Hasnain says:

“"None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, said: "It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it”

Hasnain says:

It was hard to pick just one favorite quote from this so you get two this time. Started with a banger and kept going strong.

“Behold the decade of mid tech!

That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally gets to touch a boob. I’m far from a Luddite. It is precisely because I use new technology that I know mid when I see it.

…

Of course, A.I., if applied properly, can save lives. It has been useful for producing medical protocols and spotting patterns in radiology scans. But crucially, that kind of A.I. requires people who know how to use it. Speeding up interpretations of radiology scans helps only people who have a medical doctor who can act on them. More efficient analysis of experimental data increases productivity for experts who know how to use the A.I. analysis and, more important, how to verify its quality. A.I.’s most revolutionary potential is helping experts apply their expertise better and faster. But for that to work, there has to be experts.”

Hasnain says:

“Seher, who wishes there were “more than 24 hours in my day”, reads about 200 electric meters a day with a handheld device that transmits data online. “It’s a lot of work, but I love it,” she says.

At home, her husband, a textile worker, now does more of the domestic chores and helps look after their three children. “A few years ago, brewing tea and sweeping floors felt impossible,” he says. “Today, I chop the vegetables ready for her to make dinner.””

Hasnain says:

I’ve been trying to learn more exploit dev, and I thought I was getting slowly better, then I look up the exploit chain of things like this and I’m like uhhhh

“We are only scratching the surface in reviewing the security of admission controllers. Initially, we were surprised to see that such a large code base is used behind the scenes. In our view, this attack surface should be restricted in a much better way: removing access from pods within the cluster, and never exposing this publicly. We were also surprised by the lack of least-privilege design, as the exploit ended up with privileges to take control of the cluster. During this research, we found other vulnerabilities in Ingress NGINX Controller, and we expect to find more in other admission controllers. “

Hasnain says:

"The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining."

Hasnain says:

“Footnotes:

[1] Since big companies throw around the VP title pretty casually, this post is arguing that many of those VPs are actually directors in thinking and accountability. This may be one reason why big company VPs have trouble adapting to the e-staff of startups.”

Hasnain says:

She is an incredibly brave woman and this interview is worth reading.

I also can’t imagine being a parent who’s so bad that your kid feels this way towards you.

“TV: Do you ever feel scared? He's the richest man in the world.

VW: He's a pathetic man-child. Why would I feel scared of him? Ohhh, he has so much power. Nah, nah, nah. I don't give a f**k. Why should I be scared of this man? Because he's rich? Oh, no, I'm trembling. Ooh, shivering in my boots here. I don't give a f**k how much money anyone has. I don't. I really don't. He owns Twitter. Okay. Congratulations.”

Hasnain says:

“What’s clear is that the definition of “software engineer” is expanding, not contracting. The skills that make someone valuable are diversifying. And this creates both challenges and opportunities.

For those who love the craft of coding, this shift can feel threatening. But remember that AI tools are still just that - tools. They don’t understand the “why” behind the code, the business context, or the human needs being served. They can’t innovate in the true sense of the word, at least not yet. And as far as we know, they can’t feel the satisfaction of solving a complex problem or the joy of creating something new.”

Hasnain says:

““It’s taught me more about parenting than any books I’ve read or professionals whose brains I’ve picked,” notes Hilton, who was inspired by Bluey when endeavoring to make Daddy: Live in Concert (out on April 8) entertaining, educational and fun for parents. “Their patience, rules, engagement, love and faults make me think it’s a show for parents masking as a show for kids. It’s reminded me many times what an incredible time in both my life and my kids’ life this is.””

Hasnain says:

Good piece on AI and how it’s affecting software engineering - I especially loved the conclusion though

“A lot of dumbasses in company leadership see AI and salivate at the idea of reducing headcount so "AI can do the work". This is clearly a fear that a lot of people who earn paychecks for a living have. I have two thoughts on this topic:

Firstly, if you're a company leader who sees a wave as large as the introduction of the computer coming and your thought is to "use less resources to do the same work", you're an uncreative hack and it's you who deserves to be fired. The goal should be how you can accomplish more when you have cognitive co-processors at your disposal.”

Hasnain says:

“Different world views

For Alicia Jones, not having anyone else to financially depend on—or split rent with—is the worst part of being single. “Especially with the threat of layoffs, it’s much more stressful being a single person,” said Jones, who is 38 and works in communications for a real-estate company in Washington, D.C.

Her last long-term relationship ended two years ago over conflicting views of their shared future. “He wanted the white picket fence and me at home with the kids,” Jones said. This despite the fact that her salary was nearly 50% higher than his. “

Hasnain says:

Definitely need to upgrade so we’re safe the next time a pirate swings by with a 2x4 cannon

“The bad news is that Joe and Jane Consumer won’t be able to buy these kinds of windows at the local home-supply store—at least not yet. While the primary manufacturer of this type of window is offering its tech to other window makers, it’s only opened up U.S. production in the past few months, and it’s still scaling up manufacturing.”

Hasnain says:

AirBnB recently did a large scale migration of code using LLMs. I've been trying to find good datapoints for things like this, so personally reading this blogpost (link in comments) was quite exciting.

I have done a crapton of these migrations by hand (aided with static analysis/codemod scripts in the past) and I'm excited to see where LLMs can go in this space.

Some key takeaways from this post (which resonated well for me, similar to how I'd do it as a human funnily enough):

* Break the migration into manageable chunks:
* Migrate each file independently
* Within that too, have a logical set of sequential steps.
* Don't try to do the whole thing in one shot
* Choosing the exact specific context matters a lot for the LLM
* Retries help -- if it fails, just try again
* It's easy to get "good enough" to e.g get 75% of the way there
* From there to 97% took a lot more work
* ... and it doesn't make sense to go to 100% (in terms of ROI)

Money quote from the article below

"Airbnb recently completed our first large-scale, LLM-driven code migration, updating nearly 3.5K React component test files from Enzyme to use React Testing Library (RTL) instead. We’d originally estimated this would take 1.5 years of engineering time to do by hand, but — using a combination of frontier models and robust automation — we finished the entire migration in just 6 weeks."

Hasnain says:

“It is time to meet the moment; the only question is how you will decide to. If you stay this course, tightly gripping the reins of power while you sabotage the fight your party and your people are ready and desperate to enter, few will see you as any sort of hero. No message you could hope to deliver will ever be taken seriously if you persist in behaving in this obstructive way. Whatever you may have accomplished in your career will be lost to the sands of time and you will be written into history as a Vichy clown, plagued by obtuse cowardice, who used his own power to make sure the nation would suffer the consequences of his own personal failures.”

Hasnain says:

“But the readers who objected to our headline have a point. My gut gave me a good reality check about the world we live in, but it failed to write a good headline. Although these are unprecedented times, a news headline should not quietly aid the erosion of our social consensus about the law, even if we ourselves are struggling to do our jobs because of that erosion. And even if the Supreme Court holds itself to be the arbiter of what is law, there is only so far that we, as Americans, can sit back and accept it — at the very least, we must flatly reject the idea that it can make Trump a king.”

Hasnain says:

“I know that some folks in the comments will whine that this is “political” or that it’s an overreaction. And it is true that there have been times in the past when people have overreacted to things happening in DC.
This is not one of those times.

If you do not recognize that mass destruction of fundamental concepts of democracy and the US Constitution happening right now, you are either willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. I can’t put it any clearer than that.

This isn’t about politics — it’s about the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible. For those in the tech industry who supported this administration thinking it would mean less regulation or more “business friendly” policies: you’ve catastrophically misread the situation (which many people tried to warn you about). While overregulation (which, let’s face it, we didn’t really have) can be bad, it’s nothing compared to the destruction of the stable institutional framework that allowed American innovation to thrive in the first place.”

Hasnain says:

“The problem right now isn’t that we’re in a moment of great tension for our constitutional system, with members of Congress poised to act if the presidential defiance of the courts continues. Nor have we stumbled into some strange ambiguity where we’re wrestling with the right path forward. The problem is that in effectively a single blink of the historical eye, we’ve seen our entire constitutional system simply … stop. We aren’t just outside the bounds of normal constitutional operations; we’re several standard deviations outside anything America has ever experienced before. We can clearly see what’s happening is wrong—illegal and unconstitutional—and the actors who can do something about that just … aren’t.”

Hasnain says:

His only crime seems to have been one we all do: walking while brown.

“The 22 cases include Chicago resident Julio Noriega, 54, a U.S. citizen who, according to court documents, was arrested, handcuffed and spent most of the night at an ICE processing center in suburban Broadview. He was never questioned about his citizenship and was only released after agents looked at his ID.

“I was born in Chicago, Illinois and am a United States citizen,” Noriega said in his statement, adding that on Jan. 31, after buying pizza in Berwyn he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. Officers took away his wallet, which had his ID and social security card. “They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.””

Hasnain says:

This is absolutely nuts. And I feel like this is a great example of honeypots to be taught later in classrooms.

“Rippling crafted a letter that referenced an empty Slack channel in Rippling’s corporate Slack instance called “d-defectors,” and implied the Slack channel contained messages that would be of interest to Deel.

The letter was sent to only three people – Phillipe Bouaziz, the chairman of Deel’s board, CFO, General Counsel, and the father of Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz; Spiros Komis, Deel’s Head of US Legal; and the company’s outside counsel at law firm.

Within hours of sending the letter, Deel’s spy inside of Rippling searched – for the first time – for this empty and never-before-used Slack channel, proving that Deel’s top executives or its legal representatives were running the covert espionage operation.”

Hasnain says:

I tend to agree with this take.

“The net result of all of this for the programming market is: more software, better software, more programmers, better programmers. But the adjustment won't be without pain: some shitty software will get shipped before we figure out how to put guardrails around AI-driven development. Some programmers who are currently shipping mediocre software will find themselves replaced by newer, faster, AI-assisted developers before they manage to learn AI tools themselves. Everyone will have a lot of learning to do. But what else is new? Software development has always evolved rapidly. Embrace change, and you'll be fine.”

Hasnain says:

Didn’t expect to see this from the FT of all places while legacy/traditional media continues to be cowards. I guess FT has a financial incentive here to be more honest and it shows.

“
My guess is that Khalil’s case will make it to the Supreme Court. There, one of three scenarios could happen:

The court rejects Trump’s attempts to bring back the Hanoverian bill of attainder and Trump reluctantly complies.

The court folds and essentially declares Trump to be king.

The court upholds the law, which gives due process to citizens and permanent residents alike, but Trump ignores the ruling.

Both 2 and 3 would end the rule of law in America, though 3 would be a more dramatic way of doing it. 1 would be great, though do not bet on it.
“

Hasnain says:

This is a horrifying article. Unfortunately treatment like this is too often swept under the rug and an open secret.

“Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.

There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of the labor committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.

But Mr. Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.””

Hasnain says:

"Funnily enough, this commit was added to HyperQueue in an enormous pull request that essentially backported most of my benchmarking experiments that I have done over the summer. The PR almost exclusively contained changes only to benchmarks, so it should have been safe to merge without a lot of scrutiny. But it also contained two teeny tiny changes. The PR description that I wrote is quite funny in retrospect:

> This backports the benchmarks that I prepared for my PhD thesis back into the HQ repository. Almost all changes are to the benchmarks repository, and they thus shouldn’t need a lot of review. There are a few changes in HQ though: command spawning optimization and the option to disable authentication for benchmarking.

Well, guess what, the “command spawning optimization” managed to break HyperQueue’s primary functionality for a bunch of users. That’s what I get for sending +3,458 -601 diff pull requests, sigh…"

Hasnain says:

"We couldn’t change the project we were assigned to, and these were the cards that we were dealt. What we could change is our attitude towards the legacy project. Instead of feeling resigned, we saw it as a place to ask questions and learn. "

Hasnain says:

“Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled. He also learned that when you die, your credit score gets marked as “deceased, do not issue credit,” which makes it tough to get a loan.

“The good news is I don’t think it can go any lower than that,” he said cheerfully.

He called the bank first, and they said an electronic notification had been triggered on Feb. 18 that he had died back in November. But I’m on the phone with you right now, he told them. Also, what did I die of? Take it up with Social Security, they said.”

Hasnain says:

I haven’t read the book yet but man the Streisand effect is in full swing here and I don’t understand the PR strategy by Meta here.

Looking at some of the claims (especially the one where Sheryl played with the assistant's hair and the one where she invited the author into her bed on a private jet) - they’re so outlandish that I feel either:

1. The author is out of touch with reality and needs mental help
2. They’re true

(It’s hard to imagine an in between here)

“Following the decision, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X: "This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams' false and defamatory book should never have been published."”

Hasnain says:

“The conjecture’s resolution is a seismic shift for the field of harmonic analysis, which studies the details of the Fourier transform.
A tower of three monumental conjectures in harmonic analysis rests atop the Kakeya conjecture. Each story in the tower needs to be sturdy for the stories above it to stand a chance themselves. If the Kakeya conjecture had been proved false — if Wang and Zahl had found a counterexample — the entire tower would have come tumbling down.
But now that they’ve proved it, mathematicians might be able to work their way up the tower, using Kakeya to build up proofs of these successively more ambitious conjectures. “All these problems that [mathematicians] dreamed about someday solving, they all look approachable now,” Guth said.”

Hasnain says:

“I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged.”

Hasnain says:

“Adams’ takeaway? Use what you have. In their case, it was an existing job queue, Golang and Kubernetes. “You decrease the maintenance burden while getting huge-scale wins,” she said.

And even the lowly cron box held a lesson or two.

“Slack ran key functionality for 10 years on one node. That’s a long time to deal with this less-than-ideal system. But it was good enough. It got the job done. And I think that is really a key takeaway,” she said. “It’s okay to keep it really simple, even if it’s kind of janky, for a long time.””

Hasnain says:

These numbers are astonishing and mind blowing. But they don’t get talked about enough. 2-3 million people a year saved for literal pennies on the dollar.

“I recognize we cannot save every hungry child around the world. I agree that U.S.A.I.D. is imperfect and should be reformed. I appreciate that helping people is harder than it looks. I understand that there are difficult trade-offs in allocating tax dollars.

Yet I think most Americans would both welcome some reforms and also be proud to see how we save the lives of hungry children and sick orphans around the world by allocating just 24 cents of every $100 of national income to aid. And I find it odious when the world’s richest man cackles about America shoving programs for needy children “into the wood chipper.”

When you meet those dying children and look into their eyes and hold their hands and feel faint heartbeats flutter, you can’t bear the gleeful laughter. You see children just like your own and hang your head in shame.
“

Hasnain says:

“As schoolchildren, many of us read the German pastor Martin Niemoller’s poem “First They Came.” Written just after the Holocaust, Niemoller’s poem highlights the moral and practical cost of allowing fear (or indifference) to prevent us from speaking out when others are targeted.

We must learn from the past. We cannot remain silent in the face of authoritarian attacks on our peers, even if they have not yet come for us.”

Hasnain says:

Chilling day for free speech in the US. Already a lot of the “free speech warriors” have shown themselves out by applauding this rather than seeing this for what it is and what it portends.

Also, Columbia, why are you repeating your own shameful history?

“Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer.”

Hasnain says:

Trying to read up more on AI and agentic systems, and this deep dive on how Claude Code was implemented was pretty helpful for me to learn.

If y’all have tips on what I should be reading to better get familiar with this space I’m all ears.

“After diving deep into Claude Code and similar architectures, I realized there's a gap in practical, engineering-focused documentation on how these systems actually work. Most resources either stay at a theoretical level or skip to implementation details without covering the critical architectural decisions. This is really a "how things work" book, and the software pieces themselves would be recognizable”

Hasnain says:

Finally got around to reading this as I’m trying out and learning more about memory corruption exploits.

Kinda bummed I hadn’t read it earlier!

“This short book is written for people who want to understand the internals of 'heap memory', particularly the implementation of glibc's 'malloc' and 'free' procedures, and also for security researchers who want to get started in the field of heap exploitation.

The first section of the book covers an in-depth, yet concise, description about heap internals. The second section covers some of the most famous attacks. It is assumed that the reader is unfamiliar with this topic. For experienced readers, this text might be good for a quick revision.”

Hasnain says:

as someone joked, why file taxes early if they might abolish the IRS?

“It isn’t clear how the SALT deduction cap will play out this year, but one of three scenarios will occur: it’s modified, allowed to expire, or is made permanent. “

Hasnain says:

“AL JUHNKE: Al, I got a great idea.

GARSD: On how to solve Nebraska's severe labor shortage.

JUHNKE: Why don't we invite any immigrant - legal, illegal, I don't care - invite them to Nebraska, 'cause we have lots of openings out on our farm, and we need help.

GARSD: Juhnke smiles warily. “

Hasnain says:

This had some fascinating history but I cannot help but laugh at this part unfortunately

“Yoga, al-Munajjid preaches, is a form of idolatry ‘based on lies and charlatanry’ that may appeal ‘to simple minded people who are weak in faith’. Some yoga postures imitating animals detract from human dignity including ‘adopting nakedness and resting on all fours’. He has also criticised the tendency of yoga practitioners to encourage a vegetarian diet ‘for which Allah has not revealed any authority’.”

Hasnain says:

“I’ll finish this rant with a related observation: I keep seeing people say “if I have to review every line of code an LLM writes, it would have been faster to write it myself!”

Those people are loudly declaring that they have under-invested in the crucial skills of reading, understanding and reviewing code written by other people. I suggest getting some more practice in. Reviewing code written for you by LLMs is a great way to do that.”

Hasnain says:

I generally say I add negative value to any project if I am involved UI work but I like to think I’d still avoid this one somehow.