Hasnain says:

This is so on point.

“How do I convince people I am legit?

Tell people you are open to speaking engagements. Talk about the number of trees you planted this month. Tell them someone else forced you to post on IH or HN because of how great your content is.

Act quirky on Twitter.”

Hasnain says:

I came across this story randomly on Twitter and it seemed too incredulous to believe - massive insurance fraud, pervasive through the system where people would fake accidents, have doctors be in on it to actually bill the insurance companies, and ... it gets even crazier. But this all checks out! I wonder if there’s a documentary on this somewhere (article is from 2003)

“I can't tell you their names. Or even the type of cars they were driving. If I do, someone might find them. And when you're involved with organized crime and you talk about it, you don't want to be found. What I can tell you is that the accident, which occurred in the winter of 2002, proved to be a very big deal indeed. In the months that followed, the four passengers listed on the police report were arrested. Their testimony ultimately led investigators in Suffolk County, Long Island, to uncover what may turn out to be the largest organized insurance-fraud ring in U.S. history. In mid-August, Suffolk County district attorney Thomas Spota announced that a grand jury had indicted 567 people and corporations connected with the ring, which he says is tied to more than 1,000 car accidents in the New York area. The list of indictments includes passengers; the "runners" who recruited them and orchestrated the accidents; the doctors who "diagnosed" and "treated" the victims; the medical clinics that processed their insurance claims; and the financiers the district attorney alleges are the masterminds of a vast and interconnected criminal enterprise.

Only 240 of the indictments have been made available to the public. The rest, along with many of the facts in the case, remain under seal. Over the past two months, however, FORTUNE has interviewed dozens of officials involved with the case, including insurance company investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and detectives; reviewed hundreds of pages of confidential documents; and heard the stories of people charged in the scheme, who agreed to speak on the condition that we shield their identities. The picture that emerges is of a sophisticated organized-crime syndicate that rivals any drug lord's, and that systematically bilked some of the best-known names in the insurance industry out of hundreds of millions of dollars. The losses from the case are still being tallied. State Farm has acknowledged potential exposure of $48 million, and experts involved in the case predict that when Allstate, GEICO, and others weigh in, that number could easily reach $500 million.”

Hasnain says:

“The crude little two-stroke engines used by most commercial backpack-style blowers are pollution bombs. “Simplest benchmark: running a leafblower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles,” Fallows writes. “About one-third of the gasoline that goes into this sort of engine is spewed out, unburned, in an aerosol mixed with oil in the exhaust.””

Hasnain says:

I know this is basically an ad for a documentary but it’s still an engaging story.

“"This story sheds light on refugees in a positive way, about what happens when they're given an opportunity," she says.

"Ultimately, this is a story of a guy who came to the country with nothing, and with some hustle, and dreams, and a little luck, really made quite a charmed life for himself."

Which he then threw away.”

Hasnain says:

Sigh :/

“In a 1977 speech, Bell Burnell insisted on not feeling slighted by the Nobel committee, citing the difficulty of resolving “demarcation disputes between supervisor and student” and the belief that “it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students.” But it is hard to read such sentiments without wondering whether there might be a kind of Stockholm Syndrome of the disenfranchised at work — after all, those systematically marginalized and discriminated against by any power structure have no choice but to rationalize injustice as a coping mechanism if they are to continue operating within that ecosystem without being broken by its biases.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty interesting technical post mortem for why half the internet was down the other day.

Hasnain says:

Oof. I don’t even know where to begin.

“One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.”

Hasnain says:

Is it time to short Intel? Or am I too late?

“For years, Intel and AMD have been playing a chess match, sniping back and forth with improvements in CPU performance, battery life, and onboard graphics. Apple appears to be playing an entirely different game on an entirely different level. The same interplay between hardware and software that has led to such huge successes on the iPhone and iPad has now come to the Mac.

The most exciting — or frightening, if you’re a traditional PC chip company — part of Apple’s new chips is that the M1 is just the starting point. It’s Apple’s first-generation processor, designed to replace the chips in Apple’s weakest, cheapest laptops and desktops. Imagine what Apple’s laptops might do if the company can replicate that success on its high-end laptops and desktops or after a few more years of maturation for the M-series lineup.

But when a $1,000 M1 laptop can outdo a maxed-out, $6,000 MacBook Pro with quadruple the RAM and Intel’s best chip, while also running cooler and quieter in a smaller and lighter form factor and with twice the battery life, where do competitors even go from here?”

Hasnain says:

"The work provides an ironclad assurance that quantum computers exist in a different computational realm than classical computers (at least relative to an oracle). Even in a world where P equals NP — one where the traveling salesman problem is as simple as finding a best-fit line on a spreadsheet — Raz and Tal’s proof demonstrates that there would still be problems only quantum computers could solve."

Interesting read/overview on quantum computing.

Hasnain says:

"Researchers have found some answers here, too. There is evidence for a decline in fathers’ testosterone even during the partner’s pregnancy, so cues from the mother could be important. There is also evidence that postnatal contact with the infant can both lower T and increase oxytocin. Perhaps something about the appearance, the odour or actual tactile contact with the infant is responsible. A notable 2015 study showed that skin-to-skin contact with premature infants increases both parental and infant oxytocin levels. These findings predict that human fathers should become more strongly bonded to their children if they spend more time in close proximity to them as infants, and this has indeed been demonstrated."

Hasnain says:

Really engaging read, not just on databases, but also on a long career journey and how to continue learning and growing.

The advice at the end definitely stands out for more than just database engineers.

"When deciding where to work, which team to be a part of, or how to spend your energies outside of work, it’s always helpful to remember that we have the ability to influence our own luck. While you can’t always control the “right time”, you may have a better sense for the “right place”."

Hasnain says:

Uhhhhhhhhhh

“The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a "level" app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.”

Hasnain says:

Quoting one of the top hacker news comments on this:

"The author in a self-deprecating way says that he’s not a mathematician, but just a programmer. Bear no mind to that: this is one of the best popular expositions of Goedel theorem I’ve seen. Everything is very accurately explained, there are no silly mistakes and untruths one often sees mentioned in context of Goedel theorem, and even the original proof is sketched in a very approachable manner, striking a very good balance between getting across all crucial ideas, and skipping most of the distracting technical aspects (which are important and interesting, but I think only to mathematicians, haha). Great job all around."

This is a really good in-depth explanation of the incompleteness theorem and I can now finally say I (sorta) understand it.

(also trying not to get sucked back into doing some more proofs...)

Hasnain says:

Really good talk on understanding work that really makes a team succeed, from the perspective of the team, the manager, and a person trying to navigate their career.

"Your job title says "software engineer", but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You'd like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone's going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won't be as successful. But now someone's suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you're the glue. If it's not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?

Every senior person in an organisation should be aware of the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful. Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills. Left unconscious, it can be career limiting. It can push people into less technical roles and even out of the industry.

Let's talk about how to allocate glue work deliberately, frame it usefully and make sure that everyone is choosing a career path they actually want to be on."

Hasnain says:

While I'm a bit sad it took this long, I'm glad github did what is right here.

"No matter what we do to protect developer rights, we still must work within the boundaries of the law. And the DMCA’s current boundaries are hurting developers. One way to address the problems with the DMCA is to work to improve the law itself—and to prevent even worse laws from being enacted around the world."

"Nonetheless, developers who want to push back against unwarranted takedowns may face the risk of taking on personal liability and legal defense costs. To help them, GitHub will establish and donate $1M to a developer defense fund to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims. "

Hasnain says:

Oof :/

“A college class had two teaching assistants: one male and one female. At the end of the semester, the students scored the male TA higher on course evaluations, while the female TA got five times as many negative reviews.

There’s just one problem: They were the same person.”

Hasnain says:

Good read on avoiding a common trap when getting used to expressing software better using the type system. Types are useful when they codify invariants or properties of your business logic - names, not so much. (I'll admit I do use `newtype` or equivalents a lot, but usually to cut down on typing).

"Newtypes like these are security blankets. Forcing programmers to jump through a few hoops is not type safety—trust me when I say they will happily jump through them without a second thought."