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Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

> after a couple of glasses of red wine, we deleted the production database by accident

> It’s tempting to blame the disaster on the couple of glasses of red wine. However, the function that wiped the database was written whilst sober.

It was _written_ then, but you're still admitting to the world that your employees do work on production systems after they've been drinking. Since they were working so late, one might think this was emergency work, but it says "doing some late evening coding". I think this really highlights the need to separate work time from leisure time.

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No. Your systems and processes should protect you from doing something stupid, because we’ve all done stupid things. Most stupid things are done whilst sober.

In this case there were like 10 relatively easy things that could have prevented this. Your ability to mentally compile and evaluate your code before you hit enter is not a reliable way to protect your production systems.

Coding after drinking is probably not a good idea of course, but “think better” is not the right takeaway from this.

> Coding after drinking is probably not a good idea

I’ve done some of my most productive work this way. Not on production systems fortunately, and not in a long time.

Yes, it can be productive (depends on exactly what you are doing). But I imagine you revise your work while sober before you deploy it.

Riding the Ballmer Peak is a precarious operation, but I simply cannot deny its occasional effectiveness.

Well played, and it's always pleasant to find XKCD in one's search results. (And an on-topic one at that).

For ref: https://xkcd.com/323/

A highly experienced developer in their 50s who I used to work with said that they used to regularly sit down and code with a pint. Until on one occasion they introduced some Undefined Behaviour into their aplication during one of these sessions and it took them 3 days to track down! Probably less of an issue with modern tooling. Still, it certainly makes me think twice before drinking and coding.

You know it's totally feasible to make a car that won't turn on for drunk people. Should those systems be installed on all cars, in pursuit of creating systems that don't permit stupid actions?

Maybe such a breathalyzer interlock could be installed on your workstation too. After all, your systems and processes should prevent you from stupid things.

Don’t be absurd. Of course there are costs and tradeoffs to guardrails, and you have to balance the tradeoffs based on your requirements.

This person had to publicly apologize to their customers. One or two low-cost guardrails could have prevented it and would probably have been worth the cost.

Is that absurd? Systems should prevent mistakes, unless the part needed to implement that is a hundred dollars or so? That seems like quite the walk-back. Courts order alcoholics to install these things, they're established available technology. What tradeoffs are you balancing here?

It's a free website to keep scoreboards. Not a mission critical nuclear missile launcher.

(But if your mission critical system relies on that scoreboard website, that's on you...)

Honestly not a bad idea to install the interlocks on all cars.

Yes. I could finally start a failed interlock story blog.

Or a blog on being unable to drive your kid to an emergency room because you just finished a glass of wine over dinner.

A problem with devices of that type is that they only test for a potential source of inability to drive safely. What we want is to test for an inability to drive safely.

And while one is easy and might give some quick wins, the drawbacks scare me too much.

Being unable to take your car when your child needs to go to the ER would be terrible.

Actually getting in the car while under the influence such of stress and alcohol sounds worse.

I know someone who had a glass of wine just before her daughter needed to be brought to the hospital. This was just two days ago. She simply concluded she could not drive. Luckily, she was able to get a taxi.

Maybe we should, as a society, invest in taxis equipped with medical facilities and trained personnel so that they can provide first response medical treatment while on the way to the ER.

I'm sure that would save a lot of lives. An ambulatory medical service, if you will.

Uber Meds.

Sometimes ambulances are occupied and taking a taxi goes faster. Especially if it's something which isn't immediately life threatening.

I once dislocated my shoulder while on a large trampoline and was unable to get up from my hands and knees due to the intense pain whenever the trampoline wobbled. The ambulance was redirected to more serious injuries three times. I was stuck in that position waiting for two hours before it arrived.

Sure, that's true.

In that scenario it would also be appropriate to wait for a driver to sober up before driving you to the hospital if neither ambulance nor taxi were available (or delayed). One glass of wine would be out of most people's systems after two hours.

Thus poking hole in the "drunk drive someone to the hospital" argument, which is what this was all about in the first place.

I did argue, in my original comment, that drunk driving should not be an option. I certainly stand by that. My original comment also mentioned a taxi, to which you replied about ambulances.

In my previous comment I just meant that sometimes ambulances can take a good while and a taxi might not.

In the unfortunate case of the trampoline there were several sober people with driver's license and cars available and a taxi would have been there immediately.

Unfortunately,they failed to get me out of there, meaning I still had to wait until an ambulance was available. It was beyond painful and exhausting both physically and mentally. But it was still technically not an emergency.

That’s a problem with the ambulance service. Not with people being able to drive while drunk.

Yes. I was answering a comment suggesting the use of an ambulance (instead of a regular taxi). Simply pointing out that, in practice, there are times when a taxi can get you there faster.

Fair enough :)

Note that ambulance ride (depending on insurance) may cost an order or 2 of magnitude more than the taxi. Well worth it in some circumstances - but not always the best option.

This didn't spring to my mind as I'm Swedish and here it's less than a taxi and any medical costs beyond the first USD $130 per year is covered by the free health insurance.

You are still simply going with one glass of wine will affect everyone equally, and that is proven to be untrue. (Or stress, for that matter)

While your friend made a call judging their own abilities and the level of emergency, that's exactly how it should be: cars should not stop us humans for making that decision.

(Fwiw, if you were just having an alcoholic drink, a breathalizer would show a much higher concentration even though alcohol might not have even kicked in or there wasn't enough for it to kivk in at all)

There was a funny story recently in the UK, where a football team was late for a match because their breathalyser-equipped team bus refused to start. Turns out it wasn’t that the driver had been drinking, rather that the alcohol-based disinfectant they’d used to clean the bus triggered it.

It will be a great idea when the reliability of the system will have a large number of nines, so chances that you are stranded in the middle of nowhere and the car does not want to start because of a fault will be less than being hit by an asteroid. Other than that, people would consider it an unsafe product and refuse to use it and people vote for what finally becomes a law.

I heard the same argument for electronic gun safety measures, except that no government agency even consider using it for their own guns. Why? They are not reliable enough, yet.

Replace a breathalyzer with something that's less intruisive (like a camera with AI that would observe the person, AI with thermal imaging or air quality sensors, or another possibly-fictional-yet-believable piece of technology) and suddenly, in my eyes, the technology in this thought experiment becomes a no brainer.

If there was more of a cultural pressure against drunk driving and actual mechanisms to prevent it that aren't too difficult to maintain and utilize, things like the Daikou services ( https://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-the-Japanese-daikou-s... ) would pop up and take care of the other logistical problems of getting your car home. And the world would be all the better for it, because of less drunk driving and accidents.

I think a camera is far more intrusive than a breathalyzer.

Mercedes[1] has drowsiness detector, it observes the driver through sensors. It's freakishly accurate.

[1] https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/ATTEN...

> Most stupid things are done whilst sober.

That is because most companies these days have processes around drinking in workplace, coming in drunk and working drunk.

Most mistakes are done sober only in environments where drinking couple of vine cups and then doing production change is considered unacceptable. In environment where drunk people work, mistakes are made when drunk.

The whole piece has a slightly annoying flippant tone to it. We were drunk! Computers just.. do this stuff sometimes! Better to sound contrite and boring in such a situation IMO.

Also I agree with other comments: doing some work after a glass or two should be fine because you should have other defences in place. “Not being drunk” shouldn’t be the only protection you have against disaster.

The Exxon Valdez comes to mind - the company blamed the drunk captain, but this was just part of huge systemic failures and negligence.

If your captain feels the need to be drunk, you’ve probably made a few mistakes before it got to that point.

Yeah, I agree I'm being slightly flippant.

But it's just a side-project and I will continue late night coding with a glass of wine. I find it hugely enjoyable.

I would have a different mind-set if I was writing software for power stations as a professional.

But it's just a side-project and I will continue late night coding with a glass of wine.

Normally, this would be fine. But, it appears the site has paying members. Presumably, it's not "just a side-project" to them. You owe them better than tinkering with prod while tipsy.

I don't think that's fair. We've all had occasions from time to time when we've had a drink at lunch time or even had to do emergency work in the evening after having a drink.

The bigger issue is the lack of guardrails to protect against accidental damage. This is also a common trait for hobby projects (after all, it's more fun to hack stuff together) but hopefully the maintainer will use this experience as a sobering reminder (pun intended) to put some guardrails in place now.

According to the about page, "the employees" consist of one guy working on it in his spare time.

I am not a drinker myself (drink 1-3 times a year), but in the past I have coded while slightly buzzed on a few occasions. I could not believe the level of focus I had. I never investigated it further, but I'm pretty sure the effects of alcohol on our coding abilities is not nearly as bad as it affects our motor skills. Imo, fatigue is far worse.

I've found just the opposite. Any booze at all and I basically can't work for hours.

Me too, partly because of the reduced short-term memory (which coding relies on heavily). But more than that, my motivation drops through the floor because I can’t shake the thought that life is too short to fight with computers all day.

When I was not yet a teetotaler, each time I was hitting my maths textbooks after a few drinks, I could not believe my level of focus, and everything was clear and obvious. Textbook pages were flying at a speed never seen.

Of course the next day, when re-reading the same pages, I was always discovering that the previous day I had everything wrong, nothing was obvious, and all my reasoning when with alcohol was false because simplistic and oblivious of any mathematical rigor.

Similar effect with psilocybin or LSD - you think you had a really profound and insightful experience, but once you think back on it you realize that (most of the time) you just got the impression that it was profound and insightful.

Its there any difference between having a profound experience and having "just the impression" of it?

Also, nothing is comparable between alcohol and psychodelics

Not a great idea for studying anyway because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory

In short, ability to recall memories is at least in part dependent on being in a similar state to the time when memories are formed, e.g. something learned while being intoxicated will be more easily recalled only when intoxicated again.

For me it's really hit and miss - it can either increase focus and motivation, invigorate the mind, while reducing distractions. Other times it has the opposite effect. Same with cannabis. The cannabis absolutely took a decade or so of recreational use until I discovered/developed coding well under the influence.

Though I'm talking one or two drinks here, not firing up vscode after a night out or going through a bottle of rum.

https://xkcd.com/323/

I have no employees. I only have myself to blame

Sounds like they weren't trying to do work on production.

I think it's just a joke

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