skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How does everyone handle mobile browser testing?
Hi Everyone,

So I've been working on a mobile game engine for Saito (https://apps.saito.network/arcade) and am running into testing issues.

Right now I'm having to manually run the applications on whatever cellphones and tablets we can find. Is there a better way to do this? Asking as I figure if anyone has solved this problem with an automatic testing suite or something similar it will be someone who reads HN....

Goal is to test mobile browsers to see which ones work and eliminate avoidable failures. Most of the problems we are flagging to date are javascript-implementation issues or things like auto-transaction "features" on foreign-language browsers that strip events from the page and/or stop them from running very quickly.

Any suggestions? Anyone have a startup that tackles this sort of problem?
hmm, ok, I take your point that the US share specifically doesn't really matter so long as Apple is pricing the developer account globally -- it definitely matters to me (in the sense that many of my users are American iPhone owners) but maybe not for the pricing analysis overall. My bad.

I still do think that Apple is employing monopolistic pricing on the app store, though -- they don't have a monopoly on the smartphone market, for sure, and indeed their smartphone prices are (certainly premium but still) constrained by the prices of other competing phones. Once a customer owns an iPhone, though, the Apple app store is the only way to reach them. And Apple's pricing for developer accounts seems to reflect that - I really don't believe $99 is the equilibrium price here, nor that policies like kicking apps out the store as soon as the developer stops paying would survive in a competitive market.

I'm absolutely not forced to publish my apps to Apple, and obviously I'm taking the option not to publish them there now. And please don't get me wrong, my apps are super trivial and nobody will actually miss them when they're gone. But it does seem sad to me that both me and my potential future users will lose out (in whatever small way) because of Apple's non-competitive developer account pricing, even when I would have been very happy to pay the fair market rate for a developer account.
Get that battery replaced stat. If it’s expanding, it’s a fire risk.
I'd put it slightly differently, but I guess it is the same idea.

There are two major approaches to software development: 1) powerful text editors (vi, Emacs) or 2) IDE.

Powerful text editors are universal, but up to now their language support was often subpar compared to IDEs. They tend to do well for niche languages with no dedicated IDE, as then they're the reference editors. But for mainstream languages on can usually find IDEs with better language specific support. Still, they shine in pure editing power and after an initial investment you can use them for anything text based.

Then an IDE can have the best language support for some usually small set of languages, but is not as powerful as a vi or Emacs for pure editing.

That's the situation so far, but I see this changing thanks to the language server protocol [1]. It's the pattern seen in portable compilers, where a universal IR avoid a MxN explosion with M languages front-ends and N target ISA. Except here one avoids the M editors times N languages by having a universal protocol between an editor and a LSP server for a language. What the LSP allows is decoupling your editing front-end from the language support back-end (the LSP server).

All this is a bit young, and moving fast, but in time it offers the possibility of a no-compromise experience: use the best editor for you, and still get the best language support available. It's already possible to extract Eclipse Java support, or Microsoft Python support, and use it with any LSP compliant editor for example, with some ad-hoc work. In time, all this should get more streamlined. Which makes me happy to have invested into Emacs ;)

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/
Gin Index in PostgreSQL
You're not thinking about this the right way. The ticket doesn't have a positive expected return as a structural feature of the lottery. It has a positive expected return conditional on the total number of tickets sold being less than a fixed value.
New Trading Bot for Cryptocurrency
I have a habit of resting a finger on a key I intend to press soon but not yet. This keeps biting me in the ass with the stupid touchbar escape key.
The UK tech sector produces a unicorn ‘each month’
This can only be said by someone who doesn't use IM "properly".

IM is:
- asynchronous (vs. f2f or calls)
- multi-format (text, audio, video or files)
- searchable (vs. f2f, calls and in my case email which is horrible to archive/search stuff)
- phone-centered (vs. email which is computer-centered)

I hate to write mails only with my phone, sometimes (e.g. when driving) I don't want to write a message but speak something instead.

Obviously also the possibility to quickly capture something with your mobile-camera and share it via IM was not considered. How practical is this scenario with a computer? Not much.

E-Mail is old technology and nearly no-one adapted it to our present time (don't know if it's just the protocols used or mainly the apps to interact with it).

Group chats are also much more pleasant with IM's, the feature to @-mention users in itself is something I desperately miss from E-Mail (I am talking about name-suggestions when I type the @ and about notification of that user that I mentioned him).

It could go on like this but I think there's enough on the table to show that E-Mail is not an alternative to IM and IM is not useless.
IMs miss one thing badly, for me at least. It is headsup/important signals in a conversation flow. For now you only can mute your crowded chats and read miles of irrelevant texts later. But if a loose discussion turned into something important, there is no mechanism to notify busy participants or highlight parts of the chat for a later review.

In short, IMs should stop dinging on every message and should have two special buttons: 1. mark for reading (visual notification + table of marks), 2. wake everyone up asap (sound). Both should work for past, like “hey, it started with this message”.

I’m waiting for this separation for years, but never seen it in popular messengers (in any really).
Minimamba, a fast conda / miniconda is released
What is needed is alternating themes based on the real world day/night cycle. Even though when the sun goes down that arguable should be the time that screen time should be cut anyway.
lovely article. but also i find it so refreshing to read this as a simple github readme vs. a tweetstorm or popup-filled, gated medium article.
Am I missing something here lruor? Linking the same thing above by another that you must have seen to make this comment.

I'm not going to bother repudiating the claims made there, a quick search will find you plenty of comments that align with my opinion.

Can we get a captcha on my replies :)
If I wrote an explanation then what would check that explanation? Maybe I write "we use a Tree instead of a Wobble because Wobble doesn't support the APIs we need". But then maybe when you come to work on it, it turns out that the current version of Wobble does support those APIs. Maybe it's actually better at them than Tree. Whereas if I have a unit test around Tree that exercises the kind operations that we need to do, then you can just try dropping Wobble in there and see for yourself whether it works or not.
The NSO Group's technology ends up being an oppression enabler in practice. Citizen Lab has been quite critical:

* https://citizenlab.ca/?s=nso+group
I had the same experience with a friend and Simon the Sorcerer. We would play separately and call each other to compare progress. I was happy when I beat him with about 30 minutes. I need to replay that game with my kids.

Walkthroughs in text today are OK because you can read until the first mention of something you haven't done to get unstuck, but nothing beats a real person giving you appropriate hints. Also, there's the Universal Hint System [1] that gives you more and more detailed hints when you're stuck, but I haven't used it in a real situation. I looked up a puzzle now that I was stuck on in Day of the Tentacle, but couldn't find it.

Shigero Miyamoto has talked about this about The Legend of Zelda. They purposely added secret stuff in that game with absolutely no hints, almost impossible to find for a single player, to encourage people to talk about the game in school and elsewhere. You could only find the secrets when discussing the game with others, which was what they intended. Imagine getting a hint at school and having to wait until you can run home and test it; that way you're thinking about the game all day!

[1] http://www.uhs-hints.com/
Hey - where can I reach out to you to discuss this?
Just that I would need a new machine, my iMac still has TB2.
> mathematically, you must be right. One of the sides must be calculating their expected value wrong.

He isn't right. The state doesn't work with expected values in any way. Money comes in via ticket sales, some of it goes into the state budget, the rest goes out as lottery payouts. There is no element of chance in any of that.

As you point out here and I point out elsewhere, the expected value of a ticket for the purchaser depends on the total number of tickets sold, which has been mostly elided from the discussion. In fact, it's mostly irrelevant as to this past event; at the actual ticket volumes, returns really were positive on the days in question.
Is this a low-key ad for 23andme?
No, I am saying that the stereotype he detected really exists and somehow happily coexist with other stereotypes. That the stereotypes when combined into one person become inconsistent.

Personally I knew plenty of boys that were not fuckups. I know also boys who are fuckups or went through periods where they as kids were troubles, but I know also plenty of perfectly fine boys.
Does anyone wish we'd just attempt to have fewer video conferences instead of trying to tweak this terrible technology?
Irish Lottery, 1992, brute force - you could purchase all ~2M combinations for < IR£1M . The company played dirty when they realised what was happening, then later changed the game when they'd finished the forehead slapping:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lottery_%28Ireland%29...
Installing and Testing Out the BennVenn LCD Mod for Atari Lynx
I'm not switching to Firefox.

I never left. Firefox, even for its warts, wasn't run by a adtech company. I knew this would happen sooner or later. And now, the thumbscrews tighten.

Now yes, Moz://a has done some dumb stuff.. But so does many others. Still its the best we have.
How does Shodan promote openness? Anyone who wants to scan their own network can already do so with paid for and free tools. What this service does is, it scans your network whether you want it or not, then allows others to search for vulnerable hosts. It is a script kiddie wet dream come true service.

Continuing my "trying door handles on cars or houses" analogy imagine there is a service that has people walking from car to car and from house to house covering whole cities. Then once it compiled a database of which houses/flats/cars tend to be unlocked it made a business out of selling access to that DB. Would you have no moral reservations about that?

Almost everyone is for openness in matters of vulnerabilities in software so companies are forced to fix them, but still most 0day researches give heads up to the companies and shortly later mailing lists about the vulnerabilities they discover before they openly publish all the details including an example exploit. Therefore openness has widely accepted limits. Making a business out of selling information about third parties that are vulnerable is way past those limits.
For what it’s worth, you can run 3dsmax in Parallels like you can run CS6 in Wine...
For me, macOS "Night Shift" does the job well enough. It gradually shifts the overall color temperature to warm at the end of the day.
>I have rarely - if ever - heard girls talk about men's compentence in some general regard that

In middle-school and high-school I have never heard talk about girls being less competent than boys. You couldn't. Girls did better at school. Girls were Lisa Simpson, and boys were Bart Simpson. If there was a stereotype, that's what it was. If you went to a remedial class at my school(s), it would have been 3/4 boys. The vast majority of suspensions were given to boys.

Maybe the schools I went to were the exception, but no way could this be a singular experience.

>Women don't do well in that environment. Boys often do and say things that are bewildering for anyone socialized as female to interact with.

I feel you're making generalizations that don't reflect reality.

>A welcoming and safe environment matters a lot more to women than it does to men.

It matters to everyone. Who doesn't want a workplace that is welcoming and safe?
Aromasin is almost certainly thinking of [1]

"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a strong believer in hardware expandability, and he endowed the Apple II with luxurious expandability [....] Steve [Jobs] was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports."

"Burrell was afraid the 128Kbyte Mac would seem inadequate [...] He realized that he could support 256Kbit RAM chips simply by routing a few extra lines on the PC board,
[...]
But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party."

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
TheFunded publishes a plain vanilla term sheet for VCS
This link should be the actual article link, much longer than the original and not a fluff piece.

There's also more info there on how they differ from regular pianos, i.e. special wood treatment, different materials, extra handles, etc.
The point is that he wants to use a program that isn't available on the OS you are suggesting.
Why does this seem to me to be iffy science? Or even that big of a deal?

We could take all the money invested over the next 30 years in combating climate change and save ~90k people in the US, or we could put it into something with real results, such as curing cancer, IMHO.
Why did it close in 2012? Maybe because the old generations went away and the new one had enough crap form the old ones to add this to their full plate? Result, nulla/zip/zero/nada new customers
> There can be a lot of not obvious things going on in the opaque stuff, and you can drop things you need in the rewrite unless you are very careful.

If the knowledge is so opaque as to be nonobvious from the code in front of you, then it's already an accident waiting to happen: someone making normal maintenance changes to that code (not a rewrite) would be equally likely to break those properties.
Forgot to mention how often Intel threatened to close shop if it want get the tax exemptions it insisted on. So, let's be honest, there's hardly anything special about this pattern of corporate investment and outsourcing of development.
Not sure what you mean with your question.

Perhaps something along the lines of data in the "root" directory, with DLLs in a "lib" directory and various executables in a "bin" directory, along with a "doc" directory for locating the documentation, and a "src" directory for the project source codes?

Or have I missed your point completely?

I tend to put the source code files in the "root" directory of a project with auxiliary directories under that for various things like data, documentation, etc.

My finished projects are installed into the standard directories: executables in one of the $PATH "bin"s (usually /usr/local/bin), shared libs in one of the standard "lib" directories (mainly /usr/lib). The data gets put into a dedicated directory: somewhere in /home if it's data that is short-term or it gets put somewhere on the "archive" filesystem if it's stuff that's "write once and keep for ever".
Paycheck Stubs Affect
For that particular round of the game, yes.

Overall? No, unless the game is very badly designed.

The whole situation arises from rolling over the losses between rounds, which "sweetens" the pot for intelligent players. It's also a good way to inflate your numbers if you know that your game might get cut next year (e.g. it might be better to show turnover of 100mm and payouts of 90mm than turnover of 10mm and payouts of 8mm).
> One of the few negative things I can say about Day of the Tentacle is that it’s more fun than it is truly innovative; it doesn’t break any new formal or thematic ground

The time travel aspect and that you control three characters in the past, present, and future, where things you do in the past affect the future was truly innovative to me. I realize now that it's not as magical design or programming wise as it appears. It's not that hard to have something done in one room affect something in another room in the game, but as a player having to think across time as well as space was really cool.

The article goes on to talk about the time travel, so it's not ignored, but it seems that I found it more innovative than the author.
you would not just save 90k people. there is a chance of killing all human life with climate change. any size risk in this area is too big of a risk.
Can't she install Firefox from the Play store?
Elon Musk, the Real Life Iron Man, and the Pursuit of New Technology
And this is one of the (many) reasons why people are driving red light in Kiev like it's not even there.
> It's also a good way to inflate your numbers if you know that your game might get cut next year (e.g. it might be better to show turnover of 100mm and payouts of 90mm than turnover of 10mm and payouts of 8mm).

...wouldn't that be better under all possible circumstances? Would you rather have $10 million or $2 million?
Eye contact is something I constantly need to remind myself that people feel is really important, but I cannot say I’m naturally aware of its necessity.
Australian authorities released "anonymised" data into the public domain for research. It didn't take long for the ever-amazing Dr. Vanessa Teague et al. to deanonymise it.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-12-18/anonymous-med...
I would recommend http://www.nuclearphynance.com/

Much less activity lately, but very good insights usually. Some finance / technical knowledge is necessary though - otherwise you will struggle to understand the topics.
I ate there around 1990, he asked for my order and I started to ask for the starter 'chicken and sweetcorn sou....' when he shouted at me 'no time for soup!'
Results like this always make me wonder what the minority think, how they justify it.

My guess is "I don't care" but it may be more nuanced than that, or something entirely else. I'd like to know if anyone can comment.
Light themes during the nights are murder on the eyes. Give me a nice solarised light theme during the day and a dark one at night.
What Are the Benefits for Surrogate Care Center in Kenya for Helpless Couples?
It's you who is making the mistake.
Non-ECC RAM does not have any protection.
Prove me wrong, describe the mechanism.
> Ergonomics research has shown a long time ago that dark text on light background is easier to read on computer screens for long periods of time.

I have to wonder whether that research took into consideration how large and bright modern displays are, and for the duration that modern IT professionals are using them for.

I would guess that the majority of these people would have been using 15-19" CRT monitors, and mostly single displays.

In pretty much every office that I've seen, most people have two or three 23-27" displays. Modern LCD panels are also extremely bright.

Staring at that much screen realestate with primarily light/white colours can be painful for long periods of time. It certainly feels less uncomfortable to use a darker theme.
You can sign up at https://www.nextdns.io/ and then you can block ads at the DNS level. Simple to do, and updated, and without the overhead of running a local VPN.
I can attest to being a slave to "treatment" for a while. I used to clock into my local physician, who'd have a go at my back with manual therapy (post-op fractured vertebrae, ruptured vertebrae, and massive scar tissue from surgery) until we got "rid of all the knots" and I'd leave, skipper as anything - until they came back over the course of the next two weeks.

Eventually, after about 6 months of this bi-weekly physical therapy, I quit going because I knew it wasn't doing anything to deal with the underlying problems. I swapped to a different physio, who I complained to about having to go to physio so regularly but nothing changing. He gave me a list of exercises and told me "You want to cure your back pain? Do these until you can touch your toes. Don't come here back till then." Came back after breaking that hurdle. He gave me a new list, and said "Do these until you can touch your hips to the ground in downward-dog". Next one "Do these until you can hold a bridge for a minute." Rinse and repeat, until 18 months later, after about 10 appointments, I no longer had any back pain.

If you're struggling with injuries, I highly recommend shopping around for physiotherapists until you find something that works for you. I'd have been getting manual therapy on my back for the rest of my life if it weren't for testing the waters.
Looking for Plumbing Service in Miranda, Australia
"I don’t know how to make a screenshot, because I normally use my computer in text-mode." --Richard Stallman
See my comment above, you can use https://www.nextdns.io/
Problem is no amount of plugging and configuration on my part can fix problems that come from the complexity of the software architecture.

I can imagine it's a lot cheaper. But what is the compared value/quality? I reckon it's below the slow and steady approach. You are free to argument against.
Also, IDEs tend to have better framework support (it's nearly impossible to write Java code without one because you want an IDE that knows about Spring or Hibernate and can make all the Gradle stuff work), but that's economics - it's easier to sell an IDE than to sell an Emacs minor mode (which would end up having to fit in a with set of other things that may or may not conflict with what you have).
It's simply much, much easier for me to work with a dark background. Not fully black, but preferably a bit in the purple direction. You are not top-down reading most of the time, but working on lines, jumping between them. That's much easier for me on a black background, because the text pops out and the background "noise" is much easier on the eyes.

When you're reading a block of text, you interact much less with the background than when you're searching and jumping between lines.
Ah, the "mammals survived the dinosaurs, so the cockroaches will survive the mammals" conjecture. Probably won't happen these next 30 years.
A stitch in time saves the space-time fabric of the Universe from falling apart.
> With ZFS growing a file system is painful and shrinking impossible

You probably mean something else rather than a file system.
In ZFS you do not need to grow or shrink file systems at all.
That was my problem too but I discovered the Karabiner Elements app which lets you map caps lock to escape when pressed alone and to control when held down.
I've never seen this on Linux. There is a gcc option -fleading-underscore, which is meant for "legacy assembly code".
What happens if you really run out of physical memory (including swap) after overcommitting? Does your process get a signal, or will OOM killer just run without notifying the process that triggered the condition?