skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Last I checked, the arms race seemed to be almost over. GPUs are only 20% faster per year, and the progress seems to be getting even slower.

This is what happens when you try to make too much inferences of a trend in a short time within a step function.

The primary ingredient that fuels continued performance growth in semiconductors, including GPUs, is process shrinks. They are fundamentally what gives AMD and nVidia the additional transistors that they can use to increase performance. The foundry 20nm processes were a bust, meaning that GPUs effectively skipped a shrink. This means that the last 3 years, after 28nm became available, the only way they have had to increase performance was slight efficiency increases and growing the chips bigger.

GPUs will move to next gen foundry processes, the Samsung/GlobalFoundries 14nm and TSMC 16nm late this year or early next year. This will provide the most dramatic single change in the underlying manufacturing process of the history of making GPUs. Assuming no major architectural advances, expect twice the performance.
> Gaijin is slang. It's not necessarily used with a derogatory meaning.

I think this is incredibly important here. People watch movies like Fast and the Furious and think it's always a bad, derogatory word when that isn't the case at all.

As with many words in our own language, context is incredibly important. Take for example, the English word 'foreigner'.

If I see a guy struggling to read a menu at a restaurant, I may say "Oh, he's probably a foreigner. I'm going to go see if he needs help". That's not a negative or derogatory usage. If I say "I wish those dirty foreigners would just go back to their home country", I've now turned the word into a derogatory one.

This is exactly how the word gaijin is handled. It can be used in a derogatory manner, but it's not inherently derogatory. It can be used in a non-derogatory way. It's a shame so many people get their cultural knowledge from Hollywood movies.
Some people interpret Arrow's theorem to mean that democracy is a futile exercise. For example, the anarchist Robert Paul Wolff uses an argument similar to Arrow's theorem to show that all democracies must be tyrannical to at least some of its members.

But Arrow's theorem is first and foremost an exercise in logic. It is grossly oversimplified, and therefore should not be treated as realistic simulation of real-world voting systems. We should be very careful when drawing political conclusions from logical proofs.

There are several reasons why most contemporary political theorists don't give a damn about Arrow's theorem, despite its logical plausibility.

1) Arrow's theorem assumes everyone's preferences to be fixed points, and only cares about finding a curve that fits all of those points. But people's preferences are not fixed. People are always changing their minds, often in response to the shifting preferences of others. Many political theorists in the "deliberative democracy" camp (the dominant model since the early 90s) argue that the whole point of a democratic discussion is to get people to reconsider their pre-existing preferences and find some sort of middle ground.

2) It's not even clear why an ideal procedure would need to satisfy all of the preferences, or even most of them. If making everybody happy were as simple as designing an election procedure, we would have gotten rid of politics a long time ago! You don't even need 3 or more preferences to arrive at a conflict. Two people with one preference each, that directly contradict each other, would be enough to produce a situation where no procedure can satisfy them all. In other words, there's nothing new here. Time to move on.

3) Arrow's theorem is somewhat effective in explaining how the actual share of seats in a lawmaking body can end up being very different from the number of votes that each party received in a first-past-the-post voting system with 3 or more major parties, such as UK and Canada. But there are much simpler, more intuitive ways to explain that.

All in all, Arrow's theorem was a neat response to the political theory of the mid-20th century, when people assumed democracy to be simply a matter of efficient curve-fitting. But political theory has come a long way since then, partly in response to problems like Arrow's theorem. In the new academic milieu, Arrow's theorem isn't as relevant as it used to be.

On the other hand, I can sort of imagine how Arrow's theorem might find a new use in designing distributed computer systems. Since computers aren't as fickle as human politicians, the logical conclusions of Arrow's theorem might be more relevant there. It's good to see that the HN thread so far focuses more on technical details than on grand, mostly irrelevant political narratives.
This is incorrect, only reads from the current Raft master are guaranteed to not be stale. In the case of InfluxDB, I think caching is safe because the shard metadata is immutable.
wikipedia.

Why everyone keep showering ecyclopedic knowledge on blog posts instead of updating things there?
Anyone else having difficulty reading the article? I'm signed in but it still says "sign in to read the article". Lame.
Thank you. Yea I guess I may have misinterpreted the "poor developer" comment.

Thanks again.
Interesting. I studied in Hesse for a semester and don't recall seeing these, at least not extensively.
I'm okay with the incorrect and the correct title.
"Pretty soon the debt totaled up: $25,000 for the car loan, a $100,000+ mortgage and $45,000 in outstanding student loan debt."

Why would someone do this?!

"Oh I have a student loan of 45k, better buy a house!"
Full disclosure, I'm one of the two that built this app. Federico wrote a insightful and balanced review on the app over at MacStories. Keen to hear feedback from the HN community on having ETA on their wrists!
Iran does not have nukes. It makes no sense for them to have nukes and keep that fact secret (see Dr. Strangelove).
AAA means a certain budget, which should at least correlate* with high production value. Not necessarily "good," but "expensive looking."

*This might not be true in cases of outright corruption or incompetence.

You're spot on about the term blockbuster. Same problem there. "Blockbuster" now means high budget and mass market.
The node ecosystem in general is a mess; I don't think you can blame that on the OS. I did a node project recently and I've still not been able to get it to run on two seemingly identical systems in the same way.
Yes. Yes. Maybe. No.

TBH, while I do have a degree in Software Engineering, and do practice actual software engineering in the day job, I could give a rats ass what my actual title is.
How to start a freelancing business that won't fail
This characterization of the Ellsberg case misses its entire context. I'm not sure if you did that purposefully, but perhaps you think there are other reasons why he was acquitted.

I do agree we are off point. Snowden can't argue that his actions were legal or warranted by the Constitution while he's a fugitive. He also can't if he isn't given a fair trial: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9656310

But Eli, we agree. I too am insanely curious to see how this would be handled in court. I don't really have too strong opinions about Snowden himself - mostly I am concerned about the precedent the court case would set up and what it would communicate to other whistleblowers.

What sort of outcome do you want here? Would you like, as a result of the court case:

(A) A precedent whereby whistleblowers who share documents with the press that implicate the government in a scandal widely and bipartisanly disapproved of by the vast majority of American people are forgiven for their crimes on account of public good but where foreign spies who share documents with enemy intelligence can be charged

(B) A precedent whereby whistleblowers who share documents with the press that implicate the government in a scandal widely and bipartisanly disapproved of by the vast majority of American people are treated like foreign spies who share documents with enemy intelligence

[Or maybe you want some other precedent?]

I'm squarely in camp (A). Since law is a man made object, I say we get to making it possible for the legal landscape to allow the first precedent to be possible right away.
And that seems to be based on

a) you agree that attacking foreign nations (in this case: electronically?) is fine, because .. they're not us

b) 'traitor' is really a concept that we should still consider. I mean.. What? You might visit this site and learn about cool things to order from China, order them online and yay! New toy. But the US government can try to infiltrate that country to 'be safe'??

(Note that the same thing is just as crazy from an enlightened point of view, if we're talking about the route back, China -> US. Or .. really, any bullshit like that)
To be honest, git is already relatively painless. What problems does this solve?
They have 1 of 2 options. Go public or be acquired. Either way they are obligated to provide their investors with the best return possible. Personally as a user of Stripe I would really like to see them stay independent and go public themselves so they can mostly control the culture and customer experience. Being acquired may mean their culture is changed or their focus gets jacked around.
I'm confused by your response. I do not understand the point you are trying to communicate.
Nothing to release right now - we're focused on developing the core product!
I guess that makes more sense, though I'd argue that not having the necessary information to make those biases could result in ideas actually being judged in a vacuum (how can you be biased against someone if your subconscious is incapable of knowing whether that someone is subject to its biases?). This is part of the reason why the "hacker" subculture (if the Jargon File is anything to go by) claims itself to be more egalitarian than other STEM-oriented subcultures; since a lot of collaboration is entirely text-based, it doesn't invoke gender/racial biases (or at least does so far less often).

Basically, in the scenario you've described, if the "meeting" is instead a discussion on, say, an IRC channel, then as long as the participants are anonymous, there shouldn't be any reason for bias to occur (and even when they aren't anonymous, I'd hypothesize that - due to the lack of stimuli reinforcing those biases, like visual confirmation of race or gender - bias will be significantly diminished).
The redditification via downvotes here every single time makes me applaud Facebook for only allowing positive votes.
> If China did it to you would not think, "oh china, you rascally superpower"

What do you mean if China did it? They do do it. So does Russia. So does North Korea. So does the US.

There is essentially the cyber equivalent of the Cold War going on right now, and attempting to get into each other's systems, especially infrastructure systems like power plant control systems, is the equivalent of flying fighters provocatively close to someone else's border.
Intolerence of gays and transexuals is something that has extreme impact on a significant minority of the population right now. NSA spying may have an impact on 100% of the population in the future, or it might not. I think reasonable people can disagree as to the probability of "totalitarianism" and I think, instinctively, the public values that probability very low.
I come across many legacy systems that use JavaEE in my sysadmin work.

After a bit of searching I found that the jobs typically may be found by searching for "Java Enterprise" - surprisingly nothing turned up for me with the search term "JavaEE". Of course, it depends which job board you are using in your search - I tried Monster & Seek.
Well, Israel has nukes but on an official level 'doesn't have nukes' - the Dr. Strangelove analysis isn't fully complete. (It is true that everyone knows that Israel has nukes).

Iran does not have nuclear weapons but they are extremely close to having nuclear weapons. They have the knowledge, the material, etc such that if the sustained cooperation of other nations to sabotage their nuclear operations were to discontinue they would be nuclear capable very quickly. This is probably what the author intended - though it is dishonest to round it up the way he did.
Has Bluetooth Become Secure?
Cuentos de México
There's two ways to get around this. First the easier way: you could google the article title and click the top result for wsj.com.

Or you could automate that as described [1] here:

[1] http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-th...
Is a law legal if there's no public knowledge of its legality?
Looks interesting. I think speed is absolutely important when it comes to version-control interfaces. It was one of the main reasons Linus created it in the first place (as opposed to SVN), and I'd argue it's important to maintain flow.

My current git interface is "tig", a curses-based command-line client, which I enjoy for its speed and simplicity. Gitup looks appealing for similar reasons.
Oracle are doing everything possible to discourage startups from using Java.

Pity that Android chose Java - but then again, back then it seemed like a good idea (TM).
I don't prefer dropouts or degree holders or the other. I would say I'm mostly agnostic to it. Having interviewed hundreds of candidates throughout my career I have found little correlation between a college degree and someone's ability to program. I have noticed that the college grads know a little more of the abstract computer science but it usually doesn't matter unless they are a candidate that will be involved with system architecture issues. For that level I would want to see a CS background but not necessarily a CS degree. I would be perfectly willing to accept someone self-taught if they had the requisite knowledge and skills.
Can you provide a citation for that? Every study I know on how American people writ large feel about Snowden show conclusively across the country and across party lines that the American people felt that what NSA did was wrong are thankful to Snowden for revealing it.
The war over Java
It's not unconstitutional, but it wasn't authorized by the Patriot Act §215 because it was sucking up data unrelated to any investigation.

I'm too lazy to find a link but the second circuit recently ruled on this.
That's really not true.

The XML Snap exports to is a completely different language from Snap. You're not versioning Snap, you're versioning the XML that Snap exports to, and unless you're really planning to hand-code software in XML the composability is just not going to be there. Version control involves tying code changes to functionality changes, and unless you're directly writing the XML you have no way of being sure that such things are maintained.

Yes, you can version it, but you're versioning it as a black box, in the same sense as you would version an MP3 or a JPEG. The XML allows you better compression than a binary format, but it doesn't give you the ability to textually navigate changesets.
This looks great.

BTW I don't get all the negativity in the comments about Mac-only tools. A huge number of developers use Macs specifically for well-designed third party software with *nix goodness. I wish other platforms had the same quality of third party software, but they just don't. This is mostly because it is much more difficult to make money selling software for other platforms, for whatever reason.

In any case, I don't see the justification for ragging on someone for developing for (1) the platform they choose to use themselves and (2) the only platform where indie devs can make any money.
So he did something wrong (exposing 'legal' things) and did the world a favor.

The US has a brandished reputation. Snowden made it worse and could actually prove his cases.

As a German, Snowden is awesome. I wouldn't give a rat's ass about whether you consider it legal to spy on this country. You (the state) suck. We learned this once more, got proof, understand that the US of A is not friendly and cannot be considered socially compatible - the values don't line up.

Yeah - I don't think he should return to the States. I think we should fire a politician or two over here and pay him a pension for life. And _really_ limit our cooperation with that aggressive/invasive country.
I like your reasoning, but I wonder about magnitudes. Since:

10 feet/story * sin(0.001 degree) = .00017 feet/story

then:

50 stories * .00017 feet/story = .0085 feet [building]

If things added up this way, your magnitudes would be way off.

In fact, since sin(x) is linear for small x, you'd need about 100x more angle to get 100x more deflection. 100x more deflection would be about 0.85 feet one way, or 1.70 feet peak-to-peak.

Two feet peak-to-peak for 50 stories matches some of the figures quoted in the article for buildings of this scale ("A hundred-story building, by comparison, may move on the order of two-and-a-half to three feet to each side...").

However, on reflection, I think the offsets cumulate quadratically. Because:

*
\
\ [story 2]
\
|
| [story 1]
|

The first story has an angular offset, but the angular offset of the second story adds to that of the first, etc. This must be common knowledge among structural engineers.

In that case, since we can just add all the displacements, the appropriate quadratic multiplier would be 50 * 49/2 = 1225, not just 50, and the total displacement is:

1225 * .00017 feet/story = 0.21 feet.

This would mean your original, very tiny, angles were only about 5x too low. Nice work!
You might be right about Germany, granting asylum would certainly impose high political cost that they may not want to bear. However, of all the other countries I'd think that Germany would be one that knows a thing or two about the dangers of the direction we are heading. Also, if they did this it might be just the message the US intelligence agencies need to realize they are out of control and check their course. I can't believe there aren't people within these agencies who are not comfortable with the direction they are going with mass surveillance. Snowden asylum would morally strengthen their opposition.

Finally, I don't think Snowden is safe in Russia so I hope he gets out soon.
All of these experts are involved with the UN Human Rights Council, a thoroughly discredited organization that consists mostly of undemocratic regimes with dismal human rights records, including Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan, Vietnam, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. There is only a single item that is permanently on the agenda and must be discussed at every meeting of the council: supposed Israeli human rights abuses. I'm not surprised to see more anti-Western and anti-capitalist propaganda coming from these people.
I hope he did mean LCs. It's easy to confuse the two: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_certification#Differences...
Thanks, we're adding this.
Disconnect is the management/config of VMs. We use vagrant, which means I have to check out the repo onto the drive to get the config...

Sounds like if either have to nest VMs (is that even possible?), check out the repo twice. Or have a config that is very different on windows vs everyone else.

Oh well... Maybe win 10 will support a Linux compatible FS.
We're fixing this now. Thanks for the clarification.
Cofounder for Ramen Profitable Company
I have been working on a concept for 3 years as a single founder mainly due to the unavailability of qualified risk takers in the midwest/south east area.

Over the last 3 years, I have:

-Gone through 2 accelerators, have had one pivot, found a pain point that I am passionate about and could solve, Raised small seed capital round, built an MVP based on customer request and expanded it to a few customers, am Ramen profitable now

I am in the process of bringing on a business partner to expand the company now and raise some funds. How do you think the deal should be structured?
I largely don't care about titles, my current one is Software Engineer, I self describe as a software developer.

In the US the title of Engineer is not reserved except in a few very specific instances and the argument about whether software creation is engineering needs to first agree on what engineering is, a very open question and one that seems largely uninteresting to me.

In my own head I think of myself much more as a logician/mathematician than I do an engineer, but I bet you couldn't guess/interpret that from the output.
You probably just didn't notice, because it is totally normal to not use them, but they they are common.
I think they see the most use at places like bakeries, where high counters make handing money over directly harder.
You could try signing up at https://www.cofounderslab.com/. I've had a number of people reach out to me who are looking to partner with a developer.
They're not arriving in groups. If they were arriving in groups, breaking up those groups so you could form them into platoons of 10 would still make no sense.
I've only been to Tokyo (not smaller cities) but I've never seen a drive-through there. People take the train and walk, not drive.

It reminds me though, in fast food places they often have you order by kiosk and then take your receipt to exchange for the food. So there's no (other) human involved in the transaction.
Camping? You could camp out at McDonald County Park, if you bought a couple of cheap tents and gear from Walmart. Convenient for Sand Hill Road, but not really convenient for SF. You'd need a car.

Otherwise, I'd second the AirBNB apartment idea - I think you could probably skip the "hacker houses" and just look for something where you could get a 2 bedroom apartment.
Location: San Jose, CA

Remote: Not a problem

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: PHP (Vanilla, Cake, Laravel),
JavaScript/JQuery, Python, HTML/CSS,

Java, C++ (JUCE Framework), C#,

SQL, Hadoop, AWS/Redshift

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljvarner

Generalist full-stack developer with strong desire for product or service focused work. Willing to relocate, depending on destination.
I agree with you about the amusingly named Human Rights Council, but that doesn't mean these trade agreements should be negotiated in secret or that these agreements are necessarily good.
Interviewing while holding a job?
I'm currently working a job at a startup and I'd like to interview with some companies in the area. I'm not necessarily ready to switch jobs, but would like to see what's being offered and get some experience interviewing. Any advice on how to go about this without it interfering with my current position?
With the amount of app piracy, this would make no sense, in my opinion. Developers would be actually robbed.
Tweets are threaded now. Conversations work, though can break down if people compose new tweets with an @mention instead of the reply button.

Can break down with sub-conversation trees a little, but that's hardly only twitter's problem. I'd be more than happy with reddit-style @reply threads.
> the theorem states that if there are more than 2 candidates, then there is no voting system that has all 4 properties above.

There is no rank order voting system that has all those properties. (Rank order means, that the voter puts the candidates in the the order of preference: 1., 2., 3. etc.)

But there are other voting systems, e.g. a system where you give each candidate points between 1-100 or whatever, and you can give the same amount of points to several candidates if you want.
I don't see why it's arbitrary.

It's not at odds with the dismissal of the Nuremburg defense because it was a violation of the international law. I do have to admit that is sort of a cop out since international law at the time was more moral than real law.

Another huge distinction is that nobody was charged at Nuremburg for not exposing the crimes, they were charged with aiding them. If Snowden had a moral issue spying on people, he could quit.

Also at Nuremburg, we were just punishing the losers of a war.