Iowa fertilizer spill kills nearly all fish across 60-mile stretch of rivers

I found "aquarium cycling" to be pretty interesting.

To prepare aquariums filled with water for fish, the chemistry needs to be balanced.

First you put in water. Then you add drops of ammonia in the water for a few days. Somehow magically bacteria that consume ammonia and produce nitrites start populating the tank. Keep going and a second set of bacteria populate the tank, that convert nitrites to nitrates.

When those bacteria are present and stable (few weeks?) the fish can be introduced to the aquarium and they will survive.

There's a further step, adding plants, that can consume the nitrates (which are coincidentally in fertilizer)

This article made me think of this because fish produce ammonia, and without a way for an aquarium to remove it, they will die.

But it's always a company at fault, not someone you can throw in jail.

No, more about having one's ability to work in any engineering field (a broad definition which includes anything physical including environmental) revoked, similar to how lawyers can be disbarred, or how medical practitioners can lose their license to practise.

I have a modest proposal; fine the shareholders of record for the cleanup costs. If there is the possibility of real consequences for errors, they're going to make sure errors don't happen

Phrased passively like this, it’s darkly hilarious.

It’s preventable.

I lived in Iowa for about 10 years, couldn't agree with you more. I have good memories of the place, and have occasionally visited Atlantic,IA, which is off the Nishnabotna river, polluted by this incident. The state is very clean and livable as far as air pollution goes. Air pollution is almost non-existent. Water, on the other hand...

A personal experience: I stopped washing my hair as reguarly as I used to when I was in Iowa, since it had started falling out. I thought, ageing, and what not. But when I stopped washing my hair more than twice a week, the hair-fall stopped. This was more than 20 years ago, and I still haven't balded much after that. I have always wondered whether it was related to the water quality.

9 hours ago "more comments", 1 hour ago "less comments".

I feel like it isn't a surprise Hacker News has more opinions on software security than enviornmental disaster.

If you post about the backdoor to an environmental forum, I suspect it wouldn't gain as much traction.

For the average HNer, a fertilizer spill is unactionable. There's no digging I can do, nothing I can change. At most I can add it to the big list of things I should consider talking to my senators and representatives about.

By contrast, the liblzma compromise is immediately actionable and HN is who should be reacting to it. I'd wager that some HN readers got paged this morning to deal with the liblzma compromise. There were debian and other distro maintainers on HN communicating about what they knew, what they were doing in response, and what the average HN reader should be doing. I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable percentage of HN ran, not walked, to run updates on a potentially compromised Fedora installation. Furthermore, the data was all out in the open (git commit history, mailing lists) and in a format that HN readers are specialized for dealing with. A supply chain attack on openssh isn't just relevant to HN, it's the kind of thing that should be on HN because HN is full of the kind of person that we want to be spending time responding to this incident.

It makes perfect sense; other replies have already made good arguments, but I'll add mine.

I am not in agriculture. I know very little about farming, and there is nothing I can realistically do to fix or prevent agricultural mishaps. On the other hand, I am in Tech. I know a lot about computers, and there are things I can do and learn from the SSH article.

Also, the SSH article is more scary than some dead fish (Yeah, dead fish suck, but that's 1000 miles away from me and a localized problem). The sophistication of the XZ attack is scary. It looks like a group of malicious actors did it. How widespread are attacks like this? We only learned about the `xz` attack because a brilliant person dug into a very minor side-effect caused by the attack. Is the Linux Kernel compromised in a similar attack? Who knows. What about the 2 billion other libraries a modern Linux system depends on? How will we detect and prevent this from happening in the future?