Hasnain says:

“That was another rathole, and the answer was also a thing to behold: I couldn't see it in the checked-in source code because it had been fixed. Some other engineer on a completely unrelated project had tripped over it, figured it out, and sent a fix to the team which owned that program. They had committed it, so the source code looked fine.

[ Another side note: this person who fixed a bug in some code that wasn't their actual "job" was the kind of excellent behavior that used to be lionized there - "nothing at FB is someone else's problem". That credo died a long time ago. ]”

Hasnain says:

“In the end, it took me probably less than an hour to find, diagnose and fix this bug, so it wasn’t that bad, as far as bughunting stories go. But I found the bug to be sort of beautiful, so I wanted to share it anyway.

I hope that you found this bughunt case interesting, and that you perhaps also learnt something new along the way.”

Hasnain says:

Coolest math fact I’ve learned in a while.

“One may claim this is cheating, but it seems to be in line with the rules of the puzzle! Note that the entity n doesn't actually appear anywhere - it's just a helper to count the number of repeated square roots.”

Hasnain says:

“So why did I say getaddrinfo sucks? It's because it was designed for POSIX. Do one thing, and do it well. And in that sense it succeeded without a doubt. Could it be better, more flexible and more extensible? Sure. But if that were the case it would also probably be more buggy, and have a bunch more differences across platforms. But what of the other APIs we looked at today? Well, these are the results of each platform doing their own thing. Some had a common starting point - see res_query - but slowly diverged to accommodate the specific requirements of their users and platform. What we now have is a buffet of choices, each with their quirks and buggy implementations.”

Hasnain says:

“"We are not going to fix this problem without better regulation and actual, real, serious consequences for delivering ads that fund horrific companies and activities," Edelson says. "It's too profitable to just ignore this. It's going to be impossible to solve without changing those incentives."”

Hasnain says:

20 years. Life goals.

“I financed PerfectTablePlan out of my own savings and it has been profitable every year since version 1 was launched. I could have taken on employees and grown the business, but I preferred to keep it as a lifestyle business. My wife does the accounts and proof reading and I do nearly everything else, with a bit of help from my accountant, web designers and a few other contractors. I don’t regret that decision. 20 years without meetings, ties or alarm clocks. My son was born 18 months after PerfectTablePlan was launched and it has been great to have the flexibility to be fully present as a Dad.”

Hasnain says:

Loved this one because deterministic thread scheduling for testing is vastly underrated

“Not all heroes wear capes

Yes, it's cliche – but it's true.

Concurrent program debugging is incredibly important. These tricky concurrency bugs take an inordinate amount of time to debug and work through. While new languages like Rust have built in mechanisms to help prevent race conditions like this, the majority of software in the world is already written, and written in something other than Rust. Java, even after all these years, is still one of the most used languages. Improving debugging on JVM based languages makes the software engineering world better. And given how some folks think that code will be written by Large Language Models, maybe our jobs as engineers will eventually just be debugging bad LLM code instead of just our own bad code. But, no matter the future of software engineering, concurrent program debugging will remain critical for maintaining and building software.

Thank you Ao Li and his colleagues from the PASTA Lab for making it that much better.”

Hasnain says:

“On 4 October 2022, just over a week after Brink’s remarks about the significance of Wu’s experiments, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it had selected Alain Aspect, Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger as the recipients of that year’s Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” Because Wu died in 1997 and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, she could not have been considered for her early photon entanglement experiment. Despite at least 12 Nobel nominations and two leading-edge experimental contributions in topics that ultimately received the accolade, Wu never received the honor (see “Physics Nobel nominees, 1901–70,” Physics Today online, 29 September 2022). That oversight, though, does not diminish her accomplishments.

Wu’s scientific achievements transcend the development of the atomic bomb. She contributed to a profound and meticulous understanding of the physical universe. “As a woman in a field almost entirely dominated by men, when most doors were closed to women, she was a trailblazer with an indomitable spirit and determination and a focus on scientific inquiry,” said Columbia’s Elena Aprile at the 2022 anniversary celebration of Wu’s life and work.8 Aprile joined the physics department faculty at Columbia in 1986; she was the second woman to join the department, more than four decades after Wu.”

Hasnain says:

“Bickel suggests that as more adults developed overbites, they accidentally began to use "f" and "v" more. In ancient India and Rome, labiodentals may have been a mark of status, signaling a softer diet and wealth, he says. Those consonants also spread through other language groups; today, they appear in 76% of Indo-European languages.”

Hasnain says:

“I love the shouts of “gola kabab para aqui,” “tres naans, por favor” and “rapido, rapido” that ring out of our kitchens — Pakistani cooking instructions delivered in another language and prepared by cooks from another food culture. And yet, nothing is lost in translation. Immigrants are the backbone of our restaurant and, by extension, of the community we serve. And as a fellow immigrant, I am very proud of the migrant mosaic at the heart of Zareen’s.”