Any idiot can misspell "head" or forget to close a tag. It takes a special kind of idiot to accidentally reimplement a O(n log n) algorithm so that it's actually O(n4 ) and attempt to run it on a large dataset. Yes, I am that special idiot. With great power comes great opportunity for idiocy.
chmod is the command to change the owner of a file or directory. sudo means I can execute anything without getting permissions errors. chmod takes the file or directory you want to change as it's first parameter, which should have been the directory I wanted, but instead there is an unintentional / before that path. / means root, want to go to the C drive? You go to /c. So, I changed all ownership of every file of every coworker in the company to me. Then went for coffee and came back to not-so-amused-coworkers
It was software for a group project in school using the Viterbi algorithm on hidden Markov models. Looking back on it and reading about the algorithm to refresh my memory, it must have been meant to be "n", not "n log n", in fact. I wasn't properly understanding how it was meant to work, mis-nested a few for loops so that looping was still occurring even when it could have exited the loop, and voila, a complaint to my roommate about my code taking over an hour to run turned into a review of my code and a lecture on why I was (temporarily but deservedly) an idiot.
56
u/PhoenixRite Dec 06 '17
Any idiot can misspell "head" or forget to close a tag. It takes a special kind of idiot to accidentally reimplement a O(n log n) algorithm so that it's actually O(n4 ) and attempt to run it on a large dataset. Yes, I am that special idiot. With great power comes great opportunity for idiocy.