Hasnain says:

This was exciting, and I probably need to go and read the linked series.

“But a second consequence is that, if we want human-originated sentience to spread across the universe, then the sooner we get started the better! Just like Bill Gates in 1975, we should expect that there will soon be competitors out there. Indeed, there are likely competitors out there “already” (where “already” means, let’s say, in the rest frame of the cosmic microwave background)—it’s just that the light from them hasn’t yet reached us. So if we want to determine our own cosmic destiny, rather than having post-singularity extraterrestrials determine it for us, then it’s way past time to get our act together as a species. We might have only a few hundred million more years to do so.”

Hasnain says:

“Expectations run high for software that makes real-world decisions, particularly when money hangs in the balance. This edition of Drill Bits shows how well-designed software can effectively create wealth by finding subtle opportunities for gains from trade. We'll unveil a deep connection between auctions and a classic problem from our school days, we'll see that clearing an auction—allocating resources based on bids—resembles a high-stakes mutant Tetris game, and we'll learn to stop worrying and love an NP-hard problem that's far from intractable in practice.”

Hasnain says:

““The health-care software industry is enormous, and it exists largely because it’s privatized, it’s not standardized,” says Stone. “There are a lot of free-market inefficiencies. And the country doesn’t have a public health infrastructure, so there isn’t any real drive to fix it.”

“You think about the industries that have been transformed by technology—someone said, How do we get a pizza to your house faster? That’s a competitive advantage,” he says. “That has not happened in American health care.””

Hasnain says:

This is pretty damning. Good examples for why you should listen to the team and inspire folks and let them do their best.

“Then, according to numerous current and former employees of Frazzini’s game studios, he ignored much of their advice. He frequently told staff that every Amazon game needed to be a “billion-dollar franchise” and then understaffed the projects, they say. Instead of using industry-standard development tools, Frazzini insisted Amazon build its own, which might have saved the company money if the software ever worked properly. Executives under Frazzini initially rejected charges that New World, an Amazon game that would ask players to colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans, was racist. They relented after Amazon hired a tribal consultant who found that the portrayal was indeed offensive, say two people who worked on the project. The game, previously planned for release last year, is now scheduled for this spring.”

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty good example of nerding out over just how fast modern hardware has become.

“Why would you even need such IO throughput in a single machine? Shouldn’t I be building a 50-node cluster in the cloud “for scalability”? This is exactly the point of my experiment - do you really want to have all the complexity of clusters or performance implications of remote storage if you can run your I/O heavy workload on just one server with local NVMe storage? How many databases out there need to sustain even “only” 1M disk IOPS? Or if you really do need that sweet 1 TB/s data scanning speed, you could do this with 10-20 well-configured cluster nodes instead of 200. Modern hardware is powerful, if used right!”

Hasnain says:

Pretty interesting case study of applying ML to an infrastructure problem, realizing some cost savings on a heavily used code path while maintaining the same user experience.

“Cannes is now deployed to almost all Dropbox traffic. As a result, we replaced an estimated $1.7 million in annual pre-warm costs with $9,000 in ML infrastructure per year (primarily from increased traffic to Suggest Backend and Predict Service).”

Hasnain says:

This was really interesting and I’m glad for the scientific process by which they (failed to) reproduce past research and thus come up with improvements and novel insight.

Wonder how long this will take to be as popular as the original study though

“Past research has found that experienced well-being does not increase above incomes of $75,000/y. This finding has been the focus of substantial attention from researchers and the general public, yet is based on a dataset with a measure of experienced well-being that may or may not be indicative of actual emotional experience (retrospective, dichotomous reports). Here, over one million real-time reports of experienced well-being from a large US sample show evidence that experienced well-being rises linearly with log income, with an equally steep slope above $80,000 as below it. This suggests that higher incomes may still have potential to improve people’s day-to-day well-being, rather than having already reached a plateau for many people in wealthy countries.”

Hasnain says:

Moving from a low trust society to an (uncomfortably) high trust society was an interesting eye opening experience and this was quite relatable.

“We can create trust by contributing to existing communities and creating new ones. The more we show up and are willing to have faith in others, the more we’ll get back in return.”

Hasnain says:

Answering my own question from earlier, of course there’s now a Matt Levine article on it and now I understand this well along with a lot more stuff.

“Here is a YOLO story, a story of utter nihilism. You know this story. This story is perhaps best told with a series of rocket emojis, but let’s try words instead. The people on the WallStreetBets subreddit sometimes all get into a stock at once. This is fun, a nice social outing in an age of social distancing, a risky but potentially lucrative collective entertainment. Recently they decided to do GameStop. Because, I don’t know, they’re gamers, or because it’s a little comical to pump the stock of a chain of mall video-game stores during a pandemic, or because a lot of professional investors are short GameStop and they thought it’d be funny to mess with them. Or, especially, because their friends on Reddit were buying GameStop and they figured they’d join in the fun. Or all of those things in different combinations. Take one person who’s long for fundamental reasons, add 100 people who are long for personal-amusement reasons like “lol gaming” or “let’s mess with the shorts,” and then add thousands more who are long because they see everyone else long, and the stock moves”

Hasnain says:

Pretty important reminder.

“We hope this post will remind those in the security research community that they are targets to government-backed attackers and should remain vigilant when engaging with individuals they have not previously interacted with.”

Hasnain says:

“If you’re struggling right now to get a vaccine appointment for yourself or your parents, the frustration and unfairness you’re feeling, that’s what millions of Americans experience everyday — and have been experiencing for years — when it comes to navigating our healthcare system. You might have felt it yourself, or felt some corner of it. Regardless: remember this feeling of helplessness. Keep it close. Know that no matter how much tinkering and funding the Biden administration directs into the system won’t actually address the root of the problem. If you hate this, if you’ve hated all of this, if you authentically never want anything like this past year to happen again, start thinking now about the systems and beliefs that allowed it to get this bad in the first place. Right now, we need fixes. But for our future, we need foundational change.”

Hasnain says:

““When the situation does change—and especially if the change is anomalous, high-impact, and rapid, allowing little time for adaptation—such a system will be very fragile, since the conditions to which it has been adapted no longer prevail," the authors wrote.”

Hasnain says:

“A vision of the future, perhaps, in a post-peak world: smaller populations crowding ever more tightly into urban centres. And outside, beyond the city limits, the wild animals prowling.”

Hasnain says:

“The post-Brexit world is so tough for many that the government’s own trade specialists are advising afflicted British entrepreneurs to relocate some of their operations out of the UK and to the EU. This has to be one of the greater absurdities of Brexit. British companies are being told by the British government that the way to survive is to lay off British workers and transfer their jobs to folk across the Channel.”

Hasnain says:

This was such an entertaining read, so well written.

Also people please make your Venmo transactions private.

“My Venmo membership is one of the most conveniently creepy aspects of my digital life. My profile is set to private, but to my absolute delight, most of you have a public Venmo profile. And I love watching what you do there.”

Hasnain says:

This just gets more and more infuriating the longer you go on reading.

Just continues to document the insane amount of racism that still exists in 2021.

“As the fight intensified, Cornish, whose youngest child graduated in 2018, began to think differently about Carroll’s official motto, stamped on T-shirts and yard signs across Southlake.

“Protect the Tradition.”

She started to wonder: What was the tradition her neighbors were fighting to protect?”

Hasnain says:

What did I just read

Hasnain says:

“Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of enrollment in universities and colleges and men just over 40 percent, the research center reports. Fifty years ago, the gender proportions were reversed.”

Hasnain says:

Yay for more Rust adoption stories!

“If you’re new to Rust, start small and build on top of that. We ran a large number of experiments when we were getting started to try and find the edges of what a Rust-based solution could provide. When your experiments pan out, try to reimagine the ways you used to work with other languages and see if your code can benefit from Rust’s philosophy.”

Hasnain says:

"I think most CEOs, it's not that they're bad people, they're just cowards. They're like, "Yeah, I would like to take a stand, but I can't because of investors, customers and things like this." It basically comes down to, "I care more about hitting the next quarter results than preventing a civil war," which is so fucked up. They're more afraid of their investors than they are of militants. I'm in a lucky position where I don't have to be afraid of my investors. I'm super profitable. I can't get fired. There's no majority on the board that can fire me. So I think that I am in a position [where] I can take these stands much more than others."

"I think that CEOs need to have the courage to actually step up for things that matter, and be less sort of afraid of the impact on their businesses. Because most customers, especially the people who are actually buying the software, they care about stability, they care about democracy."

Hasnain says:

“That combination of personnel roster and management culture was simply smarter than the market. From 1988 through 2018, Renaissance’s flagship Medallion Fund had an average annual return of about 40% after fees, with almost no money-losing years; before fees, its returns were even more eye-popping. Although Medallion’s trading strategies do eventually get discovered by the market, forcing the company to find and exploit new inefficiencies, their profitability tends to last for decades rather than mere months. That steady outperformance has earned Simons an estimated fortune of $22.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.”

Hasnain says:

Good technical read on standing up a new API gateway and how to build shared infrastructure.

“If you’re working on an infrastructure team, you should do all in your power to avoid being the “gatekeeper” for the teams you service. Also, people often don’t think about User Experience when building infrastructure services and that is a huge mistake, infrastructure services still have user interfaces and you have to think about how you’re going to expose that for users, including providing sane defaults (real timeouts instead of the infinite timeouts in Golang’s default HTTP client and server) and blocking operations that might be syntactically but not logically correct.”

Hasnain says:

This is a pretty good read on engineering practices within and across companies - though it could do without the constant put downs of factory work.

“The expectation from developers at traditional companies is to complete assigned work. At SV-like companies, it's to solve problems that the business has. This is a huge difference. It impacts the day-to-day life of any engineer.”

Hasnain says:

Insightful and engaging read on the making of one of the most recognizable game maps ever.

“Ultimately, it’s hard for me to claim I knew what I was doing as I pieced Dust together. I attribute its success more to incredible luck and lack of imagination more than any skill I possess. If anything, I learnt more from Dust post-release (and in writing up these memories!) than I knew when I was making it.”

Hasnain says:

What the actual... I’m not surprised, just disappointed.

“According to new data released Friday, employers cut 140,000 jobs in December, signaling that the economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is backtracking. Digging deeper into the data also reveals a shocking gender gap: Women accounted for all the job losses, losing 156,000 jobs, while men gained 16,000.

Meanwhile, a separate survey of households, which includes self-employed workers, showed an even wider gender disparity. It also highlighted another painful reality: Blacks and Latinas lost jobs in December, while White women made significant gains.”

Hasnain says:

The international obfuscated C competition entries are always crazy but this year’s winner has to take the cake. Tic tac toe implemented in one call to printf - because of course printf is turing complete.

“This program consists of a single print statement wrapped in a while loop. You would not think that this would amount to much, but you would be very, very wrong. A clue to what is happening and how this works is encoded in the ASCII art of the program source.”

Hasnain says:

“ARONCZYK: At that point in time, Wendell is working for an insurance company. He's working for Cigna.

POTTER: Our internal polls showed us that a majority of Americans were favorable to the idea of a Canadian-style health care system. And that scared us to death.

ARONCZYK: They were going to need a bigger playbook.”

Still kinda sad there won’t be mass jailing for everyone involved in this large scale corruption, both within the government and within the medical industry.

Hasnain says:

This is an interesting human interest story on passwords.

I'm genuinely surprised so many people gave up their passwords over the phone to a reporter, and also equally surprised a company was able to recover most of their passwords with a mix of bruteforce and just talking to family.

Also, making those calls right after 9/11...

"Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the world’s largest financial-services firms, still cries when he talks about it. Not long after the planes struck the twin towers, killing 658 of his co-workers and friends, including his brother, one of the first things on Lutnick’s mind was passwords. This may seem callous, but it was not.

Like virtually everyone else caught up in the events that day, Lutnick, who had taken the morning off to escort his son, Kyle, to his first day of kindergarten, was in shock. But he was also the one person most responsible for ensuring the viability of his company. The biggest threat to that survival became apparent almost immediately: No one knew the passwords for hundreds of accounts and files that were needed to get back online in time for the reopening of the bond markets. Cantor Fitzgerald did have extensive contingency plans in place, including a requirement that all employees tell their work passwords to four nearby colleagues. But now a large majority of the firm’s 960 New York employees were dead. “We were thinking of a major fire,” Lutnick said. “No one in those days had ever thought of an entire four-to-six-block radius being destroyed.” The attacks also knocked out one of the company’s main backup servers, which were housed, at what until that day seemed like a safe distance away, under 2 World Trade Center."

Hasnain says:

"A dollar today is better than a dollar tomorrow. It’s worth more. If I have a dollar today, I can invest it and make more by the time tomorrow comes around. I should prefer less than a dollar today to exactly a dollar tomorrow, less by a discount rate (which, spoiler alert, is hard to figure out and shouldn’t be modeled as a constant, but please keep reading).

If you accept this truth, then you do exactly the opposite of “spend more now to (maybe) make more later”. Those dollars you spend now are more expensive than the dollars you earn later."

Hasnain says:

This is pretty big news

Hasnain says:

A set of war stories on debugging code across many systems and machines.

“On a properly functioning computer this stress test should never fail, but surprisingly we discovered that on about 1% of the computers being used to play Guild Wars it did fail! One percent might not sound like a big deal, but when one million gamers play the game on any given day that means 10,000 would have at least one crash bug. Our programming team could spend weeks researching the bugs for just one day at that rate!”

Hasnain says:

“The same holds true for the isms. Our rejection of false positives, our refusal to push back on ambiguous isms, has directed all the damage at specific groups in our community, such as minorities and women. That is unfair at a huge scale. The shift we’re seeing now, being more sensitive to these isms when we see them, is a significant improvement, a way to shift some of the burden of those false negatives off of these historically targeted groups. It comes at a cost: those of us (like me) who have historically been untouchable *and* given the benefit of the doubt are suddenly being hit by false positives — -we didn’t mean it, but they’re coming after us anyway. But at least some amount of that cost is worth bearing. A system with no false positives, only false negatives, is not an optimally configured system. We have to balance out the impact of our imperfect assessments, making sure that everyone shoulders a part of the burden.”

Hasnain says:

I for one welcome the transition to remote work over the upcoming years.

"This highlights some of the conflicts many companies will face as they strive to remain competitive and retool themselves for a workforce that expects flexibility on where they work from. Making that transition will come with major challenges."

Hasnain says:

Bit dated, but a really interesting human interest story.

"The CTLA-4-blocking drug Ipilumimab, approved by the FDA in 2015, was the first of a new class of drugs called “checkpoint inhibitors” and the beginning of what researchers refer to as a tsunami of new cancer treatments. The pace of progress is staggering, such that we now recognize that what Allison discovered is not only the end of that 100-year scientific mystery, but also the the beginning of a new chapter in medicine. Already, new therapies such as CAR-T have essentially wiped out some forms of cancer; the newest checkpoint inhibitors have turned stage-four metastatic death sentences into full remission. This work has only just begun. And while it’s hopeful, it’s not hype."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later re-reading.

"One of my earliest memories of computing is a maze generator running on my family’s Apple IIe. It filled the screen with a grid of green squares, then incrementally cut holes in the walls. Eventually, every square of the grid was connected and the screen was filled with a complete, perfect maze.

My little home computer could create something that had deep structure—every square of the maze could be reached from any other—and yet it seemed to be chaotic—it carved at random and every maze was different. This was enough to blow my ten-year-old mind. It still kind of does today."

Hasnain says:

:/

“At St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County, fewer than half of the 700 hospital workers eligible for the vaccine were willing to take the shot when it was first offered. At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in five frontline nurses and doctors have declined the shot. Roughly 20% to 40% of L.A. County’s frontline workers who were offered the vaccine did the same, according to county public health officials.

So many frontline workers in Riverside County have refused the vaccine — an estimated 50% — that hospital and public officials met to strategize how best to distribute the unused doses, Public Health Director Kim Saruwatari said.”