Type in the exact number of machines to proceed • Hacker News Board

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#231

Post by jodrellblank » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:32 AM UTC

greedo wrote: post #149

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing the person who happened to be at the wheel when a mistake like this occurs never seems like the right choice to me, especially if their performance to-date had otherwise been good. Everybody has off days, or just instances where circumstances misalign in just the wrong way. To pretend otherwise is silly; instead, it's the leader's/team's responsibility to ensure that those sort of off days don't lead to massiv…

Sometimes. And sometimes they make the same mistake over and over. We had an admin in charge of our storage. He had worked with our old vendor's SAN for years, then we got a new SAN. Trained him/certified him etc. He "accidentally" shut down the entire SAN. That brought down the entire company for over 9 hours. Fast forward two years later, he screwed up again and caused a storage outage affecting about 1100 VMs. Luc…

> "He had worked with our old vendor's SAN for years, then we got a new SAN."

Great way to invalidate years of experience. Presumably from your telling of the story, he didn't cause problems with the old vendor's SAN?

> "He "accidentally" shut down the entire SAN."

So, was it an accident, or was it an "accident"? You can't have it being a mistake if you're also hinting it was deliberate and malicious.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#232

Post by viraptor » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:33 AM UTC

csmattryder wrote: post #8

I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. I personally took it to heart, it's a good system for forcing a cache miss in the brain - make sure you're on "database production" or "database localhost" etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

I try to do that during incidents. I'm not 100% there since it's no a company rule, but it helps me at the time and later when writing up details: "I see ", " should fix it because ", "I'm starting to do now and seeing ...", etc.

It also helps when Z results in a total meltdown and you need to pull in more people to help out, so they have context of what happened.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#233

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:39 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #101

UncleMeat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't about testing if the president can do surgery. It is about forcing the president to look somebody in the eye before they kill them.

> It is about forcing the president to look somebody in the eye before they kill them. Right, but can you understand that 'the President being able to look somebody in the eye before they killing them' is not a requisite for 'the employment of nuclear weapons being justified'? We require the president to be able to do B before they can do A. But what if A is the right thing to do but the President is not able to do B…

Doing A cannot be the right thing to do if you think doing B is still impossible.

If you cannot kill your friend to kill a few hundreds of thousands more, how can it possibly be justified? I just struggle to come up with a scenario where that is the case.

Of course I’m of the school that thinks firing nuclear weapons is never a good idea.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#234

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:41 AM UTC

the_af wrote: post #163

chrisseaton wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole point of the 'rule' is that they have to do it themselves.

I think it would work equally well if the president had two aides and had to order one to butcher the other, in front of her eyes, in order to launch a nuclear strike. Regardless of the exact details, I think the point of this thought experiment is that for a head of state, the decision to launch a massive attack that will cause hundreds of thousands of casualties can feel a little abstract. "Bombing a city" can seem…

I guess that’s exactly why we order a bombing raid instead of an invasion. We don’t have to deal with the consequences of that action so directly.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#235

Post by ineedasername » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:43 AM UTC

Oh god this would have saved me so much stress once. It was early in my career, and part of my duties was to run a merge/purge process on dupe records.

I'd select the dupes for merge using a checkbox, but the vendor's interface for this just had a "confirm" button. So, I confirmed. However I'd selected the "select all" box and.... confirmed. Merging every. single. record. into one (1) record.

I was fortunate, the vendor was able to roll back the changes, and nothing was lost. I also had a very good mentor-like boss who avoided reaming me out before we knew if there was a solution or not, and when there was he simply told me "I'm sure you've learned your lesson, but don't do that again."

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#236

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #136

gumby wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well exactly... doesn't that show you that it's a bad idea? I don't think so, no. Sometimes we think too abstractly and make what turn out to be poor decisions. Emotions are really valuable heuristics and should be harnessed at a time like this.

Absolutely not, mutually assured destruction only works if both sides know that the other is committed to carrying out a retaliatory strike in the minutes before their death. It’s essential that the person in the position to order a retaliatory strike be someone ready to kill hundreds of millions of people for no reason other than the fact that they said they would. Putting emotional barriers between that person and…

> Absolutely not, mutually assured destruction only works if both sides know that the other is committed to carrying out a retaliatory strike in the minutes before their death.

Not really. You would need to be absolutely certain that the other party won’t carry out a retaliatory strike before they’re destroyed.

The only thing that matters is that the other party is capable of indescriminate destruction, not the certainty they’ll actually do it.

It’s like punching someone holding a gun in the face.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#237

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

benlivengood wrote: post #171

roydivision wrote: post #12

Reminds me of the proposal to keep the nuclear launch codes inside the body of an innocent volunteer, so the President would have to kill the person to get the codes. https://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/proposal-keep-the-nuclear-...

Too bad sociopaths and narcissists are more common in positions of power. All it would do is uselessly kill a volunteer. Time is also of the essence for MAD; known delay only makes MAD less effective if e.g. sub-launched cruise missiles are faster than dissection. And do all the fallback commanders need their own willing victim to mount a response?

I dunno, Putin? Yes. Trump, shmaybe? Obama, not really.

I guess that’s why they consider the idea here and not there.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#238

Post by stjohnswarts » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

csmattryder wrote: post #8

I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. I personally took it to heart, it's a good system for forcing a cache miss in the brain - make sure you're on "database production" or "database localhost" etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

I always called it a "that can't be right" interrogative.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#239

Post by stjohnswarts » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

robaato wrote: post #183

harikb wrote: post #62

I have a habit of creating cli tools, which potentially do dangerous things, to default to dry-run mode. For example, instead of the typical `--dry-run` or `-n` option, my scripts instead had a cheesy `--do-it` to be non-dry-run. It is annoying as hell to my colleagues, but saved the day many times.

Bash tip I picked up from observation - always start a potential command with # # rm -rf some_dir Then if you accidentally press return before completing it hasn't happened. When you have reviewed and are sure it is correct, you recall and delete the hash to execute - simples!

I generally throw up a status report type of thing "you are applying $this_operation to $this_many_machines on $this_farm. Continue (yes/no)?" and enforce yes/no full typing. Anything other than yes is a no

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#240

Post by PureParadigm » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

harikb wrote: post #62

I have a habit of creating cli tools, which potentially do dangerous things, to default to dry-run mode. For example, instead of the typical `--dry-run` or `-n` option, my scripts instead had a cheesy `--do-it` to be non-dry-run. It is annoying as hell to my colleagues, but saved the day many times.

A coworker of mine would write all his bash scripts to echo out the commands it would run, and then to actually run it he would pipe it to bash. This way he could inspect the commands to make sure they were correct before running them.

Something like: ./dangerous-script.sh $args | bash