I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Don't tell them to run "rm -rf /" as root. That's too nice. There might be inodes left on the hard drive.

MAKE IT WORSE:

"cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda" as root.

LEAVE NOTHING.

Me on my laptop. My flatmate is next to me. I'm trying to create a live CD.
Me: I'm gonna dd this iso on the USB. What is the output file? /dev/...?
Flatmate: /dev/sda.
Me: Okay, th... Waiiiiitt...
*Flatmate laughs his ass off*

List of commands that will destroy your Linux system.

BEWARE! THESE COMMANDS WILL GREATLY HARM YOUR LINUX DEVICE! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE DONE ON YOUR DEVICE! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU CANT GET YOUR DEVICE TO WORK AGAIN!

- sudo rm -rf /*
- mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda
- cowsay hello there >> dev/sda
- :(){:|:&};:
- rm -f /bin/su
- rm -f /usr/bin/sudo
- cd /etc;echo hello | tee *

The fun I'm having is currently overwhelming.

Never trust a breadboard. Days spent trying to figure out why my I2C device was not recognised. SCL and SDA were FUCKING SHORTED INSIDE THE BREADBOARD.

Linux gives you so much freedom, for example the freedom to fuck your system.
When i was experimenting with bootsticks i typed the following in the terminal:
sudo dd if=bootstick.iso of=/dev/sdb

Where is the mistake? The usb-stick was already plugged in at boot-time and since it was bootable linux mint named it /dev/sda.

You propably already realized it, i wrote the iso the my harddrive. My attempts to restore the partition-table failed, but luckily the kernel still had it in memory and i was able to backup my files via nautilus.
Still, i nearly had a heart attack

I wish I could type into my brain:"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1337"

To delete everything of my ex gf memories...

She just wrote a message, again...

Remember to regularly defragment your drives on linux. use this handy command.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

Terminology:
dd: Disk defragment
if: input file (the pattern to search for, and should always be /dev/zero)
of: output file (your disk, /dev/sda for instance)
bs: blocsize 1M is fine here

$ dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096
^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C ^C

Happens

My idiot friend nearly destroyed his install because of me.

He was complaining to me about some program he was running in terminal writing too much lines to terminal he didn't care about.

So I wrote to him verbatim:
"Just redirect the output to /dev/null by running it like ```cmd > /dev/null```.
Or better yet do ```cmd > /dev/sda``` it will be more fun ;)"

Three minutes later I get a screenshot from him where he's trying to run ```cmd > /dev/sda```, but it keeps saying Permission denied. He's tried to use sudo in the screenshot like million different ways.

Thank god he doesn't know how to use sudo with redirects...

This was about two years ago, and is so fucking simple. But it's because I fucked up something so goddamn simple that I'll never be able to forget.

One of the stupidest fucking things I've done?

Went into the GNOME Disks utility trying to wipe a SanDisk Cruzer USB drive. BAM! There goes the entirety of my /dev/sda disk! Oh, and you know all partitions on that disk?? Gone!! Nothing I could do.

I don't know which pisses me off about myself more: The fact that Linux has more complicated tools that do the same exact job but make me think about what the actual fuck I'm doing thus preventing fuckups, or the fact that I was too fucking lazy to use them and decided to go with the dirt simple option and still managed to fuck myself over in the end...

Lesson for you kids that haven't fucked yourselves over in a way this dumb yet: ALWAYS have that backup installer USB somewhere. ALWAYS.

Finally got a new laptop at work!
The first thing to do: install linux in it so the beast could roar free.

Download mint iso, dd it into an usb drive, boot it up in uefi mode, .... /dev/sda read error: -110. Fuck, must be smth w/ secure-boot. Disable it, rinse and repeat. Same error. Wtf, could my drive be broken?
dd iso into another usb drive, boot live env -- read error. THE FUCK! It's wildly unlikely my both usb drives died on the same fucking day!

Go to it admin to ask for an usb drive. Iso->usb, boot -- live env is up. My my, look who's unfortunate today :)

cryptsetup, install, reboot et voila, the beast is finally roaring!

Sometimes I wish I could just print out Ubuntu byte by byte onto a paper and then throw it into a fire to just watch it burn... ....🤔.... .....hold on!.... ....waaaait a moment.... can I just literally do "dd if=/dev/sda | lp" ?!! 😈 ...brb

Decided it was high time to give windows the boot, other than the very rare gaming I do there seemed to no longer be a valid reason to keep it. So off I went, kubuntu looked nice, but after 2 hours I determined it did not like me much. No matter how much I google, could not find out why it would not pick up sda in the installers drive selection.

So figured, last try, grab the Ubuntu ISO and booted with that, and what do you know, 5 min later I am installing my software....

Come on guys, I want to gather deadly One-Liner for Linuxsystems. Maybe someone has some more creative ways than the standard ones below.

1. rm -rf / —no-preserves-root
2. echo . > /dev/sda
(3). :(){ :|: & };:
4. mv / /dev/null

I'm a bit tired. Flushed an ISO to sda. My laptop now asks if I want to use try or uninstall xubuntu on boot. Before slowly seeing my complete gui disappearing and had by luck still a terminal open - I could save ssh keys. Dammit. Was switching laptop anyway.

Dammit! I can't believe I did that.

I JUST CAN NOT UPDATE THAT ONE SERVER TO DEBIAN 9

- it has no /dev/sda but a /dev/ploopXXXXX which is mounted as / but I can't see it
- uname says it's Linux 2.6.32-042stab126.2 and it says Debian some lines later in the ssh login
- there is no boot loader (I can't find it)
- lsb_release tells me it's running Debian 9.6 stretch, I put stretch into the apt sources
- in /boot there are 2 different versions: 3.16.0-7-amd64 and 4.9.0-8-amd64
- and I do not have physical access to it

WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?!

I wanted to install OpenVPN on it but that Linux Version doesn't support the Tunnel Interface /dev/net/tun

???? @ bash

Hi!
I was trying to format my backup drive (/dev/sdb)
Was focused on eating also at the same time
Wrote sudo fdisk /dev/sda and didn't notice and changed the partition type to GPT(although it was already like that)
I gave me message that will do on next reboot
My dumb mind didn't suspect, instead rebooted (facepalm)
Lost all my data
Instead of trying to recover was quick to install OS
Permanently lost my data
Help me I need hopes and tricks to move on

How did you cope up with yourself once you lost all your data?

Working two hours on this FFS. Three the same laptops:
- Two USB sticks of different brands working on two of the laptops. One doesn't work.
- BIOS versions: the working two are from 2018 and 2020. The not working one is from 2022.
- BIOS settings: 99% the same, especially where matters. Literally went trough every menu.
- I thought, maybe the 'new' 2022 BIOS has a buggy - so maybe update BIOS? Everything only for windows on Lenovo website.

I installed xubuntu on it before. All laptops say "cant find /boot" but on two of them it's not a problem and they run the live USB stick with option to installii. Since I installed it before, the BIOS version is probably not the issue.

If i close my eyes i see swastika's.

Detail: the not working laptop is the one that i wrote the xubuntu iso to /dev/sda (what was the hard drive, see a few rants ago). For some reason, it aggresively boots from that one. I do see my USB stick working (very busy flashing light). Is it maybe possible that it mounts my HD as installation cdrom? The HD contains those files.

Anyone tips?

Well fuck...

Korora 26 finally came out and I wanted to install it on my new laptop. I'd previously put Ubuntu MATE on there, with Cinnamon kind of tacked on, but it wasn't great, mostly because it wasn't Korora.

Unfortunately, Korora (and Fedora) still have a bug in the installer where it will complain if your /boot/efi partition is not on /dev/sda, which in my case it was on my M.2 drive. However, I was able to eventually get it working.

But when I booted it up and tried to log in, it would take me back to the log in screen. I logged into a TTY, where I was reminded that when I had set up my Ubuntu install, I had chosen to encrypt the home folder.

Not knowing how to set up the eCryptFS with an existing encrypted home folder setup, I opted to wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch--I had a backup of most of my files from the Ubuntu installation. However, I lost some very important documents that I'd set up since then.

Fast forward to today where my laptop won't boot unless it is either a.) unplugged with just the battery or b.) plugged in without the battery, with a different power cable from the one I got with the computer.

Thankfully the people responded quickly after I mentioned I was having issues. Hopefully it doesn't get worse...

I try to delete a partition from my sundisk Pendrive using GParted but when I do this I got the error that is shown in the image.

And If I try to use "fdisk" which run `sudo fdisk /dev/sda` following command it gives me ```welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.34).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.

fdisk: cannot open /dev/sda: Read-only file system```

following error does that mean my pendrive permanently broke can anybody help me!

So I put my old laptop up for sale on ebay. I 'shred -v /dev/sda' -ded it's hdd twice. What do you think, is that enough before it is shipped to a potential buyer?