Hasnain says:

Technical tutorial mixed with instructions on how to annoy spammers.

“I've had a bunch of PRs between live-tweeting earlier today and pushing this blog post just now. Thank you! I'd really like to get this more intelligent; maybe there should be different "paths" for password criteria to mix it up a bit? Maybe it should differ based on the day or time? Maybe based on the requestor's country (which you can easily access via the inbound request)? The optimal approach should be one that keeps the victim trying to get the password right for as long as possible whilst simultaneously infuriating them and burning their time. Either submit your own PRs or leave comments below, I'd love to hear your ideas.”

Hasnain says:

“At the same time, it also leaves mathematicians with a new question to solve, this time about sets in which it’s not possible to find a sum of unit fractions that equals 1. The primes are one example — there’s no subset of primes whose reciprocals sum to 1 — but this property can also hold true for other infinite sets that are “larger,” in the sense that the sum of their reciprocals approaches infinity even more quickly than the reciprocals of the primes do. Just how quicky can those sums grow before hidden structure reemerges and some of their reciprocals inevitably add to 1?”

Hasnain says:

Great retrospective.

“And so, two years on, we still don’t have good public insight around airborne transmission, or the vital importance of ventilation. But things are changing — and this band of outsiders is determined to provoke a shift in standards in ventilation requirements in line with the transformation in the 1800s, when cities started organising clean water supplies and centralising sewage systems.

That means contending with a legacy of buildings worldwide that don’t just have inadequate ventilation, but fail to meet basic building standards. Then there are others that have been built to conserve energy and prioritise comfort over ventilation, and the hope is that the experience of this pandemic could pave the way for investments in schools, workplaces and homes to improve air quality by revamping the built environment.

“I would love to see the same action on ventilation and environment as we’ve seen on pharmaceutical interventions [such as vaccines and drugs],” says Noakes.”

Hasnain says:

Just learning about this news and … wow. Columbia has risen to #2 in the US news rankings and it took some folks by surprise. Including, apparently, their own faculty - one math professor analyses the numbers and pretty conclusively shows fraudulent behavior on the part of Columbia to juice the rankings:

“There should be vigorous demands for changes, but changes will be hard to make. The incentives for bad behavior will remain as strong as ever. Columbia has come to depend, for example, on transfer students as a source of tuition revenue. Furthermore, a culture of secrecy, a top-down management structure, and atrophied instruments of governance at Columbia have hamstrung informed debate and policymaking.

It would not be adequate, therefore, to address the accuracy of the facts underpinning Columbia’s ranking in isolation. Root-and-branch reform is needed. Columbia should make a far greater commitment to transparency on many fronts, including budget, staffing, admissions, and financial aid. Faculty should insist on thorough oversight in all these matters, and on full participation in decision-making about them. The positions they arrive at should be shared and debated with trustees, students, alumni, and the public.”

Hasnain says:

“Since the beginning of the year, 550 children have died from Covid-19 in the US, compared with 1,017 children in the preceding 22 months, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

Hasnain says:

“So why is this meme becoming so popular (at least among some online communities)? Lars Doucet, a prominent land value tax proponent, explains that a big part of the reason is that for a long time the automobile made sprawling suburban development possible. That meant people could still access valuable labor markets even if they couldn’t afford to live near their jobs (as long as they were willing to suffer long commutes, that is).

“Now we’ve run out of suburbs,” Doucet argued. “We can’t push any further through expansion.””

Hasnain says:

“Then a few years ago, Penedones, Vieira and Guerrieri started talking about using the bootstrap method to constrain what can happen during particle interactions. They first successfully applied the approach to particles called pions. “We said, OK, here it’s working very well, so why not go for gravity?” Guerrieri said.”

Hasnain says:

Great read - it’s a mix of a career story and a history of streaming platforms at Netflix. Lots of great technical details in here!

“Raise abstraction by combining the best of both simplicity and flexibility. There is much value in understanding the deep internals of various data technologies, but not everyone needs to do it. This line of thinking is especially true as cloud-first data infrastructures are becoming commodities. Properly raising data infrastructure abstraction becomes the immediate opportunity to make all the advanced capabilities easily accessible to a broader audience. Technologies such as streaming SQL will lower the barrier of entry, but it’s just the beginning. Data Platform should also raise abstraction to the dividing boundaries (e.g., streaming vs. batch) are invisible to the end-users.”

Hasnain says:

“Additionally, physicists could study very large time crystals in the same way that more conventional, spatial crystals have been investigated for decades, says study co-author Krzysztof Sacha, a physicist at Jagiellonian University in Poland. Here, physicists could exchange space for time to investigate whether time crystals engineered with certain defects or bathed with excess energy display unexpected behaviors. Such behaviors are typically harder to detect in small crystals, so the ability to make its light-based system large potentially sets up the team for a foray into a fully new realm. "I think that is really opening a new [physics research] horizon,” Sacha underlines. Wilczek agrees. “This is a whole new class of states of matter,” he says. “It is very conceivable to me that, when you examine them, useful devices and other surprises will emerge. It’s virgin territory; we are discovering a new world here.””

Hasnain says:

Great read as always from Amos.

“But from the outside, all we see is that all requests are stuck.

All requests.

Not just the first one, not just for the first five seconds, all requests, forever.

And that's what my big bad dayjob incident was about: a bunch of in-flight requests got in a bad state, and so we'd be forever stuck waiting for them, long past any chance they'd ever complete, and never starting new requests.”