Hasnain says:

“Big data” has arrived, but big insights have not. The challenge now is to solve new problems and gain new answers – without making the same old statistical mistakes on a grander scale than ever."

Hasnain says:

I think it's cool that Amazon, google, and Microsoft have all decided to reduce the prices of their cloud offerings.

Hasnain says:

I don't even know where to begin with this

Hasnain says:

"In this paper, we propose to turn JIT compilation into a precision tool by adding two essential and generic metaprogramming facilities: First, allow programs to invoke JIT compilation explicitly. This enables controlled specialization of arbitrary code at run- time, in the style of partial evaluation. It also enables the JIT compiler to report warnings and errors to the program when it is un- able to compile a code path in the demanded way. Second, allow the JIT compiler to call back into the program to perform compile- time computation. This lets the program itself define the translation strategy for certain constructs on the fly and gives rise to a powerful JIT macro facility that enables “smart” libraries to supply domain- specific compiler optimizations or safety checks."

Hasnain says:

"It was a system of extraction and coercion so flagrant that Alabama Circuit Court Judge Hub Harrington likened it to a modern-day “debtors’ prison.” In a July 2012 ruling in a civil action brought on behalf of Debra Ford and three others, Harrington wrote: “The court notes that [debtors’ prisons] generally fell into disfavor by the early 1800s, though the practice appears to have remained commonplace in Harpersville. From a fair reading of the defendants’ testimony one might ascertain that a more apt description of the Harpersville Municipal Court practices is that of a judicially sanctioned extortion racket…. Disgraceful.”

Then he seized control of the Harpersville Municipal Court."

Hasnain says:

"And that's how I set out to simplify ordering Starbucks and created an internal banking system. "

Hasnain says:

"Rendering a Head in WebGL" - This is cool.

Hasnain says:

"It was obvious why our team wasn’t working: People didn’t trust each other. The result was a culture of obfuscation and backstabbing in which we achieved less than we were capable of achieving. Staff members and volunteers became disheartened and eventually left. The leader’s constant lies, no matter how insignificant they seemed to him, had caused a breakdown of integrity and trust in the organization, and without integrity and trust nothing worked."

Hasnain says:

This is a really interesting challenge for those looking to exercise their programming chops.

Hasnain says:

no comments

Hasnain says:

"This writeup is my attempt to give a quick survey of various approaches for simulating a loaded die, ranging from simple techniques that are highly impractical to the very optimized and efficient alias method. My hope here is to capture different intuitions about the problem and how each highlights some new aspect of simulating loaded dice. For each approach, my goal is to explore the motivating idea, core algorithm, correctness proof, and runtime analysis (in terms of time, memory, and randomness required)."

This is a really interesting look into stats and randomness.

Hasnain says:

Abrash and Carmack working together again. This is huge.

Hasnain says:

This is a really good blog post on speeding up the C/C++ preprocessor.

Hasnain says:

Sensationalist headline aside, it's cool that iOS supports mesh networking. I did not know this.

Hasnain says:

"It’s all in good fun, at least we’d like to think so, but try as our logical brains might, we still got the same “cloning feeling". Especially when people called Threes, a game we poured over for nearly a year and a half, a clone of 2048. Others rifled off that they thought 2048 was a better game than Threes. That all stung pretty bad. We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it. And obviously, Threes is the reason 2048 exists."

Hasnain says:

This is really useful.

Hasnain says:

Some more Haskell stuff.

Hasnain says:

This sounds like a really really useful tool.

"Many, many people have noticed that if we had a way to reliably record program execution and replay it later, with the ability to debug the replay, we could largely tame the nondeterminism problem. This would also allow us to deliberately introduce nondeterminism so tests can explore more of the possible execution space, without impacting debuggability. Many record and replay systems have been built in pursuit of this vision. (I built one myself.) For various reasons these systems have not seen wide adoption. So, a few years ago we at Mozilla started a project to create a new record-and-replay tool that would overcome the obstacles blocking adoption. We call this tool rr."

Hasnain says:

"On Tuesday, we dusted off the source code for early versions of MS-DOS and Word for Windows. With the help of the Computer History Museum, we are making this code available to the public for the first time."

This is a good gesture. Though the license doesn't allow redistribution from what I can tell.

Hasnain says:

This is a really great Haskell reading list.

Hasnain says:

"Here is what went through all our spinning heads: We're fucked, it's over"

This is a good read on how to survive crises.

Hasnain says:

Some much needed innovation in the battery space.

Hasnain says:

"I would prefer Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later"

I have an honest question. How does one become a CEO of a huge tech company and still not know to not send such emails?

Hasnain says:

"In February 2013, Google Flu Trends (GFT) made headlines but not for a reason that Google executives or the creators of the flu tracking system would have hoped. Nature reported that GFT was predicting more than double the proportion of doctor visits for influenza-like illness (ILI) than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which bases its estimates on surveillance reports from laboratories across the United States (1, 2). This happened despite the fact that GFT was built to predict CDC reports. Given that GFT is often held up as an exemplary use of big data (3, 4), what lessons can we draw from this error?"

Hasnain says:

This is a really interesting behind the scenes look at how computers from a previous generation were made. It's from 1981 but the story is still relevant and interesting.

(Part 2 at http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/81aug/8108kidder.htm)

Hasnain says:

"And part of their corrupt little game is to produce new editions every year or so, even though 95+% of the books are the same. So the "new and improved" book being pushed was hardly different than previous editions (I checked page by page). But it would help undermine the used book market."

Hasnain says:

"But the problem is much broader. Given the vast web of legislation and regulation that exists today, virtually any American bears the risk of being targeted for prosecution."

Hasnain says:

"Earlier this month a new paper by Naomi Benger, Joop van de Pol, Nigel Smart, and Yuval Yarom hit the news. The paper explains how to recover secret keys from OpenSSL's implementation of ECDSA-secp256k1 using timing information from "as little as 200 signatures"; ECDSA-secp256k1 is the signature system used by Bitcoin."

Hasnain says:

"Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too. He must sue to get them back.

Many police departments now depend on forfeiture for a fat chunk of their budgets. In 1986, its first year of operation, the federal Asset Forfeiture Fund held $93.7m. By 2012, that and the related Seized Asset Deposit Fund held nearly $6 billion."

Hasnain says:

I did not know much about the history of professional bowling. I now know a little bit.

"Indeed, these gambling events attracted more than the best bowlers -- mobsters often got in on the bets and threw down “huge wads of cash” on their favorites for the evening, often placing local bowlers in hairy situations. In one such instance, bowler Iggy Russo fixed his match and bet a ton of money on his opponent to win. During his last frame, in which he was positioned to either win or lose the match with a spare, he learned that some “”unsavory characters” were betting on him to win.

He was caught in a catch-22: if he won, his financial backer would kill him; if he missed the spare, the “unsavory characters” would. Instead, he avoided the entire predicament by faking a heart attack."

Hasnain says:

This is an excellent piece of writing and has some good advice (though some parts need to be taken with a grain of salt, as it's slightly dated).

"In that blunt answer lies the substance of my experience, and what I believe to be the real secret of business achievement. So sure am I of the soundness of this philosophy that I have five very simple rules for hiring men, which are the outgrowth of it! ......

4. Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do. I look very critically into little things respecting the men I hire; the details of their dress, their handwriting, their record of tying up a job and leaving no loose ends. The biggest men of my acquaintance in business are "detail men" to an amazing degree. Often the president of a company is the only man in it who knows the little things about every department."

Hasnain says:

"The candy weighing demonstration, or, the unwisdom of crowds"

This beautifully illustrates why it's important to have a random sample in a survey.

Hasnain says:

"It used to be the case that governments funded a lot of development of breakthrough technologies. The bad news is that they have mostly stopped; the good news is that the leverage of technology is such that now small startups can do what used to take the resources of nations"

Hasnain says:

This article is adapted from “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014,” to be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

From a synopsis of the book: "Carlotta Gall has reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for almost the entire duration of the American invasion and occupation, beginning shortly after 9/11. She knows just how much this war has cost the Afghan people, and how much damage can be traced to Pakistan and its duplicitous government and intelligence forces. Now that American troops are withdrawing, it is time to tell the full history of how we have been fighting the wrong enemy, in the wrong country.

Gall combines searing personal accounts of battles and betrayals with moving portraits of the ordinary Afghanis who endured a terrible war of more than a decade. Her firsthand accounts of Taliban warlords, Pakistani intelligence thugs, American generals, Afghani politicians, and the many innocents who were caught up in this long war are riveting. Her evidence that Pakistan fueled the Taliban and protected Osama bin Laden is revelatory. This is a sweeping account of a war brought by well-intentioned American leaders against an enemy they barely understood, and could not truly engage."

Hasnain says:

This is pretty huge. Kudos to them for opening up their code and making it easier for the average indie developer to get started.

"Epic’s goal is to put the engine within reach of everyone interested in building games and 3D content, from indies to large triple-A development teams, and Minecraft creators as well. For $19/month you can have access to everything, including the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine’s complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development."

Hasnain says:

"It’s a great market to be an engineer, but finding the right job still requires a lot of time and effort. Spray applications anywhere and everywhere you like the look of, and see what sticks. A little organisation will go a long way, but a little over-thinking will quickly make you go insane. How best to conduct a technical interview process is a hot and very worthwhile topic of discussion at the moment, but just go with whatever is thrown at you, regardless of what you think is and isn’t a good hiring strategy."

Hasnain says:

"Now, more than a week after the story's publication, it seems clear that Newsweek fingered the wrong man. So the question now turns to Newsweek and the level of irresponsibility they displayed in publishing this at all."

Hasnain says:

How can they mention all he did and not even make a passing reference to LaTeX?

Hasnain says:

"It’s time for us to start making the news a little nerdier."

This is a very good read on journalism, and FiveThirtyEight's goal to make journalism much more quantitative.

Hasnain says:

It's sad that it only lasted 4 days.

Hasnain says:

As someone who saw way more than his fair share of car accidents growing up ... this rings true.

"In 2012, automobile collisions killed more than 34,000 Americans, but unlike our response to foreign wars, the AIDS crisis, or terrorist attacks—all of which inflict fewer fatalities than cars—there’s no widespread public protest or giant memorial to the dead. We fret about drugs and gun safety, but don’t teach children to treat cars as the loaded weapons they are."

Hasnain says:

This is a very good writeup on how to easily work with concurrency in Go.

Hasnain says:

This is an interesting paper on face recognition.

"Our method reaches an accuracy of 97.25% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, reducing the error of the current state of the art by more than 25%, closely approaching human-level performance."

Hasnain says:

I knew tax laws were crazy, but I didn't know they were this crazy ...

"In Denmark, all reporting to the authorities is done via web – or in most cases even, automatically.

In the US, however, it’s like being in the 70’s in Denmark. In a country, where the NSA supposedly reads all my email, knows how much money I make, what I ate for breakfast and what color underwear I prefer, I cannot report electronically to the authorities!"

Hasnain says:

This is a good analysis of how gambling odds can be used as a predictor for the excitement during a game.

"What are the most exciting matchups in sports? What’s the most exciting sport? What if a computer could tell us which games are hot right now—like an NFL RedZone channel, not just for NFL football, but for basketball, soccer, hockey, and baseball?

Introducing Gambletron2000.com, a tool that uses live in-game gambling data to quantify excitement in sports, write automated game recaps, finally settle the debate about whether the first half of NBA games is even worth watching—and much, much more. It might even make you rich."

Hasnain says:

"It began hundreds of years ago, deep in the Albanian Alps—an unusual tradition where women, with limited options in life, took the oath of the burrnesha. A pledge to live as a man. To dress like a man, to work like a man, to assume the burdens and the liberties of a man. But these freedoms came with a price: The burrneshas also made a pledge of lifelong celibacy. Today these sworn virgins live on, but their numbers have dwindled. Many Albanians don't even know they exist. What happens when the society that created you no longer needs you? And how do you live in the meantime?"

Hasnain says:

I'm not sure what to quote here. It's long and presents a very good view of technology, start-up culture, ageism, and life in the valley.

Hasnain says:

"After visits to several doctors, we first heard the word “autism.” Later, it would be fine-tuned to “regressive autism,” now affecting roughly a third of children with the disorder. Unlike the kids born with it, this group seems typical until somewhere between 18 and 36 months — then they vanish. Some never get their speech back. Families stop watching those early videos, their child waving to the camera. Too painful. That child’s gone."

Hasnain says:

"By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn't sleep, couldn't focus, didn't want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, "worried about my well-being." His tweets became darker and more cryptic. "I can call 'Flappy Bird' is a success of mine," read one. "But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it." He realized there was one thing to do: Pull the game. After tweeting that he was taking it down, 10 million people downloaded it in 22 hours. Then he hit a button, and Flappy Bird disappeared. When I ask him why he did it, he answers with the same conviction that led him to create the game. "I'm master of my own fate," he says. "Independent thinker.""

Hasnain says:

"Entrepreneurship is a central path to job creation, economic growth, and prosperity. In the earliest stages of start-up business creation, the matching of entrepreneurial ventures to investors is critically important. The entrepreneur’s business proposition and previous experience are regarded as the main criteria for investment decisions. Our research, however, documents other critical criteria that investors use to make these decisions: the gender and physical attractiveness of the entrepreneurs themselves.

Across a field setting (three entrepreneurial pitch competitions in the United States) and two experiments, we identify a profound and consistent gender gap in entrepreneur persuasiveness. Investors prefer pitches presented by male entrepreneurs compared with pitches made by female entrepreneurs, even when the content of the pitch is the same. This effect is moderated by male physical attractiveness: attractive males were particularly persuasive, whereas physical attractiveness did not matter among female entrepreneurs."

Hasnain says:

This is pretty cool. Hats off.

Hasnain says:

"Direct3D -> OpenGL translation layer.

Taken directly from the DOTA2 source tree; "

This is awesome!

Hasnain says:

Some very good tips on introducing people over email.

Hasnain says:

Let's hope some of that $19B goes towards securing user data, at least.

(the same AES key for every user? tsk tsk tsk...)

Hasnain says:

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Game - 30th Anniversary Edition"

This is awesome.

Hasnain says:

"In fact, technology companies appear to be extremely picky in even choosing to interview applicants, let alone actually hiring them. This pickiness alone probably accounts for the perceived “shortage” of “qualified” applicants. It also explains why a minority of software engineers who fit or appear to fit the extremely narrow, rapidly changing, and often unstated criteria of the tech companies report fierce competition and multiple job offers, while many others like Chand John or Darin Wedel (and perhaps Brian Acton in 2009) report a long frustrating job hunt."

The writer makes a very good point.

Hasnain says:

Today's dinner menu: One (1) Baked Macbook Pro.

Hasnain says:

"Wangohan’s head fell to his desk. “Clearly a cardboard box must be a fit meal for the Emperor’s daughter, for here it is on the Imperial menu.”"

Hasnain says:

This seems surprisingly easy to do.

Hasnain says:

The first episode of the Cosmos remake airs tonight!

Hasnain says:

"Ted Chiang has only published three SF stories prior to this one and his first, “Tower of Babylon”(1990), won the Nebula Award; another (“Understand”) won the Asimov's Readers Award in 1991, and he won the John W.Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992. He is a careful and accomplished writer, and his work is distinguished by originality combined with the high quality of his re-imaging of old SF ideas. This is his fourth published story, his first in more than five years (he seems to have a satisfying life in the Seattle area that leaves him little time for SF writing). It is the longest story in this book and may well be the best. The theme of communicating with aliens was prominent in the SF fiction of 1998, but nowhere better done than here."

Hasnain says:

"With the exception of Grade nine, the winning team , “came from a private school, an exam school, a parochial school, or a public school populated by the children of Apple engineers,” Tough writes.

Except, that is, for middle school grades, the space where Elizabeth Spiegel teaches.

These students didn’t win just one grade, they won every grade they entered. “The roster of schools they beat,” Tough writes, “reads like a wealthy parent’s wish list of the most desirable private schools in the country.

The chess program at IS 318 is one of the best in the country. But why?"

Hasnain says:

Long, compelling, and quite interesting.

Hasnain says:

This is a very good intro to Haskell.

Hasnain says:

This is a really good article on how to become more productive.

"I went through this when I went to id software. I had rationalized that John Carmack's success was just a factor of timing and luck since, hell, he was my age, and I was pretty smart, so what else could it be? Upon my arrival I had a crash course in humility, because he was way smarter than me and way more productive as well.

This took a while to sink in, because until then I was used to believing I was one of the better programmers at a company. And then working with Carmack I realized he was not just a little better, he was orders of magnitude better. And I couldn't dismiss it with a "But I write a lot of code" hand wave, because he also wrote like 80% of the Quake code base."

Hasnain says:

"First: I don’t trust people in Silicon Valley to tell me what’s happening elsewhere in California, let alone what’s happening (or should be happening) in Africa. The steady stream of idiotic products that accompanies every sliver of innovation from the tech world is evidence enough of this. "

I don't necessarily agree with most of the article, but this part rings true.

Hasnain says:

This is a really impressive gigapixel shot taken off the new WTC.

Hasnain says:

It's sad that in this day and age we still rely on modes of transportation that can result in such catastrophic failure.

Hasnain says:

With great powerpoint comes great responsibility.

Hasnain says:

This is long, detailed, and quite interesting.

Hasnain says:

Yay for social engineering.

Hasnain says:

"Obesity may have harmful effects on the brain, and exercise may counteract many of those negative effects, according to sophisticated new neurological experiments with mice, even when the animals do not lose much weight. While it’s impossible to know if human brains respond in precisely the same way to fat and physical activity, the findings offer one more reason to get out and exercise."

Hasnain says:

This is a really good perspective on the deal.

Hasnain says:

For all the physicists out there, Brian Greene was doing an AMA.

Hasnain says:

"Research has shown that putting even one intermediate currency between the consumer and real money, such as a “game gem” (premium currency), makes the consumer much less adept at assessing the value of the transaction. Additional intermediary objects, what I call “layering”, makes it even harder for the brain to accurately assess the situation, especially if there is some additional stress applied."

Just reading that leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Hasnain says:

This is a really impressive writeup on the lighting and rendering that went on behind the scenes in BioShock Infinite.

Hasnain says:

"12% said "USB" is the acronym for a European country. In fact, USB is a type of connector."

Hasnain says:

"Microsoft, it seems, is also following in the footsteps of Google operating systems such as Android and Chrome OS. Last week, The Verge reported that Redmond is preparing a free version of Windows 8.1, its latest operating system for desktop and laptop PCs."

Hasnain says:

“I make myself do it,” she said.

“I tell myself, ‘I know you’re tired and you can’t feel anything and it’s hard but you’re going to finish this.’ And then I do.”

Hasnain says:

"Can a policy that banks use to combat insider fraud also make tech companies produce better products and happier employees? Sure. "

Hasnain says:

This reminds me of "A pale blue dot".

Hasnain says:

*sigh* ...

Hasnain says:

"He was once asked whether receiving the award from the Indian president was the happiest moment of his life. He said no - his proudest moment came after he installed a machine in a remote village in Uttarakhand, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where for many generations nobody had earned enough to allow children to go to school.

A year later, he received a call from a woman in the village to say that her daughter had started school. "Where Nehru failed," he says, "one machine succeeded.""

This guy is inspiring.

Hasnain says:

This illustrates a very good point.

Hasnain says:

"I'm asking because it now appears that management consultants PA Consulting acquired the hospital admission and treatment records of every NHS patient in England and Wales (all 47 million of them). This is almost certainly inappropriate, and comes at a point when the roll-out of the care.data national health statistics database is on hold for six months over concerns about who would be able to access it and whether the records could be de-anonymized. Now it appears that PA Consulting staff uploaded the entire hoard to Google servers based outside the UK—a process that took weeks, as the data came to them archived on 27 DVDs (making it on the order of 125Gb, after compression)."

Hasnain says:

I'm a bit late to the party, but this is a pretty cool list of projects/libraries/frameworks for anyone that develops in Python.

Hasnain says:

"A radiation-proof superhero could make sense of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in an afternoon. Our champion would pick through the rubble to reactor 1, slosh through the pooled water inside the building, lift the massive steel dome of the protective containment vessel, and peek into the pressure vessel that holds the nuclear fuel. A dive to the bottom would reveal the debris of the meltdown: a hardened blob of metals with fat strands of radioactive goop dripping through holes in the pressure vessel to the floor of the containment vessel below. Then, with a clear understanding of the situation, the superhero could figure out how to clean up this mess."

Hasnain says:

"The full number is not currently available for download, as it is 4.6 GB in packed binary format."