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donaltroddyn

544 karma · joined February 21, 2016

https://www.obscurity.ie

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/troddyn; my proof: https://keybase.io/troddyn/sigs/YVbOLcnCObGGhqryxJKcyPEvOfu88jczttr2R-J7zhk ]

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donaltroddyn··on Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants
Ireland's corporation tax rate is purely an internal matter, even in the single market. In fact, Ireland rejected by referendum the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, and only voted for it the following year after a series of clauses known as the Irish Guarantees were added. One of those guarantees is:

> Nothing in the Treaty of Lisbon makes any change of any kind, for any Member State, to the extent or operation of the competence of the European Union in relation to taxation.

It's legally binding, and ensures that Ireland retained the right to set our its corporation tax rate.

All the other EU nations at the time (some have joined since) unanimously ratified the Irish Guarantees, so if anything, it's rich of them to now complain about an agreement that they willingly and knowingly signed up to.

donaltroddyn··on Show HN: A website that converts any IPFS file to HLS and reups it to IPFS
I think you're experiencing the Slashdot effect.
donaltroddyn··on Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics
Some people are taking advantage of this to leave messages for us: https://simpleanalytics.io/simpleanalytics.io

Edit: It seems to have been filtered now, but people were using spoofed referer headers to leave offensive messages for HN users.

donaltroddyn··on Why We Need Web 3.0
Having read the article, I can't tell if this is satire.
donaltroddyn··on Email security on Democratic campaigns is as bad as 2016
The US government does mandate numerous IT security measures for companies involved in military/defence-related projects, justified by national security concerns. The same argument could be made for regulating private organisations involved in national elections.
donaltroddyn··on Show HN: Local Sheriff – Browser extension to show PII leaks to third-parties
Given that this analyses network traffic on the client side, Local Sheriff is probably playing the same catch-up game that a blocker targeting that same PII is.
donaltroddyn··on Man Who Stole Plane Near Seattle Raises Troubling Security Question
Whatever system that you put in place would have to never (or very close to never) have a false negative during normal aircraft operation.

One other commenter here mentions a simple ignition key would have prevented this incident, but there's been at least one major ignition system flaw in cars that caused multiple deaths ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch... ), and the consequences of a failure causing loss of control to a passenger aircraft far outweighs that in a car.

Given the very low rate of unauthorised takeoffs of passenger aircraft, and that this case was an insider who may have been able to gain access to keys/codes anyway, is introducing introducing a new system to aircraft justified?

donaltroddyn··on User banned from Das Keyboard forums for telling people of open-source drivers
That could easily be survivorship bias, though. How many of those 40-year-old contemporaries died decades ago?
donaltroddyn··on Credit-Card Backlash Mounts as Kroger Weighs Expanding Visa Ban
My own experience is that the United States is an extremely risky place to use a credit or debit card, and it's the only place where I've ever had a credit card skimmed (from living and travelling around Europe and Brazil) - three separate times. It's also the only place where I could almost never make contactless or chip+pin payments, and had to swipe and sign.
donaltroddyn··on New Video of F-117s Flying Out of Tonopah Despite Their Fates Being Sealed
The article supposes that the paints were adapted and improved over time, so the paint on the airframes at retirement could be a decade more advanced, and that on current airframes could be two decades ahead, of that on the aircraft shot down.
donaltroddyn··on Twitter shares drop after reporting declining monthly active users
I left Facebook entirely earlier this year, and haven't replaced it with any other service. I'm wondering now about my Twitter account. It's a good source for infosec and test automation news, but nothing I couldn't live without.
donaltroddyn··on Is killing the boom the key to supersonic air travel?
Well, the impetus for enhanced airport security was first the spate of hijackings in the late '60s to early '80s, and later 9/11.

While you can hijack a train, you can't fly it to a friendly country, and you can't fly it into a building, so it's a very different threat model.

donaltroddyn··on Show HN: Headless Chrome as-a-service
Hey, this is very impressive. In the past we've run full Chrome in Docker containers, and are now experimenting with running Chrome Headless in Lambda, for economic and concurrency reasons.

How do you stream the running Chrome to the iframe - that's very cool?

donaltroddyn··on Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
In Ireland, both English and Irish (Gaeilge in Irish - not Gaelic) are our official languages, and both are also official languages of the EU.

English is also an official language in Malta, but not Cyprus.

donaltroddyn··on As U.S. Postage Rates Continue to Rise, the USPS Gives the Chinese a 'Free Ride'
You're probably right, but I used to buy cheap USB chargers from Amazon and Deal Extreme, and had a couple fail with visible scorching and melted plastic.
donaltroddyn··on As U.S. Postage Rates Continue to Rise, the USPS Gives the Chinese a 'Free Ride'
The problem is that you don't know who has plugged in a death trap transformer about to explode into flames in the apartment below yours, not to mention the numerous other ways that mains appliances can be unsafely wired.
donaltroddyn··on Show HN: PDF.cool – API for converting web pages to PDF
That's pretty cool. I'm guessing at that pricing you must be running Chrome in Lambda?
donaltroddyn··on Does anyone QA their software?
I'm happy to discuss this in more detail - my contact details are in my profile - but the product I'm working is currently in public beta and we're venture funded.

We're taking a slightly different approach in that, in your example login form, we're using ML classifiers and some NLP techniques to pick the most likely candidate username and password fields, and if we get it wrong, you can correct us which then feeds into the training data.

We have free accounts if you'd like to try it out, at https://developer.unravel.io . It'd be great to see if the user experience from a developer's perspective is close to what you're imagining.

donaltroddyn··on Does anyone QA their software?
Full disclosure: I'm working on a product that's designed to eliminate the pain points of Selenium.

On point four, a lot of companies aspire to having great test suites, which these days for user-facing apps often means aggressive unit and API testing on the backend, and using browser tests for end-to-end or integration tests. We're seeing companies moving away from running comprehensive functional tests in the browser because they take so long to run, and tend to be very brittle.

When it comes to writing browser tests, Selenium is still the most common tool for browser automation, but especially with the advent of Chrome Headless, there's a whole slew of new tools popping up (and there are lots of commercial tools like SmartBear's TestComplete or Telerik TestStudio). Selenium is not very popular, because it can be a pain to write the tests, and they tend to rely heavily (although it depends on how they're written) on addressing elements with XPATHs or CSS selectors, which are very brittle - especially in large teams or where the front-end is changing a lot.

It's also hard to get devs to write Selenium tests. It's tedious work, and they often need constant maintenance, so enterprise usually have dedicated test automation engineers, who are hard to find and tend to move on to better roles as soon as they can.

donaltroddyn··on Ask HN: What 5 software tools do you use most for work?
CTO: 1. Chrome 2. Pycharm 3. Docker 4. Git 5. Boto

TBH though, a lot of my time is spent in Gmail (in Chrome) these days.

donaltroddyn··on How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers
I'm the CTO for a startup that is launching our public beta next month. Do you think it's work trying to find the "dream" journalist and giving them a launch exclusive or is it a case of the more, the merrier?
donaltroddyn··on Why Recorded/Playback Tests in Selenium Break
Thanks, but literally all the hard work has been done our dev team - not me.
donaltroddyn··on Why Recorded/Playback Tests in Selenium Break
Well, instead of having to explicitly fill each field in a form, you can just say "Fill the personal details form" or "Fill the credit card form" and we'll work out what each field is and fill it with sensible inputs - either dummy data or data supplied by the test author. Since you aren't hard-coding each locator, and we determine what fields are present and how to deal with them at runtime, unstable ids, classes, & xpaths, and even adding/removing form fields can be handled gracefully (as long as the user journey doesn't change semantically).

We can also handle other common actions like "Login", "Search for ipsum", "Select the first search result" (or "Select the first product/hotel/flight/etc" - that one's really impressive), "Add to cart", "Checkout". When writing the tests, we give you the list of imperative actions than we think your declarative commands map to, and you can correct us if (when) we get it wrong.

We also have some value-adds. Apart from the usual assertions (checking the page loads, looking for certain text or elements, et cetera), you can write assertions checking for the presence and correctness of 200+ advertising and analytics tags, and can included computed assertions (assertions that are computed from the context of the test). We also have natural language date handling, so you can write evergreen tests with commands like "Search for a flight next Monday" and we'll resolve that to the actual date to input into the datepicker. We're also working on malware detection (basically checking all loaded resources and outbounds like on every page we load for suspicious markers).

donaltroddyn··on Why Recorded/Playback Tests in Selenium Break
I'm the founder/CTO at Unravel, where we're working on using machine learning to solve this problem. Unravel lets devs write tests using our declarative DSL and we generate the browser tests at runtime, using ML for element classification & expert systems to determine sensible actions. You can either give us explicit inputs or use predefined data profiles (ie, complete a form with dummy details for a U.S. user with a test Mastercard, etc).

The dynamically generated at runtime tests solves the weak locator problem, and it's smart enough to avoid inputing invalid values in input fields. We deal with page loading well, and we're working on being able to automatically deal with alerts (and other modals).

The result is browser tests that are way faster to write (because you don't have to worry about locators), and the tests are way more resilient. We're currently pre-release, but we're looking for companies and devs who'd like to be in our upcoming alpha.

donaltroddyn··on Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
Yeah, I've looked at all the current tools and there's basically two types (other then just writing straight Selenium):

- Test recorders that aren't a great experience and output incomprehensible, brittle tests.

- Test composers that I can best describe as 90's SQL query builders for Selenium.

Complex JS apps are still a challenge for us (especially with some of the WTF code we come across in the wild), but we have a strategy in the works for them. We're still pre-release though. If you're interested, send me an email (donal@unravel.io) and I'll add you to our alpha list.

donaltroddyn··on Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
Yeah, this is one area where webdev is way behind other fields, and i think we're going to see lots of new tooling in this area soon.

We're currently working on a way to help devs test web app functionality and complete user journeys without having to actually write tests in Selenium or whatever. The idea to is let devs write down what they want to test in English ("load the page", "search for a flight", "fill the form", "pay with a credit card", etc), then we'll use NLP to discern intent, and we have ML-trained models to actually execute the test a browser.

You can give us arbitrary assertions, but we also have built-in tests for the page actually loading, the advertising tags you use, page performance, some security stuff (insecure content, malware links). At the end we hand you back your test results, along with video and perf stats. It’s massively faster than writing Selenium, and our tests won’t break every time an XPATH or ID changes.

donaltroddyn··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2016)
UNRAVEL ANALYTICS (https://www.getunravel.com) | Dublin, Ireland | Senior Python Developer | ONSITE | Full-time | VISA

Unravel is a quality assurance tool for tagging that automatically steps through and audits complex user journeys on websites, analysing tag behaviour across hundreds of device and browser combinations and pinpointing undetected problems.

We need a Senior Python Backend developer to join our small, agile team to help design, architect, and build the next generation of our reporting platform.

Stack: Python 3, Django, Docker, AWS

Full details at https://my.hirehive.io/unravel-analytics-ltd/jobs/23144/seni...

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