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Comment by tauwauwau | Hacker News Reader

Once we get used to doing same thing multiple times a day, it doesn't matter if the log shows that we're about to take a destructive action, we'll still do it. Only thing that is foolproof is to not take the destructive action because people make mistake, it's human nature. I don't know how this can be implemented, may be encrypt the files, take a backup in some other location (which may not be allowed).

Multiple reviewers here didn't catch the mistake

https://www.bloombergquint.com/markets/citi-s-900-million-mi...

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While this is a huge issue, a solution (well, a partial mitigation) I've seen and used is the "Pointing and Calling" technique. The basic idea is that you incorporate more actions beyond reading and typing or pressing a button—generally by having people point at something and say aloud what it is they're doing and what they expect to happen.

It's used rather extensively in safety-critical public transportation in Japan [1] and to a lesser extent in New York (along with many other countries) [2]. This can easily extend to software without overcomplicating by just setting the expectation that engineers, Q&A, etc. do this even when alone.

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

Hell, GitHub does that to an extent, with the "type the name of this repository to delete it" prompts. Typing the name of the repository isn't exactly perfect, but it's an interesting direction.

There was a thread recently about a repo that accidentally went private and lost all of its stars because of confusion with GH teams vs GH profile readme repo naming. I think this type of prompt is very useful for explicitly preventing the rare worst case scenarios but the problem is making any type of prompt "routine" so that our brains fail to process it.

The suggestion in that post about how to fix it is good, and mirrors one I read in the Rachael by the Bay blog - type the number of machines to continue:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/26/num/

The take away by both is there is actually something to do which can wake people up when the stakes are high, and they might not be doing what they expect.

And most importantly, don't let yourself get into the habit of copy pasting the value

I wonder if your could print some non visible characters in there to taint the copied value in some detectable way.

Prompt in words, but expect the value in numbers, eg: "Twenty-five" and the box requires you to type "25"? At least this specific case, it would require you to type it.

yeah, that would possibly stop the copy and paste problem. to make it robust they would need to use a string of a few non-visible characters but that would fail if the browser's clipboard system doesn't copy them over for some kind of privacy initiative. might be another way it fails that I can't think of right now.

This is it I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758

I always copy-paste into that box as well, they should probably make at least an attempt at disabling pasting into it

Azure has the same when deleting a database just a verify this is the correct one by typing the db name

I heard of this technique, but unfortunately I don't see how it can be easily applied in software engineering/devops.

Also, I now realized that aviation checklists seem to tend to be done similarly with gestures - at least from what I saw on YouTube, not sure if that's representative or only used during education (?)

Spelling out loudly the command you are about to execute and explaining the reasoning behind it can help a lot too.

Ok, but am I to do it on every single command I do on my terminal? Or on which ones specifically? If the problem we're trying to solve is that I can sometimes overlook the "dangerous commands" among "safe ones", by definition of overlooking it won't work if I tell myself to "spell out the command only in case of the dangerous ones", no?

I'm honestly trying to think of the way how I could approach this for myself, just I don't see a clear solution yet that wouldn't require me to spell out everything I type in my terminal window.

“I’m removing that semicolon!” (Pointing)

Parent meant this sort of pointing.

https://t.co/TjfX5K54H7

Because everyone assumes that everyone else is looking at it more closely than they are. “I’ll just do a cursory look since I’m sure everyone else is doing a in-depth look.” Narrator: nobody did an in-depth search.

I'm a fan of doing things temporally so data is very rarely actually deleted from the database. Most of the time, you just update the "valid_to" field to the current time. Sometimes real deleted are required such as with privacy requests, but I think that sort of thing is pretty rare.

If your application has space concerns, you can modify this approach to be like a recycle bin where you delete records which are no longer valid and have been invalid for over a month (or whatever time frame is appropriate for your application). However, I think this is unnecessary in most cases except for blob/file storage.

That form had a couple weird checkboxes with odd wording. It is a famous mistake, but also rather understandable just because the form was cryptic.

> Multiple reviewers here didn't catch the mistake

Sure, but we can only do so much. I find its good bang for buck and alternatives that might prevent that are not always available, so we do the best we can. You gotta make a call on whether its enough or not.

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