Hasnain says:

Hoping everyone stays safe out there.

“Widespread flooding, mudslides and road closures have already occurred all around region, including water so deep in the Bayshore area south of San Francisco that Highway 101 shut indefinitely in both directions. Snow continues to blanket the Sierra Nevada mountains, according to the National Weather Service.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really important read. The author explains their struggles with mental illness; and calls out the feedback they got from being rejected at Yale. And then how they got admitted at Harvard after leaving their struggles out of the essay. This also has opinions and analysis of how this affects a lot of other current students.

“Effective admissions policies require grasping how mental illness manifests in different students’ lives. The same crisis that leads to an outpouring of support for a wealthy child might cause a foster youth to be sent to a locked facility, prescribed antipsychotics and forced to change schools. Stigma varies widely across communities, affecting how teenagers view their struggles and what leeway they get from adults. Some kids are far less likely to be diagnosed and treated; others receive superfluous labels and get overmedicated. Understanding these disparities is crucial in the face of worsening adolescent mental health and ever more competitive standards at the colleges that produce an outsize share of leaders.

For a decade, I believed my story was an anomaly, but every year that seems less and less true. There are so many young people unable to hide their crises. We all lose out if this disqualifies them from a better future.”

Hasnain says:

Great exposition of ideas in programming language design conveyed through documentation. I’m looking forward to trying this.

“This isn’t for everyone. But it is for me, because after ten years in the industry, the last thing I want from a programming language is “power”. What I want are fewer nightmares. The “liberties” that programming languages provide feel like expressive power until your codebase becomes a mental health superfund site.”

Hasnain says:

This was an emotional and moving read - one I am only starting to fully appreciate.

“Other parents note that the nature of the relationship between parent and child changes over time in ways that are hard to stomach. One of the reasons parenting gradually gets less demanding is that parents become less central to a child’s happiness. School and friends, and eventually partners and work, take precedence, and parents shift into the child’s periphery. Although the utter physical dependency of a small child on their parents can be overwhelming, it comes with an intimacy that is impossible to preserve as the child matures. “I have a great relationship with my daughter now,” Marie Graham, a mother of one from Salford, England, who runs a wellness company, told me. “But the intensity of the relationship you have with your young child, you’re never going to re-create.” Regardless of how close my daughter and I remain, there will come a time when she no longer seeks comfort by crawling into my lap. Whatever liberation comes with that transition will be bittersweet.”

Hasnain says:

“This year on Christmas Day, unmasked travellers across the country screamed at unmasked ticket agents, while unmasked leftists criticized unmasked liberals for the DOT’s non-response, while unmasked kids suffered yet another reinfection with a disease known to spike risk of heart failure 72%. Next year on Christmas, the picture will look much the same unless we confront our collective denial and acknowledge that COVID won’t go away because we pretend not to see it.”

Hasnain says:

“UK millennials and their “Gen Z” younger cousins will probably cast more votes than boomers in the next general election. After years of being considered an electoral afterthought, their vote will soon be pivotal. Without drastic changes to both policy and messaging, that could consign conservative parties to an increasingly distant second place.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great analysis and I found myself nodding along - we love going to our local Barnes and Noble.

“Frankly, I could draw many other lessons from the Barnes & Noble turnaround. I praise its decentralization, and its willingness to empower booksellers at the local stores. I like the way the stores look nowadays, and the improved selection on the shelves. But the key element uniting all of this is putting books and readers first, and everything else second.

That’s a strategy that others could learn from. Although I’m not sure you can teach it.

You don’t fall in love for logical reasons, and you could never convince someone else to do so on the basis of arguments. People either feel it or they don’t. That’s true whether you love your spouse or you love something more intangible like a song or a book or a movie.”

Hasnain says:

I’m a huge fan of Advent of Code so I read this for that alone. But this has a great set of tips for how to learn in general - not just applicable to programming languages.

“I highly recommend Advent of Code to anyone looking to sharpen (or re-sharpen) their programming skills.

It is exceptionally well done.

And, if you want to attempt your own bread-first search of programming languages, it is an excellent way to do so!”

Hasnain says:

Very timely article after the thing I recently shared re: technology bugs causing revenue loss. This situation has been nuts.

“But the scale of this past week’s storm, coupled with a network that still hasn’t been fully restored in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, gummed things up. Even as it tried to solve one set of problems, new ones would emerge.

Crews and planes were out of place. Phone lines jammed up, and Southwest pilots and flight attendants trying to get assignments couldn’t get through to the scheduling department. Some shared screenshots on social media that showed hold times of eight hours or more—which meant they could wait a full workday for instructions while flights were stuck for the lack of a crew. The airline was scrambling just to figure out where its crew members were located, union leaders said.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting analysis - I've definitely run into a lot of bugs here and there but have never done an analysis like this.

"That got me interested in the class of bugs where the cost is direct and obvious. And the most obvious case of “obvious cost” is when the bug prevents me from spending money. In October I started recording instances of this I’ve run into."