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I'm not sure whether it's terrifying or relieving to realize that if all I dream of comes to pass and I achieve something akin to the legendary status of pg in
by dasil003 14y ago
I'm not sure whether it's terrifying or relieving to realize that if all I dream of comes to pass and I achieve something akin to the legendary status of pg in the hacker community that I will still be susceptible to the inevitable facepalm moments that come with direct database access.
In any case I am thankful for the detailed explanation.
- hnriot 14y agohe's not legendary for his IT skills.
- dasil003 14y agoLow blow.
- jbverschoor 14y agoNow he is ;)
- mark-r 14y agoIt was his IT skills that got him the big sale to Yahoo that got him the bucks to start YC. Not sure where this comment came from.
- papsosouid 14y agoYou really think yahoo bought viaweb because of pg's legendary ability to reboot servers and type "./configure && make && sudo make install"?
- larrys 14y agoSome of the most spectacular airplane crashes are by the most experienced pilots. If you've ever tried something new as a hobby you tend to be very careful. Once you gain confidence you take more chances and don't do what even a beginner might do.
- stcredzero 14y agoThere must be a rare personality type that never experiences this kind of overconfidence. Perhaps a less glamorous cousin to the Buddhist beginner's mind?
- larrys 14y agoI find that if I am doing something "dangerous" (example might be using power tools) I have to say to my self "be careful this is dangerous" to avoid being on autopilot and making casual errors. Maybe a better example is the way you train yourself after you've picked up a box the wrong way and pull something to try to remember each and every time to watch your specific movements.
- dasil003 14y agoI have to remind myself this every time I start up Sequel Pro now since in the last release they switched the command keys for Run Selected... and Run All...
- kamjam 14y agoBut at some point, you will become complacent, and it will taken a mistake to remind yourself again. We've all done it. I shut down an NT4 production server because I was connected via remote desktop and clicked shutdown rather than log off. This was back in the day when there was no pop-up asking for reason you want to shut down and confirmation. Luckily it was just our internal intranet server!
- Joeri 14y agoThe amusing part is that no matter how legendary you become, restarting the server is always a good idea to solve problems. Software is rarely designed to run forever. Last week i had a moment of madness because a line of code remained buggy even after i debugged it. Turned out it was php's opcode cache that just needed a reset to get its wits back.
- Eliezer 14y agoI thought it was a pretty cool error. I mean, you've got to not screw up on a lot of boring things before you can screw up this interestingly. Most failures are much more boring.