Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Count to ten when a plane goes down

johncbeck.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 284 posts

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#141

Post by thrownaway2424 »

marbletiles wrote: post #18
mikegreco wrote: post #4

The author states they felt it was appropriate when they were fired. In what world would it be appropriate to get fired for a single, simple, incredibly easy to make mistake? Doubly insane when there were exactly zero safeguards in place to prevent the mistake from being made.

The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…

You forgot the part where the only reason he was fucking with the F6 key in the first place was to play a game. That's irresponsible and grounds for firing.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#142

Post by deckiedan »

MBCook wrote: post #137
gry wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I actually really like the added knowledge that my login screen and password input box is a system one...

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#143

Post by ghayes »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #141
marbletiles wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…

You forgot the part where the only reason he was fucking with the F6 key in the first place was to play a game. That's irresponsible and grounds for firing.

Actually, from the article he was a system administrator and another employee had been playing a game which froze her own terminal. The author did nothing wrong except press the wrong button (and to your point: not report his coworker for playing games on her terminal in her free-time).

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#144

Post by nerfhammer »

mikegreco wrote: post #4

The author states they felt it was appropriate when they were fired. In what world would it be appropriate to get fired for a single, simple, incredibly easy to make mistake? Doubly insane when there were exactly zero safeguards in place to prevent the mistake from being made.

He publicly embarrassed USG, POTUS and a major US ally. SK is going to call up the state dept and demand an explanation. Someone has to be fired. This isn't some startup in California where everyone just plays it cool. The termination of his boss and his boss's boss and his boss's boss's boss all the way up were probably considered as well.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#145

Post by oakwhiz »

LukeShu wrote: post #128
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.

I've done it enough times that I was finally motivated to figure out to set browser.showQuitWarning=true in about:config.

The other reason I enable browser.showQuitWarning in Firefox is because you can Save and Quit instead of just quitting.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#146

Post by tremendo »

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.

Or, Settings > On Startup... "Continue where you left off". This will restore your tabs after launching Chrome.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#147

Post by jqm »

raverbashing wrote: post #59
feld wrote: post #2

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

I don't remember how it is on the newer versions, but try using fdisk in an old linux distro and see how many confirmations you get when deleting a partition. Or just the old rm -rf / Older stuff asks for much less confirmations.

It's still the same on some Linux distros at least. I wiped a Slackware install last year carelessly attempting to fdisk an external drive. I caught it a few moments in, but it took a bit of doing to get the data back and I had to re-install.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#148

Post by bentcorner »

jzwinck wrote: post #79
australis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the chance of it happening when writing a script Such as this classic: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...

Ten years prior to that, Apple had a similar bug in one of its installer scripts on OS X. I have a hard time finding much about it online now, because it happened at a time when OS X and the Internet were a lot less popular than today, but what I recall is that an unexpectedly customized installation directory (say with spaces or one level closer to "/" than the default) would cause the installer to delete a whole lo…

There's also this one from Pool of Radiance's 2001 release:

http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2001/1416.html

Uninstall wipes out your Windows directory.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#149

Post by alxndr »

djur wrote: post #123
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another alternative is confirmation fatigue. As in: I hit F6, "Do you want to reboot this?" dialog pops, I hit 'Y', "Do you really really want to reboot this?", I hit 'Y' again. Instead of actually reading what it says, you just instead press F6-Y-Y in quick succession. Modern interfaces sometimes make you type some kind of string to confirm, but most either use a password (like sudo) or some hardcoded string that ev…

Whenever I implement a bulk delete feature I tell the user how many records they're about to delete and ask them to type it back in. If it's possible they're trying to delete data from the wrong place (say, an administrative account that manages many customers) another safeguard is to have them select the name of the context (customer name, etc.) out of a list of four or five nonsense alternatives. The user experienc…

In another comment, derefr points out that GitHub similarly makes you type the name of the repo when you delete it.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#150

Post by alxndr »

MBCook wrote: post #140
grecy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Some fun exploration of a `rm -rf`'d system: http://lambdaops.com/rm-rf-remains

discussed here last month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7892247

Post reply on HN