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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The plea of stupidity in high profile insider trading cases is a smoke screen - that was my point.
Highly successful executives engage in insider trading quite frequently (see link). When they do, they take a calculated risk. You can be quite sure that none of them are stupid in any sense of the word. They take a measured risk and some succeed and some fail, depending on luck, skill, ambitions, and how big/rich they already are. From what little I know, doing it in a an open manner is actually the best best way to go about insider trading. If you attempt to skirt around it by doing anything shady like having friends/relatives execute the trades for you, the evidence is undeniable once discovered. If you go about it 'openly' and instead rely on blurry interpretation or your ability to plead ignorance or put the timeline into question, it's a lot harder to nail you.
There are many cases of brazen broad-daylight insider trading, such as Donald Trump right now. Only the ones that end in successful legal action go on to be considered stupid. Even when they do get caught, a lot of the time the penalties are relatively lax, like suspended or weekend sentences for first time offenders.
So no, just because he is successful as an executive at a major corporation doesn't at all make it 'stupid' for him to engage in insider trading. That line of reasoning is a diversion from the facts of the case.
> 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.
I would say that if people on HN are saying the attack is too stupid to be government supported, then the government has succeeded at their primary goal of having plausible deniability with these issues.
If we take recent history, we now have hard evidence of all sorts of conspiracy theory type stuff being absolutely true. With that in mind, do we just keep defaulting to 'not government' every time there's a deliberate backdoor identified? Sounds like a great way to maintain the status quo and ensure that no action is ever taken to curb this.
> this is a textbook example of a sloppy developer who doesn't understand security
> There's no reason to believe this is connected to a government
Why the fuck not? Over the last 5 years, we have time and time again been shown that governments can and do engage in backdooring everything they can get their hands on. I mean, there's hard evidence that they were intercepting packages with cisco gear and making modifications to them. And with that kind of historical record you think there's no reason to believe government could be involved with WD? What?
That's probably a question that CS researches will get to address one day in the future... Estimating what percentage of reasonable length DNA arrangements leads to intelligent organisms.
The definition of 'arranged marriage' today has been neutered. Until 2 generations ago, arranged marriage meant that women had absolutely no say in their marriage - it was at the decision of the parents and to further the desires of the parents.
Today, arranged marriage means that the woman's parents will present her with prospective marriage partners but leave the decision making to her, including veto or asking the parents to 'arrange' for a man that the woman fancies - kind of like Tinder but the matching algorithm is parents. That version of arranged marriage is straight up better than the (serious) dating scene in westernized countries.
The original version is definitely considered evil by today's morals.
Humans don't have such a capacity. The notions of 'good' and 'evil' have historically been in flux and went through many huge changes. Modern humans consider the typical behaviors of past humans as 'evil'.
Vikings - rape after conquering is good. People today: that's evil.
India until 2 generations ago - arranged marriage is good. Today that's evil.
Homosexuality - has oscillated many times between good and evil. In fact, different geographic regions will still have polar opposite views on this today.