Hasnain says:

I wonder if the Fire Phone is worth it at $200

Hasnain says:

A once great corporation comes to its demise.

Hasnain says:

Yay for really cool networking tech.

Hasnain says:

Here's another fun logic game.

Y'all can hate me for wasting all your time again.

Hasnain says:

Maybe I should give this a read...

Hasnain says:

"The duo took their experiment to a trendy Southern California restaurant, where they enlisted a (fake) water sommelier. The sommelier brought guests a water tasting menu, listing luxury bottled waters such as “L’Eau de Robinet” and “Agua de Culo.” After sampling them, most patrons were wow-ed by how good the water tasted:

“Definitely better than tap water [...] It’s got a flavor that, it almost feels like a beverage other than water, but without sugar or any additives.”
“Seems smoother than tap water.”
“Better than LA County water!”

In actuality, all this luxury water was sourced from a garden hose out back behind the restaurant. And L’Eau de Robinet and Agua de Culo weren’t real designer waters: one is the French word for “tap water” and the other the Spanish for “ass water.”"

Hasnain says:

"The company is your public life. Have an issue with your landlord? The company will handle it, in those cases where the company is not your landlord. (“So let me get this straight: we’re going to pay our employees, and then they’re going to immediately hand 25% of their salary over to an apartment? Doesn’t this suggest an obvious inefficiency? We could just buy a building and house dozens of employees there — lower transaction costs plus economies of scale.” Many Japanese companies have done this math already, and company dorms are quite common, particularly for young, single employees.)"

Hasnain says:

“You would probably end up living like we did in the 18th century. With much simpler equipment, much simpler kitchen tools, much simpler things in all respects. It might be a lot like going back in time.”

Hasnain says:

Yay for databases.

Hasnain says:

"You could also call the Knowledge the greatest tribute a city has ever paid to itself, a love letter more ardent than “I ❤ N.Y.” or anything else a Chamber of Commerce might cook up. The Knowledge says that London is Holy Writ, a great mystery to be pored over, and that a corps of municipal Talmudists must be delegated to that task. To the extent that the mystifying clichés hold — that taxi drivers are London’s singers of songlines and fonts of folk wisdom, carrying not just the secrets of London navigation but the deep history of the city and its streets — the disappearance of the Knowledge would be an assault on civic memory, a blow, if you will, to historic preservation. Smartphone apps and Google Maps may ensure that Londoners will never again be lost in their own city, but if the Knowledge disappears, will something of London itself be lost — will some essence of the place vanish along with all those guys on mopeds, learning the town’s roads and plumbing its depths?"

Hasnain says:

Worth a read.

Hasnain says:

This is some really cool stuff, low level optimization is always interesting.

Hasnain says:

"The gap between image and substance is also a recurring theme in the comic Dilbert, whose creator, Scott Adams, was inspired by his uninspiring stints in the working world. Again and again, Adams questions not only the link between work and rationality, but also the relation between work and productivity: “Work can be defined as ‘anything you’d rather not be doing,’” he says. “Productivity is a different matter.”"

Hasnain says:

"And Uber can only change Los Angeles’s car culture so much. In a nod to the city’s continued obsession with the status ride, the company recently implemented, in Los Angeles and Orange County only, UberPlus, with a fleet of BMWs and other luxury vehicles. Even with ride shares, what you pull up in matters.

“If you’re going to the airport, you use UberX, who cares,” said Mr. Heitzler, the Venice artist. “But if you have to go to a party at the Chateau” — the see-and-be-seen celebrity-magnet Chateau Marmont — “you at least go black car. Or even a giant S.U.V. There’s nothing better than getting out of a giant S.U.V. at the Chateau by yourself.”"

Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2014-11-02T04:37:21+0000

Hasnain says:

This is a really moving story about mental illness.

"“I’ll have these questions for the rest of my life,” he says, and begins asking them again. Did Gus want to kill him? Did he know his father loved him? Did he hear him? Is that why he stopped? The questions keep coming, even though by now he has realized the inescapable answer.

“I’m never really going to know,” he says, and once more he is driving, music on, window down, and winding through the woods."

Hasnain says:

These are hilarious.

"A graduate student (let's call him Saeed) is in the airport standing in a security line. He is coming back from a conference, where he presented some exciting results of his Ph.D. thesis in Algebraic Geometry. One of the people whom he met at his presentation (let's call him Vikram) is also in the line, and they start talking excitedly about the results, and in particular the clever solution to problem X via blowing up eight points on a plane.

They don't notice other travelers slowly backing away from them.

Less than a minute later, the TSA officers descend on the two mathematicians, and take them away. They are thoroughly and intimately searched, and separated for interrogation. For an hour, the interrogation gets nowhere: the mathematicians simply don't know what the interrogators are talking about. What bombs? What plot? What terrorism?

The student finally realizes the problem, pulls out a pre-print of his paper, and proceeds to explain to the interrogators exactly what "blowing up points on a plane" means in Algebraic Geometry.""