skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you remember a front end testing tool?
Hi,

I saw on HN a few weeks ago a comment talking about a software or script to do front end testing.

You define a path on your website (click on that button, enter, a login, password,..., visit page X,...) and the soft automatize the testing of the website.

Does somebody know the name of that soft/script ?

Thank you!
How many of these examples do we need to see before something is done with the US patent system?
Don't use GET (<a href="api?deleteId=213">delete</a>) requests for operations that are intended to modify content. Some browser plugins follow/crawl links which could inadvertently ruin the users day ;-)
Home Interior Design Ideas 
Everyone wants to have a big home that look fantastic. Many people think that the only way to have a nice design home is to have lots of money and a good designer. The truth is that you only need a good designer or good articles and photos to get inspired. It’s not that hard, you know ? Before you buy anything try to draw how it will look or put a friend of you that knows how to draw, this will save you the lots of money you thinked you must have !
Slime Molds Are Earth’s Smallest, Oldest Farmers
Costs $50 to publish a bet there, though, so transaction costs would eat up anything but a very, very large bet at 0.2%
Memory and Creativity (1996)
You should also be careful about taking your opinions on debugger usage from compiler, virtual machine runtime, and operating system implementers. Debuggers, particularly gdb, are seldom useful for more than crash dump analysis when you're looking at situations such as:
- Bad optimized code being generated
- Crashed trying to do something like execute an integer (happens with GC race conditions)
- Deadlock that only happens on maximum number of available cores when no debugger is attached

I've had to deal with all of those specific issues in the last couple of months on our compiler+runtime, and there's sadly not a lot of tools in the free space to help with situations like that.
Easier of cross platform development is a good reason to use JavaMe in lieu of Qt when developing for Symbian because Android does not fully support C++ development.

[edit] eSWT provides access the GPU under Java.
You're debating me out of context. Greatgrandparent raised the point about usability and I was simply rebutting it.
Just yesterday I attended a presentation on the upcoming Qt Quick toolkit and QML, the language for defining UIs. Should have support for both Meego and whatever Symbians remain. QML looked quite nice in itself and a definite improvement but, in historical context, I'm not yet convinced…
I think it depends on commenter karma (mass) and is inverse (square?) proportional with time elapsed. Comments with the highest 'gravity' float to the top.

Child comments don't modify the parent's gravity, do they?
I'm having trouble with the 'if you don't know about a burning fire, it isn't your problem yet' bit.

Now, granted, perhaps they should have called if there was a fire... But perhaps your portion of the fix can wait until you get into the office, but should really be worked on as soon as possible. Should they wake you up with a phone call to tell you that, or send that email? If you are known to ignore emails for the first few hours, you'll be getting that wake-up phone call.

No, instead, I do exactly the opposite of this. I check my email first, get all the piddly stuff out of the way first, and then settle in for some real coding.
Same story, different source:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2122544
I'm not convinced that perceived availability of jobs leads to an improved talent pool for headhunted Fortune 500 CEOs; it's not as if suitable people are declining to consider interviewing for positions because they've heard that there are many more vacancies for programmers or equity analysts.

Assuming that the board isn't certain of hiring the best candidate, lots of space at the top is going to make any individual companies' talent pool worse by ensuring that other companies snag some of the best available talent for their own vacancies.

This selection problem (and your argument about signalling) might partly explain why larger companies are more willing to fire and loss-making companies are apparently no more likely to fire than profitable ones - a loss-making small company is much less confident in their ability to hire an outstanding replacement than a profit-making larger company with a board perceived as trigger-happy.
My comment was not expressing an opinion on the relative values of Arc and the HN discussion community. HN delivers lots of value for the modest price of your time. Claiming that its performance is shameful when it isn't being directly monetized, or even indirectly monetized like Facebook &co., is unfair.

If you were talking about Facebook, Twitter, or Basecamp, that would be a different matter.
I signed up for Lovefilm earlier this month for the film streaming. I searched before hand and they had a nice film selection so I figure I'd go for it, if it sucked I could cancel. I signed up for the best plan that had streaming included (had no intention of doing postal DVDs) and found the following:

- The only films you can watch for free (after you've paid the monthly registration fee) are from before 2007, even though their entire catalogue contains newer films and it says "Your package includes unlimited online viewing" and "With access to 5,361 watch online titles" on both the sign up pages and in my account.

- After paying £4 for a film (Inception) which I expected to be included in the first place (a pipe dream I guess) I load it up... it's 360p at best, full screening makes it unwatchable.

- I figure if this is the state of it and I have to pay for shitty quality films I may as well go out and but the DVD, which I wanted to avoid... so I decided to cancel my account to find it's impossible to do online, you have to phone up... it was 4am, they were closed.

Terrible experience, but the joke is on me I guess, I didn't realise I could buy/rent films on iTunes so I'm doing that now.
I'm not sure what post you're referring to, but Selenium might be what you are looking for? http://seleniumhq.org/
Looks like they're just having some repo issues. Later in the thread: http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-Januar...
I don't recall it being discussed on HN recently, but this description sounds like Selenium, http://seleniumhq.org/
Never thought that the word 'subaltern' would ever turn up in tech discussion. Good one. :)
Even in my open-source project, where I make all the decisions, I have to work with technologies that annoy me. If you want to actually ship working software, you have to make some compromises.
In some jobs, that's true. Fortunately, many companies have more work than workers, so it isn't a problem.
HTC Desire HD : First Purchase Through My Blog Earnings
American Idol Finalist Lost 90 Pounds
> I've been using this technique since 1995 and it has never once been a problem.

Thousands of HN users experience the problems every day: link expired.
A more well-formatted PDF version, for those who'd like to click through: http://www.physics.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/unedited-t...
I have a feeling I'll get some comments about how its intent isn't immediately obvious but I wanted it to operate like a true application. I am honestly tired of seeing 99% of startups' websites looking like only a slight variation of the last.

I've intentially made the initial page is so (seemingly!!) limited so that anyone who visits for the first time is pretty much forced to read what it is (you'll see it if you wait 2-4 seconds!)... and once you know what it is... you know exactly what it is and for that information to remain afterward makes it cluttered. I'm also covering a fairly small niche with the product so most people who visit will know what it is beforehand anyway (by word of mouth - given the nature of the business). You'll notice that if you start typing your name before 2 seconds arrives, the popups telling you what it is don't appear. ;)

If you can't tell, I'm a big fan of simplicity and efficiency but with high function. There's a lot more going on with my app than it seems at first glance.

I would also like as much feedback as possible regarding the mobile version since I've only been able to test it on a small handful of phones. I'm actually in the process of downloading as many emulators as I can right now.

On average I've been putting in 70+ hours a week since July, as I've put it together entirely from scratch. No frameworks whatsoever other than a graphing library and the phpmailer library (more reliable/portable than the native mail function). I think it's time I slow down a little bit and get on with my life... lol... I'm 23 and this is my first startup... and I'm going solo... unfunded... so any guidance in helping this move forwards is GREATLY appreciated!!!
You're unlucky, I guess. Which technologies, for example?
The key to avoiding this is to stop thinking like a programmer, and start thinking like a sysadmin.

A programmer will automate some tedious repetitive task, and then boast about the automation to his programmer peers and managers. The programmer will then be rewarded with more tedious tasks to deal with.

A sysadmin automates a boring task, and tells nobody. The only way anyone can request work done is to file a ticket in the ticket tracker. The work gets done, but nobody besides the sysadmin knows how it was done. If the sysadmin is good at his job, he is rarely seen at his desk, and often seen playing foosball.
When I visited in Chrome, I wasn't sure what your site offered. When I visited in IE, I got a laugh out of your warning screen, but at least I was able to read the page title - "Advanced Data Collections and Analytics System."

Clicking through the sign up forms, I'm guessing it's analytics targeted at creative groups, but I'm not sure what your competitive differentiator is.

EDIT: After reading your post (looks like we were typing at the same time, I guess it makes sense and I appreciate your efforts to stand out. If I were to mention it to a colleague though, without any other info, I'm guessing said colleague wouldn't stick around long.
Fred Wilson: Monetizing Mobile Audio
Agreed - in the short run, it wouldn't have an effect for the reason you highlight (the pool is fixed). I was thinking more about the long run, where a change in CEO probability alters the career choice of people deciding say between going into business or going to medical school, becoming a lawyer etc.
I did about 50% of Founder Institute SV winter-2009/2010, but had to go to Iraq before finishing. Overall, I liked it, and think it could be valuable for a lot of people, but it's rather different from what I imagine YC is like.

Quora has some decent comments about it:
http://www.quora.com/Is-Founder-Institute-a-good-deal-for-en...
http://www.quora.com/How-do-programs-like-Y-Combinator-and-T...
http://www.quora.com/Founder-Institute/What-has-the-experien...

The biggest difference is that FI is not full-time, and a lot of people were both older and had unrelated day jobs to their startups. There were also a lot more business types than tech types, and the program is more focused on VC/fundraising than technical product development, although the product is also iterated on.

Assuming I had to choose between YC and FI, I'd pick YC almost every time.

By far the best program (maybe even better than YC) that I've ever seen is the MIT Entrepreneur's Club (e-club) run by Richard Shyduroff, but it's only open to the MIT community. It is affiliated with the MIT 100k competition, too. There are classes, a lot of people from the business school and engineering school mixing, etc. If I lived in Boston, I'd try to be actively involved; it's not too hard to get invited if you're a decent tech person there.
I applied to AlphaLab in Pittsburgh but didn't get in.

My start-up is a better approach to what I have been doing for years. In fact, the project was suggested to me by quite a few customers. It's a small business system (order processing, inventory, accounting, ecommerce, CRM, etc.) that can easily be modified to handle the company's special needs.

I had been (and continue to) work on this. I don't need the money but there were several compelling reasons to want to be part of the program:

- access to advice where I am weak
- possibilities for collaboration
- better access to new ideas
- better access to more funding
- office space (a nice perk for a single founder)
- Hacker News has opened me to the possibilites for a program like yc
- I would LOVE to be more involved with the start-up community
- I am committed to Pittsburgh for family reasons

The funding is also provided by taxpayers, so I figured it would be nice to get something back.

The staff was extremely helpful with feedback and office hours. I completed my application and got a little help from friends from Hacker News (rms & SteveKlabnik).

I made it to the presentation round, but was rejected. I focused on the technology, but my audience was more interested in the business plan. Since my own customers were pushing for this, I didn't see the need. Big mistake.

The feedback I got was that there wasn't a business case. No one would buy it. I know they're wrong, but I didn't convince them otherwise, so I just moved on.

Ironically, at the exact moment I was being told that no one would buy it, one of my biggest customers texted me, "do they get it when do u start" How I wish my phone was turned on. Eight words from a customer said more that I could say in 30 minutes.
List of convicted computer criminals
Not the person I'm thinking of but thanks for replying.
Very true indeed, but this particular post was about programmers :)
"Ignorance is bliss". The problem is rather universal. Put a good "X professional" to do job Y and a bad X to do the same job, it will be more miserable for he who is good because he has more knowledge and is better able to realize all the reasons why job/task X is a miserable sorry job.

On the other side you could argue that a good programmer would be able to abstract away a proportional amount of miserable work to a bad programmer, thus leaving them equally miserable.

In the end its your attitude as a person that decides if a task makes you miserable. If your attitude makes everything you do into a job — some piece of tedious labour you do at someone elses whim — then no wonder you are miserable.
We http://Sleep.FM - The Social Alarm Clock went through this program in Summer 2008.

We enjoyed the speakers; knowledge gained in marketing & PR has proven invaluable(we were featured on various tech publications after the program). As well the stories of perseverance (CD NOW) were inspiring.

Further the support and advice you receive from the core team as alum is strong and very helpful!

Also, you are provided the opportunity to interview recent business college graduates and MBAs and bring them onto your team if a good fit is found. Some of DreamIt's most successful companies found some great people that has facilitated their successes!
People are charged for incoming messages by some US carriers and are not provided with a clear option for blocking them. A person low on minutes can let a call roll to voicemail without incurring cost, there is no similar option for messages.
The interesting thing here is that Twitter hasn't even infringed by design. The celebrity culture is more a matter of who happened to find the service useful. If you can be sued for something you didn't even implement but is an artefact of how your platform is utilised by users, well, there's a problem.

What's next, suing Apple because consumers can stick an iPad to their fridge therefore infringing on 'System and method for affixing a touchscreen to a refrigeration device'?
Probably not until the Government gets served papers for something they are doing that infringes on a random patent some troll is holding.

At this point most companies consider it cost of doing business; changing it could possibly weaken or remove the leverage they have with their patent warchest.
I find knowing what the stack is at the point where things go wrong incredibly useful. Having an IDE that allows me to work my way back up the stack and see what direction my code was called from that meant that I ended up with an invalid state is terribly handy.

I also sometimes find it useful when calling code I don't have decent documentation for. I can examine the various properties of the object I'm trying to work with, and see which ones contain useful information.
I doubt it's because you're in Canada. Doesn't work for me either, and I'm in the USA, but also running Linux, which Flash doesn't get along with.

Granted, I am Canadian, so maybe it's just prejudiced against Canadians in general, not where you live... :-)
At least they're not doing it traditionally by pillaging the village and raping the women.
They raise them - then they eat them.
National Internet Defense - Small States on the Skirmish Line
Flexible screens to inspire new devices
I used debuggers long ago, but I've found that I work just as well, if not better, without them. I have to actually understand the code, not just get to a certain point and see what the variables are.

In the end, it means I know that section of code inside and out and can rewrite and/or refactor it as needed to solve the problem. It usually results in cleaner, more efficient code.
Try http://dukgo.com/lite
Nokia sells alot of dumbphones right? Nokia sells more smartphones than dumbphones. Oh, and they've also been the most successful in transitioning customers to smartphones (60-70% of nokia dumbphone users become nokia smartphone users).
Reading the US-centric blogs and tech-sites makes it seem like only the US companies are in the smartphone market (Google with Android, Apple with iOS, etc)
That's what I do every time I'm on a bus :)
Ask HN: Help choosing App name: Resume vs CV
I needed to do my CV as I'm looking for a new job and so instead of just opening the word processor and writing it like a normal person I started writing an app to do it for me. After getting a bit carried away for a couple of weeks just before Christmas I ended up with something that I realised others here on Hacker News would perhaps find useful. I've now started to add features that I think would specifically appeal to Silicon Valley tech types.

I'm planning to launch a beta pretty soon and am going to provide as many Hacker News readers who show interest with a free account. Watch out for that post here. In the meantime I'm struggling with the name and consequent domain name registration. I really want to use CV, short for Curriculum Vitae for those in the dark, instead of Resume. But I'm not sure whether you guys in the US use CV and Resume interchangeably like we tend to do here in the UK. My tagline will more than likely have the word Resume in it if I do go with CV in the main name. I'm probably making too big a deal of this one word, but I'm concerned about a) recognition of CV by my target market (Silicon Valley tech types like your good selves) b) that Resume has about 10 times the volume of searches in the US vs CV according to SEMRush. So I should probably have resume in the domain name rather than the tagline.

Any input that you US readers have on this CV vs Resume debate would be great. Is CV even recognised in the US as the thing you send along with a job application?
That's the real scam - charging for incoming.

Charge for outgoing. Leave it at that - otherwise it's a mess.

Why should i have to pay for a message I can't reject? That's silly.

The CRTC should be hit up on that one.
This is a better starting point for the politics of the situation:

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2011-Januar...
The patent in question: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=e-ULAAAAEBAJ

A cursory browse will show that this is as expected: a wide-ranging patent that shouldn't have been granted in its submitted state.
Part of being a great teacher, I think, understanding where your students trip up and their wrong thought processes. Next time, you teach the course, perhaps you might want to ask that person their train of thought.

I think it is based on mistaken beliefs like these :

* 0 is not a number, it's the absence of a number. Therefore, standard number properties like parity does not apply.

* All even numbers are twice another number, which is not true of 0.

Also, very early on, people learn that 0 is "weird", e.g. you cannot divide by it. Also there's something that irks the common psyche about treating the statement "this set has zero elements" similarly to "this set has 5 elements".

This doesn't show the stupidity of the general public (or some of your students), it's just that 0 is among those abstract mathematical concepts (like infinity) that you just have to get used to. Remember that it was invented much later than natural numbers.

P.S. People also see other weird conventions (e.g. 1 is not a prime, 0!=1) and may think that this is another one.
My mates installed it for me and I didn't make it past the first day. Search results wasn't accurate enough for me so I went back to Google.
The site is for specifically for touring artists and their management/booking agents/record labels. I can't imagine someone outside of the industry being referred to it, as it's a very specific niche... would it be wrong to assume that 99% of people visiting the site already know what it is? Even with that said, the limitations on the front page should force you down a path that tells you what it is. 4 seconds after the page loads a tip appears saying "What is RELA?" And there's a video tutorial link in the bottom left... with facebook and twitter links at the bottom right (which are pretty much the only things on the page)... all of which explain what it is. I was thinking anyone visiting for the first time would be nearly forced to at least check out one of those things. I mean... they're visiting it for a reason - probably not just some random skim through like people here at HN would do.
Played with the mobile version on a Blackberry 9700 (using Blackberry Browser) - so far, no problems. I don't have a band or any experience being in one, so I can't provide any commentary in that regard. Sorry!
Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon.

For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS though, at least not yet.)

This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology.

Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview:

http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-pr...

If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.:

http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components
Google Analytics 101: How to Filter your Visits
Are they just aggregating search results from various websites and putting it all together into one package?
Worthless Stocks from China
Hanlon’s razor and corporations
The Ann Rand fanboy fantasy thought permeates so many of the trustfunded hipsters here.
Ask HN: What non CompSci courses to take in college?
Courses in any of the other departments that would help in a programmer/entrepreneur career ?
Magentocommerce services - osCommerce PayPal Payment..
Yes that's it ! Thank you very much :)

Thank you also djhworld!
just one more and then they'll do something about it