Hasnain says:

Learnt a lot of math and systems stuff here.

“It is entirely acceptable and workable to treat erasure codes as a magic function that turns 1 file into chunks and back. You can stop reading here, and not knowing the details of what math is being performed will not hinder your ability to leverage erasure codes to great effect in distributed systems or databases. (And if you continue, take what follows with a large grain of salt, as efficient erasure coding is a subject folk have spent years on, and the below is what I’ve collected from a couple of days of reading through papers I only half understand.)”

Hasnain says:

Finally got around to reading this which was published in April. Great read

“It’s impressive what a tiny team of experienced engineers can build. I had to triple-check that Bluesky’s core team was only two engineers for almost nine months, during which time they built the basics of the protocol, and made progress with the iOS and Android apps. Even now, Bluesky is a very lean team of around 12 engineers for the complexity they build with and the company’s growth. “

Hasnain says:

“We’ve explored a bunch of different databases, all used in production by some of the largest companies on the planet, and hopefully this will have exposed you to some technologies you weren’t familiar with before. Take this knowledge with you as you look to solve interesting problems.”

Hasnain says:

The math isn’t mathing: we see daily reports of at least 100 folks killed but the death toll is still 40k (tech4palestine has a great explainer on why). I wish the media would explain that more accurately. I wish I was wrong here (would be the happiest person in the world to be wrong) but I strongly suspect the toll is already at or above 200k

“The developments underscore the worsening humanitarian situation in the enclave, where tens of thousands of people have been killed by the Israeli military, and chronic hunger threatens the remaining civilian population. On Friday, two children and a woman were crushed to death while attempting to buy food from a bakery in central Gaza.”

Hasnain says:

This is the same guy who’s said a lot of disgraceful stuff about Palestinians in the past. And even he’s calling it like it is.

““There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re now operating in Jabaliya. They’re basically cleaning the territory of Arabs,” he said, referring to towns and cities in northern Gaza where a renewed Israeli offensive against the militant group Hamas has caused extensive damage in recent months. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began in response to the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023.”

Hasnain says:

“In the meantime, Broden, Nazareth and Voth have all graduated high school. Only Broden has decided to continue working on the tetrahedron problem — when he’s not busy with college coursework — but all three are considering math careers. “It feels meaningful that I’m trying to contribute to something bigger than myself, to the nature of truth,” Nazareth said. It all starts with asking the right question.”

Hasnain says:

“Looking at the incoming Trump administration, his Republican governing trifecta, and the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, Rabin-Havt says: ”The truth is, we are condemned to the future we are going to be forced to live in because two octogenarians had egos too big to know when they had to quit: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Joe Biden.””

Hasnain says:

“Let me finish with this, and it hurts: Most companies just need basic bash / make knowledge, a single instance SQL processing engine (DuckDB, CHDB or a few python scripts), a distributed file system, git and a developer workflow (CI/CD). Everything else is sugar and enterprise stuff. Not saying these last ones aren’t important, but the basics should be well covered, otherwise you’ll have a huge mess. I’m still surprised by how quickly we forget about the good practices we have learned over the years in software engineering (testing, deployment, collaboration, monitoring and so on)”

Hasnain says:

Susan’s powerful speech at Oxford Union the other day during which they passed a resolution declaring it apartheid (and I believe genocide). Worth reading in full. Powerful words. There is a super long segment I felt like quoting but it was a bit too long

“It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.”

Hasnain says:

TIL lots of fun optimization math

"Taking a look back at all of the hardware-specific optimizations, we can see an orders-of-magnitude improvement over our initial naive implementation and stock NumPy implementation. Utilizing and exploiting hardware features has delivered performance boosts from 10 MB/s to 60.3 GB/s on Intel hardware, and 4 MB/s to 29.7 GB/s on Arm hardware. It underscores the absolute importance that specialized hardware acceleration libraries have on even the simplest of computational algorithms."