Show HN: Curated collection of 82 free beautiful CSS box-shadow ready-to-use - <AUTHOR> https://getcssscan.com/css-box-shadow-examples <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

One of the reasons I created CSS Scan was because I'm always interested in knowing how some websites make their box-shadow.

So I made this collection of my favorite box-shadow on the internet, and I'll be adding new shadows to the list every time I see some new ones.

"CSS box-shadow examples by CSS Scan" is a curated collection of 82 free beautiful CSS box-shadow.

Bookmark it (keep it on your favorites) and use it whenever you need it for your projects! All you have to do is click on a box you like, and it'll copy its CSS box-shadow rule.

And if you have any ideas or suggestions, I'm all ears.

Thanks all!

Launch Tweet: [https://twitter.com/gvrizzo/status/1303958972022403072](https://twitter.com/gvrizzo/status/1303958972022403072)</comment>


Group of Researchers Holds the Key to Using AI to Solve Real Human Problems - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@atduskgreg/power-to-the-people-how-one-unknown-group-of-researchers-holds-the-key-to-using-ai-to-solve-real-cc9e75b1f334#.36hugzlmt <comment><USER2> Greg Borenstein, the author of this Medium post, is a researcher at MIT Media Lab, so we can assume he's a smart guy. The post is well-written in the sense that the sentences flow well from one to the next -- but they also contain some deep factual misstatements:

> _And then, as Deep Learning gained more support from big companies like > Google and Facebook, it started to produce achievements that were legible — > and extremely impressive — to the wider public. AlphaGo won historic > victories against the world's leading Go players. IBM Watson dominated human > players at Jeopardy on network TV._

While IBM's current business unit Watson may employ deep learning here and there, IBM Watson, the technology responsible for its Jeopardy victory in 2011, had absolutely zero to do with deep learning. It's not part of the same trend at all. The Watson team at that time was not inspired by Hinton et al to apply deep learning to NLP for the purpose of answering trivia questions.

Which leads us to this, the supposed reveal:

> _But now for a splash of cold water: while AI systems have made rapid > progress, they are nowhere near being able to autonomously solve any > substantive human problem._

Self-driving vehicles are a substantive human problem, and deep learning is at the heart of the computer vision technologies that help steer them. Most tasks of machine perception, whether we're dealing with images, time series, sound or text, have seen great gains as well. Insubstantive? Hardly. For a brief review of deep neural networks and a non-exhaustive list of what they can do, please see these pages:

[http://deeplearning4j.org/neuralnet- overview.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/neuralnet-overview.html)

[http://deeplearning4j.org/use_cases.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/use_cases.html)

If Borenstein means that AI doesn't solve problems by itself without human intervention, well, sure. But nobody is saying that it does, so it would be a strange straw man to argue against. It's like saying: Beware of chicken -- it does not roast itself! Do humans need to be involved in constructing and tuning AI solutions? Of course they do.

Here's what Borenstein is driving at:

> _What's needed for AI's wide adoption is an understanding of how to build > interfaces that put the power of these systems in the hands of their human > users. What's needed is a new hybrid design discipline, one whose > practitioners understand AI systems well enough to know what affordances > they offer for interaction and understand humans well enough to know how > they might use, misuse, and abuse these affordances._

So human-computer interfaces and augmented intelligence are the only "substantive" human problems Borenstein recognizes. While those are great problems to work on, I think few people would actually agree with him that they are the only significant problems to be solved.

> _As Recurrent Neural Nets surpass Convolutional Neural Nets only to be > outpaced by Deep Reinforcement Learning which in turn is edged out by the > inevitable Next Thing in this incredibly fast moving field..._

This is unfortunately untrue. While they have some overlap, CNNs and RNNs both do great on different problems, and few researchers would claim that one has surpassed the other, or that RL has surpassed them both. (Yann LeCun would be especially surprised to hear that...) DeepMind's AlphaGo algorithm _combines_ CNNs with RL with Monte Carlo Tree Search, meaning the best algorithms arise from combinations, rather than winning a horse race.

Such a poor understanding of these algorithms bodes ill for Mr. Borenstein's attempts to bring it to the masses by building a Visicalc equivalent for AI...

> _The core job of most machine learning systems is to generalize from sample > data created by humans. The learning process starts with humans creating a > bunch of labeled data.... At the end of training the learning algorithm > produces a classifier_

Mr. Borenstein has glossed over unsupervised learning, which deep learning can perform well and which has no need of labeled data. Unsupervised learning can be used for both search and anomaly detection, two enormous problems. This omission makes many of his subsequent assertions irrelevant or wildly off base when applied to ML as a whole. He's really just talking about classifiers.

On the subject of building classifiers, yes, we do need systems that allow us to label data easily, we need to improve them. Crowdflower and Mechanical Turk are two tools that researchers use now, and many companies roll their own solutions in house. Unsupervised learning does not have that problem.

> _So, if we want to build systems that users trust and that we can rapidly > improve, we should select algorithms not just for how often they produce the > right answer, but for what hooks they provide for explaining their inner > workings._

This is one of the most baffling sentences in the whole essay. If we were to select algorithms for their explanatory power, we would not be working with deep neural networks at all, because they lack feature introspection. And by doing that, we would give up most of the gains AI has made in recent years. His stance is perplexing and scientifically regressive.

While I support initiatives that integrate AI and HCI to augment UX and technology in general, I find this essay to be a particularly poor expression of efforts in that direction. It's disappointing to see a researcher employ the sensationalist tactics, subtle falsehoods and exaggerations of the press to draw attention to his writing and school of thought, and it does not do credit to his cause.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article suggests an area for product development: an easy to use app for labeling training data and building models.</comment>


Apple Has Been Reduced to (Gasp) Salesmanship - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/apple-has-been-reduced-to-gasp-salesmanship/2018/12/04/e425216e-f7ed-11e8-8642-c9718a256cbd_story.html <comment><AUTHOR> Clutch your pearls. Prepare the fainting couches. Are you ready for this bombshell? Apple Inc. actually has to try to sell its phones. How embarrassing.

Bloomberg News had a look inside the Apple empire, which has shifted some staff members to work on marketing the latest iPhone models released this fall, and the company or its partners are deploying incentives to move the merchandise. One person described the situation as a "fire drill" to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

The company recently offered a $300 discount in at least some places on its lowest-priced new iPhone with a trade-in of a two-year-old model. Wireless carriers in Japan are moving to give subsidies to boost sales of the same new iPhone. And Apple store personnel were encouraged to tout a program with higher trade-in prices for older iPhones.

It shouldn't be news that a company that sells consumer products is discounting merchandise or seeking to peddle its products. Even Apple is not immune to the behavior of a typical company. It is one of the biggest spenders on television commercials to nudge people to consider buying its smartphones, Mac computers and other products. And like many consumer electronics companies, Apple has worked in the past to help subsidize the cost of iPhones or find other ways to give people a financial reason to pick Apple's devices over those of rivals.

But at least outwardly, Apple has behaved as though the normal rules of consumer companies don't apply. In Apple's world, the company's amazing products sell themselves, or at least that was the perception Apple preferred to portray to the world. The company is brilliant about product segmentation, pricing and marketing strategies, but Apple would never, ever, admit it.

Now it's getting harder for Apple to pretend it's not trying. By all accounts, sales in the smartphone market have stopped growing and may even be declining slightly despite booming demand in India and some other countries. Research firm Gartner said Monday that sales of smartphones in the third quarter crept up 1.4 percent from the same period in 2017.

Apple does not acknowledge the state of the smartphone market, but it's tough to buck the trends of flat-lining consumer smartphone demand. It's true that the company has done an impressive job persuading its fans to pay more for a product that is a price-sensitive commodity in most of the world. The recent success shows that hundreds of millions of people like Apple's products and want to keep buying them rather than alternatives. This is a good thing for Apple in the long term.

It's never enough, however, simply to make good products and let nature take its course. That's doubly true given the flat smartphone market and Apple's reliance on that market for roughly two-thirds of its annual revenue. Unless something changes — either smartphone demand perks back up or Apple releases a blockbuster new product or something else — Apple will need to keep trying harder to sell its most important product. In fact, it is trying harder already, but the company could be doing much more.

Consider what Apple has done just in the last year or so to lure more people to its iPhones and other products. The company in recent days agreed to make its digital music service available on Amazon.com Inc.'s voice-activated speakers as a way to widen the number of people who might pay for Apple Music, a relatively unusual decision for Apple, which in the past has tried to keep users locked in its own ecosystem. Apple has also done more to spur downloads of iPhone and iPad apps by, for example, writing short articles to highlight some apps people might find useful.

Think of Apple like that much-talked-about beautiful duck hanging out on a pond in New York's Central Park. On the surface it looks as if it's gliding effortlessly, but beneath the surface its legs are paddling like mad. There's no shame in exerting effort to stay afloat.

In a note to investors on Monday, HSBC stock analysts wrote that it's time for investors to "look at Apple as a stable/low revenue growth company." The analysts are valuing Apple by assessing how much stock buyers should pay for the company's cash flow — a method of valuation used for boring, slow-and- steady companies. Apple in fact is slow and steady — and wildly profitable and savvy. That's all perfectly fine as long as the company and its investors admit it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is full, ad free article :)

<comment><USER2> How magnanimous of you.</comment></comment></comment>


Fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04688 <comment><USER2> Jeremy is probably one of the smartest people out there. The fact that he decided to allocate his time to teach and to build open source tools — that is: a selfless way to provide value to his community — is something rare & worth being acknowledged.

<comment><USER3> So true. And he cares about ethical behaviour as well (it appears from the outside where I am), in AI and work life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice to see our paper on HN! FYI the paper covers v2, which is a from-scratch rewrite that introduces a new layered API.

There are quite a few comments here pointing out (quite correctly!) that v1 was not at all easy to hack on. We've spent the last couple of years fixing that. Have a look at the paper to see what mean - especially the "mid-layer API".

<comment><USER4> Oh btw if you don't have time to read the paper, I've summarized some key bits here: [https://mobile.twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/122797513809...](https://mobile.twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1227975138097819650)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is cool... but... personally, I feel that PyTorch's API is more or less where I want a deep learning API to be.

TensorFlow is too low level. Fastai abstracts too much away and feels way too magical - once things start going wrong, or if you need to do something totally outside the bounds of the library, good luck.

Guess I'm mostly just a bit tired of frameworks for what feels like frameworks sake.

<comment><USER6> For most cases, objects in the fastai framework inherit pytorch objects and are often rather thin. This means that you can usually roll your objects if the fastai ones aren't sufficient. This really help alleviate the feeling that you're "on rails" of the library.

That being said, a current project I'm working on didn't really fit the fastai pipeline and I needed to drop into pytorch. It's a total shame since there are so many little niceties that make things easier.

<comment><USER7> Can you go into more details on why pytorch was a better fit for your particular use-case?

My coworker recently completed a bootcamp using pytorch, and I am working through the fastai course, so it has been interesting to compare experiences.

<comment><USER6> I'm training a semi-supervised task which consumes three text samples while training. In retrospect, I might have been able to concatenate them, and treat them as one, but as it was I wasn't able to implement some of the functions fastai's Databunch required.

Might give it another go if I decide to give it another refactor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally, I really enjoy the design and level of abstraction that Pytorch provides. FastAI has always felt too abstracted and trying to go outside the bounds of it gets really hard and complex, really fast. I glanced through the paper and while it certainly looks interesting and to be an improvement, I am not very convinced that doing custom things will be easy, like it is with Pytorch. My experience has been that it is easy, if you already understand all the pieces of the entire library, which is not an easy task at all.

That being said, I admire the passion and effort that goes into FastAI and I think it does a great job at providing an entry point into the world of ML/deep learning that is far more accessible to people. I'll probably still read through the library because I always pick up interesting ideas and learn new things when reading other peoples code, especially when a lot of thought has been put into structuring a library.

</comment><comment><USER9> The lectures have a ton of gems in them, but I have a hard time following the lectures as a beginner/intermediate practitioner, as around 1-5 percent is relevant for me. I don't particularly like the fastai library as it feels like an obstacle between me and the underlying pytorch library. After trying to use fastai for some time, I started looking directly at pytorch and found that all the abstractions and features I liked with fastai were actually from pytorch. That said, it's a great resource and if you're doing cookiecutter stuff it seems pretty nice. Also, students of fastai have done some pretty amazing things. I like how Jeremy emphasizes the top-down view, but it's very hard for me to submit to it. I can't shake the need to understand the underlying ideas and build stuff bottom-up, even though I see my progress suffers from it.

<comment><USER10> The second part of the course ([https://course.fast.ai/part2](https://course.fast.ai/part2)) - builds stuff bottom-up, starting from matrix multiplication all the way up to ResNets. This is a great resource even if you want only use Pytorch.

<comment><USER9> Great tip. Thanks:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My small complaint is that there seems to be no backwards compatibility whatsoever between fastai versions.

I get it that it is supposed to be working on the very bleeding edge of deep learning technologies, but at the same time it is sold as "practical". At least I would be slightly uncomfortable doing anything in production with a library that is all but guaranteed to get no (compatible) development love whatsoever after a couple of months when the developers have started working on the next version.

But I guess it may just be a too tough nut to crack to provide a bleeding edge deep learning library with production quality life cycle support.

<comment><USER12> We're actually using fastai in production and will happily switch to v2. Sure, there are serious questions about long-term stability and we know these projects will be high maintenance.

However, they would be anyway: Core models and algorithms are quickly outdated and any change that allows us to achieve similar or better results with less effort in creating training data is easily worth the engineering work.

That said, I really hope v2 feels a bit more like other libraries: extending v1 models has been pretty painful in several occasions. E.g. making some changes to the underlying pytorch models was very straightforward but still using all the goodies for training build into fastai (in particular all the stuff based on the work of Leslie Smith, tuned for best practices inside the fastai universe) was pretty painful. It is awesome to have a library actually implement best practices from latest research, but sometimes all this greatness was pretty hard for me to transfer to changed models.

That said, it has worked for us in v1 and the benefits outweighed the problems by far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hi Jeremy, just wanted to say you are amazing. I've followed all your lectures and I wish I had you as a teacher for all my assignments in college. You truly have a gift to explain hard things in a very simple way. And the things you are doing with fastai are a gift to the community that is moving science forward. I'm doing my Master Thesis, and fastai is a key piece of my experiments. So again, a big thank you. Hope some day I can do a favor to you as you've done for me

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Jeremy is a fantastic teacher. The paper is written in his usual lucid style and mixes code with narrative in a seamless way. The paper feels like an extended version of one of his pedagogical jupyter notebooks.

</comment><comment><USER14> Bleeding edge is great for fun and personal development, Jeremy (with the fast.ai team as a whole) is wonderful and all that, but you need to have your own suitable case study to make the most of such techniques and implementation... nlp for the time being, it was image processing when they were just starting and I followed their courses. In 2020 or year V, VI or VII of this new machine learning explosion, generalists cannot not do much on their own anymore imho.

<comment><USER15> My impression from 3 years of working under the job title of "data scientist" is that generalists have a huge advantage compared to specialists. Data scientists these days have to have some idea of how each step in the data science workflow works, including non-technical aspects like business, office and institutional politics, and domain knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like fast.ai a lot. For those who remember OpenRDF, fast.ai reminds me of how nice it was to use Sesame Sails (though sometimes you had to create your own sail components). Sails were modular semantic reasoning and triple store layers you could stack in different ways to 'make your AI ship go'.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is "fastai to pytorch" what "keras is to tensorflow?"

Glad to see pandas support for tabular data.

<comment><USER18> Kind of. Fastai abstracts a lot more of Pytorch then what keras does to TF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does it still have the _requirement_ for a GPU (driver) to be around to even run, like fastai 1.0 had? (Had to manually comment requirements and imports to have it run CPU-only...)

 _I get it that for any serious use you 'd want a GPU, but for learning and toying around you might want to be able to run and debug code on your freakin macbook! Is that too much to asks?_ (Some of us do code in IDEs, not in notebooks + vim on server, and _we 'd want at least our test suite to be able to run locally ffs!_)

(Also, hopefully they've got rid of the lovecraftian architecture with _methods that can mutate an object 's class_ [?!] - I understood the practical appeal and why they did it, but as a software engineer with sympathy for functional-programming that almost made me wanna barf :|)

Anyway, _fastai is awesome for learning and experimenting_ , keep up the good work! I just hate it that it's so obnoxious to use and learn for anyone with a more traditional software engineering background...

<comment><USER10> It is possible to run everything on CPU, even if we fastai 1.0. Only training can be 100 times slower than on GPU. Even for a toy exercises involving image processing and actual deep networks (30-150 layers) it means hours or days of training.

It is not FastAI fault though.

<comment><USER19> My actual use case some time ago was to _run tests suites for some tricky and convoluted data wrangling code that used (by necessity since it was doing some funky tiled image loading and segmentation) fastai dataframes and stuff_ , locally on CPU to debug those tests... neither training, nor even inference actually, just _running a useless micro-training session at the end to sanity test that data was loaded in a usable way and things didn 't broke when you tried to train_.

But in fastai 1.0 it was all bundled together in one big yarn, with everything depending in the end on some data loading classes that depended on GPU driver etc.

Anyway, it was really bad architecture and dev practices in the codebase I was working though, the tested behavior would probably not have matched production one 100%... I don't blame fastai much for not helping with a broken workflow, but _I prefer more barebones and less opinionated frameworks, aka using tf or pytorch directly, since some times you really need to get that "broken" thing running in production before you work on a refactored version of it :P Fastai seems very research-oriented and opinionated._

I'll definitely look into fastai 2.0 though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really like the fastai abstractions and their attention to detail. Also their callbacks are amazing. I always look at their implementations for inspiration.

But my main issue with it is the code formatting ([https://docs.fast.ai/dev/style.html#layout](https://docs.fast.ai/dev/style.html#layout)). Maybe I am too used to PEP-8 and black ([https://github.com/psf/black](https://github.com/psf/black)) formatted code, but honestly I cannot stand the code format.

<comment><USER21> Ufff that's rough to read. Totally. The only one I agree with is the one that says:

        Aim to align statement parts that are conceptually similar. It allows the reader to quickly see how they're different. E.g. in this code it's immediately clear that the two parts call the same code with different parameter orders.

That'd turn something like this:

        class OneClass:
            def __init__(self, a, b1, b2, c_long):
                self.a = a
                self.b1 = b1
                self.b2 = b2
                self.c_long = c_long

Into this:

        class OneClass:
            def __init__(self, a, b1, b2, c_long):
                self.a      = a
                self.b1     = b1
                self.b2     = b2
                self.c_long = c_long

(maybe not the greatest example, there are places where this helps much more)

The others all are un-pythonic and make the code more unreadable.

<comment><USER4> It's certainly unpythonic - as the link explains, it's based on research that goes back many more decades than Python has existed, and that PEP 8 entirely ignored.

But it only makes the code unreadable if you don't make a tiny effort to adjust. If you do make the effort, there's some great payoff, like this code:

        try:
            self._split(b);                                  self('begin_batch')
            self.pred = self.model(*self.xb);                self('after_pred')
            if len(self.yb) == 0: return
            self.loss = self.loss_func(self.pred, *self.yb); self('after_loss')
            if not self.training: return
            self.loss.backward();                            self('after_backward')
            self.opt.step();                                 self('after_step')
            self.opt.zero_grad()
        except CancelBatchException:                         self('after_cancel_batch')
        finally:                                             self('after_batch')

That's the inner part of the training loop. You can see at a glance: what steps are in the loop; what callbacks are in the loop, in what order; what step corresponds to each callback. And you can see the whole training loop at once, which is great for getting a clear picture of what's going on.

<comment><USER21> By looking at that code without knowing much of the context in which it works, I assume self('begin_batch') and the like are "signals" that set some state or are used for logging. That behaviour could be achieved using other mechanisms (perhaps some metaprogramming magic or an observer pattern).

And while I can appreciate it can be quick to see where the signals are sent, the use of ; and having two things in a line still aren't convincing me.

Even more, if I were to run the line_profiler here, I know it'd report weird numbers precisely for having more than one thing per line.

The other thing that I dislike is opening blocks and closing them in the same line. It may be force of habit for me, but that screams unreadability at my face.

Rounding up, all I see is behaviour that can be achieved through other mechanisms, and dev/tools unfriendliness. And notice I'm not sayin anything about PEP-8, because:

a) There are parts of it with which I don't agree either.

b) Many people use PEP-8 as a sort of "silver bullet" and argument-ending- remark. That's not what it should be, it should be a _guide_ to be used when it helps, and ignored sparingly (with reason and consideration of _why_ you decide to ignore it, in the sake of readability).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How does the default NLP tokenizer work with transfer learning? Are all the fast.ai pretrained NLP models pretrained with the same tokenization scheme?

</comment><comment><USER4> FYI, I also created an HTML version of the paper, which is much easier to read on mobile, and probably easier on a computer too if you're not printing it out:

[https://www.fast.ai/2020/02/13/fastai-A-Layered-API-for- Deep...](https://www.fast.ai/2020/02/13/fastai-A-Layered-API-for-Deep- Learning/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Jeremy <3

Is this paper about version v1 or v2 of the API?

<comment><USER24> V2 according to his twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Listen to the paper here you can [https://youtu.be/XO26sNuJaXg](https://youtu.be/XO26sNuJaXg)

</comment><comment><USER26> All hail Jeremy et al. A leader and a legend.</comment>


Join the First Ever ReactOS Hackfest - <AUTHOR> https://www.reactos.org/ru/node/948

<comment><AUTHOR> Join us for the very first ReactOS Hackfest from Friday, 7th August to Wednesday, 12th August 2015, in the German city of Aachen.

Discover Germany's most-Western city in the direct neighborhood of Belgium and the Netherlands. Within the historical city center, Aachen offers a scientific environment and a high density of pubs.

Let's catch this atmosphere to code the week away and achieve great results as a team!

It is now time to plan your trip!

Flights and Accommodation won't get cheaper.

Find all details on this Wiki page: [https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_Hackfest_2015](https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_Hackfest_2015)

Don't forget to add your ideas and travelling details to this page: [https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_Hackfest_2015/Lists](https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS_Hackfest_2015/Lists)

If you have any further questions, just drop Colin a line by E-Mail or call him on the mobile phone number He sent to ros-priv.

Looking forward to meet you!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ReactOS Hackfest 2015 Join us for the very first ReactOS Hackfest from Friday, 7th August to Wednesday, 12th August 2015, in the German city of Aachen. Discover Germany's most-Western city in the direct neighborhood of Belgium and the Netherlands. Within the historical city center, Aachen offers a scientific environment and a high density of pubs. Let's catch this atmosphere to code the week away and achieve great results as a team!

It is now time to plan your trip! Flights and Accommodation won't get cheaper.</comment>


Show HN: Selenium-like user flow testing, but with a nicer interface - <AUTHOR> http://fleetapp.cc/ <comment><USER2> It's a nice interface, and I like the idea of the environment having the test- editing inline with the context it's operating on.

But "UI tests - no code required!" is something I see in various places. It seems to imply the hardest part of creating and maintaining UI-level tests is writing the code. It reminds me of "PHP was originally designed explicitly for non-programmers (and, reading between the lines, non-programs)" from [https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- design/](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

<comment><USER3> When I was first starting out as a SET/QAA/whatever it's called now I had to deal with the joys of record/playback tests from Selenium. It's a bloody nightmare to debug someone else's actions that have been translated, often poorly, to code by a machine.

Other than being able to whip something up in 30 seconds I haven't found a benefit. From the CSS identifiers that are selected to the backing code there just aren't positives. Unless you consider the 30 seconds of dev time you "saved" by converting it into 30 minutes of tech debt to be a positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the preview frame an iframe? What if your site uses iframe busting?

</comment><comment><USER5> What's the process like when you update the UI? Does it list the interactions that broke and give you the opportunity to view/edit/delete each individually?

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow that's looks pretty cool!</comment>


Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for governor of California inspired a cult - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/mankind-unite <comment><USER2> Oh wow, so that's where that Jacobin cover came from. I thought it was way over the top when I saw it, but now it seems fun and tasteful since it's a reference.

[https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1097858342867951616?la...](https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1097858342867951616?lang=en)

</comment><comment><USER3> _The "Inquiring Cameraman" conducts interviews with Californians prior to the gubernatorial election of November 6, 1934. Voters state their opinions on candidates Upton Sinclair, Frank Merriam, and Raymond L. Haight._:

[https://youtu.be/TkIq9eIIAq4](https://youtu.be/TkIq9eIIAq4)

Not so far removed from the responses you'd get asking voters who they plan to vote for in 2020.</comment>


Make Excel One-Click Easy with AXbean QuikBots (now in Beta) - <AUTHOR> http://www.axbean.com/store.html <comment><AUTHOR> Our goal with AXbean QuikBots was to do the impossible: turn MS Excel, the most complicated popular software in the world, into the simplest and most user-friendly software ever.

That meant reimagining every feature to make it not only faster to learn and to get projects done, but also better. The result is more than just a new tool. It's the future of Select, Click, and Done.

And now, with over 25 of the most popular and most used features at your control, Excel is even more capable. And so are you.</comment>


Encryption "would not have helped" at OPM, says DHS official - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/encryption-would-not-have-helped-at-opm-says-dhs-official/

<comment><USER2> _A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is 'so what's new?'"_</comment>


What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/College-and-University-Faculty/What-is-it-like-to-be-denied-tenure-as-a-professor

<comment><AUTHOR> The best answer for those with no access: Pablo Pomposiello, biotechnologist ----

short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. It was a big hit to my ego, and a big reality check: I was not made for a life-long academic career. At that time, and after feeling like dirt for a while, I started consulting for the biotech industry and loved it. In 2009, I moved to Spain and took a job at a start-up, which in turn went belly up. Now I run my own synthetic biology company in Madrid and enjoy a different take on experimental science. I miss teaching, though.

The somewhat longer answer: it felt like being the victim of a mafia hit by members of your own "family": the same people that yesterday invited you to their kids birthday parties and pinned awards on your lapel are today pulling the trigger. I was treated with exaggerated courtesy, and I could tell some people were truly afraid I could go psycho and do something terrible. It felt unreal, after 15 years of a successful academic career to end like that. It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth.

By the way, it is worth saying that the University did everything right, at the Departmental, College and University levels. There was no monkey business in my case. In the previous years, the Dept and the School really helped to lighten my load and facilitate research and grant writing. When the moment came, the Department Chair came to my office almost in tears to explain to me his negative vote, and I knew that without his support, it was a lost cause. I had a long time to prep for the final decision. The Dean took me for lunch when the dust settled, to offer his support.

Personally, it helped to push me into a mid-life crisis that had been looming for a while. I was depressed and withdrawn, everyday tasks became titanic work, and I could see the worry in my student's eyes, for me and for their careers. I started therapy, which helped. I tried antidepressants, which didn't. I was advised to take legal action, which I didn't. I guess deep inside me, and despite 16 years of preparation, I knew that it was not my scene. But I was too deep into it to face this reality, and the conflict really took a toll on me.

Little by little, and helped by my great Department colleagues and a few close friends, I started shaking the blues off and tried to find comfort and enthusiasm in other aspects of my life. I faced the ultimate question: would I have given tenure to myself, objectively? The answer was clearly no. When I made peace with that reality, I started planning a future. I realized that I was lucky: no kids, relatively young (41) and with a good track record. I got married and I moved to Spain, a country I've always loved.

It took me a while to understand that anyone who makes it to a tenure-track position in an American research university has self-started so many projects and amassed such a network that starting anything new is actually quite easy. Good luck to all tenure-trackers out there! And cheers to the tenure survivor, one way or another.</comment>


ShowHN: SubQL – Realtime data subscriptions with GraphQL - martin-ting https://github.com/cmdco/subql <comment> martin-ting SubQL is an open-source library for enabling real time data subscriptions with GraphQL over socket.io websockets. This library aims to integrate with graphQL apis to allow clients to subscribe to queries as if your graphQL api is a streaming API. This means that when a client subscribes to a piece of data via a GraphQL query, any updates to the data corresponding with that query will trigger an event that pushes that updated data to the subscribing clients.

We were inspired by the way GraphQL is changing the way we design our APIs. We wanted to bring the power and stability of GraphQL to real time web applications.

SubQL is currently in the alpha phase of development so we are very open to suggestions and/or feedback about how we can improve the library.</comment>


Professor Ian Donald: The govt strategy on Coronavirus is more refined - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/iandonald_psych/status/1238518371651649538 <comment><AUTHOR> Twitter thread on the UK's strategy:

The govt strategy on #Coronavirus is more refined than those used in other countries and potentially very effective. But it is also riskier and based on a number of assumptions. They need to be correct, and the measures they introduce need to work when they are supposed to

This all assumes I'm correct in what I think the govt are doing and why. I could be wrong - and wouldn't be surprised. But it looks to me like. . .

A UK starting assumption is that a high number of the population will inevitably get infected whatever is done – up to 80%. As you can't stop it, so it is best to manage it.

There are limited health resources so the aim is to manage the flow of the seriously ill to these.

The Italian model the aims to stop infection. The UKs wants infection BUT of particular categories of people. The aim of the UK is to have as many lower risk people infected as possible. Immune people cannot infect others; the more there are the lower the risk of infection

That's herd immunity. Based on this idea, at the moment the govt wants people to get infected, up until hospitals begin to reach capacity. At that they want to reduce, but not stop infection rate. Ideally they balance it so the numbers entering hospital = the number leaving.

That balance is the big risk.

All the time people are being treated, other mildly ill people are recovering and the population grows a higher percent of immune people who can't infect. They can also return to work and keep things going normally - and go to the pubs

The risk is being able to accurately manage infection flow relative to health case resources. Data on infection rates needs to be accurate, the measures they introduce need to work and at the time they want them to and to the degree they want, or the system is overwhelmed.

Schools: Kids generally won't get very ill, so the govt can use them as a tool to infect others when you want to increase infection. When you need to slow infection, that tap can be turned off – at that point they close the schools. Politically risky for them to say this.

The same for large scale events - stop them when you want to slow infection rates; turn another tap off. This means schools etc are closed for a shorter period and disruption generally is therefore for a shorter period, AND with a growing immune population. This is sustainable

After a while most of the population is immune, the seriously ill have all received treatment and the country is resistant. The more vulnerable are then less at risk. This is the end state the govt is aiming for and could achieve.

BUT a key issue during this process is protection of those for whom the virus is fatal. It's not clear the full measures there are to protect those people. It assumes they can measure infection, that their behavioural expectations are met - people do what they think they will

The Italian (and others) strategy is to stop as much infection as possible - or all infection. This is appealing, but then what? The restrictions are not sustainable for months. So the will need to be relaxed. But that will lead to reemergence of infections.

Then rates will then start to climb again. So they will have to reintroduce the restrictions each time infection rates rise. That is not a sustainable model and takes much longer to achieve the goal of a largely immune population with low risk of infection of the vulnerable

As the government tries to achieve equilibrium between hospitalisations and infections, more interventions will appear. It's perhaps why there are at the moment few public information films on staying at home. They are treading a tight path, but possibly a sensible one.

This is probably the best strategy, but they should explain it more clearly. It relies on a lot of assumptions, so it would be good to know what they are - especially behavioural. Most encouraging, it's way too clever for #BorisJohnson to have had any role in developing.</comment>


Fallacies of Distributed Computing Explained (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.rgoarchitects.com/Files/fallacies.pdf <comment><USER2> I think we need to add a fallacy about serialization and protocol changes, but I'm not sure how to summarize it in a simple sentence.

Specifically, "magic" serializers often have problems interoperating with different languages; or with different versions of a protocol.

I've come across serious problems where:

\- An application's deserializer can't handle a new value included in a new version of a protocol, and thus crashes.

\- A server needs to forward part of a serialized object unmodified to another server. It strips out unrecognized values, thus requiring that we upgrade all three pieces of software instead of only two.

\- A server's serializer is so rigid that we can't add xml tags / attributes without lots of involvement with the team that works on the server; even though there's no real reason for them to be involved in all the details

<comment><USER3> I share your frustrations.

I am enamored with serialization libaries like Protocol Buffers that schematize data in its unmarshaled form and strip the symbols from the data in its marshaled form. By representing properties of the data with codes, one is free to add/rename properties (but not remove) from the schema over time. Different versions of the schema can successfully marshal and unmarshal the same data as long as codes (and semantics of what the codes represent) never change. It's a very forwards/backwards-compatible way of working with data as long with you can handle managing semantics over time.

By contrast, schema languages like JSON Schema or XML Schema may be more expressive about target language constraints than something like Protocol Buffers, but they often suffer from the brittleness of the "messages I consider correct must be considered correct by you in precisely the same way"-problem when their messages move over the wire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't recall seeing this explanation before, though I'm pretty sure I've read a version of it.

What I noticed immediately was what I felt was something missing in explanation of fallacy #1 (The network is reliable), something I predicted decades ago when the network gear salesmen first came around to try and convince us to replace our aging concentrators (multiport hubs) with fancy new switches: losing the backpressure mechanism of collisions would lead to bandwidth-related failures.

The article's explanation mentions the reliablity of modern switches but makes a fairly shallow dismissal of this by referencing things like pulled power cords but spends most of the text actually talking about WAN reliability.

What I've seen in practice is, including with (maybe even especially with) distributed computing environments, is the scenario I proposed to the salesperson way back when: What happens when two servers send data out of their network ports at full line speed (100Mb/s) each, at the same time, for a total of 200Mb/s, to another server's network port that can only receive 100Mb/s?

Of course, once the switch's buffer fills up, half the packets get dropped, and it's not practically deterministic which half. In a distribute environment, where the number of sources greater than 2 and the number of sinks is greater than 1, it gets even less so and often more intermittent.</comment>


What's next for Uber drivers' lawsuit? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/What-s-next-for-Uber-drivers-lawsuit-9173534.php <comment><USER2> Uber has agreed to pay up to $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit which resolves a major challenge to its business model by allowing the ride- hailing service to keep its California and Massachusetts drivers as independent contractors.

The lawsuit had claimed that Uber [UBER.UL] drivers are employees and thus entitled to reimbursement of expenses.

The case against Uber had been closely watched in Silicon Valley, as other companies in the on-demand tech economy share Uber's reliance on independent contractors. The class action had been scheduled for a trial in San Francisco federal court in June.

"We realize that some will be disappointed not to see this case go to trial," said Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney for drivers.

However, Liss-Riordan said the plaintiff drivers faced significant risks of losing if the case moved forward, particularly because a federal appeals court had recently agreed to review an order allowing Uber drivers to sue as a group.

Nothing about the settlement prevents a future court, or U.S. labor authorities, from deeming Uber drivers as employees, she said in a statement.</comment>


New Oxford exam times help women - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/new-oxford-exam-times-help-women-q8cqrx7lh <comment><AUTHOR> PAYWALL:

New Oxford exam times help women

An extension to the time allowed for all maths undergraduates to sit papers has boosted the grades of female students

Oxford University students were given longer to complete exams for the first time last summer in an effort to help women achieve higher grades.

Extended durations for exams have been introduced by the mathematical and computer sciences departments in response to a growing gender gap, especially in final year exams.

Undergraduates were given 105 minutes to complete papers rather than 90 minutes "with no change in length or difficulty of questions". The university said women did better as a result.

It is hoped the change will reduce "the undue effects of time pressure", which is thought to have more of an impact on female students than male ones.

Helen Zha, a member of Oxford's Mirzakhani Society for women studying maths, said female undergraduates were more likely to experience problem-solving difficulties when male students were in the same room.

She said: "One thing I've heard and felt is that where there are more males in the room, women will . . . perform worse than they would otherwise."

The change to maths exams follows a decision by the history department to replace a traditional exam with a "take-home" paper, also done in an effort to try to boost results for female students. The move was criticised as "sexist" by some academics for implying that women were the "weaker sex".

Of all subjects at Oxford, maths has one of the biggest gender variations in results. Just seven female maths finalists achieved firsts last year compared with 45 men. This means that 21.2% of women on the course graduated with first-class degrees against 45.5% of men.

Maths dons at Oxford looked at whether "shorter exams may particularly disadvantage women" and pointed out that exams were not supposed to be "a time trial".

Internal documents obtained under freedom of information laws show the decision to extend the time of examination papers "with no change in length or difficulty of questions" had the intention of reducing the disadvantage to "students most sensitive to time pressure and stress".

The document said: "It is thought that this might mitigate the gender gap that has arisen in recent years, and in any case the exam should be a demonstration of mathematical understanding and not a time trial."

It is widely accepted that there are no inherent gender differences in mathematical ability or intelligence. However, Sarah Hart, a maths professor at Birkbeck, University of London and an Oxford graduate, said she had noticed a tendency for female students to double-check their answers in their heads before suggesting them to class.

Male students were quicker to answer questions, she said, but were more likely to get the answer wrong.

She added: "I am a big fan of giving people as much time as they want to do exams. After all, you never have to prove theorems against the clock in real life so mere speed is not what we want to assess."

Oxford University said: "The departments are not drawing any firm conclusions from the first year's data. However, third-year female students did show an improvement on their second-year marks. While there is clearly more progress to be made, the departments will continue with the longer papers for the foreseeable future, monitoring the exam data carefully."</comment>


Welcome to Tech-sas, a Houston Hackathon by the Community, for the Community. - <AUTHOR> http://lanyrd.com/2014/welcometotechsas/

<comment><AUTHOR> The Iron Yard is planning a tech conference by the community, for the community – right here in Houston! We are collaborating with companies like January Advisors ([http://januaryadvisors.com](http://januaryadvisors.com)), Two Sigma ([https://www.twosigma.com/](https://www.twosigma.com/)), RED Labs ([http://redlabs.bauer.uh.edu/](http://redlabs.bauer.uh.edu/)), and the City of Houston office – with a full range of media coverage (radio, publishers, etc). We are working on putting together several other partnerships, and would love to have tech companies involved.

The premise of the event is to invite over 250 people, with little-to-no coding experience, and spend the day learning basic website development. Local talent – like myself – will lead a small group through a short instruction, followed by a lab to build something. The sweet deal? Attendance is free, and upon completion of the event, participants who didn't previously know how to code will have built their very own landing page. Instructors and others who attend will have the chance to mingle with some power-house developers and companies in Houston.

Our goal is to raise awareness of the expanding Houston tech-and-startup scene, and cultivate a new community of professionals who bring a wealth of talent from the industries that call our brilliant city home. (Healthcare, Energy, Oil, Finance, the list goes on…) To top it off, we have local roasters supplying the coffee and local eateries supplying the food. All-in-all, this will be the perfect storm to nurture the "Tech-sas" community that we all know exists. As such, since this is an event with drinks, we are targeting college students and older – for both networking opportunities and for the obvious vices being provided.

We would love if you could join in, attend, or instruct. We are looking to get about 20 technologists who can be part of the event, and just provide a few hours of basic instruction on web technologies.

Additionally, we are looking for local companies to help sponsor. The Iron Yard is already fronting almost all of the costs. We just want to make sure the food, booze, and space is covered. All of this is being planned as we speak. Just attend and help us nurture something special (that might be able to turn into a recurring event in the future, for all skill-levels!).

You can find out more about the event and direct others to it here:

[http://techsas.co/](http://techsas.co/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Oh yah!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yeah! [http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd309/HTBrown1953/KoolAid...](http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd309/HTBrown1953/KoolAidOhYeahman.gif)</comment></comment>


Why You Should (Almost) Never Rewrite Your Software - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/2596/Why-You-Should-Almost-Never-Rewrite-Your-Software.aspx <comment><USER2> When you SHOULD Rewrite Your Software:

When it's a house of cards.

Perhaps I'm a little jaded, but I've built a very nice career rewriting software that never should have been written in the first place. Of the existing code I've encountered, at least 95% would never have passed a code review by me (or anyone else who knew what to look for).

The problem is that we're so committed to pass user acceptance testing that we never subject the source code and data base design to the same rigors.

I like to think I've seen it all: one and two character variable names that mean nothing, homemade routines for <sorting, selecting, you name it>, memory leaks, iterations to nowhere, upward branches to nowhere, data base schemas that would make M. C. Escher jealous, and on and on and on. Face it, if programmers were doctors, we'd all be dead.

As a constant victim of the "You Can't Get There From Here Syndrome", I often tell my clients the same thing, "It's not how soon we get started, it's how soon we finish AND how capable we are to handle the next revision".

Often rewriting is the last best hope.</comment>


Andre Geim: in praise of graphene - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101007/full/news.2010.525.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _You haven't yet patented graphene. Why is that?

We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.

I considered this arrogant comment, and I realized how useful it was. There was no point in patenting graphene at that stage. You need to be specific: you need to have a specific application and an industrial partner. Unfortunately, in many countries, including this one, people think that applying for a patent is an achievement. In my case it would have been a waste of taxpayers' money._

Crazy</comment>


Gossiping Commons - <AUTHOR> https://gossipingcommons.org/ <comment><USER2> Even knowing the April Fool's origins I can't help but interpret it as a Discordian style satire of both copyright for trying to claim exclusivity and copyleft for going from undermining the previous to its own social contract. I am more than willing to admit that the idea may be from viewer preconceptions and overthinking as opposed to any inherent message beyond the inherently silly instructions.

<comment><USER3> I've heard of copyleft but I'm not too familiar it. Can you explain how it's evolved into its own social contract?

<comment> jagged-chisel Copyleft puts the traditional concept of copyright on its head. "Copyright" limits "who can make copies." If _I_ hold copyright on a work, only _I_ can make copies (or only _I_ can decide who else can make copies.)

Copy _left_ uses copyright law to enforce a different scheme, a _social contract._ The license, which can only be assigned by the holder of copyright on a work, insists that licensees (you, if you have access to my work which I've put under an appropriate license) must also allow copying by anyone, even when you modify _my_ work.

I don't think this is an _evolution,_ (the parent to your comment doesn't actually claim so); I think it was the entire original intent by Stallman. What _has_ evolved is the terms of the GPL license, attempting to keep up with changes in technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Don't say anything unless it's good. And this is good...(wink)"

\--- some old TV show

</comment><comment><USER5> This sort of reminds me of those copy pastes people would put on their Facebook walls claiming that they had no right to their photos. Are facts even license-able the same way a formula or code would be...

<comment><USER6> Wiki data has decided "no" to your question, all contributions are under CC0 (functionally WikiData only stores raw 'facts')

<comment> jagged-chisel you can edit and delete comments with errors (within the allowed time)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it just the Entertainment industry?

</comment><comment><USER8> Does it mean that we can officially cancel social media?

<comment><USER2> It will work out like when Puritans canceled gossip and succeeding generations lacked it entirely.</comment></comment>


Key Stroke Logger - Source Code - <AUTHOR> http://22.214.171.124/16k/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a passive key stroke logger (back in 2007) called 16k to demonstrate how these type of key stroke loggers work. No one has ever paid it much attention, until yesterday when several anti-keylogging softwares discovered it and realized that their software did not detect it. Since that time, my hosting provider has received multiple abuse notices and take-down requests that I have had to respond to and a few DNS services have blacklisted my domain names (clear cloud dns). I can't believe this has happened.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

nslookup www.16s.us 18.104.22.168

Server: 220.127.116.11

Address: 126.96.36.199#53

Name: www.16s.us

Address: 126.96.36.199

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

My source code and binaries are GPG signed, authenticode signed and MD5'ed and have not changed for more than a year. They've been available for download for many years. And now, all of a sudden, out of the blue they are labeled as malware. I had a small degree of respect for commercial security before this, but now I have none. It seems Security Theater and morons are in charge of companies claiming to make the Web safe.

I was hoping HN would help me get the word out. My site <http://16s.us/16k> has no javascript, java, cookies, flash or advertisements. There is nothing malicious _at all_ about it.

Edit: Formatting</comment>


Live Collections using Backbone.js, Faye and Node - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.troupe.co/posts/live-collections/

<comment><USER2> We wrote up this tutorial for a presentation at LNUG on how to create realtime collections on Backbone.js using James Coglan's excellent Faye.

The article covers step-by-step how to go about doing this and also references a demonstration as well as a public repo on GitHub where you can download and try it out for yourself.

Enjoy! Would be great to hear your feedback as we hope to give back a lot more to the community on how to build realtime applications in Node.js. Would also be interested to hear on different approches that others are using.</comment>


The Complete Guide for Short Tandem Repeats and Its Implementation Importance - <AUTHOR> http://www.creative-bioarray.com/Services/Short-Tandem-Repeat-Analysis.htm <comment><AUTHOR> The Importance of STR Analysis It is still common for cell lines to be misidentified and cross-contamination, although scientists use a variety of traditional methods to identify cells, there are still dozens of cross- contamination happened. And even some researchers found that cell lines were misidentified or cross-contamination while cell identification reports for the higher score study articles publication, resulting in erroneous conclusions. All of which will lead to the waste of research funding and time, and resulting in a large number of invalid or erroneous data that will mislead other researchers. Based on the statistics data, around 20% of the cell lines were misidentified and cross-contamination in the labs so that it is a serious concern for researchers to provide accurate cell line identification and prevent cell lines from cross-contamination. Currently, several STR loci have been developed to analyze cross-contamination and cell types at the same time, that can detect up to 0.1 ng of DNA (about 15 Diploid genomes) with high sensitivity for the trace pollution.

All the mentioned above is the complete guide for the Short Tandem Repeat and its importance!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Brief Introduction for Short Tandem Repeats Microsatellite DNA, also known as short tandem repeats (STR) or simple repeat sequences (SRS or SSR), is widely found in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes, consisting of a unit of two to thirteen nucleotides repeated hundreds of times in a row on the DNA strand which is about 5% of the eukaryotic genome, the basic unit (core sequence) is 1-6bp. The most common of these is (CA) n and (TG) n, and the human genome has about 5 × 104 ~ 1 × 105 (CA) n repeats which take 10% of the genome. Each microsatellite DNA has the same core sequence structure, the number of repeating units is about 10 to 60 times, and its length is generally not more than 300bp, mostly located in the non-coding region of the gene, intron or untranslated region. which may be present in the Alu sequence or Satellite sequence, but in the coding sequence and exon also can find the presence of microsatellite DNA.

The high polymorphism of microsatellite DNA is mainly due to the difference in the number of tandem numbers. There is a big difference of the distribution for microsatellite DNA in different races and populations due to the number of repeat units and repetition, which constituted STR genetic polymorphism. And the number of repetitions between different individuals at a homologous STR site is also different so that STR loci analysis can identify individuals that are similar to fingerprint recognition. It is possible to create a personal gene file by identifying a specific sequence of genomes at particular loci. Currently, there are more than 10,000 STR loci are available. STR analysis has become an important analytical method for individual identification and paternity testing in the field of forensic science. It can be applied to judicial case investigation, that is, genetic fingerprint analysis.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> STR Detection Method STR analysis is one of the most useful methods in molecular biology which is used to compare specific loci on DNA from two or more samples. There are two common methods for STR detection: capillary electrophoresis (CE) and gel electrophoresis, which can be used to determine the specific amount of microbes Satellite sequence and draw the STR map. Typically, each allele is shared by about 5-20% of people. And the advantages of STR analysis will be reflected in the simultaneous identification of multiple STR loci. Each individual can be identified accurately by the resulting STR map. In theory, if there were 16 STR loci being used in combination, the recognition rate will be 0.999999999998.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Causes of STR The replication slip caused by mismatches between DNA strands during the mitotic process is considered to be the most common cause of the occurrence of STR, and in general, there will be an average of one- thousandths of microsatellite DNA will undergo replication slippage. The study showed that the rate of tandem duplication at repeat sequences was higher than the probability of point mutations occurring elsewhere in the genome. Most of the replication slides only cause a change in the repeat unit, and the probability of replication slip is different due to the size of the different copy units and different species.</comment>


Show HN: Bookmarks manager – Fastbmk.com - <AUTHOR> http://fastbmk.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! I built Fastbmk.com as a fast, lightweight and reliable bookmarking service. You can create bookmarks with tags and notes. List bookmarks by tag. Search bookmarks. Import and export bookmarks.

Browser addon is available for Firefox and Chrome. Using addon, you can create bookmark and check if the current page is already bookmarked.

I intentionally used a minimal set of web technologies to create a tool for everyday use, which doesn't waste resources of client's computer.

Minimalistic design Low CPU/Memory usage Quick server responses

I already use the service on a daily basis and it works just fine. So I invite you to try it too :) Currently the service is more like a minimum viable product. A lot of features are planned to be implemented in the future.

So your opinion, questions, suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated :)</comment>


Gender Social Norms Index - <AUTHOR> http://hdr.undp.org/en/gsni <comment><AUTHOR> _The Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) measures how social beliefs obstruct gender equality in areas like politics, work, and education, and contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 percent of the world's population.

The analysis reveals that, despite decades of progress closing the equality gap between men and women, close to 90 percent of men and women hold some sort of bias against women, providing new clues to the invisible barriers women face in achieving equality.

According to the index, about half of the world's men and women feel that men make better political leaders, and over 40 percent feel that men make better business executives and that men have more right to a job when jobs are scarce. 28 percent think it is justified for a man to beat his wife.

The publication also includes the GSNI trends for 31 countries, representing 59 percent of the global population. The trends show that while in some countries there have been improvements, in others, attitudes appear to have worsened in recent years, signaling that progress cannot be taken for granted._</comment>


New Reinforcement Learning MOOC Out of Rich Sutton's RLAI Lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/specializations/reinforcement-learning <comment><AUTHOR> A number of us from the lab have been helping to put this course together. It's lead by Martha White and Adam White - two awesome RL profs at the U of A (Martha now leads RLAI) - and is based very heavily on Rich's textbook. The goal is to provide a really strong foundation for those looking to dive deeper into reinforcement learning. It starts with bandits and works all the way up through function approximation, control, policy gradients, and deep RL.

If you have any questions feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

<comment><USER2> In a previous discussion regarding RL learning materials, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20294453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20294453)

Someone commented:

> there's still no great resource to learn RL "from scratch" \- there's still > a huge gap between Sutton&Barto and implementing DDPG. You have to figure > out everything by reading existing implementations, various Medium posts (a > lot of them containing errors and imprecisions), and research papers. I > wouldn't consider Spinning Up as a beginner-friendly resource, it's too > dense/math-heavy. The closest I have found so far is the Udacity course: > [https://eu.udacity.com/course/deep-reinforcement-learning- > na...](https://eu.udacity.com/course/deep-reinforcement-learning-na..). > which costs $1000

I too think OpenAI's Spinning Up isn't beginner-friendly. But I also don't want to just learn bandits and tic-tac-toe. Will this course fill the gap?

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed! A lot of material out there is like the "how to draw and owl" meme: [https://imgur.com/gallery/RadSf](https://imgur.com/gallery/RadSf) \- start with bandits and now do DDPG.

The goal is for this course to provide the foundations for whatever folks want to do in RL after. It starts with bandits but then covers things like TD, Sarsa, Dyna, etc. in the tabular setting. Then folks learn about more advanced topics like linear and non-linear function approximation (read - linear e.g. Tile Coding, non-linear e.g. neural nets/deep rl).

This very much follows the intro RL course taught by Martha/Adam/Rich at the U of A, and follows Rich's textbook really closely.</comment></comment></comment>


Exceeded my 5GB data cap on T-Mobile, my phone is now an expensive paper weight. - <AUTHOR> http://www.circuitbored.com/content/i-have-exceeded-my-5gb-data-cap-t-mobile-my-phone-now-expensive-paper-weight

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the original TXT in case the server gets overloaded:

People don't call each other anymore. Well, my parents call their friend circle on cell phones all the time but people in my generation (30 somethings) don't have endless talk sessions on phones like we once used to. What are so called "youngsters" doing?! They're using the Internet. FaceBook, G+, Soundcloud, Spotify, Web Sites, Texting, Twitter, Email, You name it... So why, in this great age of Internet progress and innovation, are we placing limits on bandwidth? Why does your phone mysteriously slow down or why does your bill balloon every month when you're just tyring to use the new features on your iPhone? A shocking expose awaits you below!:

I ventured out into the wild last week, once my BlackBerry suddenly died, and went to pursue a new wireless device. The hunt made me prey, and I came out with scratches of a higher bill, a more expensive phone, and a new thing called a "data cap" on Internet service for my phone.

Now, not many people are aware of data caps, especially because of cell phone plans being sold and advertised as "unlimited". Its a funny thing, but pretty much every new cell phone service contract (Except for those on Sprint Mobile) here in the US includes a ceiling for how much Internet service you can use on you phone. Some service providers even go as far as to sell you a plan, and not let you know that you will hit an ugly patch of inactivity, or a high bill if you pass that Internet data ceiling.

I am all for capitalism, because it drives innovation, and I'm all for newer devices with convenient and great new features like Wi-Fi and app downloads. I like apps, I develop apps, and I love me some good Internet. I firmly believe that the future of Internet Service Providers will be cell phone service providers, but we've really started out on a bad foot here with this type of data cap rate limiting. Let me first give you a bit of the back story:

I originally had a BlackBerry Bold. Due to hearing about the slump that company is currently in, some terrible people had convinced me to get an Android phone. I held out for over 6 months, until my BlackBerry started exhibiting signs of cardiac arrest during tethering and a tiny screen that made it quite hard to read most content of relevance to me online. I naturally started browsing new phones, and began to like one of the new devices out, The Sensation from HTC, its design was simple, and the screen much bigger than an iPhone 4's, I have no complaints about the device other than its outrageously poor battery life.

OK, so while shopping many different claims and representations were made to me in T-Mobile stores, often conflicting, I was quite surprised to see that there was a huge difference in price quotes between each store I went to. Ultimately, I saved 150$ off of the price I was originally quoted for the phone. The phone price is only 50% of the bargain though, just as, if not more important is the plan that I get for the phone. At the time, I had T-Mobile's "unlimited" plan for BlackBerry Data, my total monthly bill was around 84$ (don't ask me how the taxes and fees got the price up to there, even they can't explain that to me).

I of course had to start a new 2 year commitment for this phone (HTC sensation), along with 10 dollars more for the new "Android data plan" because it uses different Internets than a BlackBerry I guess, and a few extra fees because the unlimited plan had been updated. Reps at T-Mobile were all too eager to tell me my 2 year old BlackBerry unlimited plan was "Grandfathered" making it the youngest grandfather to ever exist I guess.

What I gave up by switching plans, was my ability to have a phone without data caps. That is the essence of having a grandfathered plan, despite years of being a loyal T-Mobile customer, my bill went up by over 30$ and they offered 5$ off, but having a data cap was such a significant sacrifice now because just 1 week after leaving the store with a new phone, my rate limit had been exceeded. Every Internet-Based service on my phone became extremely slow, if not non-functional once my data cap was passed, and the applications I develop on Internet Based services are now inaccessible. I also have to wait until next month before being able to view any post on Reddit past those with plain text because the wait is excruciatingly long and dysfunctional. I cannot also use the brilliant wi-fi hotspot feature that my all-new phone has because that makes my usage disappear immediately once I watch a few YouTube clips. My phone is now a paperweight unless I plan on calling or texting someone, which we don't really do anymore.

Let me tell you about what happens when you exceed this "rate limit"! You basically drop on your stunning new 4G! phone to 2G! speed on T-Mobile. This makes your phone a paperweight, it seems functionally slower than a 56k modem, it reminds you about the dark ages, and the worst part is you're still paying a premium rate monthly to your wireless provider because T-Mobile charges 30$ for the next-level upgrade to 10GB, and there are no other options currently past that. I am paying about 98$ per month for less than a half a month of Internet Service, and there are no options to have full freedom on T-Mobile or AT&T. Some service providers charge you after the overage, Sprint is currently the only carrier to have an option for truly unlimited data plans at the moment, but they didn't have the phone I wanted.

Comcast has also implemented data caps on their local/home/business service in the North Eastern US, their limits work much in this same way. Your voice over IP calls will suddenly not work so great. You'll have to skip that night when you invite friends over to watch a new NetFlix movie because your data cap is exceeded (because your kids watched a really long Disney movie while you were at work). This has really significant implications that we won't realize until after its commonplace, and when we have no choice of reverting to a time of truly unlimited Internet.

As the Internet grows, so do bandwidth needs. How can we place limits on bandwidth in a society we want to grow? Why has Verizon tore up the street outside of my house to install Fiber Optic Cables if they're only going to allow me to download a few web sites and a short film each month? Where are consumer rights, competition, and fundamental fairness in this discussion? This year the US Supreme Court, in review of a case with Wal-Mart, set a precedent that makes it harder for consumers to file class-action lawsuits, you see the direction in which we're going here? Consumer satisfaction is the first thing to go in bad economies, actually its a leading key performance indicator of how well an economy is doing; based on the wireless industry, this is not a good sign for out economic outlook.

I don't know about you, but this is a pretty frickin' scary trend to me! I see a world in a few months where you pay a premium for Internet service yet you will have a harsh cut-off in service at a certain point each month (during your peak points in productivity) that will cripple you. Data Caps are hardly a desirable feature for customers of mobile service providers, but they continue to be enforced by service providers as proof that the benefit of competition in the industry is failing due to posturing and positioning of companies. This will only get worse as AT&T and Verizon buy out most of the smaller providers. There will suddenly only be 2 competitors that dictate the price and limits on service we (as consumers) will have to deal with.

The Internet was founded on the principle of being free, this changed in the late 90s with ISPs charging hourly, we caved. The Internet was born around the ideal of being open, but Google and FaceBook kind of killed that, we caved once again. The Internet was built on the principle of being without boundaries, throttling, and limits, lets not cave to mobile and Internet Service Providers putting data caps on our Internet usage. If we do, the only points of view you get will be provided by large corporations, encouraging you to pay a premium for limited access.</comment>


The meaning of special dollar sign shell variables - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sudoask.com/the-meaning-of-special-dollar-sign-shell-variables/

<comment><AUTHOR>
        $1, $2, $3, ... are the positional parameters.

        $@ is an array-like construct of all positional parameters, {$1, $2, $3 ...}.

        $* is the IFS expansion of all positional parameters, $1 $2 $3 ....

        $# is the number of positional parameters.

        $- current options set for the shell.

        $$ pid of the current shell (not subshell).

        $_ most recent parameter (or the abs path of the command to start the current shell immediately after startup).

        $IFS is the (input) field separator.

        $? is the most recent foreground pipeline exit status.

        $! is the PID of the most recent background command.

        $0 is the name of the shell or shell script.</comment>


Money-launderers use Chinese online shopping sites to funnel cash offshore - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/e669a621-b40b-45b0-abc0-9648d10cdd1b <comment><AUTHOR> NASDAQ listed Pinduoduo was using faux transactions to boost order volume (a key metric it had been using to justify a high valuation). Similar to some used car sales websites in China that gave normal, brick and mortar sales locations POS equipment (so that every transaction was incorrectly attributed to the website, not the actual brick & mortar dealer). Incentive was to pay for CC processing fees.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Money launderers have used some of China's leading online shopping sites to transfer billions of dollars to offshore gambling sites, police raids have revealed.

People wishing to evade China's strict capital controls, for example to gamble on offshore websites, have been placing fake orders on the shopping sites, including on Pinduoduo, China's second-largest platform by users. A corresponding sum is then credited to their gaming account.

In recent months, several police forces across China have announced arrests in a slew of cases, alleging that at least Rmb14bn ($2.06bn) was laundered to offshore gambling sites through these fake ecommerce purchases and other methods.

The People's Bank of China has said it is digging into the networks enabling the cross-border transfers, and the government launched a publicity campaign to "attack and control cross-border gambling".

In one large case, police in the eastern city of Wuxi found 600m fake packages had been inserted into courier firms' tracking systems by company insiders in order to complete fake ecommerce transactions. Many of those same package tracking numbers appeared in money-laundering cases in two other Chinese cities where more than Rmb7bn was allegedly funnelled to offshore gambling sites.

Ni Shiyuan, a police officer in Wuxi, said the government should "urge the related platforms, especially new social ecommerce platforms, to strengthen internal controls". Pinduoduo is the most famous "social ecommerce" company.

A spokesperson for Pinduoduo said "gambling syndicates operating under false pretences on ecommerce platforms is an industry-wide problem". The company said it has referred more than 1,000 leads to authorities since 2019, resulting in the arrest of more than 200 suspects.

Gambling on the 'Next Month Chess' app Court cases in China show criminals have used several of the most popular ecommerce sites to launder gambling money. Alibaba and JD.com declined to comment.

Several gamblers said they had used Pinduoduo to transfer money. Zhao Yongdong, who became addicted to online games during the coronavirus lockdown, said he had transferred Rmb110,000 through Pinduoduo purchases, most during the first three months of the year.

He said that topping-up his gambling app by making fake purchases on a well- known platform such as Pinduoduo made it feel legitimate and he believes the company does not do enough to oversee activity on its marketplace. Two other gamblers, Zheng Meiyu and Wang Kai, claimed they had transferred a collective Rmb2m through the shopping app. Mr Wang said he had made 477 purchases through Pinduoduo to move the money.

Mr Wang and a group of gamblers protested outside Pinduoduo's headquarters in Shanghai this summer, calling for the site to take action and to reimburse them their losses. They wore red shirts scribbled with large characters: "Pinduoduo's unscrupulous merchants — repay my hard-earned money".

"They've never taken us upstairs, they usually don't even let us in the front door," said Mr Wang, adding the local police have carted them away on several of his visits.

The gambling app toggles a transaction in Alipay Pinduoduo said some gamblers had come to its offices to demand their money back. "As gambling is illegal in China, their cases were referred to the police for further investigations," the spokesperson said.

The fake transactions can inflate a key metric used by online shopping sites, the gross merchandise volume, or the total value of all orders placed. Nasdaq- listed Pinduoduo, whose market capitalisation is $96bn, has repeatedly highlighted the rapid growth of its GMV.

Pinduoduo said it does not count orders that it has identified as fake or illegal in its GMV.

Pinduoduo's marketplace has attracted authorities' attention before. China's market regulator ordered the company to strengthen merchant and product oversight in 2018 amid concerns over counterfeit goods. It was added to the US Trade Representative's "Notorious Markets" list last year, joining Taobao and several other Chinese marketplaces.

Pinduoduo has also sued the company behind Chaping, a Chinese online news publisher, for claims about gamblers misusing its platform for money laundering. A Shanghai court fined Chaping Rmb200,000 and ordered it to delete the article and apologise, but also said that "objectively" some merchants on Pinduoduo were engaged in money laundering and said the company should strengthen its oversight and "fill in possible loopholes on the platform".</comment>


The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History - <AUTHOR> http://guywhosteals.blogspot.com/2010/12/25-most-notable-quotes-in-tech-history.html It's not love, war, or baseball. But over the years some memorable things have been said about technology. Some have been memorably eloquent; others are unforgettably shortsighted, wrongheaded, or just plain weird. Let's celebrate them, shall we?
A few ground rules for the list that follows: I considered only statements attributable to a specific individual, which ruled out most ad slogans ("Think Different") and many durable Internet memes ("You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"). I did, however, include individuals who happened to be fictional, or canine, or inanimate. I also let a couple of quotes slip in that are not strictly speaking about technology, though neither would exist without it–one from 1876, and one from earlier this decade. Sue me.
It's hard to rank quotes by how notable they are. So I faked it by listing them using an imprecise, unscientific factor I call Googleosity: the number of results Google reports that reference (or riff upon) each quote. (You may quibble with the queries I performed to determine Googleosity, but I tried my best.) Googleosity tends to reward quotes that are not only famous but fun–they're the ones that people like to allude to, to parody, and to generally weave into blog posts and other online conversation.
We'll start with the quote with the lowest Googleosity factor, and work our way up from there. <comment><USER2> Why do people think a social networking toolbar, social networking side panel and facebook iframe add value to their website?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not anymore.</comment></comment>