Hasnain says:

This is a technically engaging read, the author got annoyed at really long load times in GTA:O and decided to do something about it.

I’m also surprised, given that this game is such a huge cash cow, that no one from Rockstar thought to ever profile this code given that their load times were >6 minutes and this would have stuck out like a sore thumb in any profiling.

“If this somehow reaches Rockstar: the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve. Please do something about it :<

You could either switch to a hashmap for the de-duplication or completely skip it on startup as a faster fix. For the JSON parser - just swap out the library for a more performant one. I don’t think there’s any easier way out.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading.

“I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the distributed systems area. (I focused on the core distributed systems area, and did not cover networking, security, distributed ledgers, verification work etc. I even left out distributed transactions, I hope to cover them at a later date.) “

Hasnain says:

Inspirational story.

“I chose Google because they will send me to Europe for the internship. Having the chance to spend the summer in Europe will be life-changing for me. I’ve never been on an airplane before. My only time out of Gaza was when I went to RBK in Jordan! And I think I will learn a lot at Google.”

Hasnain says:

“It is miraculous that successful large-scale games get made at all, anywhere. A big-budget game can be beautiful, but does the “jump” feel good? It can piece into a popular genre, but is it too same-y? Does the plot make sense? Are the characters balanced? And, most of all, is it fun? There is no potion to drizzle into the fizzing cauldron of game development to produce a hit; it takes all kinds of people channeling their personal inspiration into one multitudinous commodity. It’s crazed and human. That’s the alchemy that tech giants still can’t solve for.”

Hasnain says:

Who blames an intern?!

Hasnain says:

“Some of those who spoke to Recode recounted what they saw as biased interactions inside Amazon’s corporate offices, including a white male manager who told a Black female employee, unprompted, that his ancestors “owned slaves but I’m pretty sure they were good to their slaves.””

Hasnain says:

I’m at a loss of words for explaining how insanely cool this is.

A static website + web server distributed as a single zip file you can add your content to and it’ll serve it. The zip file is a valid executable. That runs (without modification) across Linux, Mac, and windows.

“redbean makes it possible to share web applications that run offline as an single-file αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε zip archive which contains your assets. All you need to do is download the redbean.com program below, change the filename to .zip, add your content in a zip tool like Windows 10 or InfoZIP, and change the extension back to .com.”

Hasnain says:

Absolutely infuriating, especially when you get through so much of the slowly building rage and then get to this quite, having internalized the full context of the situation:

“Another manager wrote in the review: “Management definitely recognizes his efforts and successes but these can be overshadowed when he displays what some might perceive as a sense of entitlement. He needs to be subtler when it comes to voicing his opinion about his compensation.””

Hasnain says:

:|

On one hand, I’m happy they tried to work on this problem. On the other hand, bungling the execution like this can do more harm than good. On the third hand, I don’t believe any other large silicon valley employer would be able to do better either because the problem is so structural.

There are too many quotes to pick out - I’ll pick the one that struck me the most:

“"It was like nobody had seen an African American person before," said 2018-19 student Saraah Cooper, describing her everyday experience on Google's campus.

"A regular Google employee came into the game room and asked us for all of our IDs and we were kind of confused because he wasn't security or anything," said 2018 scholar Afeeni Phillips.

"There was this lady in front of me in line for a food truck and she turned around, looked me in my eyes and said 'this line is only for Google employees — you can't eat here,'" Tolbert recalled, adding that he considered the incident a symptom of broader issues not exclusive to Google's campus. "So I grabbed my badge and lifted it up to my face because apparently that's the only place she was looking."”

Hasnain says:

Really looking forward to the next post in this series.

“This has been a deep dive into the world of branch simplification, with an emphasis on how we engineered Cranelift’s new backend to provide very good compilation speed taking control-flow handling and branch lowering/simplification as an example. We believe that there may be other significant opportunities to rethink, and carefully engineer, core algorithms in the compiler backend with specific attention to maximizing streaming behavior, minimizing indirection, and minimizing passes over data. This is an interesting and exciting engineering pursuit largely because it goes beyond the world of “theoretical standard compiler-book algorithms” and calls on problem solving to find clever new design tricks.”

Hasnain says:

“Delivering his judgement, Lord Leggatt said that the Supreme Court unanimously dismissed Uber's appeal that it was an intermediary party and stated that drivers should be considered to be working not only when driving a passenger, but whenever logged in to the app.”

Hasnain says:

Shitty software UX leading to large money losses again, take #28581. The exposition of the actual bug as it happened and the screenshot of the software are scary. Also interesting was the callout from the judge that the recipients thought the payment was legit because they only started joking about it on their internal chat a day later - after they found out it was a mistake.

I should probably start subscribing to Bloomberg since Matt Levine’s columns are always solid.

“Last August, Citigroup Inc. wired $900 million to some hedge funds by accident. Then it sent a note to the hedge funds saying, oops, sorry about that, please send us the money back. Some did. Others preferred to keep the money. Citi sued them. Yesterday Citi lost, and they got to keep the money. I read the opinion, by U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, expecting to learn about the New York legal doctrine of finders keepers—more technically, the “discharge-for-value defense”—and I was not disappointed. But I was also treated to a gothic horror story about software design. I had nightmares all night about checking the wrong boxes on the computer.”

Hasnain says:

This leaves me with a lot of mixed feelings. It's a blogpost by the founder of Waze on his experience at google and why they left N years later.

I was first nodding along with agreement as a bunch of things matched my experience at a bigco (for better or worse). But then some of the later sections around work-life balance, compensation, and transparency/directness left me with a bad taste in my mouth - in some cases I'd expect the author here to have more control over the things they are complaining about; and in others... well, I don't think 'd enjoy working with them.

"If I had to summarize it, I would say that the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers. You need to be able to answer the "what have I done for our users today" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech. I guess that's just not me. As the tech regulation / anti trust heats up - the noise will continue to get louder than the signal. The innovation challenges at Corp-Tech will only get worse as the risk tolerance will go down. Soon, Lawyers > Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new companies."

Hasnain says:

"The ultimate learn-by-doing experience might be a lesson from Japanese parachutist Yasuhiro Kubo, who holds the world record in the activity's banzai category. The sky diver tosses his chute from the plane and then jumps out after it, waiting as long as possible to retrieve it, put it on and pull the ripcord. In 2000, Kubo—starting from 9,842 feet—fell for 50 seconds before recovering his gear. A safer way to practice your technique would be at one of the wind-tunnel simulators found at about a dozen U.S. theme parks and malls."

Hasnain says:

Pretty great read on business models for a (small) open source company to consider.

“Running your own business, especially one based on open source software, is enormously rewarding, but it’s a big step and requires a lot of commitment. Make sure you put the time in ahead of time to determine which model, if any, is right for you.”

Hasnain says:

“The law is clear enough, what we need is regulatory enforcement. Just because this practice is widespread doesn't mean it's correct and acceptable."

Mr Walshe noted that the ICO had used a pixel within its own e-newsletter.

The watchdog told the BBC it was used to track email openings, but not users' locations, adding: "We're working with our provider to remove the pixel functionality and this should be completed soon."

Hasnain says:

I knew Bitcoin energy consumption was bad for the world but this really makes the scope of the problem cleared - and it’s so much worse.

“As we will see below, the more than 2 million machines used in Bitcoin mining alone consume as much energy as Egypt or the Netherlands consumes each year. And they do so while simultaneously only securing a relatively small amount of payments less than $4 billion last year. “

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting read on the whole mess that started after the NYT piece was published the other day. I haven’t been following things closely (and I had read some SSC here and there but not regularly) - the perspective here was quite useful to understand what’s going on.

“This demand for unalloyed positivity is exacerbated by a reactionary grievance culture in some corners of the tech industry that interprets critique as persecution, in part because of a widespread belief that good intentions exculpate bad behavior. Why be critical of people who are just trying to change the world? (Through their casual gaming app that allows people to group digital candy in sets of three, or their gig economy platform that has the effect of driving wages well below standard minimums, or their social network that may be responsible for an active decision to algorithmically distribute disinformation because that’s what the customer apparently wants?) Why be so negative all the time? Why be negative at all?”

Hasnain says:

Memory allocators are hard!

“Usage of an allocator which is not optimal for a workload can cause a huge waste of memory. If you have a long-running application with a lot of threads and care about memory usage then glibc malloc is probably not your choice. Allocators that are designed for multithreaded services, like TCMalloc, jemalloc and others can provide much better memory utilization. So be conscious of this factor and go and check how much memory your application wastes.”

Hasnain says:

Where do I even begin...

“"We had a conversation with one of our white friends, and she said 'No problem. I'll be Tenisha. I'll bring over some pictures of my family,'" Austin said. "She made our home look like it belonged to her."

The home appraised for $1,482,000, or roughly $500,000 more than it appraised for just weeks prior.

The change was equal to a nearly 50% increase in value.”

Hasnain says:

“I am heartened by how startling and repulsive all this blatant sexism is to the younger generations watching, and posting about, the doc. Social media has allowed new voices to circumvent the cis-white-male gatekeepers and begin to lead the conversation, and we’re better for it; young people just aren’t having this mess. They won’t stand for any guff on Billie Eilish’s baggy tracksuits or Lizzo’s size or whether Taylor Swift seems likable enough. It’s a nonstarter. I like how bad we look to them in “Finding Britney Spears.” It means there’s been progress.”

Hasnain says:

Only read the first two articles in this series so far but it’s resonated a lot and I keep nodding along. So much insightful stuff on burnout, and how it’s being horribly mismanaged.

“When you analyze the real causes of burnout, it becomes clear that almost everyone has been attacking the problem from the wrong angle. According to Christina Maslach of the University of California, Berkeley, Susan E. Jackson of Rutgers, and Michael Leiter of Deakin University, burnout has six main causes:

Unsustainable workload
Perceived lack of control
Insufficient rewards for effort
Lack of a supportive community
Lack of fairness
Mismatched values and skills

While these are all organizational issues, we still prescribe self-care as the cure for burnout. We’ve put the burden of solving the problem squarely on the shoulders of individual employees. “Let’s just recommend more yoga, wellness tech, meditation apps, and subsidized gym memberships — that’ll fix it,” we say. But those are tools for improving well-being. When it comes to preventing burnout specifically, they won’t be effective. We desperately need upstream interventions, not downstream tactics.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future rereading - postmortems are always enjoyable

Hasnain says:

“I built Litestream to bring back sanity to application development. Litestream is a tool that runs in a separate process and continuously replicates a SQLite database to Amazon S3. You can get up and running with a few lines of configuration. Then you can set-it-and-forget-it and get back to writing code.”

Hasnain says:

Continuing on the topic of the bungled vaccination rollout in the US, this is depressing - not using a vaccine and letting it go to waste *should* be criminal - what he did should be fine.

"The officials maintained that he had violated protocol and should have returned the remaining doses to the office or thrown them away, the doctor recalled. He also said that one of the officials startled him by questioning the lack of “equity” among those he had vaccinated.

“Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.

Exactly, he said he was told."

Hasnain says:

Finally a decent summary of the huge mess that was all over Twitter yesterday (very engaging drama though to be sure)

Hasnain says:

This attack is both genius and terrifying at the same time.

“From one-off mistakes made by developers on their own machines, to misconfigured internal or cloud-based build servers, to systemically vulnerable development pipelines, one thing was clear: squatting valid internal package names was a nearly sure-fire method to get into the networks of some of the biggest tech companies out there, gaining remote code execution, and possibly allowing attackers to add backdoors during builds.”

Hasnain says:

“Aside: Writing a scheduler is hard. It is much easier to have 1000 while loops waiting for the right time, than one while loop waiting for which of the 1000 is first. A scheduler can track when it last ran something, but the work can’t rely on that being the last time it ran. Idempotency isn’t just your friend, it is your saviour.)”

Hasnain says:

I think it’s extremely brave and cool that even after facing such horrible discrimination, she is pushing for laws that would start to put an end to it for everyone.

“Now, Ozoma is helping lead an effort to dramatically expand the law. She's been working for months behind the scenes with employment rights advocates and the office of California State Senator Connie Leyva, who introduced CCP 1001 in 2018, to put together legislation that would allow every person in California to speak out about workplace abuse, even after signing an NDA.”

Hasnain says:

Uh... this is extremely scary.

“"The guy was sitting there monitoring the computer as he's supposed to and all of a sudden he sees a window pop up that the computer has been accessed," Gualtieri said. "The next thing you know someone is dragging the mouse and clicking around and opening programs and manipulating the system."”

Hasnain says:

“I interviewed 10 scientists for this story and was surprised by the vehemence of some of their language. “Are you sure it could be that bad?” I asked, over and over.”

Hasnain says:

😐

““All Google has done is capitulate to PTA and censor our community,” Zafar said. “This exacerbates the human rights abuses against us as it validates Pakistan’s basis of the persecution. If there are alternative solutions, we would like to hear them, but to date Google has offered no alternatives.” “

Hasnain says:

I just read this and I don’t even know where to begin or end.

The title does not do the horrors any justice and reading it gets worse and worse as you understand the magnitude of what went wrong here - both on a personal and a societal level.

* This was not the first attempted murder
* The guy raped his niece (which is left out of the title)
* ... and was trying to murder her to prevent her testifying

I mean..

Hasnain says:

This is a harrowing and infuriating human interest story.

But also... what and why is this person doing nothing useful at all.

“She and her husband both had early work trainings that morning — training Mercedes actually wanted to engage in. “Yet he gets to lock himself in his office all day while I’m expected to entertain Mila and make breakfast for everyone,” she said. “Why can’t he do it? Why am I expected to do it all?”

Her husband is the primary breadwinner in their family, so she knows that is part of the answer. But on this day, it was as if the world was rubbing it in her face.

Mila was crying to play and Eddie kept telling her “later” — then disappearing into his office. While Mercedes was on the phone with a client whose mother had died, Mila began screaming “MAMA!” and Eddie began popping popcorn. Later, as she worked, trying to keep Mila entertained, he took a nap on the couch.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later re-reading and maybe ebook purchasing

Hasnain says:

“Despite the difficulty of the puzzle, he and other physicists still hope for a solution soon. Perhaps these efforts to understand the cosmological constant problem will reveal deeper truths about quantum physics and general relativity. Or maybe scientists will discover a simpler fix. And even while they're seeking a solution that may never materialize, many physicists revel in the quest.”

Hasnain says:

“Following a trip to Hollywood to meet with the specialist who worked on Frozen’s snow effects, Gaume modified the film’s snow animation code for his avalanche simulation models, albeit with a decidedly less entertaining purpose: to simulate the impacts that avalanches would have on the human body.”

Hasnain says:

Uh...

“The US is currently paying $13.8 million a year just to keep me here, so he could save a lot of money by just letting me go home. I am just taxi driver from Karachi, a victim of mistaken identity. The CIA even captured the real Hassan Ghul, but after interrogating him they let him go and kept me imprisoned. Perhaps they are embarrassed by their mistake?”

Hasnain says:

“On Monday Politico reported that if Republicans don’t strip Greene of committee assignments, Democrats will try to do it, bringing the issue to the House floor. Republican members will have the chance to distance themselves from her. If they don’t, it will be because they know she belongs”

Hasnain says:

“Consider the adjective “hungry” in English, a concept conveyed with the noun hambre in Spanish. By imposing Spanish grammar on the English sentence, you get the phrase: “I have hunger.” Pretty, maybe, but odd. Similarly, someone attempting to recreate a foreign cuisine may find that their native grammar sneaks into their conception of the meal. As a result, trying your home food abroad can prove disorienting: Parisian restaurants may serve a hamburger with a fork and knife; a Japanese restaurant serving yoshoku, or “Western food,” might place croquettes and cabbage rolls in a bento-like box along with tiny portions of pickled vegetables and miso soup. In China, explains Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, rice is served after the main and before the soup, making the American-Chinese tradition of serving white rice alongside the main seem as odd to Chinese diners as an English-speaker hearing a foreigner say “old silly fool” instead of “silly old fool.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting postmortem of the Slack outage from a while back.

“Slack’s annual traffic pattern is a little unusual: Traffic is lower over the holidays, as everyone disconnects from work (good job on the work-life balance, Slack users!). On the first Monday back, client caches are cold and clients pull down more data than usual on their first connection to Slack. We go from our quietest time of the whole year to one of our biggest days quite literally overnight.”