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

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#91

Post by smsm42 » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:04 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #80

thefreeman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I agree. Mistakes happen, everyone has accidentally hit the wrong key at one point or another in their life. I was pretty surprised how seemingly fine he was with being fired. At the same time, I guess the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response, and it has been about 30 years since it happened.

> the net result of the mistake was big enough that it did kind of require a response That's a dangerous way of thinking. 9/11 was big enough that it required a response. Not sure if we'll ever reverse the airport security stupidity that was such a response.

This is a result of a way of thinking called "Politician Fallacy": "We need to do something. This is something. Therefore, we need to do this". Of course, 9/11 required a response - however it didn't require just any response, it required appropriate response. TSA is not one, and it starts to be more and more clear to more and more people. OTOH, firing somebody who caused the network to go down at the critical moment may be entirely appropriate - one of your responsibilities is not to make such mistakes, you failed at it, you're fired.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#92

Post by CoolGuySteve » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:06 AM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #37

feld wrote: post #2

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

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…

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 everyone eventually memorizes.

But even today, Windows 7 only makes you click that one button in UAC, and most people probably do it without even thinking about it.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#93

Post by sliverstorm » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:07 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #58

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…

> you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained No amount of training can prevent something like this. It's like today's browsers where the tab can be closed with ctrl+w and the whole window with ctrl+q. It doesn't matter how many times you've done it and how used are you to the position of the 'w'. One day you will close the whole window by accident.

IMO the fact that we have multiple examples of these kinds of accident-prone key pairs does partially exonerate whoever did this particular F6/F7 bit.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#94

Post by lamontcg » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:07 AM UTC

lotsofmangos wrote: post #6

I often suspect that most of the work involved in keeping a power hierarchy going, is involved with trying to pretend that this kind of shit doesn't happen all the time.

And then conspiracy theorists latch onto this kind of shit, but believe that it must be malicious silliness...

Why didn't Reagan respond immediately? Well, he was waiting to hear from Chancellor Gorkon that the KAL flight had been successfully beamed aboard and was en route to Pluto, of course... Clearly they'd have their shit together better so it couldn't have been a 23-year old rebooting all the computers accidentally and wiping out hours of critical work -- that would just be ridiculous...

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#95

Post by sliverstorm » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:10 AM UTC

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.

Function first, failsafes second. Or fifth. Or twentieth.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#96

Post by mseebach » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:10 AM UTC

feld wrote: post #2

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

You know what's totally plausible? That hitting F6 and F7 prompted for confirmation, but using the same prompt - and he just hit "Y", "Return" as he'd done 1000 times before (just like everybody does with the UAC dialog in Windows 7 today), and that bit didn't make it into the story because it's totally irrelevant to the point he's making. Heck, it probably wasn't even F6 or F7. If he's a normal human, he likely can't remember.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#97

Post by sushid » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:10 AM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #76

viraptor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained No amount of training can prevent something like this. It's like today's browsers where the tab can be closed with ctrl+w and the whole window with ctrl+q. It doesn't matter how many times you've done it and how used are you to the position of the 'w'. One day you will close the whole window by accident.

...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.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#98

Post by btilly » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:12 AM UTC

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #92

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…

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…

I have idly considered addressing that problem when it really matters by asking multiple random questions whose answers need to be some combination of "Y" and "N" to proceed. With the result that you simply cannot engage in muscle memory.

Anyone using the app would hate me.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#99

Post by chengiz » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:14 AM UTC

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.

IMO cleary he is not telling us the entire story.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#100

Post by thinkpad20 » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:15 AM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #56

baddox wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But typing "rm -rf /" is significantly harder to do accidentally than typing F7 instead of F6.

The / key was right next to Enter on a lot of old keyboards. It was quite easy to type 'rm -rf /tmp/garbage*' and have a simple fumble turn it into 'rm -rf /'. I mean, there's this guy I know, he did that once.

The one that I did only a few months ago was something like

    $ cp -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory
    $ (run some commands to verify copy did what I wanted)
    $ rm -r path/to/some/directory path/to/very/important/directory

Of course, all I had meant to do was delete `path/to/some/directory`, but I just pressed 'up' in my history and switched `cp` to `rm`. Of course I hit Ctrl-C in an instant, but my FS was already hosed...