Hasnain says:

This is amazing.

“Accenture’s developers also misrepresented the extent of their testing of the code by commenting out portions of the code, so the code appeared to be working.

On top of that, despite having specifically requested that the consultants provide a style guide in an interactive and updateable format — rather than a PDF — Accenture kept providing the guide in PDF format only, Hertz complained.

When Hertz confronted the consultants about the PDF problem, guess what the response was? Yep, it wanted "hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional fees" to cover the cost.”

Hasnain says:

“The memo therefore tells us what we suspected all along: The most powerful economic actors in the U.S. — entities like Bank of America and its clients — do not like working people to have power. But it’s nice to have it in their own words.”

Hasnain says:

This is a surprisingly hard problem that I’m always worried about introducing - I’ve seen this cause issues before too.

“Making these changes won’t be easy, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done. Before Rust came along, achieving both memory safety and C++ levels of performance in a practical, easy-to-use language seemed impossible. And this change doesn’t even require a new language! It’s just a matter of redesigning a commonly used library to be less error-prone. Hopefully someday, deadlocks too will be an almost-unheard of class of bug. Even if this proposal isn’t suitable for implementation as is, I hope this starts a conversation so we can find better ways to address the problem.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read on life in rural Alaska. It brought back a harkening for a simpler way of life - and it was an engrossing story told over food.

“Pagkalinawan reminded me, “People who come up to Bettles are amazed that we eat better than they do. I always tell them we can’t just go to a restaurant; we know what we want to eat and have to plan ahead for it.”

A friend from New York City, an amateur chef who studies food systems, came to visit and we hosted a potluck with the theme “eat local.” Adam went to the river and caught grayling, which was served over a bed of sauteed greens with a rhubarb sauce. Our neighbors brought moose burgers, locally grown potatoes cooked with our garden rosemary, and blueberry cobbler. We stayed up late, which can be hard to realize during the peak of the summer when the sun is still high in the sky, sharing food and drinking Bota Box wine. Although this was a gourmet meal, in many ways it was just as great as the store-bought hot dogs and macaroni salad we had eaten together hundreds of times before; the quality of a meal is really a reflection of the company you share it with as well as the long process and coordination it takes to get everything on the table. Then before bed, with the sun just starting to near the horizon, we all walked over to the small shop on the airstrip and finished the evening off with Mounds bars and Doritos.”

Hasnain says:

The science coming out of the JWST has been so incredibly exciting to see and learn about.

“JWST should be capable of finding far more distant supernovas too, which will give it another way to serve as a probe of the early universe. It may also find stars being torn apart by the supermassive black holes that reside at galaxies’ centers, something no previous telescope has seen. “For the first time we’re going to be able to peer into these very deep, dark regions,” said Ori Fox, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who leads the team studying transients.

Transients, like other astronomical phenomena, are set to be redefined. After decades of planning and construction, JWST has hit the sky running. The issue now is keeping pace with the constant barrage of science coming down from a machine so complex yet faultless it almost defies belief that it was built by human brains. “It’s working, and it’s insane,” said Larson.”

Hasnain says:

Garbage collection is fascinating and definitely something I need to read up more on.

“The last remaining bit of the puzzle is still lacking: how is it guaranteed that the collection is completed before the FREE list is empty? If the mutator runs out of free objects before the collection cycle is completed, then the only option is to force the cycle to completion by calling advance() repeatedly until there are no more gray objects and then flip, but that's a stop-the-world situation. The solution is to call advance() from within alloc() guaranteeing scan progress. Baker proved that if advance() is called k times for each alloc() call, then the algorithm never runs out of free objects, provided that the total heap size is at least R*(1 + 1/k) objects, where R is the number of reachable objects.”

Hasnain says:

“Recent research has shown that a family has to earn at least $35.80/hour just to meet basic needs. The average two-kid family spends 25% of its income on child care alone — and these figures don’t even fully take into account runaway inflation, which recently topped 9%.

The reality is that today’s $40/hr median family income doesn’t leave as much wiggle room for American pastimes as it used to.

And as Steven Martinez, and many others, have learned, this is especially true of “the most magical place on Earth.””

Hasnain says:

How can these folks sleep at night? So much money wasted and much more importantly a misdirection of efforts away from things that could have saved so many lives.

“Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.

And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.”

Hasnain says:

Lots of mixed feelings after reading this one. Like the author, I too yearn for the "good old days" when I would fully sink myself into my work and use that as a major fulfilment in life. There are definitely upsides to it.

I don't agree with taking it to the point where people feel like *they have no other choice* though - like the author points out they would cry at work, be forced to skip vacations, etc. Can't we have the best of both worlds - people motivated by their work that they want to do really well; but also not feeling so pressured they *have* to fire on all cylinders all the time?

I feel like the author has conflated the two things and while, sure, they are correlated, in a truly great work culture they shouldn't have to.

"A few months ago, someone complained to me that the new (very hot stuff) startup they were at had a “lgtm culture.” Upon inquiry, they explained that no matter what they do or how good it is, everyone just says “looks good to me.” “I know I should feel good about being a competent, trusted, contributing team member,” he continued, “and my new colleagues are so, so kind, but at the end of the day I just feel like no one has any standards.” He looked down at his coffee for a moment. “I’m afraid I’m never going to see my best work again.”

Yikes. Now multiply that same phenomenon across every other person working and every other company. What is that going to do for our collective impact? What will that do to progress? Mega yikes.

I’m not exactly sure how we balance the realities of the world today with a working life that asks so much of us. But I do know leaning all the way out isn’t the answer. I hope we find the right way through it, together. We certainly need the support of our leaders to get there, but I know from experience that anyone, in any corner of an organization, can play a meaningful role in building the organizations we want to be in.

And when we do, I think we’ve got a shot at transforming organizations into the incredible sources of community and self-actualization they should be.

Believe me, it’s possible. And believe me, it’s as good as you imagine it could be."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later rereading.

“Some of the techniques within are entirely Rust-specific, and some involve ideas that can be applied (often with modifications) to programs written in other languages. The General Tips section also includes some general principles that apply to any programming language. Nonetheless, this book is mostly about the performance of Rust programs and is no substitute for a general purpose guide to profiling and optimization”

Hasnain says:

This resonated with me. Though I think this forces more causality on this relationship than there actually is.

“Writing is the opposite. Writing is a commitment to durable and transparent ideas. Writing says: I am here, I believe this, I stand by it.”

Hasnain says:

“Officers found Connie’s lifeless body inside her condo Wednesday morning, June 15. But neighbor interviews, dispatch records, 911 call timestamps and surveillance video all gathered by NBC 7 Investigates show the calls for help started nearly 12 hours earlier.

Around 7 p.m. the night before two neighbors called 911 reporting a man banging on Connie’s door and screaming. Over the next hour, at least five more calls rolled into 911, but no officers were dispatched. Then, just after 8 p.m., neighbors heard and saw something that prompted dispatchers to speed up the police response.”

Hasnain says:

BRB ordering a ménage a trois from Ike’s (on Dutch crunch of course)

“Michelin-starred chef Brandon Jew grew up eating it as a hungry teenager, buying big sandwiches after school from Mister Pickle’s on the Peninsula. “The thing about Dutch crunch is that you didn’t really see it in grocery stores,” he says. “And if the options were white, wheat, sourdough, or Dutch crunch, it was like, what’s Dutch crunch? Texturally, it’s really satisfying … and once you have it for the first time, you’re going to keep ordering it.” And of course, once locals have grown up eating something, there’s always a sugar sparkle of sandwich nostalgia.”

Hasnain says:

I agree with this piece in that the US definitely needs to step up on immigration or it’ll suffer from brain drain. I wish it didn’t have the thinly veiled “china bad” trope in its messaging and instead focused on the root causes of the problem at home. But I’ll take what I can get.

“It’s not just a matter of enticing new immigrants but of retaining bright minds already in the country. In 2009, a Turkish graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erdal Arikan, published a paper that solved a fundamental problem in information theory, allowing for much faster and more accurate data transfers. Unable to get an academic appointment or funding to work on this seemingly esoteric problem in the United States, he returned to his home country. As a foreign citizen, he would have had to find a U.S. employer interested in his project to be able to stay.

Back in Turkey, Arikan turned to China. It turned out that Arikan’s insight was the breakthrough needed to leap from 4G telecommunications networks to much faster 5G mobile internet services. Four years later, China’s national telecommunications champion, Huawei, was using Arikan’s discovery to invent some of the first 5G technologies. Today, Huawei holds over two-thirds of the patents related to Arikan’s solution—10 times more than its nearest competitor. And while Huawei has produced one-third of the 5G infrastructure now operating around the world, the United States does not have a single major company competing in this race. Had the United States been able to retain Arikan—simply by allowing him to stay in the country instead of making his visa contingent on immediately finding a sponsor for his work—this history might well have been different.”

Hasnain says:

Just went ahead and read the paper, it’s a pretty accessible read. Some great insights from running and operating a system at scale.

“What's not to love about a 99.75% cache hit rate? The failure modes!

The downside is that caching introduces bimodal behavior. In the case of a cold start where request routers have empty caches, every DynamoDB request would result in a metadata lookup, and so the service had to scale to serve requests at the same rate as DynamoDB

So this metadata table needs to scale from handling 0.25% of requests, to handling 100% of requests. A 400x potential increase in traffic! Designing and maintaining something that can handle rare 400x increases in traffic is super hard.”

Hasnain says:

“In America after the end of Roe v. Wade, one brave source on the record in the final story will often be the best we can get. Obviously, reporters and editors must make sure that their reporting is accurate and true! But those who believe that the end of legal abortion in many states is newsworthy will need to figure out how to report and publish these stories with a few more constraints than they’d prefer. If performing or receiving an abortion now counts as activism, well, then journalists will need to be okay quoting “activists,” unless they only want to tell the anti-abortion movement’s side.

Countless abortion stories will never be told at all. It won’t be because they’re lies. It will be because telling them is too risky, because patients and doctors and staffers and volunteers will face arrest for coming forward.

The facts will live on in the shadows. The women and children’s real lives will continue. Even if their stories seem “too good” to be true. Even if you wish they weren’t.”

Hasnain says:

“These viral “exposure” videos have a way of inverting reality. The people with whom the police interact every day, the civilians and communities they are sworn to protect, are often people whose main crime is that they are struggling with addiction — which is to say that they, not the officers prodding at the contents of their pockets, are the ones in the most danger. There’s concern that these videos will only worsen that danger, not just by making people so terrified of invisible fentanyl traces that they hesitate to aid drug users experiencing overdoses, but also by driving the use of criminal charges to punish people for exposing police officers or emergency responders to drugs.

The story from Kansas City reported that, before the officer collapsed, he was on his way to deliver food to families in need at a local church. Suddenly, he and his fellow officers were dispatched to a burglary, where they found a few pills on the suspect — someone, perhaps, who turned to theft to sustain a drug addiction. This is a story that makes the police sound brave and sympathetic, but its central question remains obscured: What are they really so afraid of?”

Hasnain says:

Great read on the thrill of learning biology from the principles of exploration. Education in general can be quite boring; more so for biology (my experience concurs). Even though there’s so much fascinating stuff to learn!

“I’ve never come across a subject so fractal in its complexity. It reminds me of computing that way. A day of programming might involve constructing an elaborate regular expression, investigating a file descriptor leak, debugging a race condition in the application you just wrote, and thinking through the interface of a module. Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work. Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed. It’s all a big slop of global mutable state. Control is achieved by upregulating this thing while turning down the promoter of that thing’s repressor. You think you know how something works—like when I thought I had a handle on the neutrophil, an important front-line player in the innate immune system—only to learn that it comes in several flavors, and more are still being discovered, and some of them seem to do the opposite of the ones you thought you knew. Everything in biology is like this. It’s all exceptions to the rule.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on A/B testing and the perils of short term thinking.

“How many executive groups will, when shown an AB test for something like “ask users if we can turn on notifications” showing positive results that will juice revenue short-term, ask “can we test how this plays out long-term?”

As product managers, as designers, as humans who care, it is our responsibility to never, ever present something like that. We need to be careful and think through the long-term implications of changes as part of the initial experiment design and include them in planning the tests.

If we present results of early testing, we need to clearly elucidate both what we do and don’t know”

Hasnain says:

Interesting exploration on something I know is very useful and also really hard to do in a statically compiled language.

“Getting this working was… a journey. Beyond just stretching my comfort with Rust, it stretches my ability to communicate about Rust.

Our goal is simple enough: we want a way to generate code, at compile time, that can verify that a particular path exists, starting at a base type (the root) and ending up at some other type (the value). Importantly, we need to do this with only access to types; we can’t work with actual instances of those types. This sort of type-level programming is tricky in Rust.”

Hasnain says:

A great and sad look into the world of art and how much looting is behind so many museum collections out there. I’m glad some are being taken back now.

“Sometimes, instead of removing an object right away, Blue Tiger’s team would take a photograph, which was then passed up the chain of brokers and buyers connecting looters in the field to foreign markets. If word came back that someone wanted the piece, Blue Tiger would go back and dig it out. “I knew from my team that all the objects went to Thailand,” he said. “Sia Ford was the No. 1 buyer.” At the time, he never felt as though he was doing something wrong. “But now I feel so sorry. Now I know that these things belong to Cambodia. They were made by our ancestors.””

Hasnain says:

“Amid taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a counter-protest with mass civil disobedience.

Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”

The decision to send Uber drivers into potentially volatile protests, despite the risks, was consistent with what one senior former executive told the Guardian was a strategy of “weaponising” drivers, and exploiting violence against them to “keep the controversy burning”.”

Hasnain says:

“But it seems likely that, just as in the 2008 financial crash, the bad-faith actors who exacerbated this meltdown will walk away unscathed. What’s more, many of the investors who bought into the cryptocurrency boom did so to claw back security after a decade racked by recession and uncertainty. Koh was one of those. “I was lucky to keep my job, but I was really angry at the suits, at the bankers, at the high‑bonus people,” he says. “The whole space of crypto was about giving normal people the option to gain the upper edge in society financially. It was a beacon of hope. We could ride the next big thing. But that beacon of hope has been put out for now. The trust has been broken. Yet again, sitting here, in decade number two, the bankers have won again.”

Future generations may look back at this boom as a period of mania, when money multiplied like bacteria and a collective delusion gripped financial markets. It may seem unfathomable, but it shouldn’t. After all, who doesn’t want to be rich?”

Hasnain says:

“Public health in the United States generally is woefully underfunded and understaffed, said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.

Although Covid brought more money into public health coffers, those funds cannot be used for anything else. “We cannot function at the level I think that the public needs and expects us to if we’re going to always be so categorically funded,” she said. “We’re not learning this lesson for the first time.””

Hasnain says:

This was a scary read from someone who studies civil wars across the globe. It’s from march and things have only gotten worse since.

“The analogy is smoking. If I started smoking today, my risk of dying of lung cancer or some smoking-related disease is very small. If I continue to smoke for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, my risk eventually of dying of something related to smoking is going to be very high if I don’t change my behavior. And so I think that’s one of the actually optimistic things: We know the warning signs. And we know that if we strengthen our democracy, and if the Republican Party decides it’s no longer going to be an ethnic faction that’s trying to exclude everybody else, then our risk of civil war will disappear. We know that. And we have time to do it. But you have to know those warning signs in order to feel an impetus to change them.”

Hasnain says:

This was interesting and worth reading. And a parallel that I’m sure a lot of tech employees across the industry will find themselves relating to. The later part on banning creatives from even getting input from ERGs was eyebrow raising.

“Some of Sarandos’ lieutenants were similarly resistant to feedback, particularly from Los Gatos staffers. What expertise did techies have in making movies? Over time, it started to feel as if Netflix were two separate companies: the feedback-friendly tech organization, where everyone had an opinion on everything, and the top-down Hollywood studio, where executives had the final word.

Cureton, the engineer who had been rewarded for sharing tough feedback early on in his tenure, moved from the product to the studio organization and immediately found it less open to criticism. When he tried to fix technical problems outside his scope of work, he was warned to mind his own business. Eventually, he was fired. “Too much feedback and being out of my lane too often were the reasons I was given,” he says.”

Hasnain says:

Been a while since I recall the EU (rightly!) condemning the US.

“The European Parliament voted 324-155, with 38 abstentions, to condemn the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade and demand that abortion rights be enshrined in the EU’s fundamental rights charter.”

Hasnain says:

This is great.

“The DMA says that gatekeepers who ignore the rules will face fines of up to 10 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover, or 20 percent in the event of repeated infringements, as well as periodic penalties of up to 5 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover. Where gatekeepers perpetrate "systematic infringements," the European Commission will be able to impose additional sanctions, such as obliging a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it, including units, assets, intellectual property rights, or brands, or banning a gatekeeper from acquiring any company that provides services in the digital sector.

So far, Apple has heavily resisted attempts by governments to enforce changes to its operating systems and services. For example, Apple simply chose to pay a $5.5 million fine every week for months in the Netherlands instead of obey orders from the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) to allow third-party payment systems in Dutch dating apps.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. Goes into tech as well as business best practices. A harkening back to the good old days where a small team could build and ship amazing products. Worth learning from for sure.

“That a 30 member tech team has built and scaled a complex financial + stock broking stack from the ground up, built a whole suite of financial software for end users that people actually appreciate in an extremely complex, constraining, and rapidly changing regulatory environment, with zero prior industry knowledge, is quite a feat. More of an anomaly than a feat. I, however, find it natural and poignant that a group of hackers in the right environment guided by the right philosophies can be incredibly creative and productive, even in a place as unfashionable and uncool as the Indian stock broking industry. What used to be the norm—small groups of hackers building good software—has now transmogrified into being the exception.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great interview, and I should probably go ahead and look for the book now. Goals to strive for.

“Some of her observations are derived from an enlightening series of interviews she did with 40 men—most of them American and most of them in committed relationships with women—who are truly equal partners, which Mangino defines as “intentionally [taking] on half the physical and emotional load of their household.” (Finding these equal partners was a challenge; many men who initially identified themselves as such to Mangino became ineligible after their partner said otherwise.) I recently spoke with Mangino about what she learned from these couples and others.”

Hasnain says:

No words, really.

“On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio.

Hours after the Supreme Court action, the Buckeye state had outlawed any abortion after six weeks. Now this doctor had a 10-year-old patient in the office who was six weeks and three days pregnant.

Could Bernard help?

Indiana lawmakers are poised to further restrict or ban abortion in mere weeks.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great technical read that explains fuzzing and goes into some of the found issues. I do recommend reading part 1 first - I read it a few weeks ago and was waiting for part 2!

“I think we’ve all heard stories of someone running a shiny new tool on some big project they know nothing about, mass filing a bunch of issues that just say “this tool says your code has a problem, fix it” and then disappearing into the mist and claiming victory.

This is not a pleasant experience for someone trying to maintain a project. You’re dumping a lot on my plate if I don’t know the tool, have trouble running the tool, don’t know exactly how you ran it, etc.

It’s also very easy to come up with a huge pile of issues with very little sense of how significant they are.

Some things are only vaguely dubious, while others are horribly terrifying exploits. We only have so much time to work on stuff, you’ve gotta help us out!

And in this regard 5225225’s contributions were just, bloody beautiful.

Like, shockingly fantastic.”

Hasnain says:

Things keep getting worse.

“In its most extreme form, the independent state legislature theory was invoked — unsuccessfully — by Trump advocates in an effort to sidestep the legitimate outcome of the 2020 election. In Arizona, for instance, some Trump supporters used the theory in calling for the decertification of the state's electors. Among those seeking decertification was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.”