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."

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."

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."

Hasnain says:

2020 is unforgiving :(

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."

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."

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.”"

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."

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.”

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.”

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”

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.””

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. “

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.”

Hasnain says:

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

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.”

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.

Hasnain says:

This is some really cool work! It's open source, so you can also try it out on your python codebases