Hacker News Reader

Quanticleson The Dornier DO-960 Analog Computer

Sure - http://mythic-ai.com

Quanticleson Dilution

less dilution = good

money to do stuff = good

wise spending = good

these are all known things, i'm not sure this article actually digs much into how to balance them

Quanticleson The Future of Neuromorphic Computing

No, they are not from Isocline...

There are groups at UCSB and U-Tenn working on analog neural network technologies as well.

Quanticleson Why Electric Cars Will Be Here Sooner Than You Think

Bigger issue seems to be people overestimate how much they spend on fuel. You buy the car once, but you refuel it hundreds of times over its lifetime, giving the impression that fuel is a big expense.

For example, if you assume $0.073/mile, for 100,000 miles, that is $7300. If going electric cuts that in half, you save only $3650, which is only ~10% of the cost of the vehicle.

Looking at total cost of ownership (car + maintenance + fuel) makes much more sense than just fuel.

Quanticleson FBI raids dental software researcher who discovered patient data on FTP server

Any time part of an organization is given resources, they must use those resources to justify having them and continuing to have them.

They probably rarely have cause to perform this sort of raid, so they do so at any opportunity.

Quanticleson Person carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort found in U.S.

Or make little robots to fight the bacteria

Quanticleson IBM scientists achieve storage memory breakthrough

Here is a paper from 2011 where they claim 7 or 8 bits/cell http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=587322...

This research seems to take program/erase cycles into greater account.

Quanticleson Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

As far as I can tell, this is a win for encryption. It says that device manufacturers need to help law enforcement break into a device, but they do not need to create any backdoors. If Apple/Google/etc make it impossible for them to break into their own devices, then there is nothing that they can do. As long as they are not required to include backdoors then encryption wins.

Quanticleson How to do a PhD

There are pro's and con's to studying the literature. The main pro is that you can avoid a dead end. The main con is that your ideas will be shaped by the literature (i.e., not as unique).

I tend to try to solve a problem myself first (this could be days or weeks), then look at the literature. If I looked at the literature first, then my ideas would look like the literature.

It's a gamble either way

Quanticleson Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

Some of these locations don't have any other companies in the area.

Example:

You're 22, straight out of college, you take a job at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY because it was a great fit for you and you liked the area. You raise a family there, get friends there, establish a lot of roots over 10+ years. Now IBM is "transforming", what are you going to do? There are no other companies in the area

Quanticleson [dead]

The All Writs Act requires that the request NOT be a burden to the company that the request is being sent to. Isn't it a burden to affect Apple's marketing strategy?

Quanticleson Starbucks has 3x the sugar of a whole Coke in some drinks

You can dissolve up to 2 grams of sugar into every 1 gram of water, Starbucks is just trying to help push the boundaries on that science.

Quanticleson How to fend off a jerk

Maybe he's a paramedic

Quanticleson U.S. predicts zero job growth for electrical engineers

I wonder if this is a side-effect of the current silicon-valley investment scene. There are lots of low-capital startup opportunities, so who wants to fund the high-capital startups in computer hardware? There have been very few computer hardware startups the past few years, and that might have an effect on overall innovation and growth.

Quanticleson What to do when employees quit

Not everyone can be a manger, strong technical people are very valuable too.

Quanticleson Finland Is Considering Testing Giving Every Citizen €800 per Month

Let's say someone gets a PhD - that takes ~5 years. So instead of entering the workforce at 22, they enter the workforce at 27. If they retire at 70, then their working hours went down from 48 years of work to 43 years of work, or ~10%.

Do you consider the ~10% loss in working hours a major disadvantage?

I could definitely see more people getting advanced degrees in a "MINCOME" society. For example, I have a family member that really wants to do a masters, but had to work through school and isn't sure they can swing it for a masters too.

Quanticleson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2015)

Isocline - Austin, TX - Neural Network Lead

We are developing neural network microchips that yield a 10-1000x improvement in performance & energy-efficiency compared to digital ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Patents pending.

We are looking for a neural network expert who can be a development leader. An ideal applicant has significant experience in deep neural networks, modeling of physical systems, and team management. They need to be a leader who can work well with people that have a variety of backgrounds, and can manage a variety of development constraints.

$100K – $200+K Salary (Negotiable)

1.0% – 1.5+% Equity (Negotiable)

On-site, Full Time

Company website: http://isosemi.com/

Contact: dave.fick@isosemi.com

----------------------------------------------

Isocline - Austin, TX - Analog Circuit Design Grizzled Veteran

We are developing neural network microchips that yield a 10-1000x improvement in performance & energy-efficiency compared to digital ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Patents pending.

We are looking for a grizzled veteran of analog circuit design. An ideal applicant has designed ADCs/DACs/SHAs/Amplifiers/SERDESs/Transceivers/etc, has seen every problem, has written an analog design textbook, and can run periodic noise simulations in their head. They are preferably nice to talk to too, so they can kindly explain these concepts to the mortals.

$100K – $200+K Salary (Negotiable)

1.0% – 1.5+% Equity (Negotiable)

On-site, Full Time

Company website: http://isosemi.com/

Contact: dave.fick@isosemi.com

Quanticleson Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

> “’The most difficult communication between these terrorists is via PlayStation 4,’ the minister said, three days before the terrorist attacks in Paris. ‘It’s very, very difficult for our services — not only Belgian services but international services — to decrypt the communication that is done via PlayStation 4.'”

The Onion is going to have a really hard time topping this.

Quanticleson Sports At Any Cost: How Colleges Are Bankrolling the Athletics Arms Race

http://www.annarbor.com/news/eastern-michigan-university-fis...

That was their athletic department's official budget for 2014.

HuffPost has a table that implies an annual budget, but the numbers are actually for 5 years, and that is not clearly stated directly on the table. That fact makes all of the other numbers that they provide suspicious.

Quanticleson Sports At Any Cost: How Colleges Are Bankrolling the Athletics Arms Race

I don't get the table of subsidies - according to Google, Eastern Michigan has a $10.73M annual budget, but the table says that they have a $120M subsidy.

For comparison, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has a budget of around $137.5M.

The article is talking about annual student fees but the listed subsidy is apparently for a decade or more of time.

Quanticleson Civil Forfeiture and the Supreme Court (2014)

In articles about "innocent until proven guilty" it is popular to say that it is better to let 100 guilty go free than one innocent be erroneously convicted. Yet, many are willing to seize assets before that person is proven guilty in case they try to hide the assets or spend them when the assets are possibly not theirs.

I would rather let 100 criminals hide ill-gotten gains than let one innocent person have their assets seized before they can mount a proper defense.

Prosecutors: Freedom means that your job is harder, but fairness and the rule of law is part of what makes this a great country to live in. We will appreciate your sacrifice if/when this issue is ever remedied

Quanticleson Lessig Ends Presidential Campaign

This election cycle is making it clear that the democratic party leadership believes in "the ends justify the means". They want a democrat to win the presidency, so they don't want anyone to detract from Hillary and are making things harder for everyone else.

Quanticleson FBI’s Advice on Ransomware? Just Pay the Ransom

For the cyber-criminals there is little or no per-user cost to implement this attack. The refuse-to-pay strategy works when there is some hope of making their attack not worth their effort. To make it not profitable, you would have to convince such a high percentage of people to not pay that the refuse-to-pay strategy is intractable. Instead, we need to rely on the FBI and other organizations to raise the risk of getting caught.

Quanticleson Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice

There is also an imbalance in negotiating position in these agreements. If every credit card company you deal with says you must agree to arbitration, what leverage do you have to push back on that? There's just not enough competition in the market to push back on each one of the issues raised in these agreements.

Either the government needs to create enough competition in the market such that consumers have choice on these issues, or the government needs to advocate for the consumers.

Quanticleson “This mistake will become the thing you are best known for”

The background to this case seems a little one-sided, is there anything that explains how he was convicted?

It's supposed to be "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". Supposedly the only evidence was another person's testimony, who was going to get the death penalty if they didn't (i.e., they were compelled). Even without being compelled, it's still reasonable to believe that the person may be lying. There must be more to this....

Quanticleson A9 Is TSMC 16nm FinFET and Samsung Fabbed

At the very least it's going to affect power consumption. I agree that they probably went for iso-performance.

Analogy: if you build one thing out of steel and one thing out of aluminum, you can get the same weight or the same strength, but not both.

Quanticleson Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges

You make it sound like if you're not #1 in your class you'll be living homeless on the street. This is the exact type of exaggeration the article is discussing. There are many things in between Nobel Prize Winner and unemployed.

Quanticleson Why Airbnb is dead to me

It looks like Airbnb is focused on keeping their costs low instead of keeping their quality up. That's a good short-term strategy........

Quanticleson Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Over: The Future of Computer Chips

I don't think anyone doubts that we'll continue to make improvements in process technologies until the sun explodes, the main questions are pace and benefits.

Yes, we can create shorter channels using more/different materials. Yes, we can get stronger gate fields using more/different materials. Yes, we can start building vertically and cool the chip using microfluidics. But, all of these things take more time than previous scaling efforts, and are going to have quantum scaling benefits instead of the classical scaling benefits that we had before.

Even now, companies have a difficult choice when switching to 16nm - is it worth the cost and effort? The rules for designing chips have double width each new generation too, making it harder to physically design in addition to the less-manageable transistors. We now have a bad combination of high supply and low demand - new processes double supply due to shrinkage, but reduce demand due to design cost & difficulty.

edit: Newtonian => classical

Quanticleson The Plane Giving the F-35 a Run for Its Money

You could say that about the initial stage of the war, but can you maintain an occupying force for years against a sophisticated country? In that case, we would eventually run out of F-35's due to sabotage or maintenance issues.

This idea that the only thing that matters is what you already have creates a race - can you crush resistance before those who are resisting realize that you have limited long-term capability?