upvote
my favorite Debian package is Mollyguard so when you shut down a server remotely via SSH it just checks the second time to make sure you really wanted to shut down that server and not your laptop.
reply
"Are you sure?" type guards are not suitable for actions which the user does regularly. If a user repeats this action regularly, they quickly automate the thought process (i.e. don't give it any thought anymore) and it becomes useless.
reply
I agree. Fortunately, molly-guard the software can be configured with automated checks to allow safe actions (e.g. shutting down servers that don't receive significant traffic) without pestering the user.

This means a properly configured mollly-guard is invisible for routine actions but kicks in only when a genuine mistake is suspected because the operation would cause some sort of meaningful loss. That way, users aren't trained to ignore it.

reply
> can be configured with automated checks to allow safe actions (e.g. shutting down servers that don't receive significant traffic)

That's clever. This is what I meant when I wrote, that software allows for better solutions.

reply
Reminds me of this Matt Levine

>> At 08:56 a ‘Trade Limit Warning’ pop-up alert appeared within PTE. This presented the trader with 711 warning messages, consisting of hard block and soft block messages, listed in a single alert where only the first 18 lines of alerts were immediately visible unless the person who received the alert scrolled down. The trader did not appreciate their inputting error and overrode all of the soft warnings in the pop-up.

> You get 711 alerts, you only see 18 of them, you are like “ehh 18 alerts is pretty much the normal number,” you override them all without reading.

reply
Which is why that's not what it does. It asks you to input the hostname instead, just like deleting a repo in Github does.
reply
I know how it works. Please don't nit-pick. It's an interruption that forces the user to confirm. That's what I meant.

I discussed this also here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845740

reply
It's not nitpicking. The nature of the interruption being different is material. I've lost files to automatically answering yes to rm -i y/n confirm. Typing the hostname itself is different enough to get me, at least to stop and go wait, hold on. And snap me out of doing the wrong one. Especially an SSH gateway machine.
reply