Hasnain says:

“As for Barclay's plan to listen to the soundscapes within Challenger Deep, he and his colleagues finally accomplished that goal. In 2021 they landed a device at our planet's deepest point, recording the tranquil rhythms of the ocean for four hours.”

Hasnain says:

Leaving the gory details out of the summary here because they are extremely triggering. But the case here is absolutely nuts. I don’t get how 38 professors were comfortable enough writing a letter of support for this person.

What’s much more damning is how Harvard ran the investigation here though. From the legal complaints it came out that they got confidential therapy notes from the victim’s therapist (!) and handed them over to the abuser (!!). This crosses so many lines I don’t even know where to begin.

“On Monday night, as the lawsuit was about to be filed, another 50 or so Harvard scholars — most of them tenured, according to Walter Johnson, a history professor — replied in an open letter, criticizing Dr. Comaroff’s defenders for being too quick to accept the facts as presented by his lawyers.

“As evident from the letters written in his support, Professor Comaroff is a scholar with a powerful network of friends and colleagues,” who could discourage other students from coming forward, the latest letter said.”

Hasnain says:

I find it fascinating that the proven theoretical bound for squaring the circle requires something like 10^200 pieces while the experimental results are implying the bound might be … 22.

“That left some room for improvement, which is what Máthé, Noel and Pikhurko have delivered. Their pieces, again numbering about 10^200, are simpler in shape and much easier for mathematicians to visualize.
“The big leap here is that you couldn’t draw Spencer and my pieces in ways you can easily see, but with these pieces you can,” said Marks.

…

Already, Pikhurko has ideas to further simplify the pieces, reducing their total number and making them less uneven. And Marks has done computer experiments that suggest — but don’t prove — that the equidecomposition can be accomplished with 22 pieces. He believes the minimum number is likely even lower.”

Hasnain says:

From 2013, but still relevant to this day.

““For me, the real question is not about Fredrickson or Losada or Seligman,” Sokal says. “It’s about the whole community. Why is it that no one before Nick—and I mean Nick was a first semester part-time Master’s student, at, let’s be honest, a fairly obscure university in London who has no particular training in mathematics—why is it that no one realized this stuff was bullshit? Where were all the supposed experts?”

“Is it really true that no one saw through this,” he asks, “in an article that was cited 350 times, in a field which touts itself as being so scientific?””

Hasnain says:

Great read as always from Amos. I liked how this went into PL design and how sometimes a more restrictive language is better *because* of the things it makes explicit.

“If you check the comments section of whatever website you found this article on, you will surely notice comments from folks who haven't read all the way to the end (despite the title of the article being a giveaway).

We've seen many situations where Rust helps avoid common problems. We've also seen situations where Rust's design makes it somewhat harder to do something we want to do.

That's a natural consequence of the set of legal programs being smaller! A lot of useful programs are excluded! So sometimes, we need to find alternative formulations, for equivalent programs that are accepted by the Rust compiler.”

Hasnain says:

Important and insightful read on the growing teacher shortage in the US. Goes into the causes as well as some of the actions being taken to fix it.

“While some say it's too early to know the specific impacts of the pandemic, Lynn Gangone, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) told CNN the numbers already show Covid-19 further dissuaded Americans from going into teaching. In fall 2020 and 2021, about 20% of institutions surveyed by AACTE reported the pandemic resulted in a decline of new undergraduate enrollment of at least 11%. Roughly 13% of institutions reported "significant" declines in the number of new graduate students. Regional state colleges and smaller private institutions -- often found in rural communities -- have seen the steepest declines.

"I don't know how bad it's going to have to get before we realize as a country that if we don't invest in education ... we will not have anyone in the classrooms to teach our children," Gangone said.”

Hasnain says:

“"What is happening to Empyreal potently illustrates why we call civil forfeiture 'policing for profit,'" says Institute for Justice attorney Kirby Thomas West. "Law enforcement is trying to take more than a million dollars without charging anyone with a crime. That is absurd and deeply unconstitutional. It is yet another reason why lawmakers need to eliminate civil forfeiture altogether."”

Hasnain says:

Great read that comes with well sourced data and analysis - helps inform the recent reporting / discussions around crime waves in SF.

"Additionally, Mejia said that when the media covers crime, it tends to focus on individual incidents, particularly unusual-seeming ones. That’s why shootings in neighborhoods with traditionally high crime rates get relatively less coverage, or no coverage at all. But when a Louis Vuitton store gets broken into in a high-income part of town, that feels unusual and surprising, and is thus amplified.

Sensationalized media coverage of crime thus contributes to wide-scale misperceptions of crime trends. Meijia said it also engenders a feeling of hopelessness because it often does not cover solutions or efforts to change the problem, or look at underlying issues.

“It’s a hard thing to do, name responsibility and think of solutions,” Mejia said. “Traditionally coverage has not done that or doesn’t try to do that.”"

Hasnain says:

“The new paper begins with one of the most basic but provocative questions in mathematics: When do polynomial equations like x3 + y3 = z3 have integer solutions (solutions in the positive and negative counting numbers)? In 1994, Andrew Wiles solved a version of this question, known as Fermat’s Last Theorem, in one of the great mathematical triumphs of the 20th century.”

Hasnain says:

This is an amazingly well written piece of technical content. I now have another book and language to add to two extremely long lists. The author takes one key intuition all the way and gets some amazing results from it.

“HVM doesn't need a global, stop-the-world garbage collector because every "object" only exists in one place, exactly like in Rust; i.e., HVM is linear. The catch is that, when an object needs to be referenced in multiple places, instead of a complex borrow system, HVM has an elegant, pervasive lazy clone primitive that works very similarly to Haskell's evaluation model. This makes cloning essentially free, because the copy of any object isn't made in a single, expensive pass, but in a layer-by-layer, on-demand fashion. And the nicest part is that this clone primitive works for not only data, but also for lambdas, which explains why HVM has better asymptotics than GHC: it is capable of sharing computations inside lambdas, which GHC can't. That was only possible due to a key insight that comes from Lamping's Abstract Algorithm for optimal evaluation of λ-calculus terms. Finally, the fact that objects only exist in one place greatly simplifies parallelism. Notice how there is only one use of atomics in the entire runtime.c.

This was all known and possible since years ago (see other implementations of optimal reduction), but all implementations of this algorithm, until now, represented terms as graphs. This demanded a lot of pointer indirection, making it slow in practice. A new memory format, based on SIC, takes advantage of the fact that inputs are known to be λ-terms, allowing for a 50% lower memory usage, and letting us avoid several impossible cases. This made the runtime 50x (!) faster, which finally allowed it to compete with GHC and similar. And this is just a prototype I wrote in about a month. I don't even consider myself proficient in C, so I have expectations for the long-term potential of HVM.

HVM's optimality and complexity reasoning comes from the vast literature on the optimal evaluation of functional programming languages. This book, by Andrea Asperti and Stefano Guerrini, has a great overview. HVM is merely a practical, efficient implementation of the bookkeeping-free reduction machine depicted on the book (pages 14-39). Its high-order machinery has a 1-to-1 relationship to the theoretical model, and the same complexity bounds, and respective proofs (chapter 10) apply. HVM has additional features (machine integers, datatypes) that do not affect complexity.”