Hasnain says:

I am glad he’s dead but also not looking forward to the regional war this might start by the time I wake up..

Hasnain says:

“I believe these proposals are a necessary part of our long journey toward court reform. The country, I think, needs to see the Democrats try this, pass something, and then watch in horror as the conservative extremists overturn these laws before the ink dries on the legislation.

Biden’s proposals are worthy ideas. When the Supreme Court rejects them, maybe people will be ready for the ideas that will actually bring the court to heel.”

Hasnain says:

Gotta love sci-fi shorts

“Officially, publicly, to anybody outside of the smallest inner circle, it was a quantum computing project. But to describe it as "quantum computing" was a mind-boggling understatement. There were already quantum computers. They were just computers. They were just faster.”

Hasnain says:

Gotta admire this guy's approach to business.

"Yes, Healthchecks.io is still a one-man business. Until 2022, I was part-time contracting. Since January 2022 Healthchecks.io has been my only source of income, but I work on it part-time.

At least for the time being I’m not looking to expand the team. A large part of why I’m a “solopreneur” is because I do not want to manage or be managed. A cofounder or employee would mean regular meetings to discuss what’s done, and what’s to be done. It would be awesome to find someone who just magically does great work without needing any attention. Just brief monthly summaries of high-quality contributions, better than I could have done. But I don’t think I can find someone like that, and I also don’t think I could afford them."

Hasnain says:

"This blog post shows a basic approach for programmatic packet capture and how it's then easy to plot the captured time series metrics in Python and Polars.

You also had a chance to see the techniques we use inside QuestDB itself to obtain great ingestion performance."

Hasnain says:

While all the media is still calling this abuse (it's rape - even the Likud member arguing it refers to actions which qualify as rape) - it's insane that *this* is what is causing riots -- soldiers got arrested for this and they are rebelling for the right to continue to rape prisoners.

What even...

"But the operation triggered an angry confrontation between the military police and IDF soldiers at Sde Teiman, captured on video by a reporter from Israel’s public broadcaster Kann News.

The detentions also prompted outcry from members of Israel’s far right, including a coalition of extreme-right members of parliament and their supporters who attempted to storm the military base in protest. Late on Monday, protesters also targeted a second base where the soldiers were being questioned, with violent confrontations continuing into the evening."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading.

"The main idea here is that A* can be fast if you give it (a) a good graph, (b) a good heuristic. You might be used to using the grid as the input graph, and a distance function as the heuristic. Both of these are easy (and what I use in my tutorials) but not the fastest. The L1 library analyzes the grid map and constructs a smaller graph. It then analyzes the new graph and constructs a better heuristic. The combination of these two makes A* much faster than if you use a grid with a distance heuristic. Jump Point Search is well known for being faster than A* with a grid input and distance heuristic, but ordinary A* with an optimized input and optimized heuristic is even faster than Jump Point Search. See the comparison chart on the project page for numbers. Jump Point Search’s main advantage is that it works without preprocessing, which is useful for maps that change frequently."

Hasnain says:

Lots of useful insights here / this one really stood out though

“I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.”

Hasnain says:

“In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”

The rampant copying fueling the explosive growth of consumer computers meant that by 1990, the desktop user interface was ubiquitous; it was impossible to determine who originated any part of it, or who copied who. The quest to stake their claim nearly consumed Apple. But when they emerged, they had learned a thing or two. Today, Apple holds more than 2,300 design patents.

Apple's design patent for a device with rounded corners
Apple's design patent for a device with rounded corners
This story ends in 2011, with Apple suing Samsung for copying the design of its software and hardware products. One of the most remarkable claims: Samsung broke the law when it sold “a rectangular product with four evenly rounded corners.”“

Hasnain says:

Lots of deep thoughts in a tough and decisive topic, but this is required reading. Charity always threads the needle and makes great points.

“We’ve all watched companies become wildly successful under assholes, while waves of employees leave broken and burned out. I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. People’s lives and careers are just another externality as far as the corporate books are concerned.

Many live through this nightmare and emerge dead set on doing things differently. And so, when they become founders or leaders, they put culture ahead of the business. And then they lose.

Most companies fail, and if you aren’t hungry and zeroed in on the success of your business, your slim chances become even slimmer.

I don’t believe this has to be either/or, cultural success or business success. I think it’s a false dichotomy. I believe that healthy companies can be more successful than shitty ones, all else being equal. Which is why I believe that leaders who care about building a workplace culture rooted in dignity and respect have a responsibility to care even more about success in business. Let’s show these motherfuckers how it’s done. Nothing succeeds like success.”

Hasnain says:

“The solution for these irreducible representations came to Raskin at a moment when his personal life was filled with chaos. A few weeks after he and Færgeman posted their paper online, Raskin had to rush his pregnant wife to the hospital, then return home to take his son to his first day of kindergarten. Raskin’s wife remained in the hospital until the birth of their second child six weeks later, and during this time Raskin’s life revolved around keeping life normal for his son and driving in endless loops between home, his son’s school and the hospital. “My whole life was the car and taking care of people,” he said.

He took to calling Gaitsgory on his drives to talk math. By the end of the first of those weeks, Raskin had realized that he could reduce the problem of irreducible representations to proving three facts that were all within reach. “For me it was this amazing period,” he said. His personal life was “filled with anxiety and dread about the future. For me, math is always this very grounding and meditative thing that takes me out of that kind of anxiety.””

Hasnain says:

“Hopefully you have gained a little bit of an intuitive understanding of abstract interpretation. Last year, being able to write some code made me more comfortable with the math. Now being more comfortable with the math is helping me write the code. It’s nice upward spiral.”

Hasnain says:

“Hilbert was asked in 1934 by the minister of science under the Nazi regime whether mathematics in Göttingen had suffered from the departure of the Jews and friends of the Jews. He replied: “Suffered? It hasn’t suffered, Mr. Minister. It doesn’t exist anymore!” Hilbert was right. Only one of the pre-Nazi full professors stayed past 1934.

The center of mathematics shifted quickly during the Nazi era and in the wake of World War II. Courant, Weyl and others helped move it to the U.K. and the U.S., where most of the top-ranked mathematics programs are located today.

These countries’ mathematical heritage is in Göttingen. Its story is their story.”

Hasnain says:

“It is to be hoped that new archaeological discoveries will expand our picture of the Vikings in al-Andalus. Until they do, the main legacy of this period is the stories preserved by Arabic historians. The fear and fascination with the Vikings that continues to attract widespread popular and scholarly interest have exaggerated their destructive effects on medieval society. This same fear and fascination is palpable in medieval Muslim recollections of the Majūs.”

Hasnain says:

“The page-interleaved read pattern seems surprisingly under-discussed and I don’t remember ever seeing it used in code in the wild. Curious! If you’re aware of it being used anywhere, let me know, I’d love to see it! And if I’m missing any other memory-based optimization, let me know too. :)”

Hasnain says:

Don’t words have meaning?

“Michael Berkheimer was dining with his wife and friends at a wing joint in Hamilton, Ohio, and had ordered the usual — boneless wings with parmesan garlic sauce — when he felt a bite-size piece of meat go down the wrong way. Three days later, feverish and unable to keep food down, Berkeimer went to the emergency room, where a doctor discovered a long, thin bone that had torn his esophagus and caused an infection.

In a 4-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said Thursday that “boneless wings” refers to a cooking style, and that Berkheimer should’ve been on guard against bones since it’s common knowledge that chickens have bones.”

Hasnain says:

“So this VC cabal is trading against the basic principles of America — not merely against personal freedom, but democracy itself — in the hopes of profit. It’s not the first time tech has made the trade against freedom; IBM made it during the Holocaust.

In venture capital, you are what you fund. Andreessen and Horowitz understand this, even embody it. But they aren’t just funding the issues they discuss on their podcast; they are funding Trump and Vance. That means those donations are anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and possibly even anti-democracy because that is what the Trump / Vance ticket stands for. These are not subsidiary issues: these are now what two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures now stand for, too. Is that a good investment?”

Hasnain says:

Sorry we caused you to work over the weekend, here’s $10

“On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them the gift card because the company recognizes “the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused.” “

Hasnain says:

First thought: “yikes”. Second thought: “this makes sense”.

“The next question is how the US and democratic nations should handle the threat of states with massive resources like China. The United States’ advantage is decentralized and open innovation. Some people argue that we must close our models to prevent China from gaining access to them, but my view is that this will not work and will only disadvantage the US and its allies. Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult. It seems most likely that a world of only closed models results in a small number of big companies plus our geopolitical adversaries having access to leading models, while startups, universities, and small businesses miss out on opportunities. Plus, constraining American innovation to closed development increases the chance that we don’t lead at all. Instead, I think our best strategy is to build a robust open ecosystem and have our leading companies work closely with our government and allies to ensure they can best take advantage of the latest advances and achieve a sustainable first-mover advantage over the long term.”

Hasnain says:

Still waiting for a full RCA but.. they did not have a canary deployment for config changes?!

“Implement a staggered deployment strategy for Rapid Response Content in which updates are gradually deployed to larger portions of the sensor base, starting with a canary deployment.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for the future

"The skills you need are your intelligence, cunning, perseverance and the will to test yourself against the intricacies of multi-threaded programming in the divine language of C#. Each challenge below is a computer program of two or more threads. You take the role of the Scheduler - and a cunning one! Your objective is to exploit flaws in the programs to make them crash or otherwise malfunction."

Hasnain says:

Whew. Thankfully he’s doing something right for once.

““I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the reminder of my term,” Biden said in a statement.”

Hasnain says:

“I can drill into every milli— no, microsecond of every frame that Zed renders and see exactly what’s going on in which thread, with basically no noticeably overhead. That’s nuts. The UI — despite the hurdles when getting started — and how easy it then is to drill into data and examine different things going — that’s far ahead of every other profiling tool I’ve used — on macOS and on Linux, with any other programming language.”

Hasnain says:

This is horrifying. The more I’ve read and internalized about what’s going on, the more my views have gone from “the people in leadership need to stop” to [thing that would get me banned from Facebook ].

This quote is one of the less horrifying bits of the article. It really is grim.

“While touring the hospital we walked through one of the ICUs and found multiple preteens admitted with gunshot wounds to the head. One might argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.

Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.”

Hasnain says:

“I’m not naive. I know that the American people care far more about Biden’s age and debate performance than they do about his Middle East policy. I know that, if Biden is convinced to step aside, it will be because of his inability to string two sentences together in public, and not because of his nearly ten months of unconditional support for Israel’s live-streamed annihilation of Gaza. In a more moral world, the utter disregard for Palestinian life that this president has displayed since October 7 would make the idea of him seeking a second term in office laughable. The debate among pundits and voters would not be whether he has the constitution to steward the country for another four years, but whether a sitting American president should be remanded to The Hague before or after he is impeached.

We live in a world where Palestinian lives are so cheap that American journalists will watch a limbless child die screaming on the filthy floor of a bombed-out hospital, and then talk about Joe Biden’s impressive foreign policy record.”

Hasnain says:

The ruling goes on to say they breached article 3, i.e basically declaring it apartheid. They have declared Palestinians have a right of return and Israelis must leave. I hope states help enforce the ruling, though I suspect calls that ICJ is Hamas will be starting.

“ICJ finds Israel systematically discriminates against Palestinians

The international court of justice finds that Isreal systematically discriminates against Palestinians in the occupied territories and calls the occupation of these territories “de facto annexation”.”

Hasnain says:

Software is great, folks!

“Australian banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters first raised the alarm as thousands of machines started to go offline. The issues are now spreading, as businesses based in Europe are starting their working days. UK broadcaster Sky News is currently unable to broadcast its morning news bulletins, and is showing a message apologizing for “the interruption to this broadcast.” Ryanair, one of the biggest airlines in Europe, also says it’s experiencing a “third-party” IT issue, which is impacting flight departures.”

Hasnain says:

https://www.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/s/Ih54W8LZpX I do not want to be involved in the post mortem for this because yikes it seems so many healthcare and other orgs are affected (united flights seem down too)

Hasnain says:

"Our dependence on AC, in fact, masks the true scope and scale of the challenges we face.

In the end, addressing the climate crisis is not about building better technology. It’s much bigger than that. We need to rebuild our world. Fast-rising temperatures and more extreme weather are forcing us to rethink everything about how we live – where we get our energy, how we grow our food, how we build our cities, and, mostly importantly, who we vote for.

The sooner we stop clinging to the old ways and focus on building a smarter, more sustainable, more equitable future for everyone, the better off we – and every living thing on this planet – will be.

What has already been lost during the climate crisis is a tragedy. But what can be won in this fight is worth imagining too."

Hasnain says:

“Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court proved that it valued Trump over the rule of law when it granted him absolute immunity. Today, Aileen Cannon proved that she values Trump over the rule of law when she dismissed the charges against him. The rule of law is not failing—it has failed.

We live in frightening times because the rule of law has failed. America is right now, functionally a failed state. It is wrong and intellectually facile to pretend otherwise. I don’t have the solution, but I know we’ll never find one if we don’t accept the reality of our situation.”

Hasnain says:

“So Blue Maga may not be violent or authoritarian like Red Maga, but the consequences of a second major political party in the United States succumbing to a weird online cult of personality could be disastrous for our democracy.

Democrats who have spent the past decade (rightly) attacking Republicans for their blind and zealous devotion to Trump would do well to heed the advice of Friedrich Nietzche: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.””

Hasnain says:

This certainly started with a compelling hook.

“So how successful has your program been?

The results speak for themselves. A bunch of our people went to the Olympics in 2021. At the most recent world championships, every female American gold medalist in individual events was a UVA athlete. Kate Douglass showed up here at UVA a few years ago, swimming the 200-meter breaststroke in two minutes and 30 seconds. Now she’s the American record holder, with a time of two minutes, 19.30 seconds. She just broke the U.S. Olympic trials’ all-time record, and she’s a favorite to win the Olympics this year.

Nine UVA athletes, including Kate, just became U.S. Olympians — one-fifth of the U.S. team! Gretchen Walsh won the 100-meter butterfly, setting the world record. Paige Madden got second in the 400-meter freestyle, right after Katie Ledecky; Paige is now a two-time Olympian.”

Hasnain says:

“While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “has complicated things,” Elliott said, the collaboration between the U.S. and Russia on BEST is still ongoing, for now. Barinov says the team at Baksan is considering using a new source of neutrinos, such as zinc, to further test the result. They may even construct a third chamber of gallium around the source. For now, the anomaly remains unsolved, with no sign of a resolution on the horizon. “It has us all puzzled,” Haxton said.”

Hasnain says:

“Was there an earlier moment when you realized you wanted to be a scientist?

The honest truth is that I did not always want to be a scientist. At the point of entering college, I was like, maybe I will double major in biology and English. I loved biology in particular, and I’ve always loved writing, so I thought maybe I’d be a writer.

I have always been very interested in everything. It’s a common refrain for astronomers to say, “Oh, ever since I was a little kid, I absolutely loved space, and I knew that’s exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up.” And I definitely loved space as a little kid, but I also loved rocks, and dinosaurs, and lizards. Salamanders in particular. If anything, it all started with looking under rocks for salamanders with my sisters in the backyard in Virginia. It’s just a curiosity about nature and a love of learning, and that’s what you get to do as a scientist.”

Hasnain says:

“I spent a long time on this post. It was difficult to balance realism against ease of understanding, but I feel good about where I landed. I'm hopeful that being able to see how these complex systems behave in practice, in ideal and less-than-ideal scenarios, helps you grow an intuitive understanding of when they would best apply to your workloads.”

Hasnain says:

“And this is how you properly test concurrent data structures.

Postscript
Of course, this is just a toy. But you can see some ways to extend it. For example, right now our AtomicU32 just delegates to the real one. But what you could do instead is, for each atomic, to maintain a set of values written and, on read, return an arbitrary written value consistent with a weak memory model.

You could also be smarter with exploring interleavings. Instead of interleaving threads at random, like we do here, you can try to apply model checking approaches and prove that you have considered all meaningfully different interleavings.

Or you can apply the approach from Generate All The Things and exhaustively enumerate all interleavings for up to, say, five increments. In fact, why don’t we just do this?”

Hasnain says:

This approach is nuts. Learnt a lot about algorithm design and also about high performance micro-optimizations

"The program is over-fit to the input spec and the particular host it runs on (Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz, 512MB RAM, Ubuntu 20.04). Given the CPU, it only uses SIMD instructions up to AVX2, no AVX512. It assumes the input is exactly according to the spec and hence does zero error handling and even on such input will only produce correct results with probability < 1, though very close to 1, depending on the parameters you choose."

Hasnain says:

"17 TiB of tablebases are unwieldy, so to do this migration without hours of downtime, we set up a second server with the new approach. This also allowed us to run controlled benchmarks on the full set of tablebases, before finally doing the switch and retiring the old server."

Hasnain says:

“Aaaand the quick and easy solution is rarely quick or easy. This was never meant to be so arduous - this whole “let’s make a primitive function” idea was meant to take an hour tops to avoid spending a couple hours implementing it at the bytecode level, but it ended up taking much longer! I don’t think I could have easily predicted this seemingly easy change would be so hard: this requires a lot of knowledge about the system you’re working with and about interpreter design, yet I’m but a humble PhD student. We’re getting there though.”

Hasnain says:

“A thing that is happening is happening. And you don’t even need a majority of people to accept reality.

You just need the right people to do so.

Because the right people can do things like install air filters in schools and hospitals. They can encourage masks. They can call out less than ideal vaccines and push for better ones. They can generate the background noise that popularizes the idea that covid is not over.”

Hasnain says:

His writing is always pretty on point, and this is a well argued piece. This made me chuckle though:

“Apparently, the Kurzweilian ideas have mutated over time, and seem to have taken root in a group of folks associated with a forum called "LessWrong", a more high-brow version of 4chan where mostly young men try to impress each other by their command of mathematical vocabulary (not of actual math). One of the founders of this forum, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has become one of the most outspoken proponents of the hypothesis that "the end is nigh".”

Hasnain says:

“Current and former US officials also told CNN that the five Israeli units were not the only ones the State Department had been examining. The special State Department panel had reached unanimous consensus at a working level that three additional units had been guilty of abuses prior to October 7, the officials said. Only Blinken or the Deputy Secretary of State can make a final determination on whether units remain eligible to receive US military assistance and it is unclear if the matter has come before them. The findings by the expert panel would have been enough to disqualify a military unit from any other country, the officials said.”

Hasnain says:

“Zimmerman predicts that more nonprofits will be announcing closures in the months and years to come.

“It's like a structural problem in the nonprofit field where we're all trying to address the harms of capitalism with band-aids and funded by the people and companies that have helped create these conditions,” he said.

He added: “F–k capitalism is what I want to say.”@

Hasnain says:

““You shouldn’t have to resort to a fast-food restaurant app to get information about power,” said Michelle Thibodeaux, who manages Airbnb properties on Galveston Island south of Houston. (A breakfast person, her usual order is the taquitos.)”

Hasnain says:

“Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor—ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo—says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.

…

The number of commercial-scale Bitcoin mining operations in the U.S. has increased sharply over the last few years; there are now at least 137. Similar medical complaints have been registered near facilities in Arkansas and North Dakota. And the Bitcoin mining industry is urgently trying to push bills through state legislatures, including in Indiana and Missouri, which would exempt Bitcoin mines from local zoning or noise ordinances. In May, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a “Bitcoin Rights” bill to protect miners and prevent any future attempts to ban the industry.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on graphics, simulation, and optimization. It took me a little while to find the live demo but it was pretty cool.

“What is the take away here?

CPUs and GPUs can crunch numbers fast. Like really really fast. Moving data around is slow and even slower when accessing data randomly. If you want to go fast, it is good to know how hardware works.

I enjoyed the hell out of this little journey into web workers and SharedArrayBuffers. SharedArrays are kinda like magic to me with their “eventual visibility”. Once webgpu is a little more well adopted I will take a stab into compute shaders.

Until next time, have a wonderful day.”

Hasnain says:

“Age discrimination is a fact of life. In California in 2010, for example, more people filed claims with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing for age discrimination than for racial discrimination or sexual harassment. “Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg once said, in possibly the dumbest statement in American history. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, in what might be the next dumbest.”

Hasnain says:

“When I was 11, former friends of Fremlin’s told my mother he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he “reassured” her that I was not his type. In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past weren’t as “prudish” as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults. My mother said nothing. I looked at the floor, afraid she might see my face turning red.

…

One day, during that period, while I was visiting my mother, she told me about a short story she had just read. In the piece, a girl dies by suicide after her stepfather sexually abuses her. “Why didn’t she tell her mother?” she asked me. A month later, inspired by her reaction to the story, I wrote her a letter finally telling her what had happened to me.

As it turned out, in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me. She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity. “

Hasnain says:

I read this long and technically impressive post, learned a lot about physics (and ECS) and then let out a bunch of expletives when I got to this part:

“On a more personal note: I have officially graduated from high school, and will start university in late August. There’s still a decent amount of time until then, but once it does start, I will most likely have less time for development. I will try my best though, and I am very invested in trying to improve the state of physics and collision detection in the Bevy ecosystem.”

Hasnain says:

“In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28 000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58 260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85 750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024”

Hasnain says:

“The required quantities are unenviably vast. Each rider consumes close to 1.5kg of rice or pasta every day and in the region of 120g of carbohydrates per hour when on the bike - the equivalent carbohydrate content of five hourly bananas.

One EF rider once went through four tubs of maple syrup during the three-week race.”

Hasnain says:

“Moyer-Nocchi points out that coriander is not the only herb whose popularity has ebbed and flowed in Italy over the centuries. Marjoram was once widely used, but “no one necessarily associates that with Italy anymore,” she says. On the other hand, some of the flavors modern Italians use to express themselves have not actually been “Italian” for very long. Basil, which originated in Asia, has only been part of Italian cuisine for a few hundred years. “It’s very young, and yet seems so Italian,” Moyer-Nocchi says.

From Thailand with chilies to Belgium with chocolate, many modern nations have embraced once-foreign ingredients, folding them into their culinary identity until their absence becomes unthinkable. The curious history of cilantro in Italy shows that the reverse is also true. Sometimes, an ingredient becomes so unpopular that we forget it’s been there all along.”

Hasnain says:

“After learning Coq, mei began looking for an open problem to test it out. That’s when they found the Busy Beaver Challenge. A few weeks later, they’d translated several of the team’s proofs into Coq, including Ligocki and Kropitz’s proof that Skelet #1 never halts — Ligocki could finally be sure about it. Suddenly, an even higher standard of rigor than Stérin’s emphasis on reproducibility seemed possible. And it had all started with someone who had no formal training at all — an amateur mathematician.
“Let’s remember that means a lover of mathematics,” Moore said. “It is not a pejorative term.”

The Dam Breaks

Around the same time, a graduate student named Chris Xu made a breakthrough on the second monstrous machine — Skelet #17. It was usually easy to summarize the behavior of even the most fiendish five-rule Turing machines once you figured out how they worked. “Then you encounter some bullshit like Skelet 17, and you go, ‘Nah, the universe is trolling us,’” mei said. Understanding Skelet #17 by studying the patterns on its tape was like deciphering a secret message wrapped in four layers of encryption: Cracking one code just revealed another totally unrelated code, and two more below that. Xu had to decipher all of them before he could finally prove that the machine never halted.”

Hasnain says:

As an HN commenter alludes, this is why hashmaps should explicitly always randomize iteration order (at least in test mode) so people don’t rely on this behavior. It was surprising how many bugs shook out when we did this at FB

“Thanks to CxByte, Gunnar, Andrew and Brian for their help with debugging this, and their helpful tips. Gunnar in particular was the one who uncovered this bug, and despite my satirical jab in the commit message helped uncover this very interesting bug, so he’s the one who made this post possible.

Also, thanks to the person who introduced this bug (the commit log gets a little fuzzy, so I’m not quite sure who did) and hope he buys a lottery ticket. :^)”

Hasnain says:

Kept nodding while reading this.

“Healthy laziness begets agility - you have way less code, less systems, less everything, and therefore way more ability to maneuver and actually change things with a small number of motivated people - and there’s always a small number of motivated people in any place, and this place might even keep them, if they learn to bargain for raises. And you also don’t need to grow as much, because you don’t need to be adding people to take care of all these sprawling systems that you quickly come to depend on.”

Hasnain says:

“All this provides a read-only SQL queryable data in a single file representing OpenStreetMap metadata. The project evolved from merely transferring format migration to optimizing it for efficient search. This highlights the importance of iterative refinement and the power of combining different technologies to solve problems.”

Hasnain says:

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of professionals suddenly began working from home, some employers rolled out software that captured screenshots of their employees’ computers and algorithmically scored their productivity. It’s easy to imagine how the current boom in generative AI could build on these foundations: For example, large language models could digest every email and Slack message written by employees to provide managers with summaries of workers’ productivity, work habits, and emotions. These types of technologies not only pose harm to people’s dignity, autonomy, and job satisfaction, they also create information asymmetry that limits people’s ability to challenge or negotiate the terms of their work.

We can’t let it come to that. The battles that gig workers are fighting are the leading front in the larger war for workplace rights, which will affect all of us. The time to define the terms of our relationship with algorithms is right now.”

Hasnain says:

“Their assessment of the resultant reality is equally dark: Respondents describe Israeli actions in damning terms, with 41% saying they constitute major war crimes akin to genocide, nearly 34% saying they constitute genocide, and 16% saying they are not akin to genocide, but are still major war crimes. While these views may seem surprising, they are not markedly different from the views of some segments of the American public, especially Democrats, with one recent poll showing a majority of Democrats saying Israeli actions amounted to genocide.”

Hasnain says:

Yay for caches. And simplicity.

“We demonstrate that a cache often experiences a higher one-hit-wonder ratio than common full trace analysis. Our study on 6594 traces reveals that quickly removing one-hit wonders (quick demotion) is the secret weapon of many advanced algorithms. Motivated by this, we design S3-FIFO, a Simple and Scalable cache eviction algorithm composed of only Static FIFO queues. Our evaluation shows that S3-FIFO achieves better and more robust efficiency than state-of-the-art algorithms. Meanwhile, it is more scalable than LRU-based algorithms.”

Hasnain says:

“Since synchronization is literally built into the database, it’s very tempting to use the Database and the transactions they provide as the synchronization point for EVERYTHING. I would advise caution here, because the database is an expensive part of; and often is THE MOST EXPENSIVE part of your infrastructure. It’s better suited for storing bits on disk, than for synchronizing all of the things for you. If you rely on the DB for synchronization, you will inevitably need to shard and rebalance your database in order to continue scaling, and BTW, you are scaling the most expensive part of your infra.”

Hasnain says:

“That should be most of it. I mean, there are special initialization rules for static variables (constant initialization included), but, like, do you really care? In my humble opinion, here’s the key takeaway: just write your own fucking constructors! You see all that nonsense? Almost completely avoidable if you had just written your own fucking constructors. Don’t let the compiler figure it out for you. You’re the one in control here. Or is it that you think you’re being cute? You just added six instances of undefined behaviour to your company’s codebase, and now twenty Russian hackers are fighting to pwn your app first. Are you stupid? What’s the matter with you? What were you thinking? God.”

Hasnain says:

“TL;DR The code from the tutorial is available at matmul.c. This blog post is the result of my attempt to implement high-performance matrix multiplication on CPU while keeping the code simple, portable and scalable. The implementation follows the BLIS design, works for arbitrary matrix sizes, and, when fine-tuned for an AMD Ryzen 7700 (8 cores), outperforms NumPy (=OpenBLAS), achieving over 1 TFLOPS of peak performance across a wide range of matrix sizes.”

Hasnain says:

This is how we measured the success of this critical project:

* Not a single production incident, given how critical money movement is for Uber
* We didn’t have to rollback the migration for a single table
* We backfilled 250 billion unique records and not a single data inconsistency has been detected so far, with the new architecture in production for over 6 months
* Our new data model reduced complexity in the query path, and we observed latency improvements in both read and write path on Docstore
* The project also resulted in technology consolidation, reducing external dependencies

From a business impact perspective, operating LedgerStore is now very cost effective due to reduced spend on DynamoDB. The estimated yearly savings are $6 million per year, and we also laid the foundation for such other future initiatives.

Hasnain says:

“If you ever see someone advertise a language feature as “everything is an X”, your first reaction should probably be healthy skepticism, rather than delight. Programming languages generally tend to draw distinctions between distinct things for good reasons.

The C++ committee added concepts after decades of pain with templates, and even these do not overcome all the problems mentioned above. I would not be surprised to see Zig add a similar system (likely with its own twist to it) at some point if it keeps growing in usage.”

Hasnain says:

“Within each local party, we compare the proportion of competent politicians in elections after the quota to the 1991 level. The figure below show some striking results. The left panel illustrates our estimates for politicians of both genders with black dots showing the change in the proportion of competent representatives in a party which is forced to increase their share of women (by 100 percentage points). The right panel splits the results by men and women (blue dots for men and pink dots for women). It shows distinctly that the average competence of male politicians increased in the places where the quota had a larger impact, and that the effect is concentrated to the three elections following the quota. On average, a higher female representation by 10 percentage points raised the proportion of competent men by 3 percentage points! For the competence of women, we observe little discernible effect.”

Hasnain says:

From October. Prescient.

“The momentum is there, but only if you stay angry. Given this court’s pattern of behavior, that shouldn’t be hard for you to do. Don’t treat these judges with respect, and don’t allow our elected representatives to treat them with respect, either. Tell those reps that this court isn’t legitimate. It’s vile, evil and must be destroyed. Never stop saying it to them.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t see how the country comes back from this and the Chevron ruling without massive upheaval and someone willing to take action in the moment (and our current democratic leadership is certainly not cut out for this)

As someone wrote on twitter:

“Thinking about how it would be reported if the ex-president of a non-Western country was ruled immune from prosecution by a panel of judges he himself appointed”

Hasnain says:

“We can observe something similar in almost every consumer market and many B2B markets as well, and that's when we're talking about issues that have known solutions. If we look at problem that, from a technical standpoint, we don't know how to solve well, like subtle or even not-so-subtle bias in ML models, it stands to reason that we should expect to see more and worse bugs than we'd expect out of "classical" software systems, which is what we're seeing. Any solution to this problem that's going to hold up in the market is going to have to be robust against the issue that consumers will overwhelmingly choose the buggier product if it has more features they want or ships features they want sooner, which puts any solution that requires taking care in a way that significantly slows down shipping in a very difficult position, absent a single dominant player, like Intel in its heyday.”

Hasnain says:

“If I had to do this in Production, for the majority of workloads I'd probably still use an HTTP / TCP connection. It's portable, reliable on message failure, and I could split it across machines if needs be. However for the cases where latency really matters, the maintenance overhead of using shared memory is worth it.”

Hasnain says:

“In this case, however, you probably have other, more catastrophic data loss vectors to worry about. In other words: You probably don’t care if the fsync call completed when your laptop burns down in a house fire or gets stolen - the data is gone anyway.

If you are running database systems in a production environment, you (or your cloud provider) are hopefully using enterprise-grade SSDs with capacitor-backed write cache that have great write latency.”

Hasnain says:

“Service businesses have always been the easiest to start because there’s no R&D phase. But they’ve historically been tough to grow because the main ways to grow were raising prices, hiring, or pruning your service into a product. If AI keeps getting better (a guarantee) but doesn’t quite get to superhuman abilities (big question mark), there will be lots of automation opportunities that let you grow your service business beyond the traditional constraints.”

Hasnain says:

The challenges they hit were eminently predictable - but it was still cool to read about their earlier use of SQLite.

“Overall, this migration proved to be a massive success. Shepherd is now better equipped to handle a higher volume of business and priced risks. We no longer need to worry about application/database coupling, and our engineering team’s velocity continues to grow.”

Hasnain says:

“This last snippet is probably not UB-safe and is GCC-specific. But the point stands: you can write completely alien and befuddling code in C without making it unreadable.”