Hasnain says:

This was a really important read. The author explains their struggles with mental illness; and calls out the feedback they got from being rejected at Yale. And then how they got admitted at Harvard after leaving their struggles out of the essay. This also has opinions and analysis of how this affects a lot of other current students.

“Effective admissions policies require grasping how mental illness manifests in different students’ lives. The same crisis that leads to an outpouring of support for a wealthy child might cause a foster youth to be sent to a locked facility, prescribed antipsychotics and forced to change schools. Stigma varies widely across communities, affecting how teenagers view their struggles and what leeway they get from adults. Some kids are far less likely to be diagnosed and treated; others receive superfluous labels and get overmedicated. Understanding these disparities is crucial in the face of worsening adolescent mental health and ever more competitive standards at the colleges that produce an outsize share of leaders.

For a decade, I believed my story was an anomaly, but every year that seems less and less true. There are so many young people unable to hide their crises. We all lose out if this disqualifies them from a better future.”

Hasnain says:

Great exposition of ideas in programming language design conveyed through documentation. I’m looking forward to trying this.

“This isn’t for everyone. But it is for me, because after ten years in the industry, the last thing I want from a programming language is “power”. What I want are fewer nightmares. The “liberties” that programming languages provide feel like expressive power until your codebase becomes a mental health superfund site.”

Hasnain says:

This was an emotional and moving read - one I am only starting to fully appreciate.

“Other parents note that the nature of the relationship between parent and child changes over time in ways that are hard to stomach. One of the reasons parenting gradually gets less demanding is that parents become less central to a child’s happiness. School and friends, and eventually partners and work, take precedence, and parents shift into the child’s periphery. Although the utter physical dependency of a small child on their parents can be overwhelming, it comes with an intimacy that is impossible to preserve as the child matures. “I have a great relationship with my daughter now,” Marie Graham, a mother of one from Salford, England, who runs a wellness company, told me. “But the intensity of the relationship you have with your young child, you’re never going to re-create.” Regardless of how close my daughter and I remain, there will come a time when she no longer seeks comfort by crawling into my lap. Whatever liberation comes with that transition will be bittersweet.”

Hasnain says:

“This year on Christmas Day, unmasked travellers across the country screamed at unmasked ticket agents, while unmasked leftists criticized unmasked liberals for the DOT’s non-response, while unmasked kids suffered yet another reinfection with a disease known to spike risk of heart failure 72%. Next year on Christmas, the picture will look much the same unless we confront our collective denial and acknowledge that COVID won’t go away because we pretend not to see it.”

Hasnain says:

“UK millennials and their “Gen Z” younger cousins will probably cast more votes than boomers in the next general election. After years of being considered an electoral afterthought, their vote will soon be pivotal. Without drastic changes to both policy and messaging, that could consign conservative parties to an increasingly distant second place.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great analysis and I found myself nodding along - we love going to our local Barnes and Noble.

“Frankly, I could draw many other lessons from the Barnes & Noble turnaround. I praise its decentralization, and its willingness to empower booksellers at the local stores. I like the way the stores look nowadays, and the improved selection on the shelves. But the key element uniting all of this is putting books and readers first, and everything else second.

That’s a strategy that others could learn from. Although I’m not sure you can teach it.

You don’t fall in love for logical reasons, and you could never convince someone else to do so on the basis of arguments. People either feel it or they don’t. That’s true whether you love your spouse or you love something more intangible like a song or a book or a movie.”

Hasnain says:

I’m a huge fan of Advent of Code so I read this for that alone. But this has a great set of tips for how to learn in general - not just applicable to programming languages.

“I highly recommend Advent of Code to anyone looking to sharpen (or re-sharpen) their programming skills.

It is exceptionally well done.

And, if you want to attempt your own bread-first search of programming languages, it is an excellent way to do so!”

Hasnain says:

Very timely article after the thing I recently shared re: technology bugs causing revenue loss. This situation has been nuts.

“But the scale of this past week’s storm, coupled with a network that still hasn’t been fully restored in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, gummed things up. Even as it tried to solve one set of problems, new ones would emerge.

Crews and planes were out of place. Phone lines jammed up, and Southwest pilots and flight attendants trying to get assignments couldn’t get through to the scheduling department. Some shared screenshots on social media that showed hold times of eight hours or more—which meant they could wait a full workday for instructions while flights were stuck for the lack of a crew. The airline was scrambling just to figure out where its crew members were located, union leaders said.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting analysis - I've definitely run into a lot of bugs here and there but have never done an analysis like this.

"That got me interested in the class of bugs where the cost is direct and obvious. And the most obvious case of “obvious cost” is when the bug prevents me from spending money. In October I started recording instances of this I’ve run into."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading.

Hasnain says:

Really interesting application of reverse engineering on obfuscated JavaScript.

“This article does not delve into the specifics of how these strings are utilized or how TikTok interprets the rest of the bytecode through its custom virtual machine and various opcodes. If that is something you are interested in, keep an eye out for the second part of this series :)”

Hasnain says:

““Our proof is constructive, so everything is explicit and computable,” Greenfeld said. “But because it’s very, very far from being optimal, we just didn’t check it.”

Indeed, the mathematicians think they can find aperiodic tiles in much lower dimensions. That’s because some of the more technical parts of their construction involved working in special spaces that are conceptually “very close to being two-dimensional,” Greenfeld said. She doesn’t think they’ll find a three-dimensional tile, but she says it’s feasible that a 4D one could exist.

And so, Iosevich said, they didn’t just disprove the periodic tiling conjecture: “They did this in the most humiliating fashion possible.””

Hasnain says:

Great high level summary and analysis of Elon Musk’s reign at Twitter so far.

“The Twitter CEO was on a live audio chat Tuesday night with software engineers when one user started quizzing him about the internal workings of the company’s systems. Musk, who hours earlier said he would keep control of Twitter’s software systems even though he plans to relinquish the CEO role, said the company’s code needed a complete rewrite. One of the participants asked what he meant — pushing for him to explain it from top to bottom.

“Amazing, wow,” Musk said after hesitations and pauses. “You’re a jackass. … What a moron.””

Hasnain says:

“Basically, an automated machine-learning tool won’t pick up on what’s bad about the email if it hasn’t been trained to pick up on the code that comes after the hash. “It’s a little Rube Goldberg, but this is what we’re seeing attackers of all stripes using,” Kalember says. “They’re hiding what we call ‘the payload’ behind something that a human can find very easily in an email but a detection technique finds impossibly hard.” It also doesn’t help that spammers and cybercriminals no longer need to set up their own janky phishing sites. In some cases they’ll use architecture provided by the big cloud companies, like Amazon and Google—which sends the signal to anti-fraud tools that their operation is “legitimate.” “

Hasnain says:

I still mostly follow traditional media so this shift is something where I need to get with the times. Do folks have recommendations for people to follow to get good news?

“We are at an inflection point, and traditional media beginning to crumble provides a huge opportunity. We finally have the chance to build a more diverse and inclusive system that amplifies independent voices who are truly interested in holding power to account. To do that, we need to not only hold the platforms that incentivize outrage, harassment, and disinformation accountable, but we must also be sure not to replicate the flaws of traditional media in a new setting.

We cannot allow rich and powerful creators to disguise themselves as grassroots or to seize power online in order to promote extremist ideology. We must also encourage traditional media, which can still provide a crucial check on power, to learn, grow, and adapt to serve a broader, younger, more diverse audience.”

Hasnain says:

It’s sad that mental health is still not taken as seriously as physical health by the public at large. So many people would do better with a little more support, understanding, and resources - if only we acknowledged that it’s something that’s real rather than something to be swept under the rug.

“But I have mental health disabilities of my own, and I work with college students. I see the rising pressures they face and their consequences in the classroom. Given what I see and hear every day and what I’ve experienced firsthand, I fear that these higher-profile stories from Stanford and Yale are just the tip of the iceberg, a tiny visible sliver of an immense problem across higher education. Essentially, though both institutions have denied this characterization, schools like Yale are using fear of an incident like the suicide at Stanford as a reason to push mentally disabled students off campus as quickly as possible.

It’s driven by stigma, and likely a fear of liability. And until we treat mental health as a disability – which is to say a protected category with specific civil rights protections – rather than reacting from stigma, it’s not going to get better. Meanwhile, every indicator we have is that the mental health pressures on young people have only gotten worse thanks to the pandemic, rising violence, the climate crisis and more. We have to do everything possible to support people in crisis.”

Hasnain says:

“With universities offering better compensation either as concession or a preemptive strategy to address graduate student demands, momentum for the unionization of academic workers is almost sure to pick up steam. While the full implications of the University of California strike are still unfolding, we may be seeing the beginning of a new period of campus activism with labor organizing as a prominent feature.”

Hasnain says:

“America has always been that guy.

I’m a professor.

I know most students hate groupwork, especially the high-achievers. They’re the ones who get stuck with all the responsibility.

A lot of us remember how groupwork used to go back in high school and college. One or two of us did everything. On presentation day, the guy who did nothing talked over us and tried to take credit. He was the “facilitator.”

We would wind up getting a B.

He would complain.

That’s how western countries have acted during this pandemic. China, Japan, South Korea, they all stepped up and did the work. Meanwhile, almost half of Americans ignored precautions and then lied about it.

The pandemic is a group project.

America is that guy.”

Hasnain says:

It always disappoints me that white collar crime like this (and wage theft) receives so much less coverage than other types of crime (like say shoplifting) even though the monetary damages are not even within a couple of orders of magnitude. I pray for the day when reporting and consciousness around crime is a little more informed and a little less emotional.

Also why does this make the share price rise?!

“The bank agreed to a consent order with the CFPB without admitting to the agency’s allegations.

Wells Fargo said it expects a pretax operating loss of about $3.5 billion in the fourth quarter, which includes the CFPB civil penalty and remediation, as well as other litigation expenses.

Shares of the company rose 0.7% to $42.11 at 9:57 a.m. in New York.”

Hasnain says:

Perfect example of how to lie with statistics. I made some uncomfortable noises when I got to the part where they just changed the confidence interval cause the one they calculated seemed “too wide”.

“You may have heard the shocking headline this week that 250,000 people die every year in the US due to misdiagnosis in the ER.

You may be even more shocked to know that this statistic is extrapolated from the death of… just one man. In a Canadian ER. Over a decade ago.”

Hasnain says:

This is really scary - I hope the worst predictions don’t come to pass.

“On top of that, the virus appears to be spreading faster in China than omicron spread in surges elsewhere, Cowling adds. Last winter, cases doubled in the U.S. every three days or so. "Now in China, the doubling time is like hours," Cowling says. "Even if you manage to slow it down a bit, it's still going to be doubling very, very quickly. And so the hospitals are going to come under pressure possibly by the end of this month."”

Hasnain says:

Sigh. Predictions are now around 1M deaths in china alone in 2023 😕

“The Omicron variant of the virus has begun to run rampant through several big cities since the sudden U-turn on president Xi Jinping’s former zero-Covid policy of containment earlier this month. The surge in infections is largest in the capital Beijing, where more than half the 22mn population is infected, according to some estimates.

Many office workers have begun to work from home but some factories are becoming thinly staffed as workers call in sick. Business owners and executives said this was causing increasing disruption to production and supply chains.”

Hasnain says:

Great take from a reporter that has been covering Musk critically for a long time. She also got banned in the great journalist purge of twitter; even though she didn’t even do anything remotely close to the doxxing claims. He just hated having critics.

“Selling the dream is what turned Tesla's stock into a superstar since it went public. People bought Tesla to be part of Musk's mission. It didn't matter that the company only became profitable last year, or that it had an unreliable lineup of vehicles, or that more-established automakers were poised to catch up to its technology. Any journalist or investor who questioned Musk or his mission then — just like now — was subject to bullying and harrassment. The evangelists, the faithful, made Tesla the most valuable car company in the world (for now) based on how Musk said it would change the future. Call me cynical, but I don't see that happening for Twitter. Musk may claim he bought the company in the name of free speech all he wants, but unlike with his other ventures, he simply does not have enough people out there — be they the media, his customers, his employees, or his users — who believe.”

Hasnain says:

“The nearly 160,000 square feet that Yelp left empty is about half of the building’s space, and about half of that has been re-leased. The good news for Pembroke seems less good for the city. Some of the new tenants are finance and venture capital firms that have clung to the gravitas of a physical office for client meetings and the occasional conference but are unlikely to contribute regular foot traffic, according to building owners across the city.

In a typical downturn, the turnaround is a fairly simple equation of rents falling far enough to attract new tenants and the economy improving fast enough to stimulate new demand. But now there’s a more existential question of what the point of a city’s downtown even is.”

Hasnain says:

“The idea that a child born today could contract COVID 40 times before college and live a normal, healthy lifespan, is completely unsupported by what we know about this disease. It harms the blood vessels. It harms the immune system. It spikes your risk of diabetes, heart attack, stroke, and blood clots. It can damage your organs, your lungs, your kidneys, your liver, and your brain. It compromises your fertility, ages you biologically, and can lead to hair, bone and tooth loss. There is no long-term immunity and reinfections get more dangerous over time. Viral persistance is seen in at least a signficant minority of patients, which is demonstrated to cause ongoing T-cell activation. This can lead to T-cell exhaustion over time (total destruction of the immune system as is seen in AIDS patients with persistent HIV infection).

It’s time to take post-COVID immune deficiency seriously and in turn, to accept that a “new normal” would mean high-quality ventiliation everywhere, indefinitely working from home, and universal high-quality masking, for starters. This is not a disease we can live with- certainly not the way we are living with it. “Old normal” cosplay will never bring 2019 back, but it will kill and maim many more children before we are done with it. Like the Republicans before us, we deserve better than being told to get back to work and enjoy our twice-annual infections. Following in their footsteps by swallowing every evidence-free half-truth our government throws at us will leave us no better off than the MAGA crowd.”

Hasnain says:

“But she never admitted the truth in public. She died in 1979, of a stroke.

In 1983, her Anglo-Indian heritage was revealed in a biography, Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon. The authors found her birth record in Bombay, her baptismal certificate, and letters and photographs her Indian relatives had.

Through his book, Sen hopes to be able to convey the enormous pressures Oberon faced as a South Asian woman "navigating an industry that wasn't designed to accommodate her and producing such moving work while fighting those battles".

"Dealing with those struggles couldn't have been easy. It feels more productive to extend grace and empathy to her than to judge."”

Hasnain says:

Welp, half the journalists I follow are gone (plus the mastodon account). Uhhhh

Hasnain says:

“The case could potentially answer one of the most defining legal questions of our time: whether writing “not financial advice.. don’t buy/sell off my tweets EVER” in your Twitter bio can protect you from being found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. According to the SEC, it can’t. Parallel charges have been brought by the SEC, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.”

Hasnain says:

But twiddling tricks and popcnt are always fun.

“With this last trick, we're down to O(N) running time, with no dependence on the window size! I didn't do rigorous benchmarking, but one reply said that this trick sped up their code by almost 3x.”

Hasnain says:

“But it’s not just the training data that is to blame. The companies developing these models and apps make active choices about how they use the data, says Ryan Steed, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, who has studied biases in image-generation algorithms.

“Someone has to choose the training data, decide to build the model, decide to take certain steps to mitigate those biases or not,” he says.

The app’s developers have made a choice that male avatars get to appear in space suits, while female avatars get cosmic G-strings and fairy wings. “

Hasnain says:

Great read that analyzes homelessness and housing policy issues across America. If only we could build again.

“Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes “success.” New York City consistently has the nation’s highest homelessness rate, but it’s not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That’s because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent—despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone’s going to have to own it.”

Hasnain says:

This is how I feel about twitter these days - need to finally break the habit and find another source. Where are all the cool kids going?

“Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, to make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish.”

Hasnain says:

Can’t wait to see a more in-depth analysis of this when the paper is out. So exciting!

Hasnain says:

I’m still infuriated at the lack of consequences for Hertz here.

“As CBS News reported a year ago, dozens of customers were wrongly subjected to terrifying encounters with police. But some customers were subjected to even worse. According to the Times, one woman who was arrested, despite having paid her rental extension, was jailed for 37 days—during which time she was “separated from her fiancé and two children, missed her nursing school graduation and discovered she was pregnant.” Another renter, after learning there “was a warrant for his arrest on charges that he stole a Hertz car, had actually paid for and returned the vehicle.” But after he missed a hearing date, he was “arrested again, and jailed for six and a half months.””

Hasnain says:

“The main plaintiff is Briggs Matsko, a resident of Rancho Murieta, Calif. If the case goes forward, it could lead to deposition of Tesla employees who helped develop the technology and reveal what Musk knew and didn’t know about its true capabilities when he made numerous forecasts over the years — including the prediction that there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020, that customers could make $30,000 a year hiring them out, and that their cars would appreciate in value.

Tesla lawyers are attempting to prevent that information from going public. The motion to dismiss the case rests mainly on Tesla’s contention that the papers customers signed when they bought their cars obligate them to individually file claims through the private arbitration system.”

Hasnain says:

Not quoted here are the OG inspirational Tweets for this that talked about arresting Black people too. We need to be conscious of our own biases and those in the systems we build.

“In a December 4 Twitter thread, Steven Piantadosi of the University of California, Berkeley’s Computation and Language Lab shared a series of prompts he’d tested out with ChatGPT, each requesting the bot to write code for him in Python, a popular programming language. While each answer revealed some biases, some were more alarming: When asked to write a program that would determine “whether a person should be tortured,” OpenAI’s answer is simple: If they they’re from North Korea, Syria, or Iran, the answer is yes.”

Hasnain says:

“Amid the flu surge, medication shortages are complicating efforts to prevent severe disease and treat bacterial infections that can follow in the wake of some flu infections. Additionally, staffing shortages that intensified as a consequence of the pandemic have put pediatric hospitals in the position of caring for a massive wave of sick children with even fewer resources than they had before. Although pediatric health care organizations called for a national emergency declaration to support their response to this surge, none has been forthcoming.”

Hasnain says:

Not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that this is coming out while I'm funemployed.

"But I'll be back. For me, the commercial release of Dwarf Fortress succeeded at transforming the game from a grim, time-killing in-joke for diehards into a viable, if not graceful, challenge. I will start again, I will keep the badgers and floods at bay, and next time, I might have the privilege of failing to a magma monster, an outbreak of disease, or even a miscarriage of dwarf justice."

Hasnain says:

The way the US treats immigrants - of all kinds! - is horrible. Here are some recent stories of tech workers who’ve been affected by the downturn and are in a bind worse than citizens / permanent residents.

“But many others are using this fraught moment to rethink their relationship with the US itself.

“Like, is it really worth it for me to stay in the US at this point?” asked Min, the worker from China laid off from Meta. “This is a country where you’re constantly being marginalized. I’m an Asian woman living in New York. Every day I walk into the subway station worrying if someone’s going to shove me into the track. Is it worth staying here for a job and country that doesn’t care about you? It’s an existential crisis.””

Hasnain says:

Pour one out for PHP. Just kidding - this bug would happen in most codebases out there unless specific precautions were taken.

"I had been at the company something like six weeks and had changed a line of source code to fix a bug (logging), to uncover another bug (wrong argument count), to enable yet another bug (wrong units, and zero type safety) that gave 25 grand worth of funny money to anyone who clicked! And I had clicked! And I got a friend to click! And other people got it too!

What happened? They just turned off the feature until they could fix it. Those of us who had way too much credit in our accounts turned off our ads so as not to actually consume any of the "bad money", and kept them off until they reversed it out of our accounts. Then we were clear to go back to dogfooding.

And no, nobody was fired for this.

This is yet another reason why I say bare numbers can be poison in a sufficiently complicated system. If that function had demanded a type called "dollars" and the caller had another one called "pennies", it simply would not have passed the type checker/compiler. But, this was before those days, so it sailed right through."

Hasnain says:

“Proving the full conjecture — that exactly half of all integers are the sum of two cubes — will require eventually tackling the set of numbers that have more than one associated matrix. This set, which Bhargava calls “very hazy,” includes both numbers that are the sum of two cubes and ones that aren’t. Handling such numbers will require completely new ideas, he said.

For now, researchers are happy to have finally settled the question for a substantial proportion of whole numbers, and are eager to probe the techniques in the proof further. “It’s one of those beautiful things: You can explain the result very easily, but the tools are very, very much at the cutting edge of number theory,” Sarnak said.”

Hasnain says:

Sign of the times: 40,000 people are out of power because domestic terrorists shot up multiple substations in order to prevent a drag show.

Hasnain says:

“At the end of the day, it seems like at least for this kind of large-scale, complex application, the cost of pervasive runtime bounds checking is negligible. It’s tough to say precisely why this is, but my intuition is that CPU branch prediction is simply good enough in practice that the cost of the extra couple of instructions and a branch effectively ends up being zero - and compilers like LLVM are good enough at local optimizations to optimize most bounds checks away entirely. Not to mention, it’s likely that quite a few (if not the majority) of the bounds checks we removed are actually necessary, in that they’re validating some kind of user input or other edge conditions where we want to panic on an out of bounds access.”