open again and that is when the crew decides to leave saying they did not start the conversation.
What the hell just happened? :)
The author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Megre
Official PR: http://www.ringingcedarsofrussia.org/Main/English/index.php
We once forgot to bring anything steel for cooking on a fire during a week-long sheep hunting hike. After much thought, I managed to boil water for coffee and food :)
"Hacker News the site" is for anything and everything of intellectual interest. We're always hoping for more diverse stories.
I would suggest that one such metric is if you learned something interesting from an article, rather than having the article simply confirm your own beliefs.
I almost never see that. There's isn't much controversy around what counts as "intellectually interesting" here. People spend more effort trying wrongly to narrow the scope of HN, e.g. claiming that it's only about startups and tech, flagging all non-technical posts, etc., all of which is against the spirit of the site (and bad, in my opinion, for technical creativity too).
The standards are better established de facto than de jure—the last thing we want is legalistic arguing about rules. So I think the traditional description suffices:
A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting. What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, perhaps it could be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Edit: but if there's something we could do to get more high-quality links posted about historical topics, arts and letters, geography, anthropology, etc.—the myriads of interesting stories outside HN's couple of core grooves—I would love to hear about it. They are particularly welcome and we rarely have enough of them.
I'm now watching the 35 minute documentary about Agafia and surviving in the Siberian wilderness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68
A metaphor just occurred to me: Hacker News is like a better Internet version of what the Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel used to be in their golden days (back when MTV played music videos, before reality TV). HN is much better than that, since those were still TV, and did not cover business and leadership, but that's the best analogy I can come up with at the moment. I get far more out of reading HN-provided links and comments for hours than I ever did TV.
It comes and goes. My worry: US elections.
Anyway, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russ... has a lot more than either.