Count to ten when a plane goes down • Hacker News Board

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#131

Post by vehementi » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:09 AM UTC

meepmorp wrote: post #125

vehementi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the rationale of "you made a mistake, so you're fired". By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again. If you're going to replace the employee you have to pay to hire someone even better (to recoup costs of talent hunt, training) and someone who somehow won't make a typo. It just seems like a situation that is strictly worse than keeping th…

> By making a mistake, the employee has increased her value in that she will never make that mistake again. Personal experience tells me this is not always true.

You're right, I shouldn't've used "never". But that mistake is an experience and people learn from mistakes. Now that person is less likely to make the mistake again.

I mean, the goal of the business is to create value / profit and find people who add value to your organization. Not to judge and suss out people who you discover are capable of making a mistake and saying "AHA! I FOUND YOU! You were an imposter all along not worthy of paying! Time to start from scratch again!"

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#132

Post by Houshalter » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:10 AM UTC

sushid wrote: post #97

jessaustin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...the whole window with ctrl+q. OMG I've never done that but now that I know about it I'm very afraid. If I do it tomorrow I'm blaming you.

Thankfully, Chrome has a built-in feature to prevent this from happening (on OSX at least). Just go to Chrome > Warn before Quitting and make sure there's a checkmark next to the option. Now, if you accidentally press Cmd + Q, it should prompt a "Hold Cmd + Q to Quit" instead of actually quitting.

I disabled that warning because it's annoying every time I want to close the browser, even without the dangerous keyboard shortcut. If it happens, you can go to the menu and find "recent tabs" or just ctrl+shift+t.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#133

Post by dkural » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:11 AM UTC

autokad wrote: post #129

dkural wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would think after the first two times you'd find a better way to do this, realizing your infrequent but habitual mistake. Why didn't you change any of your practices after the first two screw ups?

are you that angry co-admininstrator ? just curious

hahaha :) I didn't mean the comment to sound angry - nope not the co-admin. I do have a running interest in stuff like continuous improvement, organizational excellence etc. so consider this field research!

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#134

Post by nandemo » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:13 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #60

patio11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

c.f. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il... Suffice it to say that I am aware of situations created by a societal expectation of lifetime employment which make the above article look positively sane. (And I recently learned that, in some cases, what I had assumed was just an ironclad social contract actually is legally enforceable , which blows my mind.)

Not true. See correction to article.

The correction is unclear... Since there are always exceptions, of course it's not the case that "dismissing a permanent employee (正社員) is always illegal". But there's in fact a (somewhat vague but broad) provision in labour law and also　precedents that make it very difficult to legally fire a permanent employee in normal circunstances.

Basically you can legally fire a permanent employee in the same sense that a civil servant in most countries can be fired: if the employee does something egregious, like stealing from the company, not showing up for a long period of time with no reason, etc. Certainly not for incompetence, or even　if the company has been in the red for several years in a row.

E.g. Japan Airlines went basically bankrupt (technically a restructuring) and even so they had trouble laying off part of the staff.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#135

Post by tzs » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:15 AM UTC

dkural wrote: post #116

tzs wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh....the days of sharp tools, no failsafes, and young programmers or admins. I recall that time I wrote a batch manager for the VAX 11/780 at Caltech High Energy Physics. It consisted of a program to monitor the batch queue and start jobs as scheduled ("BATch MANager", or "BATMAN"), and a program for users to submit jobs ("Run Overnight Batch INput", or "ROBIN"). The configuration file for BATMAN was stored in /et…

One would think after the first two times you'd find a better way to do this, realizing your infrequent but habitual mistake. Why didn't you change any of your practices after the first two screw ups?

I'm not absolutely sure on the number of times. It is possible that I only rm'ed it twice, and then Norman made the link to end that. This would have been around 1981, so there has been some memory fade.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#136

Post by openjck » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:16 AM UTC

feld wrote: post #2

Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.

Some people are saying that a warning would have helped.

Remember that warning functions are easy to ignore. Never use a warning when you mean undo.

http://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#137

Post by MBCook » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:24 AM UTC

gry wrote: post #114

steven2012 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this isn't true at all. The power switch on the IBM PCs were way at the back so that people couldn't unintentionally reset the computer. The same thinking went into Ctrl-Alt-Del, which was a combination that people wouldn't accidentally hit. So having a system where F7 would reboot the entire system was pretty dumb, even in the early 80s.

I can't find information why the design(s) were as they were. The design of Ctrl-Alt-Del was intentionally unintentional. Gates noted Ctrl-Alt-Del should have been one button, not three [1]. David Bradley, the inventor of the trifecta, did make it deliberately difficult to reboot, however, it was also originally an Easter Egg which made it to production [2]. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4772680/bill-gates-ad…

Ctrl-Alt-Del was an excellent choice for it's intended purpose. It can be easily typed at they keyboard (no need to fiddle with the back of the computer) but it's very unlikely to be something you hit accidentally.

I'm not sure a single key would have been a good idea. "The reboot key" just sounds like a mistake waiting to happen. I've seen enough stories on the 'net of laptops with power buttons in terrible places on the keyboard to get a glimpse.

The mistake was using it for the Windows NT screen lock/unlock. Changing the "reboot your computer" sequence into the "start using my computer" sequence is a rather non-sensicle (ignoring implementation) choice.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#138

Post by nness » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:26 AM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #113

How about when Russia returned the data recorders after years of refusing to South Korea - made a press spectacle of it - and then South Korea discovered the recorders were empty and missing the data tapes when the press was gone. Or the US navy crew who received medals after shooting down the Iranian airline. Once there is loss of life, it is 100% politics afterwards with little to no practicality, just look at all…

> Or the US navy crew who received medals after shooting down the Iranian airline.

You make it seem like they received the medal for having shot down the plane. In reality, those who were awarded medals, were awarded Tour of Duty medals for their time spend in a combat zone. I believe the distinction is important, particularly since that class of medals are routinely awarded to individuals during their time in the military.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#139

Post by flomo » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:26 AM UTC

steven2012 wrote: post #83

smacktoward wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it was a different world back then. There were so few people administering computer networks that you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained; and the thing about highly trained people is that they tend to view things like failsafes and safeties as pointless time-wasters. "I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before…

No, this isn't true at all. The power switch on the IBM PCs were way at the back so that people couldn't unintentionally reset the computer. The same thinking went into Ctrl-Alt-Del, which was a combination that people wouldn't accidentally hit. So having a system where F7 would reboot the entire system was pretty dumb, even in the early 80s.

Meanwhile, the Apple II+ had the reset button right above the return key.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#140

Post by MBCook » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:27 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #108

taylorbuley wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks. It makes me shudder to just see this printed in the comments section!

I was leaving my old job and handing in my MacBook Pro. After getting permission from the network guys (who were going to format it anyway) I ran rm -rf / as root. It was surprisingly boring, taking a very long time to delete all my files (I should have deleted them first). Eventually it got around to deleting fonts, which caused things to render a little strange, but after 60 minutes nothing much had changed and it…

I did it to one of my linux boxes once, but caught it before it got everything.

It made for a very trippy and insightful experience. Commands that had already been run (like cp, ls, mv, cd, etc.) worked fine since they were in memory but other ones wouldn't run (/bin was one of the first to go).

I tried for about an hour to bootstrap the system back to normal by copying files of CD/etc but in the end the damage was too bad for my (very amateur) experience and I ended up reinstalling.