Hasnain says:

Apps are deceptively easy to make.

Great apps hide all that complexity behind the scenes.

TIL Boehm (yes, that guy, of Boehm GC fame) wrote the android calculator app and went through some reasonably advanced math to get it right.

“With this representation, they're in the sweet spot:

All the digits shown on the screen are always correct. And they almost never show more digits than necessary.

A "computer algebra system" would have accomplished a similar goal, but been much slower and much more complicated”

Hasnain says:

“Cornish views Compact as a “low-probability, high-reward” proposition. “If I had to bet, I don’t think they’re going to find anything,” he said. “But the question is so important,” he added, that it ought to be explored “to the fullest extent.””

Hasnain says:

“Noether was an assistant in name only. She was already a formidable mathematician when, in early 1915, Hilbert and Klein invited her to join them at the University of Göttingen. But other faculty members objected to hiring a woman, and Noether was blocked from joining the faculty. Regardless, she would spend the next three years prodding the fault line separating physics and mathematics, eventually setting off an earthquake that would shake the foundations of fundamental physics.”

Hasnain says:

“Bethe ansatz methods show up in so many places, said Pedro Vieira (opens a new tab), a professor at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “It seems like nature appreciates beautiful things.””

Hasnain says:

Because of course

“The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.””

Hasnain says:

Gotta love new breakthroughs. This was really cool and interesting and I’ll have to read the paper

“Farach-Colton, Krapivin and Kuszmaul wanted to see if that same limit also applied to non-greedy hash tables. They showed that it did not by providing a counterexample, a non-greedy hash table with an average query time that’s much, much better than log x. In fact, it doesn’t depend on x at all. “You get a number,” Farach-Colton said, “something that is just a constant and doesn’t depend on how full the hash table is.” The fact that you can achieve a constant average query time, regardless of the hash table’s fullness, was wholly unexpected — even to the authors themselves.”

Hasnain says:

“ARRAF: It was really surreal because you don't see anything living in that part of Deir al-Balah, which has been heavily hit. I mean, really, it - from what we were seeing, it was just rubble. And it's important to note that Israel prevented us, according to the Jordanian authorities, from taking photographs on the ground of what we were seeing. The only thing we could take photos of once we landed were the buffer zone and the helicopter. But to actually see it real, in real life, was really unreal.”

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder from this one. I think I’ll come back to this a few times to internalize it. I have various somewhat conflicting thoughts:

* that was a simpler time. tech was a little less evil and more altruistic back then
* I really really resonate with the point back then about fewer people being in tech just for the money
* giving back seemed to be a very common theme, contrasting with the FIRE movement right now
* the avenues one can go into after a successful tech career are pretty much everywhere
* I would love to see a follow up that 1) profiles these same people and 2) profiles folks from the latest set of IPOs
* I wonder how perceptions of the tech people both themselves and in the communities around them have changed
* even without having struck gold things have changed so much with layoffs (and just general poverty)

“Seattle isn’t the only center of newly minted wealth out West. Silicon Valley, the software lodestone 30 miles south of San Francisco, has also produced its share of cash-outs—men and women, most of them still in their 30s and 40s, who made a ton of money off Internet start-ups early in the game and headed (often literally) for the hills, climbing Mount Rainier, trekking in Nepal, watching the sunset from their redwood decks high up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Because of who they are and where they come from and the way in which they became rich, they’ve spawned a social revolution of such magnitude that it is transforming entire sectors of the West. Unlike people in the ­financial-­services industry, who end up as bond traders or bankers because they want to make a lot of money, “Microsofties” made their wealth serendipitously; for the most part, they tended to be from academic backgrounds—geeky, creative, interested less in striking it rich (until recently, when the Internet got to be like the Gold Rush) than in devising innovative software programs.”

Hasnain says:

Gee thanks bruh. Good luck to my friends still there.

“She also added that Meta's offices would be open on Monday, but anyone "whose job allows" was allowed to work from home and have the day count as "in-person time." Meta currently follows a hybrid schedule, requiring full-time employees to work from the office three days per week and two days remotely.”

Hasnain says:

Great writeup as always from cloudflare. I liked this in particular as it called out one of the layering violations that’s not always obvious when working on low level infra; you have to audit all your dependencies to make sure you don’t depend on yourself being up somehow

“>On-call attempts to re-enable the R2 Gateway service using our internal admin tooling, however this tooling was unavailable because it relies on R2.”