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> Except for the poor sod in Peru who couldn't make phone calls or post duck-face pictures to Instagram, but no one asked him. There are countless situations w

by thih9 5y ago

> Except for the poor sod in Peru who couldn't make phone calls or post duck-face pictures to Instagram, but no one asked him. There are countless situations where suddenly not having a working phone means a serious problem. The article presents an extremely negligent look at the issue.

trutannus 5y ago
> extremely negligent look at the issue Yes, the part about them overwriting the data from each cycle struck me as odd. I don't think that's good practice even if testing.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  It doesn't seem unusual to me. You write a test script that generates random numbers and saves them to foo.txt, then reads them back from foo.txt for the purpose of running one kind of test. Then you wrap that in a loop for every kind of test. You end up testing everything, but foo.txt only has the numbers from the last test. To be clear, I'm not saying it's not a bad practice to do that. But the context is that it was a one-off job to do the testing, not a proper test framework, for which this kind of half-assed approach is reasonable.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    True, I think I have something like that in multiple places for tests that are used to validate prod code. But our code won't lock people's devices down with no recourse. I think what made me scratch my head is that they didn't consider that generating random phone numbers might lead to collisions. I've been hesitant to publish fake datasets that have randomly generated and validly formatted SIN/SSN numbers in it for that exact reason. Even if the risk is low, I'd still think keeping indefinite logs of that would be a good idea.
sundvor 5y ago
There are indeed large ranges of highly valid reasons why having phone/ Internet connectivity is highly critical. But sure, "post duck photos". I understand it was perhaps meant as a paraphrase, yet it is indicative of an almost callous level of arrogance at the author's company.

by thih9 5y ago

trutannus 5y ago

> extremely negligent look at the issue Yes, the part about them overwriting the data from each cycle struck me as odd. I don't think that's good practice even if testing.

Arnavion 5y ago
It doesn't seem unusual to me. You write a test script that generates random numbers and saves them to foo.txt, then reads them back from foo.txt for the purpose of running one kind of test. Then you wrap that in a loop for every kind of test. You end up testing everything, but foo.txt only has the numbers from the last test. To be clear, I'm not saying it's not a bad practice to do that. But the context is that it was a one-off job to do the testing, not a proper test framework, for which this kind of half-assed approach is reasonable.
- trutannus 5y ago
  True, I think I have something like that in multiple places for tests that are used to validate prod code. But our code won't lock people's devices down with no recourse. I think what made me scratch my head is that they didn't consider that generating random phone numbers might lead to collisions. I've been hesitant to publish fake datasets that have randomly generated and validly formatted SIN/SSN numbers in it for that exact reason. Even if the risk is low, I'd still think keeping indefinite logs of that would be a good idea.

sundvor 5y ago

There are indeed large ranges of highly valid reasons why having phone/ Internet connectivity is highly critical. But sure, "post duck photos". I understand it was perhaps meant as a paraphrase, yet it is indicative of an almost callous level of arrogance at the author's company.