Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?

Re:Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work? by matellis on Wednesday January 29, 2014 @04:10PM (#7146912)

Uh, has anyone on this thread heard of HIPAA? I'm pretty sure having a summer intern get full access to actual patient data shouldn't be possible under a properly implemented set of HIPAA processes, and the same goes for the accidental UPDATE.

The story reminds me of the day I was introduced to "BEGIN TRANS", "COMMIT" and "ROLLBACK" when someone upgraded the Sybase console and helpfully changed the default setting so we didn't need those pesky semi-colons to finish a query any more. The result was:

  DELETE * FROM TABLE x
  131054 rows deleted
  WHERE a = "foo"
  >> Malformed query <<

Phone starts to ring a few seconds later as all the users saw their morning's work disappear.

This stuff is way too easy for us noobs. Thank goodness that with modern technology we've found ways to make sure it doesn't happen any more... :-)

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Re:Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work? by HeyLaughingBoy on Wednesday January 29, 2014 @08:46PM (#7148558)

Honestly, as long as he's had HIPAA training, there's no difference between an intern making the changes and a 10-year employee doing so.

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