skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a chronic manual tester. But I want to start getting into automated tests.

What are the most important things to test? What are some good intros to pick up the basics on writing automated tests?
[Off Topic]: mnemonicsloth, please put your email address or some contact info in your news.yc profile, if you don't mind. Or shoot me an email.
You should consider a social network of parents who use the system that could add sites to the white list. Friends of parents could go in the white list of emails as well.

That would actually make a good default home page for the kids: the pages that people recently recommended for kids and a feed from parents friends and kids.
I liked it better when editor wars only involved emacs and vi.
This is a good point... I think it would be helpful to see that before you install the product on your desktop.
The problem with planning is that it oversimplifies your lived experience. Very few people live from step to step, they live by their desire, therefore the statement, "the best performers seesaw between "ideas" and "actions" is more of linear effect. You have an idea, you want it to become real, so you try, if some actions to get you to the idea, the key is knowing what actions best produce the idea. An now we are back to planning, which people do more subconsciously than consciously, and let's face it, sometimes you just need to cogitate on an idea for a few months and then it strikes you what to do to make it real. I think the more important question is how do you not loose sight of the ideas you want to make real?
"there are completely separate teams that handle just ui or serverside tasks"

And it shows.
It's a web browser -- why do I have to sign up for something to download it?
Ewww. Just because parents want to control their kids forcibly doesn't mean you should help.

You choose a list of web sites appropriate for each child in your family. PikLuk will restrict their online exploration to these sites.

This, for example, means kids growing up who don't use Google -- who don't have basic proficiency with the Internet. That's awful.
out of curiosity which sites and companies does it 'show'?
The Book of Webmin. It was published by No Starch Press in 2003, sold modestly (but got lots of readers on the web, too). It's now been combined with Jamie Cameron's book about Webmin (which was published in the same year) to form a wiki at http://doxfer.com/Webmin
LLC's protect against individual liability. They would be sueing the company, not the management team's personal assets.
It's probably fair game to make an offer to anybody you like, but to expect friendly responses from their colleagues would be asking too much. Think about other men hitting on your girl-friend. It is certainly legal to do so, but you probably wouldn't welcome it too much yourself.
It's great! Pay no attention to the dousche that said "This, for example, means kids growing up who don't use Google -- who don't have basic proficiency with the Internet. That's awful."
Jerkoff comments like that reek of someone who is a salaried desk jockey.
I mentioned it to one parent and they really like it.
The Dilbert Blog: The Day I Will Be Slightly Amusing
I personally think that test/behavior driven development is the way to go, so my advice will be geared in that direction. With that in mind, the "reference" text on it is probably "Test Driven Development: By Example" by Kent Beck. I've only skimmed it, myself, but it seems solid and Kent Beck is a smart guy.

The cool thing about testing (and TDD in particular) is that even introducing a bare minimum of that sort of discipline into your work consistent will quickly pay pretty big dividends. A quick way to get started is to read this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development. Focus on understanding the TDD cycle. Mocks and stubs are useful to know, but you can safely consider them "advanced" and skip them if they confuse you initially.

Then, pick a test harness for your platform, say RSpec (http://rspec.rubyforge.org), if you're a Ruby person. Read the documentation and search for blogs and tutorial articles on the framework you've chosen. Then just start designing a simple module using it!

As you practice, you'll find it useful to read up on Mocks and Stubs and dig deeper into the philosophy and best practices. Dave Astels has some great writings out there.
means kids growing up who don't use Google

[Rolls eyes]

who don't have basic proficiency with the Internet

[Rolls eyes]

That's awful.

[Rolls eyes]

There are 60 billion (or more) hard core porn images on the internets. No need to expose 8 year olds to them.

I think the search box in wikipedia would be sufficient to acclimate them to the whole "Type word, press search" paradigm. They'll be prepared...if only for google. I mean, Bill Gates had a teletype into a mainframe, so maybe they're doomed anyway.

EDIT: By the way, I've seen first hand how kids go straight for the very worst stuff on the web, and it's pretty depressing. So, there's definitely a valid market for this kind of thing...
Curi, we understand where you are coming from. However, most kids we're trying to cover are not even allowed to use Internet now simply because there isn't a tool out there that can reliably ensure that your kid is going to keep playing the flash game while you're cooking, for example.
What? No point using Google when you have a whitelist of sites you can visit. Actually finding useful things with Google is a skill -- sometimes the right search terms are obvious, sometimes not. Old non-technical people have trouble with it, ask them.

Regarding porn: the more you make it a big important taboo, the more people get obsessed with it and work to beat your censorship.
It is a web-based service, the browser integrates into your dashboard which is web-based. You need to have an account to use it.
That was my thought. I linked it more for the research than the advice and speculation.
LLC's protect against individual liability, unless if they were doing something illegal. There are other holes that make LLC's and other corporate entities much less bulletproof than commonly believed.
All great advice. Thanks!
You are misunderstanding the target audience for this application. It isn't a matter of whether or not kids are proficient with Google or whether we are blocking sites that for us proficient users are a dream, but instead we are giving complete control to the parents. I wouldn't even contemplate someone who is so comfortable with their 3 or 4 year old that they'd allow them to simply jump onto FF and go at it. They can accidentally click on links that take them to places their parents don't want them to see. We are removing that possibility. Again, the parent has the ultimate say as to where they are allowed. Now, if you are so inclined and trusting of your young child that you'd add something like Google to their allowed sites, then that's completely your decision.

As far as wikipedia, we will be removing that as a suggested site, for some of the reasons mentioned here.
Good job. I think it is a great idea, and useful too. Much better than most of the useless crap we see in here.

Refine it, and go for it. Remember, execution, execution, execution.
i think you should promote the fact that it's free on the front page
The argument is sort of tautological: the uncommon, huge exits that pay the bills for investors are relatively rare. Well, obviously. The author makes some attempt to establish that they're increasingly rare, but she doesn't talk too much about trends--most of her evidence is anecdotal. And it's not really fair to compare today's exits to the ones from the late 90s, since many of the latter were irrationally huge. What's more, she leaves out recent ten-figure acquisitions like DoubleClick and Skype.

That said, her basic point is certainly right: the average VC can't be as selective today as in 2001, so they're often investing at valuations higher than they'd like. That's unfavorable. But I don't think it's calamitous.
I'm very intrigued, but I couldn't find a screenshot anywhere on your page! You've gotta fix this.
I am in the same boat. Maybe TTD was invented for people certain kind of people that like to "plan" stuff well in advance? Maybe my brain is not wired for TTD, but I tried to like it, and I couldn't.

I can see how TTD is important in critical software (avionics, banking, trading) etc... but for the average web 2.0 speed of execution should be paramount, and I think TTD just slows you down. You end up writting x2 the code, plus everytime you have to change something, you have to do it twice.

In mobile client development, if found TTD pretty useless, unless you are doing mission critical things, where speed of writing a software is less important than the accuracy of it. (imagine phones crashing, not a good think).
There are two factors that make Pownce what it is. First, it's an alpha. I am not sure how clear Leah and Kevin made that, but realistically it is still invite-only. The second factor is that it is developed by a developer who is inexperienced, and a visionary that runs one of the most demanded web applications created. I believe that Pownce has a lot of potential, and what we see right now isn't exactly what we are supposed to see. Give it a few months, something's going to happen.
Alright, I downloaded it, it is great, and I couldn't break out of the walled garden. I was going to try and play the age-old game of "how many clicks does it take to get to a nipple from yahooligans" and hit the friendly stop sign animation. A whitelist is the only way to keep a browser locked down, because otherwise there are always web proxies and online translators. As others have said, you are going to want some kind of shared bookmarks for kid-safe sites.
"Yes, TDD implies that there is a more or less exact specification."

That's actually the opposite of the truth. The second D is for Design (or Development). The idea is that you organically develop the spec and the code in tandem.
Seven Steps to Graphing Your Facebook Strategy (...and waste 7 min of your time)
the first one is http://www.mediatemple.com and the second one is http://www.slicehost.com
Just a quick note on "mission critical." I've always found that to be an interesting term. I'd argue that software components critical to your business are mission critical, practically by definition. It doesn't matter if I'm an old-school avionics company or a Web 2.0 social bookmarking site . . . my software is mission critical to my business.
Atlanta Startup Action--CapVenture Kicks Off
Dear Startup: Please make branching easy
Won't someone please form a startup to tackle this problem? Branching sucks. It's one of those things that every smallish-to-large company has to deal with, and it's very non-trivial. Sure, there are a lot of complex issues, but won't someone please take a "Worse is Better" mentality and not make their tool do everything under the sun? Here's a modest list of core concepts that seem useful:

Each individual has their own branch. This individual can run a build of Product X and check in features and bug fixes. But most importantly, they can check in incrementally, instead of only when the feature is fully complete. For large projects, this would be very useful. Each changelist would still represent a feature, but the overall project might not be ready to deploy at that point.

Each individual's branch can sync to the main branch by pressing one button, and the system tries to auto-merge the results. Syncing is not branch merging. It doesn't create a changelist, for example. It should be the same process you'd go through when you're working in the main branch, only on your own branch.

Each individual can take checked-out work from the main branch and move it into another branch as a new changelist, without requiring a check-in.

Each individual can "save" their changelist at any time. When a changelist is saved, those files are copied and stored and the changelist is reverted. You can then fix a bug and check that in, then "restore" your saved changelist.

Auto-merge is critical. Every step should try to auto-merge, and only show a conflict when the same part of a file has been edited by multiple people, not just when the same file has been edited by multiple people.

Here's a quote from the CEO where I work. This was during an email conversation about branching, specifically that when you sync to the main branch it's actually a merge that creates a changelist:

"One of the key issues is the information you get from the changelist. It's not that we don't want to see checkins, it's that the checkins that result from [merging branches] don't convey information. Or if they do, it's not obvious and right up front like it is now. I puruse the change list every day to see what's going on. It's critical to my global view of what's going on."

So there you go. Make him happy and he'll give you money. We use Perforce, and it would be really great to have a layer on top of it to manage problems associated with branching.
The Atlanta startup scene is moving along pretty well. My startup (Bravadosoft) is the second one listed on here. Some pretty interesting companies there last night, and we had a good panel of VCs and investors.
No, that has nothing to do with it. If you reread that link, you would find that Kratom is only illegal in Thailand, Australia, Malaysia, and Burma and I don't live in either of those countries.
Give Mercurial a try. We use it now and have had great results. We've each got a few repositories floating around and it becomes very easy to isolate certain features/bugs/fixes into their own little worlds.
I have an almost 4 year old who I've already been playing around with on google to find out information on animals like wombats, etc. Your service looks very interesting with nice graphics, but I wonder about its ability to really control web usage. What would stop children from simply opening up Firefox or IE and circumventing your browser? Do you have a way to handle this?
KOL?
Another thing to consider is that sometimes 'QA' isn't even an appropriate term for what goes on in a 3 week change cycle. Sometimes it's only because there has to be a clear blame tree if anything goes wrong.
Pikluk is not just a browser, it can serve as a locked-down Windows shell with disabled Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Alt-Tab, taking over 100% of real estate on all monitors, etc.
screenshot that tell me type of kid stuff is inside is really missing
How can you test something if you don't even know how or if it works? You need to hack on it and see if you can get things going before you nail it down, no?
You're doing a software startup, so your costs should be minimal. You should be able to cover these costs by consulting for a few months at the beginning, then living off of this cash. Just move in together in a cheap apartment, buy food in bulk, etc. It only takes a couple months of consulting to save up enough cash for a year.
SMALL. Are you implying that it's not?

Or maybe you're with the aaron crowd in believing that it has to be absolutely perfect or it's useless. Heck, even that only could really apply to the design and architecture of an app.

Perfection is rarely necessary.

edit: And what's with so many downvotes? I thought yc was more mature.
The race to create a *real* web operating system is heating up
How many teams fail to execute and lose precious time to market debugging things that they could've caught earlier?

I am not a 100% TDD fanboy either, but it's not something to dismiss wholeheartedly.
You are assuming that development only goes in the forward direction. When I really have latitude in my goals, my code is just about impossible to pin down until it's 95% implemented.
That's why I said sometimes. If you read the article, it claims that this is never the case. I presented my disagreement with this.
If the woman were weaker, then performance would not have improved after taking them on as board directors, as this report shows conclusively.
Sorry, I think you're right. There are cases when it can slow you down overall.

Adding tests up front, from my experience, adds about 40% overhead to a project. (time spent actually writing the tests) You may get some of this time back later, as the author claims, as the automated test suite is run.

I've also been on projects where the code & entire test suite was re-written & scrapped after 6 months of initial development, pretty much making the whole test up front thing of little value.
Dude, have you tried bzr already? It's exactly what you need.

http://bazaar-vcs.org/
Amazon's Dynamo
Seven Steps to Graphing Your Facebook Strategy
None of us have the stats to prove anything conclusively.

And this is the problem. If the article is going to make such big claims with such small evidence, then it seems worth evaluating some more obvious solutions first.
bummer. i bet kids love clicking on ads.
Looks awesome guys, great job. You make those of us that are also applying for the cycle a little worried...

Only comment from me...if it's going to be marketed/involving children, I probably would have chosen a name with a real word instead of the web 2.0 naming convention. But, since kids have their own languages anyway, you're probably good!
VoIP lag test
To be fair, it seems that everyone other than I took this in the context of more traditional software project, not an ill-specified one man startup project.

I was referring to the later.
I've recently begun using automated tests of basically all my code. Both frontend and backend, when I'm doing web stuff. I usually write the code to a minimum first, and then implement tests. It's a huge relief to use these tests when I refactor and refine code. I definitely think automated testing is the way to go in most cases.
Wow - ok, nice job :)
"One of the key issues is the information you get from the changelist. It's not that we don't want to see checkins, it's that the checkins that result from [merging branches] don't convey information. Or if they do, it's not obvious and right up front like it is now. I puruse the change list every day to see what's going on. It's critical to my global view of what's going on."

"Like it is now" <-- What does that mean?
Also 35% does not equal "likely." In fact it would have been roughly twice as accurate to have the opposite headline.
.NET framework source code to be released
The very young and the very old are much more likely to click on ads because they are less likely to differentiate between advertisements and content.
For the most part, we all work in the mainline. Each changelist description is representative of the changelist.. That is, there aren't any "Work in Progress" titles. So our manager can read the changelist titles to see where the project is headed.

If we move everyone to their own branch, to simply sync to mainline we have to merge the mainline branch into our own. In Perforce, that means it creates a changelist that's checked in. Annoying when you're reading the unfiltered changelist titles, but there's something even more annoying: All your work has to be checked in before you merge from the mainline (otherwise you get horrible merging problems).
Microsoft focusing on software in battle against iPod
Practical Image Recognition (prevents cat entering house when she carries a mouse)
This is who the study was done by:

"Catalyst is the leading nonprofit corporate membership research and advisory organization working globally with businesses and the professions to build inclusive environments and expand opportunities for women and business"

Does it seem like an independent study?
Crashes are a lot worse for business if you're an avionics company than if you're a social bookmarking company.
If you don't think Facebook is a fad, ask if you can really see Facebook being around in 20 years. I certaintly can't. It is a fad, just one that may take some time to run out.
JavaScript: Put everything in a namespace
Making Ajax Elegantly Fast
If facebook isn't around in 20 years, it will only be because something better has replaced it. If I knew what that better thing was, I would make it now.

Parakey is facebook's trump card, I'm extremely curious to see how Parakey ends up being integrated into facebook.
Looks interesting. I'd like to learn more about your business plan. I DO NOT like the product name. (It's not Teletubby bad, but it's not optimal either.) I think I have a better name for you. Email me.
The sometimes precarious business models for Open Source software
I hate to be old fashioned, but where's the revenue stream?
... or Mercurial, Monotone, Darcs, or Git, all of which make branching either fairly easy or utterly trivial.
The most convincing part of his statement is "works everywhere, from PC to mobile device". I think that's where we'll see a marked divergence between 2.0 and 3.0. There's a few bits and pieces of it happening already, with Twitter and the Google Maps and gmail, etc. As the devices get closer to the capabilities of a "real" browser, and developer begin to pay more attention to those ~8 billion devices, a whole new world will open up.
Let's say you know you've gotta design a bowling pin from scratch. TDD and "standard" coding practices both require the same initial thought. You'd say, ok, what's this thing actually have to do? Maybe you start with, "it has to fall when hit by a bowling ball hard enough."

If you weren't using TDD, you might go off and create a BowlingPin class, a BowlingBall class (if it's not extant), and hack together a method in some arbitrary order and method. That's cool, but the TDD approach would have you write a mini "test." In pseudoRuby:

[http://pastie.caboo.se/103470]

This, of course, will fail because there is no BowlingPin class. So you write the class skeleton and re-run the tests.

Fails again. Why? There is no got_hit method on BowlingPin? Shit. Now you've got to go and write the simplest got_hit method that'll work. So you write something like:

[http://pastie.caboo.se/103471]

Rerun the tests. Dammit! There's no "fell?" method -- gotta implement it! And so on and so on.

There are a few things to note here. First, it's pretty critical to use a decent test harness. Running and writing tests has to be crazy fast otherwise this approach won't work well.

Next, in running through the TDD cycle you're actually (1) specifying the interfaces and behavior of your code and (2) implementing as narrowly as you can. The actual "tests" you get out of it are almost secondary! If implemented properly, it's really a design methodology. That's why the new trend is to change the language from Test Driven to Behavior Driven. The use of the word "test" seems to (understandably) evoke the same response you had of needing an iron-clad spec to work from initially. It's just not the case.
Ask YC: User feedback?
I'm wrapping up my last year of school and plan on applying for the summer YC program with two friends to work on a project we're experimenting with now. One of the key elements that I proposed was having an absolute seamless user feedback system.

I spent the past six months as an intern at a company that practiced a mix of scrum and XP methodologies and learned how important getting feedback is for the success and direction of a product, so I'm asking every bright person here for any examples or ideas in integrating in a feedback system for a web application. I like twitter.com's system [http://twitter.com/help], but that is simply to request to get help. What about a way of allowing for user suggestions? My only concern is that it could easily be "overdone" and draw away from a clean and usable site.
Testing Django applications
New documentation for testing django apps. I especially like the test client you can use to simulate http requests with.
If it's something people truly want, they'll be willing to pay for it.

I could see parents shelling out $5-$10/month so their kids have virgin eyes and ears for an extra half-decade...