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The Worst Typo I Ever Made

Tom Scott · 6.4M views · 2020-06-01 · 11:25

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Overview

Tom Scott recounts the worst typo he ever made, a subtle mistake in code with destructive consequences at a previous job. It is a cautionary tale about irreversible operations.

On Hacker News

Shared in outage and accidental-deletion threads as a relatable, well-told horror story.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Software practice, open source & careersDatabases & storageTesting, debugging & developer tools
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What people said

sneela · 2026-07 · Recommendation

The good ol' Ohnosecond: > An "ohnosecond" is the second after one makes a terrible mistake, such as deleting the wrong file or sending a text message to the wrong person, where the person in question can do nothing but say "oh no". The term is believed to originate from Elizabeth Powell Crowe's 1993 novel, The Electronic Traveler. Reminds me (and probably a lot of devs) of a time when I deployed something breaking to production many years ago :), of course I didn't know it would break production beforehand. Recently, I accidentally deleted my entire shell history which caused me quite a bit of slowdown for some time. I'm quite used to modifying complicated commands with Ctrl+R and fzf; the deletion of my shell was truly horrifying. Tom Scott, as usual, has a great video about the onosecond (sic): [VIDEO]

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rococosbasilisk · 2020-08 · Recommendation

Tom Scott has a great video on his "Oh Shoot" moment ( [VIDEO] ). Thinking back on the times I've had code exist nowhere else but the clipboard...

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Sophira · 2021-10 · Reference

Somebody just had their very own "onosecond". [VIDEO] The video is one that Tom Scott published in June 2020 about the worst typo he ever made in one of his prior jobs, and while the Facebook mistake is almost certainly not going to be anything irrecoverable like this one, you can bet that Facebook pride themselves on being available all the time.

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Sources

Video by Tom Scott, played through YouTube.

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