Hasnain says:

I really like this take. So many hard hitting points here as it leads to this conclusion.

“Question: “You’re a pin-up now, especially in England. Is that good? Do you enjoy that?” (A 17-year-old Maria Sharapova, Wimbledon 2004.) And of course there are plenty of decent, curious journalists out there doing decent, curious things. In a way, this is what makes the chronic lack of self‑awareness so utterly self-defeating. Read the room. We are not the good guys here. We are no longer the power. And one of the world’s best athletes would literally rather quit a grand slam tournament than have to talk to the press. Rather than scrutinising what that says about her, it might be worth asking what that says about us.”

Hasnain says:

I haven’t been following sports (nor tennis) much in the last few years so this may be ignorant... but to me it seems like the tournament organizers are very clearly wrong and this will backfire. They haven’t done any self introspection on the mental health issues caused by press interviews, made a very disgraceful tweet (now deleted, but the internet has a long memory), and said she’d be fined - and when she said she’s ok with paying the fine, proceeded to go with a ban unless she relented.

It seems like the players do have more power than the tournament organizers - and they should! - and it doesn’t seem like the tournament organizers are realizing how this can backfire.

“"So here in Paris I was already feeling vulnerable and anxious, so I thought it was better to exercise self-care and skip the press conferences. I announced it preemptively because I do feel like the rules are quite outdated in parts and I wanted to highlight that.”

Hasnain says:

“If Racine succeeds in his suit, it unravels the whole scheme. As one legal analyst told me, “Let's say a product today is sold for $10 on Amazon with 'free shipping'. If Amazon is forced to unbundle the FBA fee from the product price then it would cost $6 + $4 shipping. Prime makes no sense in this world unless Amazon again decided to subsidize Prime.” Amazon, as big as it is, doesn’t have $25-30 billion of cash flow to make that happen.”

Hasnain says:

“After a high-profile fracas at the AP last week and in the midst of the fallout from the Hannah-Jones case, two prominent journalists captured the tension of the objectivity debate on Twitter.

“It’s almost as if what position is the ‘objective neutral’ is in fact a subjective determination made by those in power,” wrote Wesley Lowery, perhaps the most well-known critic of strict objectivity.”

Hasnain says:

Doing this in an opt-in manner is a huge overreach - I’m sure it’s legal in the US but it shouldn’t be.

“By default, Amazon devices including Alexa, Echo, Ring, security cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers will enroll in the system. And since only a tiny fraction of people take the time to change default settings, that means millions of people will be co-opted into the program whether they know anything about it or not. The Amazon webpage linked above says Sidewalk "is currently only available in the US."”

Hasnain says:

“And they aren’t actually being rejected; they are being asked to respect boundaries. L.G.B.T.Q. officers are more than welcome to join Pride celebrations — unarmed and in civilian clothing. They are being asked to confront their complicity with an institution that does more harm than good to vulnerable communities. It is telling that some of these officers refuse to do so. We don’t need the police marching alongside us. We don’t need them at Pride providing security.

What we need, what we’ve always wanted and deserved, is what Debbie and I found when we first marched at Pride: a welcoming space where we can be safe and free.”

Hasnain says:

Still unfathomable how bad the US is at sick|family leave policies and healthcare in general.

So close with getting vaccines available for all; and now... this

Hasnain says:

Security is hard!

“Though this article focussed on personnel working at bases hosting nuclear weapons, they are likely not the only soldiers who are studying using flashcard apps. There appear to be examples of soldiers serving at other US and European bases posting flashcards that detail where cameras are positioned and whether they have thermal imaging. “

Hasnain says:

Even more important today given the shambles of a vote on investigating the Jan 6 insurrection

“Even with the filibuster removed or substantially modified, H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would still face barriers to becoming law. But to simply accept these barriers is nonsensical, the product of a fraudulent and conservative “realism” that is really defeatism by any other name. What, after all, is more important: the death of democracy, or the preservation of a Senate tradition that has been leveraged for decades to protect conservative minority rule?”

Hasnain says:

This is so messed up.

“Well after midnight, Los Angeles police made an arrest. In a separate Slack room, employees cautiously began to celebrate: "cop said its an ongoing investigation, this looks like our guy!!!" one employee wrote.

It wasn't Citizen's guy. Frame and the entirety of the Citizen apparatus had spent a whole night putting a bounty on the head of an innocent man. “

Hasnain says:

Just saw the video - wtf.

“"This past weekend, one of our flight attendants was seriously assaulted, resulting in injuries to the face and a loss of two teeth," TWU Local 556 President Lyn Montgomery wrote in a letter to Southwest CEO Gary Kelly. “

Hasnain says:

This is pretty scary.

“Those are the findings of a poll released today by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which found that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters. The same share said it was true that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to depose the pedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order.”

Hasnain says:

Honestly can’t believe this is happening. The reactions are entirely predictable though.

“The top United Nations human rights body decided on Thursday to create an open-ended international investigation into Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, after the UN rights chief said Israeli forces may have committed war crimes and faulted the Hamas terror group for violations of international law in their 11-day war this month.”

Hasnain says:

Welcome to our dystopian corporate world.

“Companies are showing, then, that they would rather rule out job candidates from an entire state rather than comply with a law intended to close pay gaps and increase transparency about pay and benefits.”

Hasnain says:

I still haven’t seen any explanation for why the Overton window in American politics is so messed up that this hasn’t happened yet.

“But they have a central problem: The things they oppose tend to be overwhelmingly popular. So they paint the agenda with the broad brush of “socialism.” Rather than insisting they are not socialists, Democrats should ignore the label and demand that Republicans specifically explain what they oppose and why. What is wrong with making corporations pay some taxes? Why don’t they want to provide two years of free community college? Do they really not want to rebuild Veterans Affairs hospitals, decrepit water systems and power grids?”

Hasnain says:

I can’t even…

Since the initial investigation happened there are now 20+ allegations. And he’s still on the faculty

Hasnain says:

As one Twitter commented so eloquently put it:

“Judges are scoring her new move at a lower difficulty out of “fear that Biles is so good that she might run away with any competition she enters simply by doing a handful of moves that her rivals cannot.””

Michael Phelps gets lauded for having genetic advantages no one has - but she does things so we it’s suddenly unfair to everyone else?

I wonder what the difference here is /s

Hasnain says:

““Traditional statistical disclosure limitation methods, like those used in the 2010 census, cannot defend against modern challenges posed by enormous cloud computing capacity and sophisticated software libraries,” John Abowd, the bureau’s chief scientist, wrote in a declaration to the court. And expanding upon practices like swapping to the degree necessary to ensure privacy would “render the resulting data unusable for most data users.””

Hasnain says:

This is still breaking news so the facts are fuzzy, but this is absolutely crazy. A flight carrying an anti-govt journalist happened to cross over their airspace so the local KGB call in a bomb threat (some sources say they also fought staff on the plane); make it land in their jurisdiction (with a military jet escort!), detain the journalist, and then let the flight be on its way.

“The Belta news agency reported that the plane had been rerouted to Minsk International Airport for an emergency landing due to a bomb scare.

An airport spokesperson told the agency that although authorities did not find any explosive devices on the plane, it was unclear when it would be allowed to take off again.

The opposition Telegram channel Nexta also reported that the plane was searched. The outlet said its former editor, Roman Protasevich had been detained.”

Hasnain says:

This was pretty engaging.

“TL;DR You can move-constructors the Rust! It requires a few macros but isn’t much more outlandish than the async pinning state of the art. A prototype of this idea is implemented in my moveit crate.”

Hasnain says:

What the heck, Salesforce?

“The sound of rumbling rubber could be heard today as Salesforce threw an engineer responsible for a change that knocked it offline under a passing bus.

"We're not blaming one employee," said Chief Availability Officer Darryn Dieken after spending the first half hour of a Wednesday briefing on the outage doing pretty much that very thing.”

Hasnain says:

Cancel culture for thee, but not for me. Also great timing since more revelations came out about Cuomo but it’s fine for him to continue influencing reporting on his brother, while Palestinian people can’t report on their country because they’ll be too biased, nor can minorities report on their issues because of that, or as I learnt recently - sexual assault survivors can’t report on that because they would be too biased. None of this makes sense.

“"There's no question I was just canceled," Wilder told SFGATE by phone Thursday afternoon. "This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around 'cancel culture.' To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture — specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine — it's always the same side."”

Hasnain says:

This was really interesting.

“SolarWinds demonstrated how precarious this structure remains, he argues. As Leetham sees it, the security world blindly put its trust in something that existed outside its threat model, never imagining that an adversary might attack it. And once again, the adversary pulled out a supporting card underpinning the house’s foundation—one that had been confused for solid ground.”

Hasnain says:

This is an amazing (not) defense: claiming that the ground truth they had is racist so there’s nothing wrong with this app being biased either.

“A Google spokesperson told Motherboard that that the entire field of dermatology suffers from a lack of data and images of non-white patients and that accounting for that problem was at the forefront of researchers minds as they designed the app, which they plan to further refine before its public release.

“Our AI-powered dermatology assist tool is the culmination of more than three years of research,” “

Hasnain says:

“Numerous outlets reported over the weekend that Palestinian protesters in Toronto had assaulted an older Jewish man. What they did not note, Domise pointed out, was that the older man had been armed and had joined a group of people who had already instigated the fight. The group appeared to be attending a counterprotest by the Jewish Defense League, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group for promoting “a violent form of anti-Arab, Jewish nationalism.” The man told the Toronto Sun that he was not a JDL member.

“When we use the wrong language, it really minimizes and reduces the pain of people felt here.”
In response to the video, Toronto Mayor John Tory made a statement condemning antisemitism, as did Ontario Premier Doug Ford. CBC later reported on the full video, which showed that the man had been armed and instigated a fight. “

Hasnain says:

This is just terrible. As someone bluntly put it, if racism can prevent such a renowned scholar and journalist (a Pulitzer Prize winner!) from getting a well deserved tenured appointment - which was approved by faculty already - then what hope does the average person have when everything is rigged against them?

“The Board of Governors has decided not to reappoint certain trustees they felt were not on the right ideological page, the trustee said, and have even engineered the ouster of chancellors with whom they disagreed. They have defunded academic centers and discontinued programs with which they were at political odds. Trustees across the system know that track record when they’re making these kinds of decisions, the trustee said.”

Hasnain says:

Worth reading the transcript in full.

“And that’s really the the central aspect, because what is happening now in Gaza, it has to stop. This kind of bombings, it just has to stop. That’s the most essential aspect to save human lives. But that’s not sufficient. The people responsible need to be held accountable, because, otherwise, it’s just going to be allowed to continue the same way that this has been allowed to continue, which has brought us to this assault on the Gaza Strip. But also, it’s essential that we do not go back to the status quo. The status quo is a false term. It’s never static. And the status quo is not justice. The status quo is apartheid. So, yes, the bloodshed that is happening now has to stop. But the bloodshed is related to the underlying reality, to the overarching reality, to the condition of apartheid that has to end.”

Hasnain says:

“The residents’ response surprised the cleaners. “This is the perfect time to fix this distortion and start to employ only Jews! Or Arabs who are loyal to the State of Israel and declare so openly,” one resident wrote to City Hall. Another added, “Fire them, it’s identifying with terror,” and another raged, “Now employ only Jews and they can go to hell.” Only one resident countered these comments, writing, “People are losing their homes and lives these days, but Modi’in’s garbage hasn’t been collected. Too bad that the garbage that comes out of people’s mouths is harder to collect.””

Hasnain says:

“And despite the culture’s best effort to slickly reimagine this moment as one born of women’s ‘choices’, the truth is far simpler: American women are being gaslit. Being pushed out of our careers is not a good thing, and it is absolutely possible to be a happy working parent, even now. How do I know that parents can ‘have it all’? That it’s actually completely feasible to work and take care of children without giving up your career goals or life ambitions?”

Hasnain says:

“I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because one time everyone else in my department quit or was fired in the space of six months, leaving me and a Harvard guy. I asked Harvard if he was worried and he said no. He was thinking about taking a year off anyway, then maybe starting his own business. On my way home, I noticed Starbucks was hiring. “

Hasnain says:

“Now, members of the new organization are calling on Google to support freedom of expression internally — particularly around anti-Zionist viewpoints. “Google is the world’s largest search engine and any repression of freedom of expression occurring within the company is a danger not only to Googlers internally but to all people around the world,” they wrote in an FAQ.”

Hasnain says:

“Giapis agonized over how to explain that discrepancy. Because of delays due to COVID-19 shutdowns, he was not able to run the rope conductivity test until just a few days before the shoot. "We were about to start filming and my theory had a gaping hole in it. I had to think hard and fast." And then, just two days before the shoot, the answer came to him: After the ship was grounded, it became more electrically charged.”

Hasnain says:

TIL a lot more about chess than I knew before.

“There are many more fascinating positions that baffle even the most advanced chess A.I. To demonstrate this, I've selected ten types of positions that your brain may be better able to understand than a silicon imitation. While some modern engines may be able to solve these positions with considerable time to think and a lot of powerful hardware, many of these positions will fully defy the understanding of even the best modern engines.”

Hasnain says:

Really interesting debugging story and technical read. I just learnt a bunch more about networking!

“This was an eye-opening experience for us. We saw how far behind Linux is on the tracing tooling side. Even with all advances on the eBPF front, there’s still no unified format in Linux for collecting traces across all kernel subsystems. tcpdump is an awesome tool, but it only provides insight into what’s happening on the wire—it can’t connect that to other kernel events.

netsh trace, on the other hand, correlates events on the wire with events that happen on the TCP layer, timers, buffer management, socket layer, and even the Windows asyncio subsystem (IOCP).”

Hasnain says:

“The problem is compounded by how little government funding is going toward studying the effects of these platforms, relative to how much of each day many Americans spend engaged with the technology.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is mostly focused on curing diseases, but because there is no specific disease officially associated with screen time, experts say it's difficult to get studies funded by the federal government.”

Hasnain says:

“The report said working long hours was estimated to be responsible for about a third of all work-related disease, making it the largest occupational disease burden.”

Hasnain says:

IGN had come out in support of the Palestinians in a way I had never seen any US corporation do before - ever - and it was so well lauded. A lot of people, myself included, were really disappointed when it was (inevitably) taken down.

This offers more insight into just how that happened and I am glad the employees are taking a stand against corporate.

“Importantly, we feel the latest statement dangerously turns what was a matter of supporting innocent civilians facing a humanitarian crisis into a harmful case of “both sides”-ism. Helping children and civilians harmed by the horrors of war should be uncontroversial no matter who the two sides are, and is in keeping with IGN’s ongoing efforts to highlight causes that are important to our team — such as our support for Black Lives Matter last year and our more recent celebration of AAPI Heritage Month and joining the call to end AAPI hate. The victims here deserve the same support.”

Hasnain says:

“AI is a field dominated by emotionally immature white and Asian men. If you can ignore all of the brilliance of human interactions and focus your soul on calculus you can become a rising star in the field of AI. All you need to do is beat the benchmarks and come up with clever formulae and you can be great. What Timnit said resonated closely with me because when I had gone to that conference with Meg I saw an engineer present his findings regarding police profiling systems. A researcher from UCLA had presented a system for determining whether or not a given dispatch was “gang related” so that the police could bring “the appropriate amount of force”. Several other people had asked him about the biases of the datasets his system consumed and he had canned answers for those questions. I asked him: (paraphrasing) “Let’s assume that all of those concerns are irrelevant and that your system perfectly predicts whether or not a dispatch is gang related. Are you at all concerned that the informational advantage you’re giving to the police might cause the gangs to unilaterally raise their force profile thereby making a bad situation worse?” His response: “Man I’m just an engineer.” I decided that the best response was to sing Tim Lehrer’s “Werner von Braun” into the microphone.”

Hasnain says:

“The speed has been extraordinary. As I've talked with folks who have expressed interest in the jobs we're hiring for, they've been asking what to expect, and I told them that if anything, this will feel like they're hitting an accelerator from what they've come from. I lived fast-growth startups prior to coming to Google, I lived some bets, company initiatives at Google, and then at Google Ventures got to see companies grow to go public. This feels like any one of those busiest days is a typical day here.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty interesting read on corporate cultures, investigations, and the real kernels of truth in this story.

“There’s just one problem: Montañez didn’t invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, according to interviews with more than a dozen former Frito-Lay employees, the archival record and Frito-Lay itself.

“None of our records show that Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin’ Hot test market,” Frito-Lay wrote in a statement to The Times, in response to questions about an internal investigation whose existence has not been previously disclosed. “We have interviewed multiple personnel who were involved in the test market, and all of them indicate that Richard was not involved in any capacity in the test market.”

Hasnain says:

Oooof, what the heck?! And there are people out here saying racism isn’t systemic.

“Former players who suffer dementia or other diagnoses can be eligible for a payout.

Under the settlement, however, the NFL has insisted on using a scoring algorithm on the dementia testing that assumes Black men start with lower cognitive skills. They must therefore score much lower than whites to show enough mental decline to win an award. The practice, which went unnoticed until 2018, has made it harder for Black former players to get awards.”

Hasnain says:

The US finally decided to issue some condemnation, but this totally misses the mark because it *only* focuses on journalists as if those are the only lives that matter.

When will this all end?!

“White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted Saturday that the U.S. had “communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility.””

Hasnain says:

All the news has been depressing to read and ingest over the last few days. No day should be like this for anyone. Let alone Eid. :(

And this is amidst reports that a ground invasion is planned for later today. I’m hoping that turns out to not be the case when I wake up.

“Gaza’s Ministry of Health said the overall death toll since the start of the latest offensive stood at 69, including 17 children and eight women as of early Thursday. More than 390 others have been wounded.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting catalog of COVID history that is trying to preserve an archive for when the dust settles. I’m definitely interested in following this one.

“One of the most bizarre episodes in public health had resolved, and was almost instantly memory-holed. Now it was those not wearing masks who were stigmatised- those who adopted the prevailing view of March 2020 only a few months later found themselves accused of psychopathy or toxic masculinity.

But how on earth and why did this happen? Was this a noble lie? a fumble? self correcting science? We’ll be exploring all of that next week”

Hasnain says:

I am glad he is no longer at apple. The article links to more quotes and…

Hasnain says:

I feel like if anyone submitted this as the plot to a movie it’d get shot down as being too unrealistic. But here we are. As long as it gets them to wear masks I guess?

““I am going to be watching these vaccine shedding stories like a hawk,” wrote another man on Twitter. “Is my family going to need to wear masks to protect ourselves from the vaccinated?””

Hasnain says:

“Several years later, the Scottish polemicist Thomas Carlyle jumped into the fray, in an article with the viciously racist title you might assume. With a few changes, the substance of its argument could appear in National Review today:

The West Indies, it appears, are short of labour. … Where a Black man, by working about half-an-hour a-day … can supply himself, aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work! … Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at ease in his creation, he can listen to the less fortunate white man’s “demand,” and take his own time in supplying it. Higher wages, massa; higher, for your cane crop cannot wait; — still higher, til no conceivable opulence of cane crop will cover such wages.”

Hasnain says:

Linking to Twitter threads sucks - but this was quite worth it. Really informative read on the history of infectious disease research and why the CDC and the WHO repeatedly got it wrong, dismissing airborne transmission as a theory and leading to so many deaths.

Hasnain says:

“As our time together is winding slowy to a close, I wish I'd taken better care of it. Better food, more exercise, more relaxation . . . but I also wonder if it would have made any difference. I tell myself it still has useful years ahead of it, even if it can't do some of the things it once accomplished with ease. I reflect, sheepishly, that it is the only animal I have ever treated this way. Would I have fed a beloved dog stimulants to keep it working when it needed sleep? Never. Would I have dosed a cat with a mild poisoning of alcohol to relax it among strangers? Of course not. “

Hasnain says:

Interesting technical debugging story.

“Memory reclamation is one of the most complicated parts of the Linux kernel. It is full of heuristic algorithms, complex corner cases, complicated data structures, and convoluted interaction with other subsystems. Memory reclamation is the core part of the Linux kernel and is relied upon by other subsystems. However, the bugs or suboptimal behaviors of memory reclamation may take a long time to get discovered. The fixes may be quite subtle and the validation may take substantial efforts to guarantee no regressions.”

Hasnain says:

“Society started to glorify the entrepreneurs who said they wanted to change the world, and told us how they structured their (very long) days for maximum greatness. Maitlis highlights a motivational shift between the Gordon Gekkos and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world; the latter felt they were fueled by “passion for the product or service, or for a higher purpose". (The joke was on us, though, because much of that new technology ended up enabling the kind of overwork and burnout we're dealing with today.)”

Hasnain says:

“As the valley’s tech companies have driven the American economy since the Great Recession, the region has remained one of the most unequal in the United States.

During the depths of the pandemic, four in 10 families in the area with children could not be sure that they would have enough to eat on any given day, according to an analysis by the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies. Just months later, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, who recently added “Technoking” to his title, briefly became the world’s richest man. The median home price in Santa Clara County — home to Apple and Alphabet — is now $1.4 million, according to the California Association of Realtors.”

Hasnain says:

This sounds like a coverup mixed with a case of dog ate the homework.

Hasnain says:

I had known about the Monty hall problem and the subsequent confusion as experts even doubted the analyses - but I had not known how vile and mean the comments had gotten - for no reason!

And this was back when sending comments actually required writing a letter and so I can only imagine how bad it would’ve been with the internet.

“Though her answer was correct, a vast swath of academics responded with outrage. In the proceeding months, vos Savant received more than 10,000 letters -- including a pair from the Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information, and a Research Mathematical Statistician from the National Institutes of Health -- all of which contended that she was entirely incompetent:”

Hasnain says:

“The title can be read the other way. By emphasizing latency we get feedback sooner. Learning and adapting to external changes lead to less waste and therefore greater efficiency. Each piece is inefficient (compared to some theoretical maximum), but the whole is efficient.
In my world, latency dominates. Mostly. But it depends.”

Hasnain says:

So hard hitting and on point.

“Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.”

...

“But rather than collectively grieve the deaths of tens of thousands of the people who serve us and keep us fed, and keep such tragedies in mind when considering the state of the food-service industry labor market today, business owners and their political lackeys call these workers “lazy.””

Hasnain says:

“This denialist rhetoric is occurring at almost every level. Like India’s see-no-evil approach to malaria or tuberculosis, its Covid obfuscation suppresses “bad news” in order to buoy the country’s international image and the government party’s domestic standing. Not all countries with struggling health systems do this. Some actually at times overcount deaths from other viruses in order to get more humanitarian aid. But undercounting disease is, in many ways, far more sinister. Modi’s government had a choice between saving face and saving lives, and has chosen mass death.”

Hasnain says:

So messed up.

““I decided to do exactly what was done in the article,” Duffy said. “I took down every photo of my family from my house. … I took every piece of ethnic artwork out, so any African artwork, I took it out. I displayed my degrees, I removed certain books.”

Duffy asked a white male friend to sit in on the home appraisal and did not declare her race in her application or communications with the appraisal company. The new appraisal came back at more than double the first two, valuing her home more than $100,000 higher.”

Hasnain says:

From a 60 minutes special on this: ““Are we going to go all the way back to Native Americans [and give their land back]? Where does that stop?” says a White resident of Manhattan Beach, shedding light on the local opposition to returning land taken from a Black family one century ago”

From the article:

““We’re still suffering for what their ancestors did. Somebody needs to rectify this injustice,” he said. “They’re still benefiting from the generational wealth of their ancestors while we don’t have a dime coming in.””

Hasnain says:

Really great read on how the Econ and law cabal can hurt society - especially the Chicago school of thought.

“Quantitative disciplines – physics, math, and (especially) computer sci­ence – make a pretense of objectivity. They make very precise measure­ments of everything that can be measured precisely, assign deceptively precise measurements to things that can’t be measured precisely, and jet­tison the rest on the grounds that you can’t do mathematical operations on it.

This is the quant’s version of the drunkard’s search for car-keys under the lamp-post: we can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide qualitative elements, so we just incinerate them, sweep up the dubious quantitative residue that remains, do math on that, and simply assert that nothing important was lost in the process.”

Hasnain says:

This is full of fire and such a good takedown. I won’t quote Santorum’s extremely bigoted remarks (they’re linked to early on in the article) but suffice to say they were pretty bad.

“Meanwhile, CNN has yet to make a comment about Santorum's latest outburst.

The lesson from all these examples is crystal clear for most commentators of color: You can be a nativist, a bigot, an Islamophobe, a homophobe, a creep and a liar, but as long as you’re good for the bottom line and you don’t piss off the right-wing outrage mob, you are good for cable news. If you happen to be a white conservative, like Rick Santorum, you’ll always have a blank slate to birth new controversies.”

Hasnain says:

More on the basecamp aftermath. Great reporting.

“Over the next hour, employees continued to come forward to discuss Basecamp’s new policies and what would be like going forward. But before the meeting ended, one employee spoke up to address Singer’s remarks directly in a way that Fried and Hansson did not.

“Racism [and] white supremacy are not things that are so convenient that they only happen when full intention is present, or true malice is present,” the employee said. “Evil is not required. We’re not so lucky as for this to come down to good and evil. It’s as simple as creating a space where people do not feel welcome.”

The employee continued: “The silence in the background is what racism and white supremacy does. It creates that atmosphere that feels suffocating to people. It doesn't require active malice. It's not that convenient.””

Hasnain says:

This is not the story I expected I’d be reading tonight but it’s really interesting.

“The Taliban was so annoyed by their constant fighting that they threw them in jail. But they eventually kicked them out when they continued to fight inside the prison. Levi died in 2005.”

Hasnain says:

This is so cool. When I had to do something similar ages ago (holy crap, I feel old) I ended up sharding the dataset into static flat files and filtering on the client. While that’s still held up, this is just much more flexible and easier to update.

“I was writing a tiny website to display statistics of how much sponsored content a Youtube creator has over time when I noticed that I often write a small tool as a website that queries some data from a database and then displays it in a graph, a table, or similar. But if you want to use a database, you either need to write a backend (which you then need to host and maintain forever) or download the whole dataset into the browser (which is not so great when the dataset is more than 10MB).”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future investigation of the code itself so I can contrast it with my own implementation of something similar.

“I've worked with enough companies and teams to imagine several different approaches to build a system like this. Those approaches would all require large multi-disciplinary teams like a front-end JS team, a backend team, a DevOps team, and more. In contrast, I set out to do this by myself, in my spare time, and with a whole lot of "life" happening too.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty good read on database systems.

“In this post, we’re going to talk about some of the philosophical differences between how pull and push based query engines work, and then talk about the practical differences of why you might prefer one over the other, guided by these questions we’re trying to answer.”

Hasnain says:

Have they heard of something called a door? The gif of this in action (in the article) is quite weird

“If a meeting requires privacy, a robot that looks like the innards of a computer on wheels and is equipped with sensors to detect its surroundings comes over to inflate a translucent, cellophane balloon wall to keep prying eyes away.”

Hasnain says:

“An Amazon spokeswoman, requesting anonymity even though she’s, you know, a spokeswoman, declined to comment on the new ruling or whether Amazon will appeal it to the state Supreme Court.”

Hasnain says:

The headline here is very charitable and makes it look like this guy made one small mistake. Even my quoted excerpt does that. This is just way worse. How did this guy get elected and why is he not in jail for longer!

Also, he tries to say “I went to jail for battery. Does that make me a criminal?”. Um...

“In another video, he tells students, “Class, you have permission to kick him in the balls.”

Parents told The Star that Samsel “put hands on the student” and allegedly kneed him in the crotch. In a video apparently taken immediately after the incident, the student is shown on the ground. Samsel is standing over him and says, “did it hurt?””

Hasnain says:

As someone points out - why would you do so much obviously corrupt stuff for less than you make in a year? This doesn’t make sense.

“As Netflix’s Vice President of IT Operations, Kail approved the contracts to purchase IT products and services from smaller outside vendor companies and authorized their payments. The evidence demonstrated that Kail accepted bribes in ‘kickbacks’ from nine tech companies providing products or services to Netflix. In exchange, Kail approved millions of dollars in contracts for goods and services to be provided to Netflix. Kail ultimately received over $500,000 and stock options from these outside companies. He used his kickback payments to pay personal expenses and to buy a home in Los Gatos, California in the name of a family trust. “

Hasnain says:

I mean if you’re going to make a bill like this, that you know is unconstitutional and will get struck down, at least go all in?

“The bill includes a clause that exempts a company "that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex" - which allows Disney to be exempt from this bill.

"If Facebook buys a theme park, does that prevent us from being able to regulate what happens on Facebook?" asked Andrew Learned a Democratic member of Florida's House of Representatives.

"So, if they bought a theme park and named it Zuckerland and he met the definition of a theme park under Florida statute, then yes," said Republican Representative Blaise Ingoglia.”