Hasnain says:

Long and rambles at times but there’s useful advice here - and I certainly needed some on prioritization.

“Being purposeful is also the secret to agility. Purpose can help move faster and in times of crisis, rally the team together. It helps avoid analysis paralysis and avoid the delays inherent in waiting for numbers to emerge before taking a decision. When employees are in a quandary due to a fork in the road, purpose can guide them to choose which way to move without escalating up the hierarchy or awaiting further direction from their hierarchy. In situations where it really matters, we tend to become data driven when we should be doing the opposite, pause and then reflect on why the business or product exists.”

Hasnain says:

“Keep an eye on your dicts. Don’t let them take control of your application. As with every piece of technical debt, the further you postpone introducing proper data structures, the more complex the transition becomes.”

Hasnain says:

“A year after October 7, no one seriously believes there will be peace between Israel and the Palestinians in our lifetime. The bombed and starved children of Gaza will never forget what they’ve been subjected to, nor the world’s general indifference; while it’s not on the same scale, their counterparts in Israel will never forget the national trauma of the attacks. The “two-state solution” that liberal Zionists have verbally supported for years as the only possible just outcome is an obvious fantasy. Other, far more disturbing outcomes seem likelier; at present, it is hard to see what consequences Israel will face from continuing to kill and displace Palestinians on all fronts while seizing and occupying more and more of their land. If there is one lesson to be taken from the past dismal year, it’s this: the liberal Zionist interpretation of the conflict has no predictive value, no analytical weight, and no moral rigor. It is a failed dream of the previous century, and it is unlikely to survive this one.”

Hasnain says:

“The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.”

Hasnain says:

Long, detailed read on distributed systems and retries. Worth reading and internalizing.

“A couple of months after the incident review was completed, the platform team adopted the retry budget technique with a threshold of 10%. Over the following year, there were other incidents, but no amplification from retries was observed.
Thanks to the incident review, Ben learned that “when encountering transient errors, add retries” is a risky approach. He gained an in-depth understanding of the risks involved, even with exponential backoff. He learned about exponential backoff and jitter techniques, Little’s Law and closed-loop systems, the concept of metastable failure state, the problem of retry amplification and techniques like retry circuit breaker and retry budget, as well as circuit breaker and deadline propagation mechanisms.
Ben now has an even more exciting journey ahead of him, delving deeper into retries. But that’s the subject of another post.”

Hasnain says:

“As the project progressed, they got "a bigger and bigger pile of proof that Rust does actually work well".

There were regular cross-team meetings where team leads could discuss their problems. As time went on it became more and more noticeable that Julius didn't bring up many issues at all and when he showed his results, his colleagues were often left impressed.”

Hasnain says:

A different tweet I read said this is so far close to the mathematical limits for how big a hurricane can get in this area. Holy crap.

““This is the real deal here with Milton,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor told a news conference. “If you want to take on Mother Nature, she wins 100% of the time.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday that it was imperative for debris from Helene to be cleared ahead of Milton’s arrival so the pieces cannot become projectiles. More than 300 vehicles gathered debris Sunday.

As evacuation orders were issued, forecasters warned of a possible 8- to 12-foot (2.4- to 3.6-meter) storm surge in Tampa Bay. That’s the highest ever predicted for the region and nearly double the levels reached two weeks ago during Helene, said National Hurricane Center spokesperson Maria Torres.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s a useful reminder that over the years, the traditional relational database has proved remarkably capable of absorbing innovation, from clustering to cloud to vector search. Trends in database architecture come and go, but somehow, when the dust settles, SQL always seems to be left standing.”

Hasnain says:

In a just world everyone involved would be in jail already (though that might still be too kind)

“The following day, after an additional round of Cabinet meetings, this time helmed by both Blinken and Biden, an outline of the decision was publicly announced by Prime Minster’s Netanyahu’s office: “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip” and, in a separate Hebrew version, “In light of President Biden's demand, Israel will not thwart humanitarian supplies from Egypt as long as it is only food, water and medicine for the civilian population located in the southern Gaza Strip or moving there, and as long as these supplies do not reach Hamas. Any supplies that reach Hamas will be thwarted.” The Hebrew word לסכל, “to thwart,” is frequently used by Israel to describe targeted killings and assassinations. The previous policy of "thwarting" all humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza was conveyed to Egypt as an explicit threat to "bomb" aid trucks.

The substance of the Blinken-approved policy was starkly conveyed by Security Cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich, who later told the Israeli media: “We in the cabinet were promised at the outset that there would be monitoring, and that aid trucks hijacked by Hamas and its organizations [sic] would be bombed from the air, and the aid would be halted.””

Hasnain says:

This is why I always feel like everything should be e2e encrypted and that backdoors (err, law enforcement portals “for the good guys”) shouldn’t be allowed. There’s no way to do them securely.

“The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.”

Hasnain says:

“You might expect lots of separate clusters to emerge as distinct academic families. But it turns out that almost all Nobel laureates share some connection, however distant, as represented by this sprawling network.

An incredible 702 out of 736 researchers who have won science and economics prizes up to 2023 are part of the same academic family — connected by an academic link in common somewhere in their history.”

Hasnain says:

“Adam recalled the broadcast as “an embarrassing moment” for CNN.

“It wasn’t a Hamas roster at all,” he said. “It was a calendar, and written in Arabic were the days of the week. But the report that came out from Nic Robertson just swallowed up Israel’s claim.”

To make matters worse, the Israeli claim had already been debunked by Arabic speakers on social media before the CNN footage aired, and, according to multiple CNN journalists and an internal WhatsApp chat seen by Al Jazeera, a Palestinian producer alerted her colleagues, including Robertson, but was ignored. After the report aired on television, they said, another producer tried to get it corrected before it was posted online.

“One colleague saw the report and flagged to Nic, [saying,] ‘Hold on, people are saying that this is not accurate,'” Adam said. “And apparently, Nic said, ‘Are you meaning to say that Hagari is lying to us?’

“There was a chance for this to get stopped. But Nic was adamant, and it went out. He’s a very experienced correspondent. If you are trusting the Israeli government over your own colleagues, then you need to have your wrist slapped at the very least because your reporting has given cover to the Israeli operation.””

Hasnain says:

The drama here has been nuts

“Mullenweg and Automattic have been in a skirmish with WP Engine for almost two weeks now, in which the CEO has called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress,” accusing it of wrongfully using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, and banning the company from accessing the open-source WordPress.org resources.

Both WP Engine and Automattic have sent each other cease-and-desist letters. And WP Engine earlier on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, accusing the company and its CEO of “abuse of power,” extortion, and saying the WordPress co-creator has conflicts of interest in handling WordPress as an open-source project.”

Hasnain says:

“Shifting gears to the thread that went viral this week. What was your initial reaction to realizing that Princeton had chosen not to include your responses in their announcement of your MacArthur award?

The Office of Communications reached out to me saying they had received the news from MacArthur and asked if they could interview me. So they sent me those three questions that I put online, and I wrote out my answers. And in writing the answers, I prefaced it by saying I know my answer to one puts you in a tricky position. But I would ask that if you can’t include the full context of that response, please don’t use any quotes from me in writing.

By then, I was 99 percent sure that they weren’t going to publish any of them. So I was not surprised at all that they didn’t. They were generous enough and wrote back after a few days to let me know that they had opted for option two, which is no quotes. And again, I know this wasn’t journalism. This is PR for the homepage of the university, and the point of that is to make the university look good. So I was under no sort of illusion that they were going to want to put anything in there that would cast doubt on the goodness of the university. There was no surprise.”

Hasnain says:

This is just.. I don’t have words left tonight. Will just go and hug my kid.

“Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.
- Dr. Mark Perlmutter, orthopedic and hand surgeon

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”

Hasnain says:

“I am not afraid of Ta-Nahisi Coates chronicling Palestinian life. I am not afraid of Rashida Tlaib asserting that the state should not be prosecuting protesters. I am not afraid of the discomfort that will inevitably come when we allow Palestinians to be seen and grapple with our complicity in dehumanizing them. Instead, I am afraid that those who have championed Israel at all costs will soon get to live at home in the kind of theocracy they covet abroad.

For the high holidays this year, I am choosing the radical good deed of saying so out loud, despite how much more isolated that might make me within my own faith community. One should not have to be Jewish to call out wrongs in plain sight, whether they happen on the relatively comfortable couches of morning television or in the streets of Gaza, without fear of widespread retribution. But in this media and political landscape, it is incumbent on Jewish Americans who see these wrongs to use their voices and create the permission structure for legitimate criticism and debate.”

Hasnain says:

I am hoping this does not turn into WW3. As others put it more eloquently on twitter, this was the most preventable war of all time.

Hasnain says:

This is one of the most disgraceful interviews I’ve seen recently, and I’ve seen a lot of them. I am still incredulous at the display of racism here. I know people harp on and on about media being biased (from both sides!) but it’s been interesting seeing how media is portrayed in the states. Growing up, we treated media as biased always, and we tried to correct for it. But in the US people tend to ignore that for some reason. It’s often hidden (or agrees with our biases so we ignore it). But.. it’s there. And we should call it out for what it is.

TNC has the patience of a saint.

Quoting someone on Twitter:

“Among the many reasons that this segment will likely live in infamy as a clear example of open Islamophobic racism and journalistic malpractice from @CBSNews:

The producers flanked two Black journalists to provide a cover to a white journalist who is making an open, racist case for apartheid, and who suggests that human rights do not exist for Palestinians. A combination of racism and ignorance that suggests a deeply failed moral center for that show and that news operation.”

Hasnain says:

“Thomas Wolf suggested “paste the url of your website/linkedin/bio in Google’s NotebookLM to get 8 min of realistically sounding deep congratulations for your life and achievements from a duo of podcast experts”. I couldn’t resist giving that a go, so I gave it the URLs to my about page and my Twenty years of my blog post and got back this 10m45s episode (transcript), which was so complimentary it made my British toes curl with embarrassment”