Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
This sounds actually illegal? Like unauthorized access to computer systems federal crime illegal? What the fuck were they thinking.
Comment · 8 years ago
That thing facebook does with demanding your phone number, that's my favorite dark pattern. Apple does the same thing with iOS upgrades.

First you pose a seemingly innocent question, like 'would you like to give us your phone number so we can keep your account secure?' or 'would you like to upgrade to new iOS?'. Then you take away the NO option. You replace it with 'i'll decide later'. And by doing so, you make it not a choice for the user. You make it a statistical guarantee that sooner or later, most users will cave in and hit yes, even if by accident. iOS is an extreme example of this - when you say you don't want to upgrade, you are immediately prompted with a pin code request as if your device just locked itself, and your reflex is to punch in the pin to unlock it again. But if you read what it says at the bottom, it's asking for your pin to get permission to schedule the upgrade that you just said no to.

Whoever the designers are who came up with this stuff, fuck them. This shit is going to be in ethics textbooks in a decade or two. I hope someone from the facebook UX team is reading this, I hope they know their day job is to make the world a worse place.

Comment · 8 years ago
That's a great example of why unit testing is mostly useless.

Having an expected/input output set when writing something like a parser is standard practice. Turning that set into unit tests is worthless for a few reasons.

1: You will design your code to make them all pass. A unit test is useless if it always passes. When your test framework comes back saying x/x (100%) of tests have passed, you are receiving ZERO information as to the validity of your system.

2: You wrote the unit tests with the same assumptions, biases, and limitations as the code they're testing. If you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the system should do, it will manifest in both the code and the test. This is true of most unit tests - they are tautological.

3: While doing all of the above and achieving almost zero additional utility, you had to fragment your logic in a way that easily yields itself to unit testing. More than likely, that's not the most readable or understandable way said code could have been written. You sacrificed clarity for unit testability. Metrics like test code coverage unintentionally steer developers to writing unreadable tangled code.

The only use case for unit testing here would be if this parser was a component that gets frequently updated by many people or a component that gets implemented anew for different configurations. But at this point i'm just talking about regression testing, and there are many ways to do that other than unit testing.

Comment · 8 years ago
There's a much easier way to break it down.

Tests are a pattern. And patterns are the bread and butter of the medicore. That's not to say that patterns or tests are bad, but high calibre guys know when to use which tool. As a tool, unit testing is almost useless.

Low calibre guys don't have any feel for what they're doing. They just use the tools and patterns they were taught to use. All the time. This goes from engineers to managers to other disciplines.

I've seen people at a factory floor treating my test instructions for a device I built as some kind of bible gospel. I had a new girl who had no idea I designed said gadget telling me off for not doing the testing exactly like the instruction manual I wrote says.

The same thing happened with patterns and unit tests. You have hordes of stupid people following the mantra to the letter because they don't actually understand the intent. Any workplace where testing is part of their 'culture' signals to me that its full of mediocre devs who were whipped into some kind of productivity by overbearing use of patterns. It's a good way to get work done with mediocre devs, but good devs are just stifled by it and avoid places that force it.

Comment · 8 years ago
A DNN might be more effective at exploring the hypyerparameter space than people are with their intuition and luck. Rumor is Google has achieved this.
Comment · 8 years ago
So the only advantage of the TPU is it's a simpler and more specialized asic? Google didn't break any new ground in terms of training perf?
Comment · 8 years ago
No. Handing over card details just pre-authorizes them to make transactions later.
Comment · 8 years ago
> Many of “thousand of Reddit stories” are just like your comment. Repeating a meme, nothing more.

Demonstrably, provably, completely, wrong.

https://www.reddit.com/r/netneutrality/comments/7kzblu/i_con... - 4 page account of comms

https://www.reddit.com/r/Firearms/comments/75yjkd/the_offici... - photos showing redditor attended in person instead of making a phone call. Was told their concerns would be 'passed along'

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/6dm169/i_also... - full account of comms. Again cookie cutter response.

Maybe this is biased because it's the top results. Let's jump to page 4.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/7dtlyr/i_just... - rep's voice mail is full and has been for months. No response

https://www.reddit.com/r/Connecticut/comments/7gwins/this_is... - representative actually stands up for the interests of constituents. Yay, we got one!

No memes here, just detailed accounts which overwhelmingly demonstrate that paid-for representatives have a strategy to deal with this. As for civic duties, you do not have a civic duty to uphold a process which is a textbook example of regulatory capture. If you get success by doing it, great. But statistically, for the majority of Americans, talking to their rep is worse than doing nothing. It's spending their time and effort on a process which is designed to ignore them, so they don't spend that same effort searching for an alternative process which might actually work.

This process used to be effective; before it was circumvented by lobbying activity. You can't cling to it today just because it worked yesterday. You also can't get jobs by just turning up to places and handing out your CV. Times change.

Comment · 8 years ago
You're suggesting that your n=1 anecdote weighs more than those thousands of reddit stories? Or that my position is invalid because instead of engaging in another n=1 anecdote I aggregated the outcome of many?

For your one story, you can click the top few links of that search to see detailed accounts and full documented histories from representatives who are clearly systemically stonewalling this kind of activism. And judging by those counts, they are the majority.

Comment · 8 years ago
www.google.com/search?q=i+contacted+my+representative+site%3Areddit.com

Knock yourself out.

Spoiler alert: almost everyone reports getting a cookie-cutter email or scripted response about why the rep will stay the course. They clearly have an established strategy of how to handle the 'contact your rep' crowd and channel their efforts to /dev/null.

Comment · 8 years ago
Because calling paid-for representatives has such a strong record of success over the last decade of human rights erosion.

Talking to your representative is roughly as useful in curbing these things, as doing nothing at all. What's the real solution?

Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
> The news doesn't seem to have been that bad for Intel's stock

That's a red herring. Krzanich had no idea how badly the news would impact the stock. He may have well overestimated it in his mind and chose to sell. Just because he didn't make huge gains from the possible insider trading, doesn't preclude the possibility of insider trading occurring.

So the whole argument here is:

1) Krzanich couldn't be possibly stupid enough to do this.

2) He didn't make a ton of money so it's a stupid plan, he could't possibly be stupid enough to do this.

Weak.

Comment · 8 years ago
From TFA:

> As you can see in the above code, the login functionality specifically

> looks for an admin user named "mydlinkBRionyg" and will accept the password

>of "abc12345cba" if found. This is a classic backdoor. Simply login with

> the credentials that I just mentioned from the above code.

Programming mistake? Seriously?

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