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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

> Computers are just too complex and there are days when the complexity gremlins win.

Wow. But then again it's not like programmers handle dangerous infrastructure like trucks, military rockets or nuclear power plants. Those are reserved for adults

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I'm not sure I follow your point - I think you'll find the same attitude towards complexity by operators of military rockets and nuclear power plants. If you look at postmortems/root-cause analyses/accident reports from those fields, you'll generally find that a dozen things are going wrong at any given time, they're just not going wrong enough to cause problems.

We already know humans make mistakes. But for this particular scenario lets blame computers.

I feel that computers make it easier for this danger to be more indirect, however. The examples you give are physical, and even the youngest of child would likely recognise they are not regular items. A production database, meanwhile, is visually identical to a test database, if measures are not made to make it distinct. Adults though we may be, we're human, and humans can make really daft mistakes without the right context to avoid them

All of those items have a lot of safety software in them.

There are also countless safety measures on physical items that have been iterated on over decades to prevent all kinds of accidents. Things like putting physical locks on switches to prevent machinery being turned on while people are working on it.

Can you imagine if instead of a physical lock it just said “are you sure you wish to turn on this machine”. “Of course I want to turn it on, that’s why I pressed the button”

Some software makes it a lot harder for the user to mess up now. When deleting a repo on GitLab you have to type the name of the repo before pressing delete and then it puts it in a pending deletion state for a month before it’s actually deleted. Unfortunately for developers we typically get minimal cli tools which will instantly cause a lot of damage without any way to undo.

So, silly idea. What if, to work on the production database, you had to go into the special production room, colored in the special production color, scented with the special production perfume, and sit on a just tiny bit uncomfortable production chair.

Basically make it clear even to the caveman brain that things are different.

I actually really like this idea... but who am I kidding, it's a luxury I don't have time for when I've got to fix stuff.

Yep, I hate when I'm dealing with a system literally comprised of logic and a magic gremlin shows up to ruin my day.

Seems like they though a casual "everyman" type of explanation would suffice, but really who would trust them after this?

I understand that web interfaces are trivial, unimportant work (it s what i do), but how can one sleep with such an unresolved mystery?

One explanation for the author feeling that way is that the system is has too much automation. Being in a situation where you take on more responsibilities of the system at a shallower level leads to less industry expertise. This, as it turns out, places the security of the system in a precarious position.

These is pretty common, as devs tool belts have grown longer over time.

I think at some point we will stop automating or reverse some of the automation.

> too much automation

Literally just the automation of the test suite. That's 1 automation.

> These is pretty common

? Waiting for FB to delete their db

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