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Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#51

Post by ykevinator »

aguzzi94 wrote: post #8

Oh sweet sweet failures! I'll start. I recently started trying to quit drinking for good, since it slowly turned from a thing that made me all charismatic and happy and jumping around, to a bitter angry man. This change started when I got together with my current girlfriend, since every time we would go out and have a (probably more than one) drink, I would get jealous (I'm very jealous and insecure, working on it) f…

Man, you are so self aware. That is such a huge asset. You may have a genetic predisposition to addiction. Try not to be a "dry drunk" which is a real thing and good luck. Thanks for sharing your situation.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#52

Post by elp »

Last week.

Updating DNSSEC infrastructure for a bunch of zones we manage. As part of that update I added extra DS* records at the parent zones. We were using SHA-256 and since our new signer generated SHA-384 signatures as well I included them. All nice and standard. Our tests were all good. dnsviz.net said everything was good, but... It turns out the version of Unbound that was included in older versions of Ubuntu and Redhat can't handle SHA-384 DS records and instead of ignoring them like they are supposed to simply fail validation.

Naturally those obsolete nameservers are in use by fun people like Comcast who proceeded to drop lookups for the entire zone. This particular zone was the major commercial zone for a small country ie. co.tld. Around a million subdomains.

Fortunately it this was a subdomain inside a country so we could get the SHA-384 signatures dropped at the parent quickly, but yeah tracking down the problem was ... Lets just say it was a bad day.

I wonder if I can put "I broke the internet" on my CV?

--- * English for everyone who doesn't speak DNSSEC: DNSSEC is kind of like SSL but for DNS. A DS (Delegation Signer) record is a hash that goes in the parent zone so that resolvers can verify you are using the correct DNSKEYs. Its kind of like X509 certificates in reverse.

DNSSEC is VERY complicated and brittle with many ways to hurt yourself.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#53

Post by cambalache »

vincvinc wrote: post #21
cambalache wrote: post #11

I was laid off from a middle manager position , I was with a H1-B like Visa (not in the US) the only chance to stay in my host country was to open a business and get an investor visa. I did that with a business partner, the business went down, my partner fled with the remaining money and now the government is giving me 2 months to leave since I am not longer and investor. Good times. I have always coded so I am movin…

Which host country? People on HN might be inclined to help.

It does not matter now, because I need to leave in 2 months tops otherwise I will be deported. I am planning to move to the Americas south cone (Argentina or Brazil) so it is preferable an opportunity there or remote than in my current host country.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#56

Post by tohieungoi »

cessor wrote: post #37

Most recent: Failed to get out of bed this morning at the time I comited to the night before. I wanted to get up at 8, be at work around 9, got in at 10/11. Fairly recent: I have been doing it like this for three weeks now My larger failure: I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to improve their testing karate.…

I want to get karma point to connect with "keybase" app, Can you help me how to get karma point pls!!

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#57

Post by closingin »

Past winter, I had to deploy a new version of a package that was used by a lot of our applications (at least 5 apps, some for our customers, and some internal ones).

Because it was a "simple" package, we did not have any deployment system ready, and deploying was just SSH/SCP commands that created a directory with the package version and upload my dist. I forgot to bump the package version, and ended up wiping a working and in-use package. The problem is that this package can only work up to a specific angular version (which wasn't set in the package.json, so my build installed the wrong one), therefore the only thing that our applications were producing was a blank page.

And because I had wiped the original package, I had no way to know which angular version we needed, and we had to find a cached version to get it, by reading the angular license comment in the minified code. The shittiest 5 mins of my life, even though I'm sure no one noticed it.

What I learned from this : don't speak with someone else while deploying, huge focus loss.

PS : The company is an ISP.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#58

Post by zubspace »

raxxorrax wrote: post #38
dukeofharen wrote: post #2

Well, not recent, but a few years ago I deleted the production database of my fathers rental company (whoops). The (manual) backup was a week old. Luckily, all data was still there, but on paper (all signed contracts) so I worked overnight to restore all data from the paper pile. After this, I built a script that did a backup once a day and made sure I had to go through some extra hoops to connect to the production d…

I know how that feels. Even worse than any program or script, I especially dislike db management tools that just allow you to fire off random queries against the db. On the other hand you always get these little adrenaline rushes every time you do something like that until you can confirm that you actually fired that delete statement on the correct table... or not.

Oh dear, I know that feeling. It's just a few rows and you've done it a hundred times before. You type in the delete query in a rush and look at it for a minute.. Just to make sure... Well OK: You hit F5 and then it runs... and runs... and runs...

(12'503'450 rows affected)

Oh crap.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#59

Post by scrollaway »

aguzzi94 wrote: post #13
HNLurker2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please just drink it out tonight.a glass of wine instead if jealousy

You almost got me! I'll opt for a glass of chocolate milk, but thank you :)

Can I recommend a strawberry purée + lime + orange juice mocktail? It's my go-to non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated sweet drink and it's delicious!

Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

#60

Post by scrollaway »

cirgue wrote: post #54

I’ve been building a forum. The software part is done, I worked for like 9 months on and off to get it deployed, and now I just don’t have the motivation to do the work involved in building the community.

This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a game.

You built a forum, that's great. If you set out to build a forum, you succeeded. If you set out to build a community, you just wasted a bunch of time on doing something only loosely related at best.

So the question is, what did you actually set out to do? If you are considering this a failure, then you can turn it into a success by releasing the forum software for others to use.

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