Hasnain says:

I tend to agree with this take.

“The net result of all of this for the programming market is: more software, better software, more programmers, better programmers. But the adjustment won't be without pain: some shitty software will get shipped before we figure out how to put guardrails around AI-driven development. Some programmers who are currently shipping mediocre software will find themselves replaced by newer, faster, AI-assisted developers before they manage to learn AI tools themselves. Everyone will have a lot of learning to do. But what else is new? Software development has always evolved rapidly. Embrace change, and you'll be fine.”

Hasnain says:

Didn’t expect to see this from the FT of all places while legacy/traditional media continues to be cowards. I guess FT has a financial incentive here to be more honest and it shows.

“
My guess is that Khalil’s case will make it to the Supreme Court. There, one of three scenarios could happen:

The court rejects Trump’s attempts to bring back the Hanoverian bill of attainder and Trump reluctantly complies.

The court folds and essentially declares Trump to be king.

The court upholds the law, which gives due process to citizens and permanent residents alike, but Trump ignores the ruling.

Both 2 and 3 would end the rule of law in America, though 3 would be a more dramatic way of doing it. 1 would be great, though do not bet on it.
“

Hasnain says:

This is a horrifying article. Unfortunately treatment like this is too often swept under the rug and an open secret.

“Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.

There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of the labor committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.

But Mr. Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.””

Hasnain says:

"Funnily enough, this commit was added to HyperQueue in an enormous pull request that essentially backported most of my benchmarking experiments that I have done over the summer. The PR almost exclusively contained changes only to benchmarks, so it should have been safe to merge without a lot of scrutiny. But it also contained two teeny tiny changes. The PR description that I wrote is quite funny in retrospect:

> This backports the benchmarks that I prepared for my PhD thesis back into the HQ repository. Almost all changes are to the benchmarks repository, and they thus shouldn’t need a lot of review. There are a few changes in HQ though: command spawning optimization and the option to disable authentication for benchmarking.

Well, guess what, the “command spawning optimization” managed to break HyperQueue’s primary functionality for a bunch of users. That’s what I get for sending +3,458 -601 diff pull requests, sigh…"

Hasnain says:

"We couldn’t change the project we were assigned to, and these were the cards that we were dealt. What we could change is our attitude towards the legacy project. Instead of feeling resigned, we saw it as a place to ask questions and learn. "

Hasnain says:

“Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled. He also learned that when you die, your credit score gets marked as “deceased, do not issue credit,” which makes it tough to get a loan.

“The good news is I don’t think it can go any lower than that,” he said cheerfully.

He called the bank first, and they said an electronic notification had been triggered on Feb. 18 that he had died back in November. But I’m on the phone with you right now, he told them. Also, what did I die of? Take it up with Social Security, they said.”

Hasnain says:

I haven’t read the book yet but man the Streisand effect is in full swing here and I don’t understand the PR strategy by Meta here.

Looking at some of the claims (especially the one where Sheryl played with the assistant's hair and the one where she invited the author into her bed on a private jet) - they’re so outlandish that I feel either:

1. The author is out of touch with reality and needs mental help
2. They’re true

(It’s hard to imagine an in between here)

“Following the decision, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X: "This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams' false and defamatory book should never have been published."”

Hasnain says:

“The conjecture’s resolution is a seismic shift for the field of harmonic analysis, which studies the details of the Fourier transform.
A tower of three monumental conjectures in harmonic analysis rests atop the Kakeya conjecture. Each story in the tower needs to be sturdy for the stories above it to stand a chance themselves. If the Kakeya conjecture had been proved false — if Wang and Zahl had found a counterexample — the entire tower would have come tumbling down.
But now that they’ve proved it, mathematicians might be able to work their way up the tower, using Kakeya to build up proofs of these successively more ambitious conjectures. “All these problems that [mathematicians] dreamed about someday solving, they all look approachable now,” Guth said.”

Hasnain says:

“I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged.”

Hasnain says:

“Adams’ takeaway? Use what you have. In their case, it was an existing job queue, Golang and Kubernetes. “You decrease the maintenance burden while getting huge-scale wins,” she said.

And even the lowly cron box held a lesson or two.

“Slack ran key functionality for 10 years on one node. That’s a long time to deal with this less-than-ideal system. But it was good enough. It got the job done. And I think that is really a key takeaway,” she said. “It’s okay to keep it really simple, even if it’s kind of janky, for a long time.””