placeholder

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on automated logic and reasoning, and some debates in the mathematical community.

"By the time I’ve reframed my question into a form that could fit into this technology, I would have solved the problem myself."

Posted on 2020-08-30T04:37:33+0000

placeholder

The Software Inflation Rate in 2020: 2.2%

After going up over 5% annually for the past decade, business software prices went up only 2.2% in 2020, with new pricing trends keeping most software pricing the same as last year.

Click to view the original at capiche.com

Hasnain says:

I did not realize software prices had been rising at this rate, I had mostly considered them stable.

"The dramatic price changes from the switch to SaaS have stabilized. If anything, your company may pay less for software this year, as bundles are the new norm again, giving you everything in one package so you need to buy fewer software products."

Posted on 2020-08-29T22:45:05+0000

placeholder

RFC8890: The Internet is for End Users

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has published RFC8890, The Internet is for End Users, arguing that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should ground its decisions in what’s good for people who use the Internet, and that it should take positive steps to achieve that.

Click to view the original at mnot.net

Hasnain says:

Interesting read focusing on the role of the IETF in the governance of the internet.

"So at its heart, The Internet is for End Users is a call for IETF participants to stop pretending that they can ignore the non-technical consequences of their decisions, a call for broader consultation when making them, and one for continued focus on the end user. Ultimately, end user impact is as least as important as the technical considerations of a proposal, and judging that impact requires a more serious effort to understand and incorporate other non-technical views."

Posted on 2020-08-29T22:32:32+0000

placeholder

'Overwhelmed': No end to flooding woes as rains lash Karachi

At least 13 killed and large parts of Pakistan's largest city submerged after record torrential rains in August.

Click to view the original at aljazeera.com

placeholder

Scrollbar Blindness | Sven Kadak

Scrollbar Blindness August 26, 2020 Hacker News /r/programming In 2011, Apple released Mac OS X Lion which introduced an enhanced scrollbar behavior that made scrollbars hidden by default. The scrollbar appears when the user starts scrolling a document and disappears after the scrolling stops. It ap...

Click to view the original at svenkadak.com

Hasnain says:

This finally explains all the scrollbars I see when using windows.

"As can be seen from the examples, even big organizations like Github and Snapchat that have tens if not a hundred front-end developers and probably have a code review process in place, let the problem slip through. I collected these examples months ago and the scrollbars are still just as I found them."

Posted on 2020-08-29T04:21:47+0000

placeholder

Hasnain says:

In depth guide to writing generative fuzzer for WASM in Rust, showing how easy it is to use Rust's type system and at the same time write a high quality generator.

"I realized that many people might not know what it takes to write their own generative fuzzer, so this blog post shows one aspect of it: implementing a test case generator."

Posted on 2020-08-25T08:13:01+0000

placeholder

Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?

Missing documentation and obsolete environments force participants in the Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge to get creative.

Click to view the original at nature.com

Hasnain says:

Interesting technical read on the problem of reproducibility in science - focused purely on code.

"Whichever language and reproducibility strategies they use, researchers would be wise to put them to the test, says Anna Krystalli, a research software engineer at the University of Sheffield, UK. Krystalli runs workshops called ReproHacks for researchers to submit their own published papers, code and data, and challenge participants to reproduce it. Often, she says, they cannot: crucial details, obvious to the authors but opaque to others, are missing. “All the materials that we’re producing, if we don’t actually use them or engage with them then we don’t really know if they are reproducible,” Krystalli says. “It’s much harder, actually, than people think.”"

Posted on 2020-08-25T07:42:56+0000

placeholder

Hasnain says:

Short, but engaging and to-the-point.

"So instead of searching for an extraordinary that is distorted and unrealistic, search to climb up to some space beneath the top ledge. You will be less disappointed and jealous, and you will still maintain some velocity in the right direction. Climbing to a higher vantage point can also unlock new forms of extraordinary that you might have never noticed before."

Posted on 2020-08-25T04:49:04+0000

placeholder

On Immigration

With photos taken from my travels. I guess we really do photograph what we love. I am flying on a plane today. It will take me to my country of birth, Great Britain and, when I land, someone will tell...

Click to view the original at paullicino.tumblr.com

Hasnain says:

This was an engaging human interest story discussing one persons experience with immigration across multiple countries.

“I kept the dollar bill. Canada stopped making them in the late 80s, so it served as a curiosity and even a kind of totem. At first I kept it for fun, but as my life plans changed, it became a sort of companion. At the end of 2016, in a winter that turned wondrously white, I decided I wanted to stay in Canada and in the wet spring of 2017, a wrinkling bill still in my wallet, I began that process, a process that mostly involved documents. There’s nothing quite like immigration to remind you that your life, to someone else, is mostly a collection of documents.”

Posted on 2020-08-22T06:57:24+0000

placeholder

1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond

In Age of Empires the time to complete each simulation step varies greatly: the rendering time changes if the user is watching units, scrolling, or sitting over unexplored terrain, and large paths or strategic planning by the AI made the game turn fluctuate fairly wildly. A few quick calculations sh...

Click to view the original at gamasutra.com

Hasnain says:

Excellent technical piece on game design and networking.

“At first take it might seem that getting two pieces of identical code to run the same should be fairly easy and straightforward -- not so. The Microsoft product manager, Tim Znamenacek, told Mark early on, "In every project, there is one stubborn bug that goes all the way to the wire -- I think out-of-sync is going to be it." He was right. The difficulty with finding out-of-sync errors is that very subtle differences would multiply over time. A deer slightly out of alignment when the random map was created would forage slightly differently -- and minutes later a villager would path a tiny bit off, or miss with his spear and take home no meat.”

Posted on 2020-08-22T06:45:29+0000

placeholder

“All These Rich People Can’t Stop Themselves”: The Luxe Quarantine Lives of Silicon Valley’s Elite

Travis Kalanick is throwing (outdoor) parties, private-jet owners are hopping from safe zone to safe zone, and dinner party hosts are administering 15-minute COVID-19 rapid tests—all business as usual. “Coronavirus is a poor person’s virus,” says one source.

Click to view the original at vanityfair.com

Hasnain says:

I don’t even know where to begin with this

“Another billionaire in Los Angeles has been hosting lavish dinner parties (no social media allowed) where an on-site nurse administers 15-minute coronavirus tests outside as guests drink cocktails, and allows them in to dine once their test comes back negative”

Posted on 2020-08-17T03:58:46+0000

placeholder

Weather Data Reveals Long-Predicted Pressure Waves | Quanta Magazine

An 18th-century physicist first predicted the existence of a chorus of atmospheric waves that swoop around Earth. Scientists have finally found them.

Click to view the original at quantamagazine.org

Hasnain says:

“Laplace wondered to what degree the moon gravitationally squeezes the air surrounding our planet, and he set out to analyze the types of waves that might emerge as a consequence. He imagined the atmosphere as a thin fluid on a smooth sphere, and he concluded that gravity should pin one class of waves to the ground, where they would move more or less horizontally — two-dimensional undulations that hug the planet’s surface. “He was really the first guy with this picture in his mind,” said Kevin Hamilton, a professor emeritus at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa and co-author of the new research. “It was an amazing insight.””

Posted on 2020-08-16T06:26:13+0000

placeholder

Zillow 2020 Urban-Suburban Market Report - Zillow Research

In light of the changing work landscape, suburban housing markets have not strengthened at a disproportionately rapid pace compared to urban markets.

Click to view the original at zillow.com

Hasnain says:

Interesting analysis of the housing market as a whole across the US. The breakdown for SF in particular is an outlier:

“When comparing the principal city to its surrounding suburbs, the San Francisco metro area does break the mold. Higher levels of inventory, up 96% YoY following a flood of new listings during the pandemic, are sitting on the market in the city proper, a significantly larger jump than the surrounding suburbs. Whereas in similar cities like Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., declining or flat inventory is a consistent trend within and outside the city limits. Relatively higher inventory has different causes by city, and is not clearly attributable to either supply or demand. In San Francisco, though, the softening is clear as sellers inundate the market and buyers have not changed their pace to match — newly pending sales in the city are up only 1.7% YoY. “

Posted on 2020-08-16T06:18:16+0000

placeholder

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You

God dammit, I didn’t want to blog again. I have so much stuff to do. Blogging takes time and energy and creativity that I could be putting…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

It’s been quite a while since Steve has come out with a rant, and boy is it an excellent read as always.

“Google, wake the fuck up. It’s 2020. You are still losing. It’s time to take a hard look in the mirror and answer for yourselves whether you really want to be in the Cloud business.
If you do, then stop breaking shit. You guys are rich. We developers are not. So when it comes to shouldering the burden of compatibility, you need to pay for it. Not us.”

Posted on 2020-08-15T06:59:12+0000

placeholder

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later usage. It's rare to see a project with such excellent documentation and usage examples from day one.

Posted on 2020-08-12T03:49:21+0000

placeholder

The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity

Pinterest has always been about aspiration. It is a platform for sharing beautiful images, curating galleries of an idealized world. Users…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

This whole story is an infuriating, saddening look into gender discrimination that is still happening across the tech industry.

“Exactly a week later, Ben fired me during a 10-minute video call. He said he was “sad to do something like this to someone so logical.” Two days later, he called to ask that I tell my team that leaving Pinterest was my decision and that I would be staying on for a month to ease the transition for my successor, Todd. While my arrival at Pinterest was highly publicized, my departure was buried in one line at the end of a revenue guidance revision due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Posted on 2020-08-12T02:33:37+0000

placeholder

Hasnain says:

This is a pretty good read on writing a SPA using Rust.

Having used Rust to build an interactive SPA before (both client / server), I can confirm it's a seamless experience and being able to share code/type definitions is extremely powerful.

Posted on 2020-08-11T17:07:36+0000

placeholder

Pysa: Open Source static analysis for Python code - Facebook Engineering

Pysa is an open source static analysis tool we’ve built to detect and prevent security and privacy issues in Python code.

Click to view the original at engineering.fb.com