Hasnain says:

So much great advice here. I haven’t listened to the whole thing but I did read the full summary. It’s great.

“A consequence of the interview process not changing much, but the job market becoming more competitive is how the bar to do well on these interviews went up. This is because there are more and better preparation materials, so the “average” candidate does better on these interviews than years before. Preparing for interviews at Big Tech companies and scaleups is no longer a “nice to have:” it’s a necessity for even strong engineers, who want to get a job offer.”

Hasnain says:

“The top reason those non-voters cited, above the economy at 24 percent and immigration at 11 percent, was Gaza: a full 29 percent cited the ongoing onslaught as the top reason they didn’t cast a vote in 2024.”

Hasnain says:

Cautiously optimistic here. There will be lots of gotchas and caveats. But a pause in the fighting is very welcome at this stage.

If it does turn out, as initial reports suggest, that this was because Trump pushed harder than Biden (with associated headlines / news tidbits that have been, interesting, to say the least), I will have to give credit where credit is due because at least he's stopping a genocide (even if it's for self serving aims). Hoping to learn more.

"Trump pledged last month that “all hell will break out” if Hamas doesn’t promise to release hostages by Jan. 20 and his Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, joined talks in the region to push for a deal."

Hasnain says:

I spent way too much time on this.

(well, the ~40 or so minutes needed to finish it)

Hasnain says:

Jeff has always been one of the great ones. This whole post is admirable and worth reading. When a few people win, we all lose. We need to uplift everyone around us.

“I think many of the Americans who did vote are telling us they no longer believe our government is effectively keeping America fair for everyone. Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question. We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as state and local election boards, as well as the Federal Election Commission.

It was only after I attained the dream that I was able to fully see how many Americans have so very little. This much wealth starts to unintentionally distance my family from other Americans. I no longer bother to look at how much items cost, because I don't have to. We don't have to think about all these things that are challenging or unreachable for so many others. The more wealth you attain, the more unmistakably clear it becomes how unequal life is for so many of us.

Even with the wealth I have, I can't imagine what it would feel like to be a billionaire. It is, for lack of a better word, unamerican.”

Hasnain says:

“Even more important, the work demonstrates that the Gowers norm can act as a powerful tool in a new domain. “Because it’s so new, at least in this part of number theory, there is potential to do a bunch of other things with it,” Friedlander said. Mathematicians now hope to broaden the scope of the Gowers norm even further — to try using it to solve other problems in number theory beyond counting primes.

“It’s a lot of fun for me to see things I thought about some time ago have unexpected new applications,” Ziegler said. “It’s like as a parent, when you set your kid free and they grow up and do mysterious, unexpected things.””

Hasnain says:

I've never seen a name put to this, though in hindsight I've seen it a lot. Worth pondering.

"In general, I think well-designed tools (and systems) should aim to minimize this effect. This can be hard to do in a fully general manner, but some things I think about when designing a new tool:

* Does it need to be configurable?
* Does it need syntax of its own?
* As a corollary: can it reuse familiar syntax or idioms from other tools/CLIs?
* Do I end up copy-pasting my use of it around? If so, are others likely to do the same?"

Hasnain says:

“The formatting function used by std.debug.print in the examples is a powerful generic function. Lots of languages parse their format strings at runtime, and possibly add some special validators to the string format to catch errors early. In Zig, the format string is parsed at comptime, creating efficient output code while also performing all validation at compile time.”

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder in this one.

“What's taboo is to say that the source is the system we inhabit, not our personal inability to manifest god-like powers. The system works fine for the winners who twirl the dials on the narrative control machinery, and they're appalled when they suffer some mild inconvenience when the peasantry doing all the work for them break down and quit.

A tsunami of burnout and quitting, both quiet and loud, is on the horizon, but it's taboo to recognize it or mention it. That the system is broken because it breaks us is the taboo that is frantically enforced at all levels of narrative control.”

Hasnain says:

So much truth in here. I wish I could hammer home the point about consistency, it makes a world of a difference in large codebases.

Speaking here as a guy who often has to go and clean these up for various reasons,

“Why is consistency so important in large codebases? Because it protects you from nasty surprises, it slows down the codebase’s progression into a mess, and it allows you to take advantage of future improvements.”

Hasnain says:

Having verified this myself, uh, bro, what

“Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that looks an awful lot like... Google.”

Hasnain says:

"While Yemeni coffee shops fill a need for the Muslim community, they attract a wide range of cultures, welcoming anyone looking for family-friendly outings or alcohol-free evenings.

“There’s been a huge transformation across the U.S. People are trying to transition from the nightlife bar environment,” Almatrahi says. “We provide not only the coffee experience but also the ambience.”

During the last lease negotiation for a new location, the landlord was “shocked” by Arwa’s proposed hours, according to Almatrahi. “We wanted to be open until one a.m. on the weekends. And they’re not used to that concept,” he says. “But that’s the power of cardamom.”"

Hasnain says:

This is a rough day. On one hand, I understand some of the criticisms. The fact checkers got things wrong. Facebook jail was real and appeals sucked.

But you don’t fix that by throwing the baby out with the bath water. Or making it acceptable to call women household objects. Or allowing transphobia. Or so many other things.

“The former employee I spoke with feared that whatever consequences Meta's surrender to the right on speech issues might have in the United States, its effect in the rest of the world could be even more dire.

"I really think this is a precursor for genocide," they said. "We've seen it happen. Real people's lives are actually going to be endangered. I'm just devastated”

Hasnain says:

Climate change is here. The videos I saw were scary, including the abandoned cars being bulldozed to let fire trucks through.

“A fire was burning out of control Tuesday in Pacific Palisades, destroying homes and forcing residents to abandon their vehicles and flee amid a potentially “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm.”

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder from this piece about using LLMs for day to day productivity.

A few main takeaways for me:

* ensure you can easily verify the output
* getting over the starting hump is really valuable
* having more smaller specialized modules vs fewer larger reusable modules may be better
* use LLMs for tests!

“Let me try to motivate this for the skeptical. A lot of the value I personally get out of chat-driven programming is I reach a point in the day when I know what needs to be written, I can describe it, but I don’t have the energy to create a new file, start typing, then start looking up the libraries I need. (I’m an early-morning person, so this is usually any time after 11am for me, though it can also be any time I context-switch into a different language/framework/etc.) LLMs perform that service for me in programming. They give me a first draft, with some good ideas, with several of the dependencies I need, and often some mistakes. Often, I find fixing those mistakes is a lot easier than starting from scratch.”

Hasnain says:

Same day as unconfirmed rumors hit that 300 employees of another nationality did the same thing, I see a news story about some employees doing this. Like… why

“The former employees, over a three-year period, tricked the tech company into matching thousands of dollars in donations to children’s charities when they were not in fact donating a thing, the DA's Office said. The total take from the scheme was about $152,000”

Hasnain says:

“Mr Kingswood said he would be "surprised if the airfield hadn't met all the requirements in accordance with industry standards".
"I suspect if we went around the airfields at a lot of major international airports... we would find a lot of obstacles that could similarly be accused of presenting a hazard," he added.”

Hasnain says:

“Now one can try to reverse-engineer how the app decrypts the currency file, and developers have a wide suite of tools to practice security by obscurity. You can read the file backwards, shift everything left by 12 bits, then forward by 2, modulo every second byte with 3, subtract your birthday as a UNIX timestamp, blah blah blah.

While it certainly is fun to dig around and follow the trail to having a usable file, I enjoy actually finishing my projects much more.”

Hasnain says:

I’ve tried to do some of these on my own sites too. I miss the old web. And also working with / learning from Rachel.

“I've been thinking about things that annoy me about other web pages. Safari recently gained the ability to "hide distracting items" and I've been having great fun telling various idiot web "designers" to stuff it. Reclaiming a simple experience free of wibbly wobbly stuff has been great.

In doing this, I figured maybe I should tell people about the things I don't do here, so they realize how much they are "missing out" on.”

Hasnain says:

Great read which I’ll probably revisit over the years

“Engineering choices seem – dare I say? – more pragmatic. Alex Kotliarskyi from Secta Labs said he had to dial down his “tech purist views” from when he was at Facebook and Replit, and instead just choose “good enough” tools. At Fern Creek Software, Keith also said how he noticed how it’s VC-funded companies that aspire to technical elegance, and over engineering things.”

Hasnain says:

Honestly, there was some useful stuff to ponder after reading this, since I don't think the problems are necessarily limited to super rich people. The goals and meaning of life are issues that hit us all.

Edit to clarify: this made *me* ponder things given I was already thinking about life and everything else going on and what I want to do in my life.

So that takeaway of “money isn’t everything and an ulterior motivation in life is needed” was definitely an apt reminder, regardless of which form it was delivered in.

This specific guy’s midlife crisis is a bit too out of touch - from calling people NPCs to only being in a relationship as long as it benefited him, to, uh, whatever that was with DOGE, and I hope it goes without saying that I hope to never find myself in that situation.

"I know. This is a completely zeroth-world position to be in. The point of this post isn’t to brag or gain sympathy. To be honest, I don’t exactly know what the point of this post is. I tried to manufacture one, but I just felt like a phony. Then I recognized the irony of creating purpose out of a blog post when I don’t currently have much conviction or purpose in life."

Hasnain says:

"There’s an expansionist tendency right now. You would think that this is the time that Israel could conclude that it would expand, it could occupy and it could annex with no serious international repercussions. All of this is strange because Israel is currently facing more international repercussions or threats of international repercussions than ever before in its history, and yet those repercussions haven’t materialized."

Hasnain says:

This is from 1988. What in the world..

(Thank you Twitter for the olfactory ethics discourse that lead me to this)

“Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth listened incredulously as a caller complained that the noxious black smoke pouring from a nondescript building in the desert carried the sickeningly sweet smell of burning human flesh.

“I don’t think so, it’s a ceramics shop,” Wentworth replied.

“Don’t tell me they’re not burning bodies. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz,” the man said chillingly, Wentworth recalled.”