Hasnain says:

On one hand I understand not exposing too many software knobs to users. On the other hand, especially with complex systems like optimizers, sometimes you really want an override…

“One way to solve this problem is to add hints to the query to tell the optimizer the right way to join these two tables. But PostgreSQL famously does not support plan hints (at least not natively — you have to install pg_hint_plan). In our example, the customer did not have the necessary permissions to install this extension in RDS, and the person who could do it was on vacation.”

Hasnain says:

I definitely found myself nodding along here for obvious reasons. Picking a quote alone takes time, and whenever I try to write a more meaningful summary it takes a lot longer. Let alone doing this for a book…

“It’s surprising how even many of the most prolific readers I know are unaware of the value of inspectional reading. Most readers start on page one of a book and plow through until they’re done or decide to cut their losses — without ever reading the table of contents or the preface.

One great alternative to writing summaries is to talk about the books you’re reading. Explaining the ideas you’re reading about to someone else is one of the best ways to engage with the material, since (a) it forces you to formulate it in your own words, and (b) they might challenge the ideas and get you to examine them more critically.”

Hasnain says:

This whole thing was so horrifying to read. People getting rich off a grift while kids suffer.

“In a cloud storage account she'd once shared with Winenger, she said, she found thousands of his photos and videos, including explicit images of their three shared children. She loaded them onto a thumb drive for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, whose investigation into Winenger had never closed.

Within days, Winenger was arrested. He was soon charged with 19 felonies, including possession of child pornography and 14 counts of committing forcible lewd acts against a child, Robert.

He pleaded not guilty and was released on bail, his access to the children suspended. Because of the no-contact order he'd previously obtained against Montes, the children landed in a county shelter. Winenger's defense attorney, Patrick Clancy, declined to comment on Winenger's behalf, saying he doesn't try his cases in the press.”

Hasnain says:

Not sure what’s worse: this quote or the one about installing non compliant locks over explicit objections about them possibly killing people in the event of a fire.

“Indeed, Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, loudly opined that it was unreasonable for Twitter’s landlords to expect Twitter to pay rent, since San Francisco was a “shithole.”
So, Alex Spiro is a big time lawyer. One of the biggest. But, I’m pretty sure that not paying your contractually obligated rent because the city is a “shithole” is not how anything fucking works.”

Hasnain says:

Wonder how cities will adapt to the new normal. I for one would love more walkable areas and housing / transit downtown.

“Asking rents for office space will “end the year below pre-pandemic levels” and probably hit their lowest in a decade, according to the city’s latest forecasts. Asking rents in Manhattan offices averaged $75.13 per square foot in April 2023, down 50 cents from a year prior, according to Colliers.

It’s a worry for city officials, who for the last decade have relied on an ever-expanding commercial real estate sector for taxes to pay for schools, cops and trash collection. Commercial property taxes contribute about 20% of the city’s total tax revenues — with office buildings, specifically, contributing 10%. And as those revenues are flattening, the city’s expenses are forecast to keep growing, creating challenges for Mayor Eric Adams’s agenda.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting technical read about a massive recent outage. It was a bit of a bummer that they only went about publishing it when called out about their lack of transparency.

“Another common theme that all teams encountered during the service recovery was the fact that distributed, share-nothing data stores handle massive failures much better than most distributed data stores that require a quorum-based control plane. For example a fleet of independent data nodes with static shard assignment degrades roughly linearly as the number of nodes drops. The same fleet of data nodes, bound together by a quorum will operate without degradation so long as the quorum is met and refuse to operate once it’s not. Of course the quorum-based fleet is a lot easier to manage in the day-to-day, so going one way or another is not an obvious decision, but this outage highlights the need for us to re-examine past choices.”

Hasnain says:

I spent the last half hour (and change) reading this wondrous human interest story interwoven with a history of the war(s), food economics, supply chains, and more. So engrossing and so bizarre at the same time. Super well written. Gotta start with the prelude:

“This is a story about hippopotamuses, as advertised, but it’s also a story about two very complicated and exceptional men. These men were spies. They were also bitter enemies. Each wanted to kill the other and fully expected to feel really good about himself afterward. Eccentric circumstances—circumstances having to do with hippopotamuses—would join these men together as allies and even dear friends. But then, eventually, they’d be driven into opposition again.

Whatever strange bond these two men had, they were loyal to it. They were like repulsive magnets: Some fundamental property of each was perfectly opposed to the core of the other. And yet, somehow throughout their long lives—as several volatile phases of American history tumbled along in the background—they also had a way of continually snapping back together. One of these men was a humble patriot, known for his impeccable integrity. He tried to leave detailed, reliable accounts of what he did and thought and felt. The other, I discovered, was a megalomaniac and a pathological liar.

This is a true story, and a very serious one, even though it’s composed of many details that will seem ludicrous and impossible. Most of those details are irrefutable, though. And while I worked hard to verify the rest, doing so occasionally proved futile. I’d like to try and explain why.

These two men will seem larger than life, but they lived at a time, a hundred years ago, when, I would argue, life in America seemed larger than life—when what was unimaginable still felt feasible and ideas that looked ridiculous could still come true.

That said, this is the story of one idea that looked ridiculous and didn’t come true. The idea was ridiculous. But it was completely reasonable, too.

All I can say is, try to keep that in mind.”

Hasnain says:

“There is a kind of public bloodthirst on the American right and thus among our right-leaning institutions at the moment. The simmering resentment atop which the scum of conservative politics has for so long floated is beginning to boil. I don’t know what this will ultimately mean and I’m leery of historical comparisons.

My unscientific sense, though, is that a worryingly large part of the general population—not even corrupt or prejudiced officials, but civilians who hold no office or public authority—feels emboldened by the way real, credentialed, powerful authority has begun to ostentatiously defer to murderers. Institutions, both the press and the government, are always more plastic than we think they are; they will bend so that they may countenance every kind of evil so long as they can do so in a way that reinforces their positions. Increasingly, these institutions, from the Times to the Journal to New York City’s elected officials, have become comfortable holding up callous, public murder—of leftist protesters, of homeless people, of prisoners of war—as excusable, not just on the basis of unfortunate extenuating circumstances, but in the name of a kind of hateful reverse morality.

Personally, I find myself too often tempted to meet this kind of crazed violence with equally passionate resistance; to go out looking for the fight that is constantly being threatened. But that’s not what I’ve been told to do by a figure no less central to my religious practice as a Christian than Christ. The job is not to administer the beatings, it’s to tend to the beaten.”

Hasnain says:

New anti remote work propaganda just dropped. I wonder if these folks have ever been to a big tech office. It was hard to *not* see any alcohol!

“Bloomberg spoke with a half dozen addiction specialists who treat mostly employed patients. All say that their treatment programs are over-enrolled in the wake of the pandemic, fueled by extended remote or hybrid arrangements that offer a dangerous triad: steady paychecks, proximity to drugs and alcohol out of view from co-workers, and incentive to maintain day-to-day functionality. As a result, undetected drug habits flourished and are only now coming to light as more companies require workers to return to the office.”

Hasnain says:

I had the honor of working with Yann very briefly on a couple of small bugfixes, and always was awed by his genius insights in creating lz4 and then ztsd. Didn’t know about the inspirational story behind it. (And can’t wait for the next gen successor to be fully released).

“Adam: This is the wildest story I’ve ever heard in terms of impact. A marketing professional, a project manager, a couple evenings a week after he bikes home from his job in Paris, starts tweaking a calculator game. And by the end of it, Yann has shifted a whole industry’s approach to data compression and saved billions and billions of dollars.

So the obvious question I have for Yann is how? How can you have that much impact in your career? In your hobby?

Yann: I would say the first advice here is don’t do that for the success. Success is too random and too far away. If someone targets success, it will lose stamina way before reaching that point. So do something because you like it. That’s the inner force that will drive you beyond I would say the normal investment that almost everybody can also do. And I think that’s very important one. So now if you are interested in a domain, keep going at it. And it’s really a small effort regularly in the same direction that brings you very far. I understood that from my mother”