Hello World

[Roy Smith]

In article <5497e1d5$0$12978$c3e8da3$5496439d at news.astraweb.com>,
 Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:

> Steve Hayes wrote:
> 
> > Yes, my initial reaction was "that's awesome".
> > 
> > And my second thought was that it was scary.
> > 
> > I ran it. It worked, and printed "Hello world". I was awed.
> > 
> > But what if I had run it and it reformatted my hard disk?
> > 
> > How would I have known that it would or wouldn't do that?
> 
> That's why I didn't run it myself :-)
> 
> Seriously. I read the blog post, it seemed legitimate, I could follow the
> explanation for how it worked well enough to be convinced it would work,
> but I didn't try running it myself.
> 
> If I had, I would have made sure I was running as an unprivileged user, not
> the superuser/Administrator account. Actually, since I care more about my
> personal files than the operating system, I'd prefer to *not* use my normal
> account. This being Linux, I can run suspicious code as the "nobody" user:

If I really didn't trust something, I'd go to AWS and spin up one of 
their free-tier micro instances and run it there :-)