Hasnain says:

Long and rambles at times but there’s useful advice here - and I certainly needed some on prioritization.

“Being purposeful is also the secret to agility. Purpose can help move faster and in times of crisis, rally the team together. It helps avoid analysis paralysis and avoid the delays inherent in waiting for numbers to emerge before taking a decision. When employees are in a quandary due to a fork in the road, purpose can guide them to choose which way to move without escalating up the hierarchy or awaiting further direction from their hierarchy. In situations where it really matters, we tend to become data driven when we should be doing the opposite, pause and then reflect on why the business or product exists.”

Hasnain says:

“Keep an eye on your dicts. Don’t let them take control of your application. As with every piece of technical debt, the further you postpone introducing proper data structures, the more complex the transition becomes.”

Hasnain says:

“A year after October 7, no one seriously believes there will be peace between Israel and the Palestinians in our lifetime. The bombed and starved children of Gaza will never forget what they’ve been subjected to, nor the world’s general indifference; while it’s not on the same scale, their counterparts in Israel will never forget the national trauma of the attacks. The “two-state solution” that liberal Zionists have verbally supported for years as the only possible just outcome is an obvious fantasy. Other, far more disturbing outcomes seem likelier; at present, it is hard to see what consequences Israel will face from continuing to kill and displace Palestinians on all fronts while seizing and occupying more and more of their land. If there is one lesson to be taken from the past dismal year, it’s this: the liberal Zionist interpretation of the conflict has no predictive value, no analytical weight, and no moral rigor. It is a failed dream of the previous century, and it is unlikely to survive this one.”

Hasnain says:

“The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.”

Hasnain says:

Long, detailed read on distributed systems and retries. Worth reading and internalizing.

“A couple of months after the incident review was completed, the platform team adopted the retry budget technique with a threshold of 10%. Over the following year, there were other incidents, but no amplification from retries was observed.
Thanks to the incident review, Ben learned that “when encountering transient errors, add retries” is a risky approach. He gained an in-depth understanding of the risks involved, even with exponential backoff. He learned about exponential backoff and jitter techniques, Little’s Law and closed-loop systems, the concept of metastable failure state, the problem of retry amplification and techniques like retry circuit breaker and retry budget, as well as circuit breaker and deadline propagation mechanisms.
Ben now has an even more exciting journey ahead of him, delving deeper into retries. But that’s the subject of another post.”

Hasnain says:

“As the project progressed, they got "a bigger and bigger pile of proof that Rust does actually work well".

There were regular cross-team meetings where team leads could discuss their problems. As time went on it became more and more noticeable that Julius didn't bring up many issues at all and when he showed his results, his colleagues were often left impressed.”

Hasnain says:

A different tweet I read said this is so far close to the mathematical limits for how big a hurricane can get in this area. Holy crap.

““This is the real deal here with Milton,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor told a news conference. “If you want to take on Mother Nature, she wins 100% of the time.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday that it was imperative for debris from Helene to be cleared ahead of Milton’s arrival so the pieces cannot become projectiles. More than 300 vehicles gathered debris Sunday.

As evacuation orders were issued, forecasters warned of a possible 8- to 12-foot (2.4- to 3.6-meter) storm surge in Tampa Bay. That’s the highest ever predicted for the region and nearly double the levels reached two weeks ago during Helene, said National Hurricane Center spokesperson Maria Torres.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s a useful reminder that over the years, the traditional relational database has proved remarkably capable of absorbing innovation, from clustering to cloud to vector search. Trends in database architecture come and go, but somehow, when the dust settles, SQL always seems to be left standing.”

Hasnain says:

In a just world everyone involved would be in jail already (though that might still be too kind)

“The following day, after an additional round of Cabinet meetings, this time helmed by both Blinken and Biden, an outline of the decision was publicly announced by Prime Minster’s Netanyahu’s office: “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip” and, in a separate Hebrew version, “In light of President Biden's demand, Israel will not thwart humanitarian supplies from Egypt as long as it is only food, water and medicine for the civilian population located in the southern Gaza Strip or moving there, and as long as these supplies do not reach Hamas. Any supplies that reach Hamas will be thwarted.” The Hebrew word לסכל, “to thwart,” is frequently used by Israel to describe targeted killings and assassinations. The previous policy of "thwarting" all humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza was conveyed to Egypt as an explicit threat to "bomb" aid trucks.

The substance of the Blinken-approved policy was starkly conveyed by Security Cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich, who later told the Israeli media: “We in the cabinet were promised at the outset that there would be monitoring, and that aid trucks hijacked by Hamas and its organizations [sic] would be bombed from the air, and the aid would be halted.””

Hasnain says:

This is why I always feel like everything should be e2e encrypted and that backdoors (err, law enforcement portals “for the good guys”) shouldn’t be allowed. There’s no way to do them securely.

“The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.”