Hasnain says:

This was humbling. And terrifying. If you read one take on coronavirus this week, read this one (in its entirety).

The author put up a hash a month ago with a bold claim and just backed it up with a white paper justifying predictions on the coronavirus in Japan - which were mostly correct and went against prevailing opinion at the time.

This also isn’t your typical tech person piece about a field they have no experience in - this was well researched, experts were consulted, and the author is surprisingly humble.

“If I am wrong, then I will accept any consequences. My actions were my own actions.

This is a very different essay than my typical work. It may be judged to very different standards in very different quarters than usual. Please excuse my need to write more reservedly and participate less in subsequent commentary than I usually would. Some truths have social consequences, acknowledged or not.”

Hasnain says:

This is an insanely large collection of tips and tricks that can save you a bunch of time. I only just skimmed it and learnt a few new things already.

Bookmarking for future use

Hasnain says:

This was kinda sad and inspirational at the same time.

“You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.”

Hasnain says:

“Holloway received his death sentence with pure calm. While his family cried beside him, he complimented a doctor for having a nice wedding ring.”

Hasnain says:

Such a great read on the grind and hustling needed to publish a book.

This specific book in particular is a magnificent piece of art - and I've only read the first 2 chapters in depth. Waiting for the paperback edition to come out so I can internalize this. I highly recommend it for folks interested in PL/compilers, and as the HN commenters say, this should probably become a standard textbook at some point.

The author's prior book, Game Programming Patterns, was hands down one of the best software engineering books I've ever read. I'm fairly confident that this will top that book.

"My main overarching goal of the book is to pass on that feeling, to get readers to understand there’s no magic in there and nothing keeping them out. To nail that conceit, I wanted to include every single line of code used by the interpreters in the book. No parser generators, nothing left as an exercise for the reader. If you type in all of the code in the book, you get two complete, working interpreters. No tricks.

So not only did I need to break these two interpreters into chapters, I needed to do it without any cheating. I wanted a hard guarantee that at the end of each chapter, you had a program that you could type in, compile, run, and do something with. I knew I wouldn’t be able to verify this manually, so it was time to create some tools."

Hasnain says:

Interesting read and take on the toilet paper shortage. TLDR same amount of toilet paper; demand has just shifted from industrial purchasers to the regular public.

“In the meantime, some enterprising restaurateurs have begun selling their excess supplies of toilet paper, alcohol, and other basics. Last week I picked up takeout at a local restaurant with a side of toilet paper and bananas. The toilet paper was thin and individually wrapped. The bananas were puny. They’ll do just fine.”