skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mechanize is good and watir for ruby, and then there's Selenium. Be very cautious of selenium and similar because they invalidate a large amount of QA tests (depending on what you're testing). Selenium works in 1 of 3 ways, injecting javascript into the page via a Firefox plugin, injecting javascript via a proxy and having you add the javascript to your pages. Depending on what you're testing, the addition of the javascript is a change to the page (ie, invalidate the testing depending on what you need to verify). Watir is good as it programmatically controls the browser in the same way a user would, sending the events to the items. However, it's difficult to do a large volume of tests in a reasonable time frame. WWW::Mechanize on the other hand allows you to do as many tests at a time as you like, as fast as you can connect to the server. The difference is that with Mechanize, you don't render the page at all, just process the returned HTML (and javascript elements if you choose to fetch them as well).

Many of the "state of the art" tools are really glorified "recorders", using specific wait times rather than being able to determine when the document is actually fully loaded. Additionally, many of them require you to not use the system doing the testing for anything else, as they require the browser to have focus and the mouse to be non-moving. Mechanize and Watir don't have this requirement (and I don't remember about Selenium, it never fit for the tasks I had).

The final fit I have used is Mechanize for core functionality (page loads, load testing, spidering, link checking, non-cache download times, proper javascript detection, proper text returned, etc.), Watir for interactive functionality testing (browser hidden) and Watir for visual testing (browser not hidden, just sit there and stare at it clicking away).

There can easily be others that I haven't dealt with (I haven't had to do web app testing in a year or so), but from my experience, Mechanize and Watir filled the role very well.
In evolutionary terms, dinosaurs are best described as a region of the family tree which lies somewhere between:

a) the last common ancestor of all birds, and
b) the last common ancestor of all birds and reptiles

As such, whether they're classified as reptiles, birds, or in their own category is really just a matter of taste.
My favorite rhyme:

"Sex and the City ruined women for me.
wtching coffee prince and lovin it =D"
Dear IKEA: Verdana is not a font. It's a mistake.
> At other times, there's a hint of condescension, as though the question is actually: "Couldn't make it in academia, eh? Stuck in industry, eh?"

Wow. Just wow.

If you're in academia, and you don't do original research, you've got to be an amazing lecturer/teacher to make yourself worth a damn to society. Most of American education from middle school on is credentialing based on your ability to follow instructions carefully.

You could say it "shows how well you'll fit in at a job" if you're being charitable; you could call it "obedience school" if you're being less charitable.

Without fail, all of the wealthiest people I know didn't graduate college and half of them didn't graduate high school. Engineering and programs that follow a curriculum similar to engineering do okay. But most of the rest is junk unless your goal is to be a moderately salaried reasonably secure employee. High school and college never have and can't teach you what you need to be perform on the highest levels.

Mark Twain said it pretty well: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Yes, every single point you made is correct, valid, and of much concern. My point was simply that everything the article covers was already completely doable since PHP4, even if it wasn't the most optimal solution. It was more a teardown of the article than the features of PHP 5.3, which I would be taking advantage of in a heartbeat if only people would actually upgrade their PHP installs in a timely manner...
I wonder how many people can make the 8h work day happen when freelancing. Isn't it utopian unless you let others work you in Indian sweatshops?

In case you only work 8h a day and then stay away from the computer please stand up and tell us how you do it (eating less?)!
I get the feeling that ten years ago you would have been saying the same thing about biotech and wireless electricity.

Edit: Perhaps you could inform me of exactly why you don't like this? Preferably in some way more precise than by putting the word "science" in scare quotes, if that's possible. ;)
My first professional assignment (besides the one-day-a-week high school internship) was to make a particular bit of DHTML work in Netscape 4.

It's funny how that first assignment can influence your career path...
>In the summer, when school’s out, he does this for 15 hours a day, signing on at 9am with his trademark Ed McMahon–esque “Here’s crime for today” and stopping at midnight so he can sleep. Rarely do five minutes go by without a new post. The only thing that breaks Timmy away from the buzz and chatter of the police scanner is his mom’s call of “Dinner’s ready!” “My mom doesn’t let us eat in the rooms here, so I have to eat in the kitchen,” he says.

Now that's dedication.
(draft) John Furrier on the Coming Entreprenurial Counter Culture
I've been sitting in #rvm all night helping the author with bugs and stuff. There are a few snafus here and there but nothing fatal. Things like making it work with TextMate properly, packages needed on Ubuntu when you install certan versions with RVM, etc. I'm putting any fixes I come across as comments on the Ruby Inside post :)

Basically, it's worth persevering with. Or at least going on #rvm on irc.freenode.net and bugging the creator about ;-)
Those were written in 2004 and 2005! I know newLISP might not be thee lisp for everyone. All I'm saying is it's free, it's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux (and more), It's got a decent graphical IDE and it's Lisp. Give it a try before digging up 5-year old articles; no?
I mean, my original intent here was to get a conversation about re-thinking the concept of a presentation aid, not to reiterate that they are bad.
John's jotted down some thoughts on how VC is breaking - he and I had a phone conversation on it this morning - I agree with a lot of what he's saying.

If you have any thoughts or quibbles, I'm interested in hearing them - we're trying to get a wide array of input before we do a long-ish post on it.
We plead guilty to having a fragmented suite - that was the price of rapid evolution. But they are coming together nicely now. Check in on us every few months (seriously!). We hope to surprise you.
Who Asked Flickr to Take Down Obama Joker Photo?
List: 45 Web sites to help you stop procrastinating
I don't know about the 3Gs but my 2G camera just suffers so badly from "camera shake" (I don't know what the technical term is) that it is mostly unusable. I would assume this would highly affect any OCR use.
"Other people have a right to spend their money however they want"

Except employers?

"I'd be defending peoples right to boycott"

...except you're not doing that, you're trying to argue that they're not being jackasses. I already conceded there's a right to be a jackass.
I think that largely depends on how you have it set up, and how much of a coder you are. It's definitely geared to be a nice compromise for folks that are jacks of all trades and masters of none. It appeals to the coder and the writer in me, since I split my time between the two.
How odd - his font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,Nimbus Sans,Verdana,sans-serif"
Timmy's dedication extends beyond the content of his blog, too. When I invited him to come blog on the WC, I had no idea I was essentially recruiting a brutal tester/debugger to the team. About twice a week, he sends me long missives on things that "get on his nerves" about the site. While this was frustrating at first, his near-constant UI and user experience feedback has been invaluable.
Good luck with this quest.

Hi5 has been pioneering this concept for ages.
shudder We have a business relationship with a financial company based out of Germany, and their system (which sits on top of replicated Oracle) defines "idempotent" to mean "our database already has a cache of the answer we already gave you". Oh, and they gave us a JAR file of client code that does client-side failover, with a fixed 8-second delay to account for the Oracle replication lag between sites. No coordination between different instances of our client. So now, when one client fails over due to a connectivity blip, the other clients get cached error messages (logically equivalent to 404 Not Found). "Idempotent", indeed.
Lol, dude, so you're where the Chinese companies outsource to :).

Joke aside, I suggest using Django in such low budget projects if the admin is a selling point. Will save you some time at least (In Django a very slick admin is automatically there for you). Best of the luck.
Citations (podcasts and posts from '08 where I talked about it / talked with devs from Hi5 on their translation efforts):
http://mashable.com/2008/04/24/hi5-podcast/
http://mashable.com/2008/05/21/hi5-crowdsourced-translation/
http://mashable.com/2008/04/29/hi5-growth/
http://mashable.com/2008/02/29/podcast-opensocial/
If you're in academia, and you don't do original research, you've got to be an amazing lecturer/teacher to make yourself worth a damn to society.

The vast majority of folks in academia are doing original research, that's why they're there. Most of 'em see teaching as a somewhat annoying obligation which they have to go through in order to be allowed to do research.

Without fail, all of the wealthiest people I know didn't graduate college and half of them didn't graduate high school.

This is, of course, a quirk of the particular people whom you happen to know, and not reflective of society as a whole.

The wealthiest people I know have beards.
You know, I like HN for a variety of reasons but idea sharing just isn't really one of them (for me). I haven't thought about this topic nor do I care to but here's the thing: if I did care to think about it, I wouldn't dare talk anonymously to a bunch of insanely smart, DIYers who can probably out-everything me on many levels.

So no, I will not contribute. Not because I have anything personal against you, OP, but because I think it's odd to ask the question and even stranger to reply with actual, usable content.

I know that may seem strange to some but that's okay; it seems strange to me that (a) you would ask, and (b) there are people who would respond with tons of great quality ideas that could be executed by MSFT/Apple/etc in their next release thus nullifying the potential for a small company to build "the next generation of presentation aids".
Someone just voted this down anonymously - please, come out and make yourself known so we can have a discussion.

True story: A good Chinese-Canadian friend got a PhD and was offered a professor's post. Then he jumped onto a part time project before taking his professor's post that hit it big, found it enjoyable, and got quite wealthy from it. He lectured one year before quitting to go private, and laments the time and money he wasted in academia. Maybe 10 people on the planet read his thesis.

So, anonymous downvoter, are you a graduate student? Or a high school teacher or professor perhaps? I paid for all my school bills myself. I attended university full time while running a company full time and putting 20+ hours into a startup. And you know what? I estimate I'd be worth something like $100,000 - $250,000 more if I'd put the efforts into work and getting paid for it and had the tuition money for investments later. I had exactly three highly useful university classes: Business law, project management, microeconomics. Maybe 4 or 5 somewhat useful classes, and the rest were an epic waste of time and money. So, please come out and discuss with me, especially if I've struck a nerve. It's a nerve that should be struck, discussed, and worked out. Society will be better and the would-be academic will be wealthier and more productive.

Edit: It's funny watching the score of the parent go up and down. I'm hanging around, waiting for a reply so we can get a discussion going if anyone would like to. But people would not like to. They don't want to come and say, "You said this, which I sort of agree, and you said that, which I think is wrong, and here is why." No, they read the above and go, "OhmygoshnoIdon'tlikethat." Or something like that - I don't know exactly, because they don't weigh in and establish why they disagree.

I took time and wrote my take on American education and the fact that the wealthiest people I know are not college graduates. Will there be dispute? Discussion? A half dozen people or so have voted the comment up now, another half dozen have voted it down without explaining why. If this were a less civil environment, I would call those people cowards - not cowards for not confronting my views, but cowards for not confronting themselves.

I know education/academia is a big part of identity for a lot of people. Confront yourself if you are an academic, weigh in on this thread. Am I mistaken? I would love to learn more. Please share your perspective. Maybe I will disagree with you and discuss, maybe I will agree with you and learn and amend my own perspective. But I've written candidly, thoughtfully, with real observations I've had and some people have voted that down anonymously without explaining why. Please join the conversation, if you can confront these foreign ideas in your mind.
"It helped that I was educating myself about Japan."

What was the motivation and can you elaborate and share with us on how you did this?
It's a font of last resort, just in case the user has one font on their system.
Thanks. I want to upload a new version, make it support more language article.
It isn't VoIP but it's setting up a great potential end-run around the cell monopolies, since it lets you route calls to any number, including VoIP numbers such as SkypeIn numbers.
In fact ten years ago I was quite naive about biotech, that is I looked forward to it. Believe it or not I'm an early adopter and I love progress in the right direction. Much of biotech and genetic engineering has gone awfully wrong since then like creating suicidal crops or faking and subduing Frankenfood safety studies.
Wireless electricity is long overdue, I only hope that it won't create more radiation issues.

What's my problem with the kind of bizarre "science" this article writes about? It's ethics. Not everything that's possible in science should be done. Creating monsters (and I don't just mean dinosaurs but creatures like fluorescent bunnies and mice with human ears) is not one of the things to do.
the most important part of early stage hiring is to be patient and not rush into hiring people who are not 100% fit both personality and skill wise. be extremely picky because early hires are going to interview and hire other people.
I don't see why this is modded down. /menu.gpxe seems to be the entry point. Looking at that page shows us that /menu.cfg is the next hop, which points directly to kernel inages, such as /3018/boot.gpxe. I don't see anything that would allow you to authenticate netboot.me in these files, and given the recent null-prefix flaws in SSL (linked from http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslsniff/), I wouldn't feel confident that the netboot code has got SSL implemented correctly, if it's even used for netboot.me. I would consider MITM attacks on netboot.me to be worthy of investigation before using netboot.me, especially if they add WiFi support.

The gPXE security page (http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/safebootmode) seems to indicate that security for gPXE in general is a work in progress.
> The vast majority of folks in academia are doing original research, that's why they're there.

In the hard sciences, many of them do. Vast majority? Maybe. Outside of the hard sciences? No.

> Most of 'em see teaching as a somewhat annoying obligation which they have to go through in order to be allowed to do research.

Yes. Those research professors actually tend to be the best, because they're producing new and interesting results. My professor of project management used to run a defense company, making advanced weapons for the U.S. military. When he got older, he started doing supply and manufacturing research. He joked that he just taught so that he could do research, but he was one of the best professors I had.

Yet, most American undergraduate degrees require some form of "general requirements", often taught by professors who are doing something other than original research and don't do a particularly good job.

> This is, of course, a quirk of the particular people whom you happen to know, and not reflective of society as a whole.

I should phrase that differently. Medicine and law have upper-bounds on what you'll earn normally, unless you work in medical devices or open a hospital or law firm. Yet, university doesn't prepare doctors and lawyers to open shops - that's just old school business right there. As for business school, it could be better called "consultant training" - I know, I studied business. 10-20% of the program is incredibly valuable, the other 80-90% is useless theoretical nonsense. All the MBAs I know make decent to good coin. But nothing compared to the entrepreneurs, businessmen, hustler types. I know lots of people with degrees and without degrees. Putting the time into working for yourself is much more likely to make you wealthy than getting the degree. The only exception is if you've got a passion or knack for one of the few fields that higher education does a halfway decent job with.

> The wealthiest people I know have beards.

Funny you joke that - same here. But maybe there's something more to that - office dress codes in formal areas typically require clean shaven people. People who work for themselves or in small companies usually have less strict appearances. A mentor of mine in Dubai makes $200k/month roughly. He dresses semi-casual most of the time. He calls putting on a formal suit and tie, "Dressing up and playing business." (Incidentally, he grew up in the ghettos of London and didn't graduate middle school. But that's a tangent)

The beard thing? Yeah, there might be something to do that. Wealth creators are more concerned with creating wealth than looking respectable. Mainstream American education? More concerned with credentialing than learning. By a landslide.
This was meant to be more of a brainstorm/conversation about what we want, in a presentation aid. Not an idea-stream for MS to pick up new features. I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's likely not something PowerPoint can do.
I fail to see the analogy...
dzlobinsky@gmail.com
"I do not believe in college" - Wow that's refereshing to hear from the founder of an Indian startup/company. I seriously believe the degree/pedigree obsession is dragging down business in India. What's even better is to wake up and read something like this about a company that is short drive from my home.
Sort of. The biggest threat is to the international toll charges. And, assuming they can position Google Voice correctly, to SMS.
Google Search is C++. That was my point.
As far as glacial release cycles are concerned, use Ubuntu, not Debian. Problem solved.

And about packages getting rearranged, yeah, I like FreeBSD's ports better too, but you really should be using apt-get only to install rubygems and then use gem rather than apt to install the gems.
For now, yeah, because 1.9 is still fairly new and not 100% compatible with older Ruby code. I imagine in a year or so everyone will be on 1.9 and this sort of thing will not be need by most people for a while.
Google Voice = free text messaging over the data connection.

That means an end to charging rates of $1000 per MB for SMS data. The biggest ripoff they've got going would be gone.

Of course they're in no hurry to let that gravy train come to an end.
Sridhar, What does Zoho mean ? Folks here in Thiruvanmiyur don't seem to know.:-)
He's 16 years old, not 15.

Not that the small error makes much of a difference.
What's with the 'living with his mom'? Where else would you expect a 15 year old to live?
As another freelancer much below your rate I wonder if they knew you were a one man show in your 100K project. Usually firms want to see teams and sales reps in suits if they're going to shell out large amounts like that. How did you ever gained their trust?
BitTorrent already uses a distributed hash table for tracking. A search index can be built on a DHT by using normalized search terms as keys, as with e.g. http://www.faroo.com

This effectively results in individuals being responsible for specific words in the index. I would assume that this becomes a weakness if particular search terms are staggeringly popular or carry liability, though I'm no expert and there may be solutions to this using redundancy and flux in the allocation.
I can personally say that Joe Beninato is a great guy. He personally took time to meet with me at a Starbucks and gave some honest, valuable advice when we were looking for some funding early on with Picwing. Glad to see he's still doing that!
Owning ideas is just a wrong concept. I'm glad it did not exist back then when the first human had the idea to drink water.
Why is President Barrack Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope" available for free (not download but you can read the whole book)? Is it under public domain?
A Bit of SVG and Canvas
The mention of $250k at the end is, I believe, telling. This size of deal isn't really available, yet it could well be the most useful to modern startups, especially as a seed round.

YC, despite being compelling to young entrepreneurs, presents too high an opportunity cost for a season professional, yet a megabuck is too much for an initial build.
> (I'll ignore the "he was a politician" quip, which proves nothing and says nothing.

That wasn't meant in the way you probably read it. Being a politician is a skill just like any job

As I said I don't know much about the guy, but in my experience of people in such a position (a public post) there is a difference between real change and the change we see :)

I'm just saying: only a few people (i.e. the close family) really could make a statement like that :)
I was always fascinated by Japan, particularly in the context of India . After we started, I started looking closely at Japanese companies as role models. They had figured out stuff over the years that is unbelievable. Even today, there exist some technologies that pretty much only the Japanese do well (and not only in well known industries). Take a look at this company for example: http://www.uniontool.co.jp/english/product_index.html

They make drill bits for printed circuit boards, drill bits finer than human hair, drill bits you cannot even see with the naked eye.

The magic is years and years of patient, painstaking work, with occasional inspired leaps. That was good to know, particularly when we tended to get bored or tired.
Application idea: given that voice recognition systems are not up to the task of parsing a police scanner's output, dice that police radio feed's audio into a single chunk per "transmission" and add that audio to a mechanical turk work queue. The work task is simply to enter into a form: is this a crime? yes/no. location: street, street. text details: (free text).

it wouldn't be perfect, but could this work?
One more in Calgary. We should organize a meetup, all the cool stuff that's happening in San Fran all the time is making me pretty envious ;)
Saving information in H2O
Nobel winning physicist Feynman on the importance of teaching:

http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/feynman.html
An Education Debate for the Books
That was fun. ctrl+space is already bound on my system, and / brings up inline search in firefox, so I had to copy and paste "/switch" to get it to change languages.
Karen Sypher Tapes