How I Fired Myself • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Fired Myself

#421

Post by desas » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 1:46 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #419

desas wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Babies have to learn how to work a nipple, it's not some innate human knowledge.

We may be quibbling over definitions. But do you believe that no mammal has an instinctual understanding of using nipples? Or that humans are unique among mammals in that regard?

I'm afraid I have no idea about the answer to either of your questions. I assumed the "we" in your original post meant "we humans".

I do understand that humans don't have an instinctual understanding of using nipples, human babies have a physical sucking reflex that kicks in when you put anything near their mouths. They usually quickly learn that sucking a nipple in a particular way gives out lots of yummy milk.

Re: How I Fired Myself

#422

Post by mgedmin » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 6:19 AM UTC

rurounijones wrote: post #317

protomyth wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one job I went with this scheme for terminal background color: green screen for development, blue for testing, yellow for stage / system test, and red for production. This saved a lot of problems because I knew to be very careful when typing in the red.

I have done this on a few servers but found that it always screws up formatting of the lines in bash when they are long and you are hitting up and going back through the history. Did you change the $PS1 variable? Can you share your config?

You need to wrap the escapes in \[ \] to tell bash (actually readline) that these characters do not advance the cursor when printed.

Re: How I Fired Myself

#423

Post by eru » Wed, Mar 06, 2013, 11:50 AM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #299

reinhardt wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds so unreal that I am having doubts about the veracity of the story and would defer any judgement before hearing from the "other side".

I've seen something like this. It could be a situation where they were transitioning from that backup service to their own server or another service, and the move was never completed due to some hiccup or priority change. But if no one is watching to ensure the move was finished (or they got distracted), then something many people treat as set-it-and-forget-it could easily get into that state.

If you are transitioning from one backup service to another, shouldn't you only cancel your old service, after you successful set up and tested the new one?

Re: How I Fired Myself

#424

Post by ferrouswheel » Tue, Mar 12, 2013, 9:26 PM UTC

greyboy wrote: post #257

ferrouswheel wrote: post #200

Ah, I remember being called away from my new year holiday when an engineer dropped our entire database. This happened because they didn't realise they were connected to the production database (rather than their local dev instance). We were a business intelligence company, so that data was vital. Luckily we had a analysis cluster we could restore from, but afterwards I ensured that backups were happening... never aga…

This brings to mind on of my common responses: if it's not important enough to back up - it's not important! It may be expensive, either in complexity, costs of storage/services, etc, but it's a necessity. I'm curious about many of the comments in this thread - why are people logging in as table owners? It's not too difficult (for talented data-driven companies) to create roles or accounts that, while powerful, still…

One answer... MongoDB.