midko

This is great news! As a long-time CACM subscriber, I highly recommend it! There's a lot of breadth across Computer Science topics and the in-depth articles in most issues are v good! I only wish I had more time for it..

> with each allocation limited to 1/4th of the available resources so not individual peak can choke the system.

This assumes that the scheduled workloads are created equal which isn't the case. The app owners do not have control over what else gets scheduled on the node which introduces uncontrollable variability in the performance of what should be identical replicas and environments. What helps here is .. limits. The requests-to-limits ratio allows application owners to reason about the risk they are willing to take in relation to the needs of the application (e.g. imagine a latency-sensitive workload on a critical path vs a BAU service vs a background job which just cares about throughput -- for each of these classes, the ratio would probably be different). This way, you can still overcommit but not by a rule-of-thumb that is created centrally by the cluster ops team (e.g. aim for 1/4) but it's distributed across each workload owner (ie application ops). This is what the parent post is also talking about.

Source: https://groups.google.com/a/tensorflow.org/forum/#!topic/swi...

Indeed, and that's why there are a couple of startups working on new chips and why Google has the TPU. Here's a nice technical talk from Graphcore's CTO about that https://youtu.be/Gh-Tff7DdzU

It's impressive how fast TensorFlow has become this popular (judging not only by the number of stars it has but also by the number of other projects in that list related to TF)

I can't recommend this video because I haven't watched it yet but looking at the slides it looks like a good survey talk about generative models and an intro to DCGAN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeJINHjyzOU

Nitpick: Paxos is a consensus protocol, not " a protocol for state machine replication in an asynchronous environment that admits crash failures.".

Consensus can be used for SMR, atomic broadcast, leader election. One can argue all of these replicate a sort of state machine. However, that dilutes the meaning of state machine replication -- replication of state with durability and performance in mind

The way the change was distributed (in a bugfix release) and (mis)communicated was completely wrong, I definitely agree with that. As for the parsing example, yes, that's one way to implement this but definitely not the only right one -- if you care only about a couple of fields from a massive string, it depends on your application domain whether you can tolerate the additional memory bloat. What I like about the current behaviour is that the method is less surprising and more GC friendly

The article is an example of using an anecdote ("During our course, the customer remarked that they had a real issue with this new Java 7 and 8 approach to substrings") and a skewed microbenchmark to extrapolate to general advice.

The substring change was done to address common real scenarios, as the author of the change described here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1qw73v/til_orac...

The factsheet from the links at the end of the article is also useful as it better explains the net neutrality decisions - http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-5275_en.htm