Hasnain says:

“A growing body of social-science literature suggests that, yes, this is in fact quite different. The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households. Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.”

Hasnain says:

“On the matter of Israel’s man-made famine, Foer provides an interesting corroborating detail. In early April, national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Israeli officials in the Situation Room and was prepared to tell them, “You’re about to be responsible for the third famine of the 21st century.” Sullivan never got to make his speech, because the Israelis sprang a new crisis on the White House by telling Sullivan they had just bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, killing prominent Iranian military leaders.”

Hasnain says:

Climate change is here. This is 4 hours away from any coast, 2k meters above sea level, and it still got leveled.

Also took out the world’s only source for quartz that’s used to make the crucibles for making silicon chips as I understand it.

““We have complete neighborhoods that are no longer there,” he said. “We’re just trying now to go to where these neighborhoods were and just try to do some sort of search-and-rescue in some of the houses that are still there.”
�Days after the rain subsided in the Southern Appalachians, numerous flood alerts were still in effect because of continued runoff and swollen waterways. Multiple flash flood emergencies, the most dire flood alert, were in effect Sunday for numerous lakes along the Catawba River in western North Carolina because of both “catastrophic and historic inflows” and dam releases that could lead to “life threatening” flooding downstream.”

Hasnain says:

Appointing Khan has been the one unquestionably good thing Biden has done, I’d hate for that to be reversed later.

“Roughly 80 percent of Democrats feel that the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies, compared to only 3 percent who say it should be doing less, according to new polling. Nearly 90 percent of Democrats, meanwhile, feel that lobbyists and corporate executives hold too much power over the government.

The same poll, commissioned by the Tech Oversight Project, found that more than three-fourths of Democrats feel Big Tech wields monopoly power in ways that harm consumers and small businesses. Only 7 percent said the companies should face no repercussions, since they have continued to innovate.”

Hasnain says:

“historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: The country has detected no cases of cervical cancer in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.

Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published on Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.”

Hasnain says:

Always interesting watching something you worked on - very tangentially (I did only a smaaaaallll slice of work here) - hit the news later. I didn’t realize it spawned an investigation, but it makes sense.

“Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees.

Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext and stored them in a database that had been searched by roughly 2,000 company engineers, who collectively queried the stash more than 9 million times.”

Hasnain says:

Can’t check the news without instantly getting depressed these days. At least I have the privilege to just ignore the news unlike those suffering. So many thoughts, so hard to put everything into words.

“Iran’s Foreign Minister Sayyed Abbas Araghchi told the UN Security Council the attack on southern Beirut by Israel involved 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs supplied by the United States.”

Hasnain says:

“More generally, when using SQLite as a library, you don't have to learn how to do fancy things in SQL syntax. Your logic can be in regular old application code in your programming language of choice, orchestrating the most basic SQL queries that are easy to learn. It's fine. The creators of SQLite have made this point themselves.”

Hasnain says:

“Increasing productivity: Safe Coding improves code correctness and developer productivity by shifting bug finding further left, before the code is even checked in. We see this shift showing up in important metrics such as rollback rates (emergency code revert due to an unanticipated bug). The Android team has observed that the rollback rate of Rust changes is less than half that of C++.”

Hasnain says:

“Previous advisories from U.S. law enforcement agencies have said some of the workers earn up to $300,000 annually, collectively generating hundreds of millions for the North Korean regime and its weapons programs. “

Hasnain says:

"“We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a DOJ release.

“Merchants and banks pass along those costs to consumers, either by raising prices or reducing quality or service,” Garland said. “As a result, Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing — but the price of nearly everything.”"

Hasnain says:

““They will do it even though the prosecutor doesn’t want him to be executed, the jurors who sentenced him to death don’t want him executed and the victims themselves don’t want him to be executed. We have a system that values finality over fairness, and this is the result that we will get from that.”

“It is news to all of us, and I think that it should be a shame to all of us, that we have a system that will let a man be executed in spite of all of this, really is not a system of justice,” the attorney said.

In a statement posted on X, the NAACP said “Missouri lynched another innocent Black man. Governor Parson had the responsibility to save this innocent life, and he didn’t … We will hold Governor Parson accountable. When DNA evidence proves innocence, capital punishment is not justice – it is murder.””

Hasnain says:

“Of course, this manufactured lie about Tlaib has wholly obscured that Tlaib was victim to a racist cartoon donning the pages of publications like the National Review; that she had actually begun garnering support and sympathy from her colleagues; and that Tlaib’s “original sin” was speaking out in defense of students protesting their tuition supporting a US-funded genocidal campaign in Palestine.”

Hasnain says:

1984 like, almost, especially near the end

“The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.””

Hasnain says:

I’m a simple man. TNC writes something, I read it. Powerful.

“That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

How could he have been so wrong before? The fault lay partly with the profession he loved. In journalism, he had found his voice, his platform, his purpose in life. And yet, as he sees it, it was journalistic institutions that had not only failed to tell the truth about Israel and Palestine but had worked to conceal it. As a result, a fog had settled over the region, over its history and present, obscuring what anyone at closer range could apprehend easily with their own two eyes.

…

But for Coates, one wrong cannot justify another. “All states at their core have a reason for existing — a moral story to tell,” he told me. “We certainly do. Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.” Especially, he said, at the expense of people who had no hand in the genocide.

What matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now — to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his relationships with his former colleagues at The Atlantic and elsewhere. “I’m not worried,” he told me, shrugging his shoulders. “I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am fucking worthless.””

Hasnain says:

This is glorious and worth reading to the end.

“So let’s talk about monetizing a blog, starting with the most obvious and perhaps easiest avenue: display advertising.”

Hasnain says:

…. How is this not ethnic cleansing at a bare minimum?

““We have to tell the residents of north Gaza that they have one week to evacuate the territory, which then becomes a military zone, [a zone] in which every figure is a target and, most importantly, no supplies enter this territory.”

Hasnain says:

“I enjoyed this note:

Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it.”

Hasnain says:

“The phenomenon may also be related to broader changes in how we think about the family. Bland has noticed a generational divide. Older people often have a sense of duty when it comes to family, and this means that “they won’t break relationships even if they find them very dysfunctional,” she told me. Parents tell her that they tolerated worse behavior from their own parents. But members of younger generations “feel that they need healthy relationships, rather than any relationship.” They don’t see family relationships as mandatory. Coleman told me that divorce often plays a role. The liberalization of divorce law in the seventies helped people escape terrible marriages, but divorces can also provoke feuds, introduce new allegiances, and “cause the child to feel more like the parents are individuals, with their own assets and liabilities, rather than a family unit that they’re a part of.” There’s been a shift away from “honor thy mother and father,” Coleman said, and toward notions of happiness and mental health. “In some ways, the ideals we now have for romantic love are really parallel to the ideals we have for parent-adult-child relationships.””

Hasnain says:

The response on hacker news says it all honestly. I had heard good things about Arc but now I’m definitely *not* going to try it.

“this would be the final attack chain:

obtain the user id of the victim via one of the mentioned methods
create a malicious boost with whatever payload you want on your own account
update the boost creatorID field to the targets
whenever the victim visits the targeted website, they will get compromised
the browser company normally does not do bug bounties (update: see at the end of post), but for this catastrophic of a vuln, they decided to award me with $2,000 USD”

Hasnain says:

"While no one would buy a car or board an airplane "entirely at your own risk," we do that every day with the software that underpins America's critical infrastructure, she added.

"Unfortunately we have fallen prey to the myth of techno exceptionalism," Easterly opined. "We don't have a cyber security problem – we have a software quality problem. We don't need more security products – we need more secure products.""

Hasnain says:

“We've seen it all before. So familiar are we with the sight of Beirut exploding, what’s another dozen dead? Another thousand casualties crippling an already crippled healthcare system. Another mother screaming in Arabic as she carries her maimed daughter from a wreckage after a mobile phone blew up in her tiny hand.

What does it matter, so long as its Arabic she’s screaming, right? If you’re marveling at the “audacity” of a terror state’s ability to indiscriminately kill, you should not be surprised when that indiscriminate violence is reciprocated. You might feel differently when the bloodied children are not black, brown, or Muslim.”

Hasnain says:

“In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isn’t a coincidence. I say that as a fiftysomething white man whose formative experiences include childhood visits to my extended family in apartheid South Africa. (My parents left Johannesburg before I was born.) We’d swim in my grandparents’ pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest childhood memories.”

Hasnain says:

This feels like one of those events that’ll change how people think of the world and warfare forever. Cue every security person changing their supply chain security threat model. unconfirmed reports indicate the devices were planted with explosives from the get go; and also seemingly confirmed reports say eg the American university in Beirut replaced all their pagers a couple of weeks ago for “regular maintenance”.

“Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded near simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, killing at least nine people — including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding several thousand, officials said. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for what appeared to be a sophisticated, remote attack.”

Hasnain says:

The intro is somehow the least surprising and least scandalizing part of the article.

“Neom executives were summoned to the office to manage a crisis: Three workers had recently died toiling on the world’s biggest construction project.

Wayne Borg, a former Hollywood executive hired to run Neom’s media division, expressed frustration over the interruption to his evening.

“A whole bunch of people die so we’ve got to have a meeting on a Sunday night,” he said on a phone call, according to a recording heard by The Wall Street Journal. He said the project’s blue-collar workers from the Indian subcontinent had been “f—ing morons” and “that is why white people are at the top of the pecking order.” “

Hasnain says:

“Something has to change. It begins with fundamentally shifting how we value parenting, recognizing that the work of raising a child is crucial to the health and well-being of all society. This change must extend to policies, programs and individual actions designed to make this vital work easier.”

Hasnain says:

“Earlier this year, President Joe Biden said that “if you harm an American, we will respond.” Yet the Biden Administration has not even condemned my attack. The same was true when two weeks prior Americans were bludgeoned by Israeli settlers. And when a Palestinian American teen was shot and killed in the West Bank in January. And when a Palestinian American boy was shot and falsely imprisoned by Israeli forces last December.

A week ago, meters from where I was shot, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old American activist, was killed at the same weekly protest in Beita. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called her killing “unprovoked and unjustified” after the Israeli military said she was “highly likely” hit by IDF stray fire. Biden and Harris both faced criticism in the days after her death for failing to call Eygi’s family, who say they are “deeply offended by the suggestion” that her killing was “unintentional.” They have called for an independent U.S. investigation. None have been announced.

Had the Biden Administration taken my shooting seriously, Ayşenur might still be with us today.”

Hasnain says:

““At least the Brits are willing to call it like it is, which leadership here appears unwilling to do despite being presented with all the same information about Israeli IHL violations,” said a third U.S. official familiar with the discussions. “Leadership misses the fact that if we showed the same moral and legal clarity as the U.K. … it would give us more leverage for a cease-fire deal, not less.””

Hasnain says:

“CRAIG CORRIE: Well, of course, we did call for a U.S. investigation into Rachel’s killing. Let me say that what we’re hearing today, it’s upsetting to our family to hear our State Department again, and I would expect them to say, that they are trying to find out the facts and looking to Israel for that. Israel does not do investigations; they do cover-ups. So, let’s face it, nothing’s going to come out of there that’s going to help these citizens or whoever may be killed in the future. That’s what we’re trying to stop. Our family worked for an investigation into Rachel’s killing, and we wanted some consequences out of that. And we hoped — even though we didn’t know the names of the people that would be killed in the future, we hoped that that would stop and it would not happen.

I think, at this point, yes, U.S. has to do an investigation, but there needs to be consequences. As Jonathan pointed out, these are American weapons that are being used. That’s against U.S. law, and it should be stopped. I know from working with members of Congress and their staff, working with the State Department, that under the Leahy Law, usually they’re asking for proof that it was a U.S. weapon. If I write a check, I don’t need proof about what’s going wrong. I need people to cooperate and determine that it’s not our money that’s being used that way. Israel does not do that, to my knowledge. So, we also need to look for international help here. I think that the U.N., the International Criminal Courts, they’re places that need to get involved. But we’re just sick and tired of hearing platitudes from the State Department. And these are people we’ve met. We have met with Antony Blinken before he became secretary of state. He’s a decent person. But there needs to be consequences, and there needs to be consequences that are enforced by the entire U.S. government and the international community.”

Hasnain says:

“Researchers on political extremism have highlighted a surge in violence targeting Palestinians since Oct. 7, including the murder of a 6-year-old boy near Chicago and a shooting that wounded three college students in Vermont, both of which were motivated by the victims’ heritage, authorities said. Advocacy groups have also documented waves of harassment and vandalism targeting Muslims and Jews at their homes, businesses and places of worship.”

Hasnain says:

“Coincidentally, there was an issue created just today on the Zig repository to add a select(2) wrapper to the standard library motivated by the /dev/tty limitation on macOS. It links to this wonderful blog post which I would have loved to find sooner.”

Hasnain says:

“When it comes to designing a system with GC, don’t count out conservative stack scanning; the tradeoffs don’t obviously go one way or the other, and conservative scanning might be the right engineering choice for your system.”

Hasnain says:

“These updates should be backwards compatible with any other version of Visual Studio 2022. It would be madness to make a change to Visual Studio 2022 that breaks compatibility with Visual Studio 2022's own runtime libraries. However, Microsoft did exactly that.

In Visual Studio 2022 v17.10.0, Microsoft made a non-backwards compatible change to std::mutex::lock. This was reported to Microsoft, however, the issue report was marked as "Closed - Not a Bug". Apparently this was intended!”

Hasnain says:

“It’s like walking into a movie halfway through—you can’t understand the plot because you missed the beginning.

The same goes for learning complex subjects like math, CS, whatever.”

Hasnain says:

Chock full of golden advice here. Bookmarking for the future

“You are lucky if 99.999% of the time network is not a problem.
ACID has many meanings.
Each database has different consistency and isolation capabilities.
Optimistic locking is an option when you can’t hold a lock.
There are anomalies other than dirty reads and data loss.
My database and I don’t always agree on ordering.
Application-level sharding can live outside the application.
AUTOINCREMENT’ing can be harmful.
Stale data can be useful and lock-free.
Clock skews happen between any clock sources.
Latency has many meanings.
Evaluate performance requirements per transaction.
Nested transactions can be harmful.
Transactions shouldn’t maintain application state.
Query planners can tell a lot about databases.
Online migrations are complex but possible.
Significant database growth introduces unpredictability.”

Hasnain says:

“Update, Sept. 5, 3:30pm: A reader has claimed that the default Starlink SSID is actually... "STINKY." This seemed almost impossible to believe, but Elon Musk in fact tweeted about it in 2022, Redditors have reported it in the wild, and back in 2022 (thanks, Wayback Machine), the official Starlink FAQ said that the device's "network name will appear as 'STARLINK' or 'STINKY' in device WiFi settings." (A check of the current Starlink FAQ, however, shows that the default network name now is merely "STARLINK.")

In other words, not only was this asinine conspiracy a terrible OPSEC idea, but the ringleaders didn't even change the default Wi-Fi name until they started getting questions about it. Yikes.”

Hasnain says:

One can hope

““One goal of this research, and vaccinology in general, is to work toward a universal vaccine that can generate antibodies and create an immune response with broad protection to a rapidly mutating virus,” said Will Voss, a recent Ph.D. graduate in cell and molecular biology in UT’s College of Natural Sciences, who co-led the study.”

Hasnain says:

Can confirm greppability is underrated, in logs too.

“When I’m working on maintaining an unfamiliar codebase, I will spend a lot of time grepping the code base for strings. Even in projects exclusively written by myself, I have to search a lot: function names, error messages, class names, that kind of thing. If I can’t find what I’m looking for, it’ll be frustrating in the best case, or in the worst case lead to dangerous situations where I’ll assume a thing is not needed anymore, since I can’t find any references to it in the code base. From these situations, I’ve derived some rules you can apply to keep your code base greppable”

Hasnain says:

“This notion lies at the heart of what the late British physicist Peter Higgs, namesake of the Higgs field, and his competitors pointed out in the 1960s: that one field can stiffen other fields, thereby permitting their ripples to vibrate in place with a resonant frequency, and thus giving their particles mass.”

Hasnain says:

“I think a lot of the patterns in MiniJinja are useful for projects outside of MiniJinja. Quite is quite a bit more hidden in it that I have talked about before such as how MiniJinja is abusing serde. If you have a need for a Jinja2 compatible template engine I would love if you get some use out of it. If you're curious about how to build a runtime and object system in Rust, you might also find some utility in the codebase.

I myself learned quite a bit about what creative API design can look like in Rust by building it. At this point I am incredibly happy with how the public API of the engine shaped out to be. The engine is extensively documented both internally and publicly and you can read all about it in the API docs.”

Hasnain says:

Decade old but still super relevant and the first time I’m reading it

“I’ve often regretted that I hadn’t kept fighting with the lawyers, working harder to balance all the legal requirements (many of them well-intentioned but designed for a top-down command and control culture) with my vision of how a company really ought to work. I focused my energy on product, marketing, finance, and strategy, and didn’t put enough time in to make sure I was building the organization I wanted.

Reading recently about the HR practices at Valve and Github, so reminiscent of early O’Reilly, I’m struck by the need to redefine how organizations work in the 21st century. I’m not saying that Valve or GitHub’s approach is for everyone, but they indicate a deep engagement with the problem space, and fresh approaches to the questions of how to manage an organization. Google’s People Analytics may be a more scalable application of new HR thinking to a company of serious size.”

Hasnain says:

“The only solution to this is to think early and often about the systems of accountability you have to set up. This is much, much harder than micromanaging details, because every system of accountability you set up will eventually be gamed. So in addition to accountability, you need to foster a strong, ethical company culture that encourages transparency while allowing for some mistakes.”

Hasnain says:

“Founders seeking to internalize Graham’s advice should recast it by asking themselves how they can foster mutual trust – and how they can build the systems that allow trust to be strengthened even as the team expands. For us at Oxide, writing is the foundation upon which we build that trust. Others may land on different mechanisms, but the goal of founders should be the same: build the trust that allows a team to kick a Jobsian dent in the universe!”

Hasnain says:

Great technical read as always. But I couldn’t help but chuckle at this bit

“Now, let’s explore potential optimizations. One of the first adjustments you might consider is disabling locale support. All the formatting in {fmt} is locale-independent by default (which breaks with the C++’s tradition of having wrong defaults)”

Hasnain says:

“The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.”

Hasnain says:

“What might it mean for knowledge workers to fanatically pursue virtuosity in these fundamental skills, in the way that athletes seek in their fundamental skills?”