

What's the biggest programming mistake you've ever made? - andreiursan
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9yejl/whats_the_biggest_programming_mistake_youve_ever/

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p_sherman
Is there any way we can stop with the reddit and Rolling Stones posts?

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sigvef
Just as a heads-up, this reddit post is 2 years old.

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Tangaroa
About twelve years ago, I wrote a CGI script with a loop like
"for(i=10;i>0;i++){}", with the counter going in the wrong direction. Since it
was running as apache, I did not have rights to kill it. My buddy used this
server for his business and I had DOSed it for about fifteen minutes until the
integer overflowed. If the language had used a bignum, it would have been
worse.

I made as similar mistake on the school's server a couple of years later when
I had an infinite loop in an XSLT file that I was developing. Fortunately,
libxslt had a way of detecting infinite loops in which it logged a warning to
/var/log/messages and, far less fortunately, repeated the loop. Once again, I
did not have rights to stop it and I had run it on a weekend when nobody was
working. The hard drive was full well before anyone came in to work on Monday.

Lessons learned: Test web-based programs from the command line whenever
possible. If you're a server admin, let your users' CGIs run under their
identities and consider using resource limits.

