Hasnain says:

Great read on diagnosing a ddos attack and making code changes quickly to make a server robust against them. Covers profiling, observability, caching, and various Rust frameworks.

“Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went "well, let's see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle", and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a couple DDoS attacks.

It really doesn't matter what the articles were about — the attack is certainly not representative of how folks on either side of any number of debates generally behave.

My assumption is that it's a small group (maybe a Discord?) with a botnet, who wanted to have fun.

And, friends: fun was had.”

Hasnain says:

“Our society is driven by contingent logics of austerity, under the constant pressure that there will never be enough care to go around, and you are only entitled to the survival you can buy; but we can and must demand more. We must look to those who have the most complex needs and build our community protections around those needs, instead of prioritizing the needs of the least vulnerable, which is what we are doing now. We cannot rely on pharmaceutical technology alone. We also have to use all of the social, economic, and political technologies at our disposal––just as much tools as vaccines and antivirals––like social distancing, masking, paid leave, eviction prevention, community harm reduction, upgraded ventilation, infrastructure investments, Medicare for All, debt cancellation, decarceration and so much more. These are just some of the potential social and fiscal tools that we could use to help people not just survive the pandemic but thrive in spite of it.”

Hasnain says:

“If we want to minimize disease, we need to better understand the organisms in our shared ecosystems. While it’s understandable that our focus is mostly on humans, that focus may ultimately prove costly both to us and to those who share our planet.”

Hasnain says:

The author's prior article on golang issues went viral this week (to much outrage - again) so they wrote a follow up. I am not an expert in Go (haven't written much if at all) but thought this was a reasonable and enlightening take.

"We've reached the fifth stage of grief: acceptance.

Fine. It may well be that Go is not adequate for production services unless your shop is literally made up of Go experts (Tailscale) or you have infinite money to spend on engineering costs (Google).

But surely there's still a place for it."

Hasnain says:

“The only coffee available in the building came from a vending machine that accepted a large amount of money and produced in return an undrinkable brown liquid. The Microsoft employees chipped in to buy a cheap coffee maker and put it in their shared offices. But it was identified and cited as a fire hazard and security violation.”

Hasnain says:

“But that’s dozens of novels out of thousands, hundreds of thousands, in the genre. Obviously we can imagine matriarchy, and we can write about it. So why is the number of these books so comparatively small?

The easiest reason—or excuse, depending your perspective—is that in nearly all of recorded history, men have held power. Kings run kingdoms, which are still called kingdoms even when run by queens. “

Hasnain says:

“Thanks to these efforts, hotel toiletries that otherwise would’ve ended up in landfills have been given a second use case.

Seipler has seen mothers cry with joy when they’re given soap. The small, commonplace things we often take for granted, he said, can make a world of difference when reallocated.

“I know it sounds funny,” he said, “but that little bar of soap on the counter in your hotel room — that thing can literally save a life.””

Hasnain says:

… and 75% of kids. Whoa.

“The blood test data suggests 189 million Americans had covid-19 by end of February, well over double the 80 million cases shown by The Washington Post case tracker, which is based on state data of confirmed infections. Clarke said that’s because the blood tests captures asymptomatic cases and others that were never confirmed on coronavirus tests.”

Hasnain says:

Really interesting read on the origins of Rooh Afza and how it’s been developed over the years.

“Hakim Majeed could not have known on that summer day in 1907 that in 40 years, India as he knew it would cease to exist, as the subcontinent was cleaved in two and his own family was split between India and the new country of Pakistan. He could not have guessed that his work would survive the bloodshed of partition. That in the decades to come, Rooh Afza would travel far beyond the lanes of Old Delhi to 37 countries. That in the alchemy of his simple ingredients was the beginnings of a scarlet empire.”

Hasnain says:

It’s motivating to read about an open problem being solved in a week (with effectively the bulk of it being one night) by a pair of grad students.

“When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their “expectation threshold” conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves. Their claim — a broad assertion about mathematical objects called random graphs — seemed too strong, too all-encompassing, too bold to possibly be true. It felt more like wishful thinking than a reflection of mathematical truth. Even so, no one could prove it false, and it quickly became one of the most important open problems in the field.

Now, more than 15 years later, a pair of young mathematicians at Stanford University have done what Kahn and Kalai thought borderline impossible: In a surprisingly short preprint posted online just a few weeks ago, Jinyoung Park and Huy Tuan Pham have provided a complete proof of the conjecture.”