HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is the worst that ever happened when you slipped with a mouse?

14 points by gizmore ↗ HN
One time i was on filezilla FTP and moved a folder to the parent folder. I slipped with the mouse. The application recreated logs and all the parent folders. Filezilla got crazy. A simply undo or re-move was tricky. I only slipped with the mouse. 30 min downtime.

Has something similiar ever happened to you?

13 comments

[ 475 ms ] story [ 566 ms ] thread
kstenerud
I once watched a coworker do a complete ls -lR of a remote customer system he was working on so that he could copy-paste the listing to a text editor. Unfortunately, he accidentally hit the middle mouse button while he was still over the terminal window. And he was logged in as root.

Every file that had a symlink pointing to it was overwritten (including most of bin and etc and the backup disk which was unmounted at the time). The system was completely broken, and had to be reinstalled from scratch.

treesprite82
Default behavior being for a single mouse button to paste and run (if it contains newlines) whatever's on the clipboard always seems dangerous to me. Beyond the accidental mistakes, I bet a website could catch a lot of people out about not checking in a text editor if it presented an innocuous command then swapped it out (with JS or tiny invisible text) for something nefarious when copied.
mjw1007
Many (most?) combinations of a terminal emulator and a shell nowadays won't run pasted content without a further press of the return key.

This is a consequence of "bracketed-paste mode".

stop50
Closed the browser with my remote session. Took over 10 minutes to get everything back.
eternityforest
I've never had more than minor inconvenience with a mouse. Unlike terminal, where I've accidentally wiped a(Thankfully unused) windows partition with dd.

GUI software typically has confirmation and undo as high priorities. Most software that doesn't is throwing away a lot if the benefit of GUI.

Peach_blue
Clicking the wrong flightpath in WoW classic. That would cost you time that felt like an eternity back then.
airbreather
Not actually happened, but we were doing hazard and risk studies for a new mineral processing plant that had some very large gas fired equipment and due to the placement of adjacent units and possibility there could be a turnaround crew on the adjacent unit, the identified scenario was "operator sits on mouse, kills twenty people".

End result is we took the equipment in question out of the normal operator controls and put it in the safety system PLC to remove direct control by fat fingered (butts) of operators.

0xfaded
I had a putty session open connected to a friends server he was trying to recover after a somewhat malicious employee walked off. For dumb reasons (basically I don't know how to use windows), I had the whole bash_history on my clipboard and accidentally middle clicked. Luckily the first commands where apt upgrade and then reboot, but that could have been a total disaster.
unixhero
Drag and drop FileZilla (which they refuse to remove btw) irreversibly.essed up a few systems and folder structures.
ad404b8a372f2b9
Accidentally liked an ex's bikini picture that she'd posted 2 years prior on Facebook. It's been over 10 years but I still think about it at night.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Kenneth39
Almost every day, it's a miss on a tab or closing a window. Clicking on malicious links. Accidental likes. It's just like everyone else :)