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geoelectric

2,175 karma · joined August 2, 2012

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geoelectric··on Testers vs. TDD
You have to rotate manual testers aggressively between areas to avoid that.

For exploratory, my take is rotating every release is usually OK. You need the area expertise for good exploratory but don't want them to get jaded. Since they roll their own experiments it doesn't happen as fast.

But scripted is far different. Using manual testers for scripted regression is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, but you honestly should never use them more than once in a row in the same area. We're just too hardwired to autopilot or cut corners when doing scripts once they're learned. But once is OK, so it's novel, and when they forget later it can be OK again until they learn the script again. It's why crowdsourcing has actually worked pretty well in that area.

But really, just don't use scripted manual. It doesn't work. Put people on exploratory, put scripts in automation, don't pretend either can do it alone.

I don't think it's a function of career length, though, and that threatens to be a bit ageist to be frank. I'm quite sure I found more and better bugs the length of my primary-QA career, so long as I cared about the job and didn't have to recite a script. Burnout times were different, but those aren't age-bound.

geoelectric··on Testers vs. TDD
On a multi-collaborator large system with half the behavior off in AWS?

You're either dreaming, or haven't worked on anything complex enough to see it yet. E2E means system test, whether or not you think it is, including back end. In almost any real software in 2020 that means multiple debuggers, monitors, logs, god knows what.

But if you're testing a monolith, sure. Your system is one unit, so unit test your monolith and enjoy your debugger.

If you're testing a monolith outside of something like embedded or basic app testing, quit, because the company you're working for built a monolith.

Inactionable doesn't mean "not possible", it means "more trouble than it's worth." That's why it's advisable to do E2E on P0 cases and not really advisable to do it for P3 cases. You can do tooling work to move the bar for how much trouble you have to put in, but "try harder" misses the point.

geoelectric··on Testers vs. TDD
You can find a lot of bugs with e2e but they're frequently not actionable because you can't figure out which part of your stack is causing them. Being non-actionable is one of the least-understood reasons to skip testing, and ironically the most important one for keeping focus. They also require very high maintenance, if they're going to be sensitive enough to be useful, as any stack change potentially means re-validating them.

Read up on test pyramid for more. E2E are the least useful during dev stage, more useful for exercising canary P0 use cases that can never be compromised by any stack bug or it's a stop-ship until you find it. They aren't diagnostic or robust enough for dev, but for a canary role their fragility is a plus.

geoelectric··on Testers vs. TDD
People without a professional background in test. Problem is everyone else thinks we have a conflict of interest.
geoelectric··on About the Rosetta Translation Environment
Think this is accurate. Any modern x86 virtualization software depends on hypervisor assistance from Intel/AMD to run at reasonable speeds, and that's just virtualizing x86 on x86--more like a context shift between sandboxes. Full virtualization through a CPU emulator to boot isn't very likely to be practical anytime soon.

I suspect they'll treat it as a policy restriction, though, so they wouldn't have to deal with emulator compatibility going forward. Any solution that would be even minimally able to support virtualizing x86 would probably be ugly to keep running. If VMW or Parallels gets something going, my guess is they'll have to work through Apple to get an exception.

geoelectric··on Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’
either that, or the "ticket revenue" from selling out a full theater was ~$5100. Average theater seats about 2-300 people, so ~$20 a ticket (not sure of the per-ticket price, but it was the premiere after all) works out at 250 seats.
geoelectric··on Boston Dynamics shop: Spot Explorer
I fully agree the wording isn't in line with the discouragement of ad homs, comes off condescending to a new user, and should be changed. We shouldn't stigmatize being new, though I do think a list of "stuff so stale you can drive nails with it" is pretty appropriate.

Please don't take my quote as my highlighting the noob bit, as it also made me cringe a little. It's an entirely reasonable opinion that you (and the person who vehemently took up your cause in the comment tree) want a more content-rich thread.

But you have to understand posting that opinion is at least 1:1 comment volume with the thing being complained about--so best case, 100% bloat--and it tends to start a N:1 tree under it, so N-hundred% bloat. What was one content-light joke that would've had a few light replies is now a big discussion and now the thread is very, very content-lean for on-topic discussion.

I think that's why that rule is there, not because your opinion is invalid. If it's really that much of a problem such that the downvotes won't do it, then we need to talk but most threads work fine. Further, complaining about the substance of a comment within the same thread is guaranteed to make the overall situation worse, no matter how valid the complaint, because of the above.

I realize I'm contributing to the content-leanness at this point too, by that definition. However, you do deserve a respectful explanation as to why I felt it was appropriate to reply, and the apology for quoting the poorly-worded rule without trying to somehow acknowledge that. I should have, and I am sorry about that.

geoelectric··on Boston Dynamics shop: Spot Explorer
This comment is specifically off-topic, per the rules. I don't, however, see jokes in comments mentioned.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

geoelectric··on Boston Dynamics shop: Spot Explorer
Well, of course they have a Spot check.
geoelectric··on Osborning the Mac, or not
My 16” MBP gets pretty warm when I game. Think that’s unavoidable in any laptop where the body is part of the heat sink.
geoelectric··on [dead]
Yeah, but then there's the other thread where all the cell services went flaky an hour ago. Think if you DDOS the right points you can catch bottlenecks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23531987

geoelectric··on Cell service outage spike in US
The DDOS on the Anonymous twitter might be relevant given timing. All happened around an hour ago.

https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/12726345485771653...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23533311

geoelectric··on Blur Tools for Signal
I only made it through the abstract but it looks like they’re matching the entire given LR image to a known entire HR image.

I’m saying with enough data you could potentially create a more predictive “magic sharpening” algorithm that didn’t strive to match a known original picture, but instead used that matching on divide & conquer subtiles of the original LR image against of a rainbow table of reduced HR tiles to predict a set of plausible HR images.

Basically if you can figure out with whatever context you have that the 4x4 brown smudge is very likely a brown cat, you can replace it with a brown cat. And if you know that, the orange/white/black smudge next to it is probably a calico, so stitch it in.

Of course the source image would have to be bigger than this, so it couldn’t be CSI-enhance icon to landscape, really more like a really good AI upscaler. You’d need a strong way to identify plausible scenes too. We can generate novel faces now, think this fuses the two concepts.

geoelectric··on Blur Tools for Signal
You could, however, probably tile the downscale "rainbow table" in a way that would let you predict some degree of novel original from a sufficient number of tile samples.

Thing about downscale blur is that it's nearest-neighborish, so can be addressed with divide+conquer as blur effects stay local. You'd end up with a fairly large combination of potential tiles. Some wouldn't be viable faces, but we have classifiers for that already.

Entire combination trees can be culled that way to make the problem radically smaller, as long as you know it's supposed to be a face, so I don't know how hard it would really be. It's possibly pretty easy to come up with the N possible original faces with enough certainty to then match with potential targets of interest and make N small enough to use.

geoelectric··on MicroProse Returns with the Mighty Eighth, a 10-Player WWII B-17 Simulator
F117A Stealth Fighter just showed up on Nintendo Switch of all places, too.

https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/f-117a-stealth-fighter...

geoelectric··on Launcher wipes entire SSD when uninstalling
The Myth one was particularly infamous because it’d wipe your entire C or D drive if you installed to root, and because Bungie (doing the right thing) spent nearly a million because they found it literally a day or two after shipping final copies to stores and did a recall. I don’t think it actually had any significant field impact.

As far as especially prone, custom installers were popular in the 90s (not even sure the windows MSI framework was there yet for the classic examples) and games get installed in weird places.

Weird stuff gets overlooked in testing. Nobody ever tried installing it somewhere than Program Files is a reasonable guess, saying this as an expert in software quality. Totally plausible an entire org would have that blind spot.

...in the 90s. But anyone involved in old school PC gaming knows these examples and should be planning for them in test. This was a noob mistake at a business level, no lie.

geoelectric··on Sublime Merge 2
Nothing major in the way of other problems—-think the command line utility might have been a little quirky but that was about it.

But for a visual file comparison tool having giant light regions of the screen in dark mode actually affects functionality in a significant way. The “theming” doesn’t actually theme most of the interface chrome so only minor parts of it go dark, at least last I tried it a month ago.

I haven’t tried it in Windows dark mode. Might work better there. On Mac it’s probably using a Lazarus-based widget library, assuming it’s still written in Delphi, and it probably just doesn’t integrate with the system well.

To be clear, I paid Scooter Software for the pro version back in the 90s and about two years ago again. What I’m saying is I’m licensed for it and still have been looking for other apps because it’s not good enough anymore. I’m not just spitballing, unfortunately :(

geoelectric··on Sublime Merge 2
The custom Mac builds the Meld site points you at work ok for me on Catalina. The biggest issue is there’s no proper command line utility on Mac for some reason, but the person maintaining the unofficial Mac fork documents an incantation that’ll work for git difftool, using open and Meld.app.
geoelectric··on Sublime Merge 2
I used Beyond Compare starting back in my Delphi days when it was notable for being one of a small handful of popular utilities written in Delphi. It’s a fantastic diff tool but man, it looks super rough in dark mode on Mac and I don’t think that’s been ok for awhile now in a dev tool. The “theming” is really bad.
geoelectric··on Launcher wipes entire SSD when uninstalling
OMG they reimplemented the infamous Myth 2 bug.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_II:_Soulblighter#Uninstal...

geoelectric··on Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
They should be more trustworthy than this, for sure. But sometimes a poor or harmful decision is still an operational mistake that comes down to poor information or comprehension. If it were to become more apparent to me that this was a deliberate lapse in ethics, I’m sure I’d be more where you’re at.

As it is right now, I’m giving some charitable credence to the idea he’s the CEO equivalent of the skydiving photographer that, in his passion to get a great shot, jumped out of his plane with no parachute. It certainly may end up having an analogous effect on Triplebyte’s credibility.

geoelectric··on Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
I appreciate your direct honesty here and elsewhere, but I—and likely much of your core market—feel that leverage of opt-out and old customer data to get critical mass in a pivot to an unrelated business was already unethical. That you’re a recruiter made it inexcusable but it was never a idea that was respectful to your users to begin with.

Dude, you were going to use us to publicly endorse your new platform via usage and give it immediate legitimacy, without our consent. Don’t you get that’s what “critical mass through public profiles” means? People join because people are already there?

This is probably the post that disturbs me most of what I’ve read, for simply ignoring that the decision was problematic on multiple levels. Either you’re still not completely getting it or this is disingenuous, and neither option is comforting.

And trying to be charitable as possible here, it’s very easy to take your clinical recounting as being cavalier in its precision. I don’t think we’re all necessarily far enough from the situation yet that you should treat it as the distant past when discussing it. You still have my data, at least for the moment, and it’s still an ongoing concern.

geoelectric··on Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
You can install business processes that give chances for unethical decisions to be reviewed and identified, though. Committees are shit for innovation but relatively effective for squashing interestingly bad ideas along with any interestingly good ones.

I read the apology letter as essentially saying he single-handedly drove the idea, in part because he was flailing due to COVID killing their bottom line, and was tunnel-visioned enough to not recognize it was unethical. Even at face value, that’s absolutely troubling for a CEO in TB’s domain. But smarter people have done dumber things under pressure, and sometimes dumb is at someone’s (or a lot of someones) expense by mistake.

So I’d like to think this was an exceptional occurrence, and I appreciated his personal post-mortem of sorts. However, taking this as charitably as possible, a process-oriented RCA focused on how he’ll keep his runaway ideas from being a one-man show—or whatever the problem actually was that saw this conflagration actually see light of day—wouldn’t suck.

geoelectric··on Firefox extensions to make remote work and school a little better
I'm unfamiliar with the Dark Mode extensions referenced in this article, but I've had pretty good luck with Dark Reader.

It's not as performant on Firefox as on Chrome (and it really shows in Gmail in particular) but overall it's been very reliable and easy to customize when necessary.

geoelectric··on Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19
https://www.doordash.com/dashpass-v2/chase/sapphire-preferre...

...shows some for Sapphire Preferred. Looks like a year of DashPass for free.

https://help.doordash.com/consumers/s/article/Chase-Partners...

I still have a huge problem with DD from their tip-handling, though. I know they revised it somewhat but they held out longest and have been the shadiest. I'm disappointed they're winning.

geoelectric··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
Sweet! Thanks for pointing me at that. I have applications where I might be able to use that anyway (PS4 comes to mind).
geoelectric··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
btw, this issue has some "system-supported" ways to do the simple modifications. That at least would let me do a workaround for some of what I'd need to replace (swapping modifier keys, mapping my ten-keypad to arrow keys, etc.)

https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/issues/2196

geoelectric··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
I hadn't seen that before, but figures. More and more, a nice Lenovo, Dell, or System76 laptop running Linux is starting to sound really good. Hell, it's got better gaming support than Mac now, with Vulkan.

As far as the immediate concern goes, Karabiner is such a popular thing that I suspect there'll be some way to support it. If not, I won't upgrade. I just bought this MacBook Pro, and it'll probably continue to be usable on 10.15.x for its lifetime. I'm not too interested in my gaming keyboard and 10 key pad becoming unusable, at any rate.

If they actually completely kill software support for this, I guess next best thing would be a USB intermediary to process the key codes. Possible it's doable with a Raspberry PI or something, and there are enough mechanical keyboard enthusiasts on Mac someone would be motivated to do it. Won't help for the internal keyboard though.

geoelectric··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
I think the bit where the labels change is a pretty big differentiator, for things that are per-app.

Are you old enough to remember when PC applications came with templates that fit over a 101 key keyboard to show you what all the fn keys did? That's why very little outside professional tooling uses them for anything but system-wide shortcuts anymore. They're horrible for discoverability so unless you live in the app enough to thoroughly memorize them they aren't terribly useful.

As much as I don't care for the Hot Bar in general, it is far better for per-app shortcuts that are used rarely enough not to require (and thus develop) muscle memory. You'd need one of those OLED keyboards to do much better.

geoelectric··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
Re left ctrl, btw, it’s possible now to map ctrl to esc. It’ll map both keys though—-the apple interface doesn’t do left/right.

It’s a “simple modification” (specific type) in Karabiner though, if you use that. I use PC mechanical keyboards so most of my typing devices a) have swapped around mod keys and b) map right ctrl to fn so I can do Mac device hotkeys from pc keyboard.

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