Hasnain says:

Interesting take on algorithms and polarization.
Wish it had more data though.

"In the case of something like this, the challenges are harder because the line, as you can imagine, is sometimes blurry between what clearly might be hate speech versus what might be political speech that we might find distasteful and disagree with, but nonetheless is coming from, you know, candidates that are in elections and the like."

Hasnain says:

I thought this was going to be a light human interest story without much financial advice.

Boy, I was wrong. Not only does it contain lots of info on poker, strategy, and finances, it has a bunch of solid stuff on general life advice. Choice quotes:

"One of the things I think is really important is “trust but verify.” Whenever something sounds exactly on point, exactly right, and you really want to believe it — that’s the moment when you need to verify the most. It runs very counter to human psychology. Here’s the thing: When it comes to you, nothing is too good to be true. It’s too good to be true for someone else. But you always think, “Oh, I deserve this. This is evidence of how smart I was in making this decision.” Poker forces you to let go of that very, very quickly. Because if you think that way you’re going to lose a lot of money."

Hasnain says:

Author goes into their experience on Spotify (and Apple music); with some hard hitting numbers on the financial and how to best effective utilize various ways of exposure.

"Artists should be truth tellers not hustling entrepreneurs. But in todays world that's not even close to possible.

To be a full-time artist you have to hustle and grind. Your Instagram has to be on point. You have to tour constantly. You have to sell merch. You gotta start a Patreon. Anything to support the art."

Hasnain says:

An interesting read on launching new projects with a tangent on how discussion becomes poor quality on the internet.

"However, there might be another reason why you didn’t get relevant feedback.

We tend to discuss things that are easy to talk about."

Hasnain says:

Great technical read on what the internet backbone is optimized for and now it’s not great for games.

I also learnt that Riot built out its own private network to make its games faster. Whoa!

“(Not many people know this, but this “shadow” private internet is actually growing at a faster rate than the public internet…)”

Hasnain says:

:( I am so glad no one was hurt.

Hasnain says:

HN commenter sums this up better than I can:

"When I started my SaaS two years ago, I also found it hard to get concrete info about how to design my database scheme to handle multi-tenancy, plans, and billing.

In hindsight, it all seems quite straightforward, but I was sometimes quite lost at the time. Posts like yours would have helped!"

Hasnain says:

Overseen buried in github comments is this gem of a performance optimization lesson.

"If I had to take an educated guess as to what is making us faster than pretty much any other application on Windows at putting your text on the screen... I would say it is because that is literally our only job! Also probably because we are using darn near the oldest and lowest level APIs that Windows has to accomplish this work."

Hasnain says:

This was great. It doesn't just cover the political aspects; it also goes a lot into the economic theory behind it and why "more supply = lower prices" is perhaps an overly simplistic way of thinking about it.

The best takeaway for me though was this bit, which applies beyond the confines of this article:

"It seems to me that if we want to convince people, we ought to stop yelling and start listening."

Hasnain says:

This was an amazing read. I first thought it was just going to be another one of those articles just blaming baby boomers without having any more substance; but I was glad to be proven wrong.

Read on if you want a history lesson; an intro to how legal compensation got so high; learn about social inequality, and what people are doing to stop this madness.

"That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s. It’s the protected vs. the unprotected, the common good vs. maximizing and protecting the elite winners’ winnings."

Hasnain says:

:(

Hasnain says:

This was sad and tough to read. I agree with one of the comments on HN where it's called out how folks in industry often put down those in Academia, referring to it as the "cushy" life - when it can often be the opposite, as seen here.

"Sitting at a restaurant on University Avenue, the prospective candidate mentioned that she was in therapy. One by one, the current students at the table said that they were, too, but none of them had ever discussed it with each other. "

"“[Mental health] is something that unites all of us grad students,” she said. “We know what it’s like to struggle with us and our friends, and we want something to be done about it. It’s a rallying point for all of us.”"

Hasnain says:

Senseless violence :(

Hasnain says:

Great read that both explains the cookie warnings and then takes them down, explaining how they're counter productive and harm the very consumers they're meant to protect.

"So in summary, everyone clicks through cookie warnings anyway, if you read them you either can't understand what they're saying or the configuration of privacy settings is a nightmare, depending on where you are in the world you either don't get privacy or you don't get UX hell, if you understand the privacy risks then it's easy to open links incognito or use an ad blocker, you can still be tracked anyway and finally, the whole thing is just conditioning people to make bad security choices. That is all."

Hasnain says:

I'm glad these people were caught.

The article points out that the people in this case were prosecuted because "the wealthy" should not have a backdoor that bypasses the admissions system as it's unfair.

At the same time though there is this quote: "US Attorney re the Huffman/Loughlin (among others) college scam: "We're not talking about donating a building...we're talking about fraud.""

This baffles me as it seems to morally be the same issue just at a different (10-100x lower) price point?

Hasnain says:

This made me a bit sad. This is a nice trip down memory lane of how the internet used to be with free, federated open protocols and closer, tighter knit social networks. I miss that time.

Of course, there are upsides, it was only accessible to a small population, the community was restricted/inaccessible, and I kinda like how far we've come. But sometimes one just wishes for "simpler" times.

"These days, more and more are always grayed out, because they were on some other service that’s no longer connected. It makes me sad, because I can no longer say “Hey, qq?” when I want to. So I thought I’d cut and paste some of those people. The world being what it is, chances are there are lots that I’ll never chat with again."

Hasnain says:

Pretty interesting read on how to get stuff done, title notwithstanding.

Goes into an explanation of a trap we all fall into: imagining the end results but not putting in the work.

“The Big Vision with all the bells & whistles is fun to think about because it gives you all the benefits with none of the work.

You can picture how you’ll look and feel, the money in your bank account, the respect of your friends and peers.”

Hasnain says:

Would love to read more about this story if it ever comes to light.

As it stands we only have one side of the story though and not enough to go on

Hasnain says:

Interesting read that goes into emotions, both human and animal. Hilarious examples too

“One problem, however, is that our rules are of our own making, such as “Don’t jump on that couch!” or “Keep your nails off my leather chair!” It must be as tough for our pets to grasp these prohibitions as it was for me to understand why I couldn’t chew gum in Singapore.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting human interest story on dietary habits; with a little bit of psychology and research sprinkled in.

“When I asked Krishnendu Ray, a food-studies scholar at NYU, about dietary variety, he said: “Newness or difference from the norm is a very urban, almost postmodern, quest. It is recent. It is class-based.” So, when accounting for the totality of human experience, it is the variety-seekers—not the same-lunchers—who are the unusual ones.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read on how to build an interpreter in Rust for a simple Wireshark-like language for writing packet filters.

They go through lexing, parsing, and even have a bonus section on execution engines. Great if you want to learn Rust or just want to scratch an itch.

Hasnain says:

I know there have been arguments for/against tipping culture in America - I've always thought of good arguments "for" in the case of money directly going to a person (there's a separate discussion on if we should have an equitable system so they don't need to rely on tips).

A business asking for tips on every transaction so it can stay afloat because they lose money on each transaction ...

Hasnain says:

This was amazing. Most critiques of the wildly outsized CEO pay talk about the morality and inequality - which brings up lots of thoughtful discussions; but I feel sometimes has a harder time bringing about change given current societal norms.

This article instead looks at the data, cut in many different ways and basically shows that CEO performance is indistinguishable from random. So many quotes in here that I can't pick just one to quote. So I'll pick out a bit from the conclusion:

"A Harvard Business Review article, “The Art and Science of Finding the Right CEO,” lists “proven track record” as a top, “obvious” criterion for selecting CEOs. But, to quote Sherlock Holmes, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

Journalists, investors, and boards are placing excessive emphasis on CEO pedigrees and track records. In a world that is feedback-rich, stochastic, and “fat tailed,” the simple narrative of the “great man” does not appear to have much quantitative merit — rather, it seems like yet another cognitive bias in the vein of those discovered by Daniel Kahneman. "

Hasnain says:

[pdf warning]

This is a white paper written by the folks at npm on their experience porting one of their backend micro services to Rust. It’s an interesting study because they handle the “the rewrite caused all the improvements” factor by rewriting it in 3 languages and comparing the results.

The main takeaway for me was that the Rust version took longer to write but worked out of the box in production; while with the JS version they were prepared to and had to spend quite a while post launch finding issues.

I wish it had more technical details, to be honest.

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting read on tech in Silicon Valley and how it brings out inequality.

Lots of great discussion points. I’m a bit annoyed that 2/3rds is behind a paywall especially since this is effectively something leading us towards buying a book.

Worth reading though.

“Anand: That’s kind of amazing. But, in general, people in finance own the idea that they work in finance. Whereas, with tech, I think a lot of our culture has bought into the idea that there are these figures of emancipation, and liberation, and social leveling. And it has bought them a tremendous [amount] of space and freedom that they have exploited and abused.”

Hasnain says:

This was an eye opening read - college is held as this great equalizer for people, especially for private colleges. They’re viewed as a way into the “upper class” and into the elite.

And yet they’re still not accessible due to various biases and long held privileges that are hard to overcome.

Not to mention the different upbringing that is near impossible to unlearn

“Another thing I didn’t know: There were exceptions to rules, that some people broke the rules and got away with it. Some had been getting away with rule-breaking their whole lives. That wasn’t an option for me. Following the syllabus and course policies to the letter, I came to class ill, I came to class exhausted. I was never late. I didn’t ask for a sorely-needed extension on a paper, not any paper — something many students request and many professors grant — until I was a senior. It didn’t even occur to me to try.”