Hasnain says:

This article speaks a lot of truth. I found myself nodding along a lot. Software engineers in general tend to overcomplicate things (lots of resume driven development) and I see more of it in the developer tools space as people want to make their tools stand out by appearing “cool”. But in the real world people just want to go on and solve their business problems, and they suffer in silence.

“If you watch enough conference talks or read enough blog posts, it would appear there are many software teams out there with pristine coding standards, non-flaky unit tests, staging environments that reflect production environments, and/or smooth people processes for responding to incidents. Getting to this point just requires a strong directive from above and discipline across engineering teams.”

Hasnain says:

I am a terribly inexperienced noob when it comes to biology so this took me a while to get through (lots of jargon I wasn’t familiar with) - but this was really interesting and educational!

“Another place to look is the enigmatic Asgard lineage of archaea, which were described only a few years ago and are thought to be the closest relatives of eukaryotes. They may be able to provide some resolution to the question of how cell fusion and other processes came together to create sex, ushering in the vibrant, bustling tangle of eukaryotic life.”

Hasnain says:

This almost seems like something out of a black mirror episode. I can see hardware devices going obsolete but .. wow.

“Failure is an inevitable part of innovation. The Argus II was an innovative technology, and progress made by Second Sight may pave the way for other companies that are developing bionic vision systems. But for people considering such an implant in the future, the cautionary tale of Argus patients left in the lurch may make a tough decision even tougher. Should they take a chance on a novel technology? If they do get an implant and find that it helps them navigate the world, should they allow themselves to depend upon it?

Abandoning the Argus II technology—and the people who use it—might have made short-term financial sense for Second Sight, but it’s a decision that could come back to bite the merged company if it does decide to commercialize a brain implant, believes Doerr.”

Hasnain says:

“The real losers of this year’s gerrymandering arms race might be the voters themselves. In their zeal to protect and expand their political turf, both parties have slashed the number of competitive districts across the country, meaning that millions fewer Americans will have a meaningful say in who represents them in Congress. Even Holder lamented the lack of competition in the map Democrats drew in New York. Yet for Democrats, the broader goal of their redistricting effort was not competitive maps but a fair fight for the House, and in the end, the key to achieving some level of parity with Republicans was not less gerrymandering, but more of it.”

Hasnain says:

This is great!

“"We have experienced two difficult years. With this agreement, we set a beacon for an economy that is more innovative, sustainable and digital. The aim is to be able to make people and businesses stronger," Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo told a press conference announcing the reform package.”

Hasnain says:

“Hyodo hopes that comprehensive knowledge of which two- and three-quark particles stick together could explain another mystery — why groupings of four or five quarks are so rare. Physicists have cataloged hundreds of quark duos and trios, but just a handful of tetraquarks and pentaquarks.

To that end, ALICE has been sifting through a billion or so collisions that took place between 2016 and 2018. Starting this spring, however, an upgrade to the LHC will let them take data 100 times faster. Over the next decade, Fabbietti expects to measure the mingling of rarer hadrons containing even heavier quarks.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting collection of data points. My own biases and search history lead me to generally agree here.

“This isn’t true (yet), but it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone. The SEO marketers gaming their way to the top of every Google search result might as well be robots. Everything is commercialized. Someone’s always trying to sell you something. Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.

So how can we regain authenticity? What if you want to know what a genuine real life human being thinks about the latest Lenovo laptop?

You append “reddit" to your query (or hacker news, or stack overflow, or some other community you trust).”

Hasnain says:

The original story this is referencing is wild and absolutely worth a read. But I love this meta analysis because it calls a pattern I’ve seen people reference and it’s not great.

“If we start to imagine adding steps to the interview process to protect against an imposter job candidate, the “solutions” we come up with are quite aggressive. We could ask candidates on video (or in person) to see a photo ID and match the ID against the resume. But this would seem very weird. It starts an interview off in a hostile manner, and send the a strong message of distrust. Honest candidates – which are, remember, the vast majority – will wonder why the heck this company is acting so weird, and will rightly see this as a red flag about the company culture. There will be negative consequences for your hiring practices. For example, anyone who goes by a name that doesn’t match their government ID could be forced into an uncomfortable explanation. Congratulations: your attempt to identify fraudsters has accidentally created a transphobic hiring practice.”

Hasnain says:

This type of reasoning is downright infuriating.

““UC’s own data show that UC can easily accommodate the court-ordered enrollment cap without harming in-state student prospects by limiting offers to out-of-state, international, and certificate program students,” Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods said in a press release.”

Hasnain says:

“That was fiction, but there were actual documented flatulists at work in Japan by the 1700s. During the Edo period, Tokyo streets were full of misemono, attractions that sometimes featured the kind of people who would later populate “freak shows”; one of the more popular misemono stars was a man called Kirifuri-hanasaki-otoko, meaning “the mist-descending flower-blossom man”, who, in 1774, demonstrated his ability to take in quantities of air and release it in “modulated flatulent arias”, according to the late professor Andrew Markus of the University of Washington. (Farts were a bit of a thing in the Edo period: A series of illustrated scrolls from the time, made by artists unknown, is titled “He-Gassen”, or “Fart Battle”, and is precisely, hilariously what is sounds like it is.)”