Hasnain says:

Great technical read and an example of how design docs should be written and trade offs should be considered.

“In experiments on hosts running major services at Twitter, this has the expected impact of eliminating issues related to throttling, giving a roughly 50% cost reduction for a typical service with untuned thread pool sizes”

Hasnain says:

“Think about it. After years of consumer lawsuits and investigations that showed the tobacco industry was doing all it could to get people hooked on a deadly product, the Food and Drug Administration severely limited cigarette advertising: The last Marlboro Man commercial aired in 1999. You cannot buy a pack of cigarettes without being confronted by a label warning that smoking can lead to cancer, lung disease, diabetes or other terrible diseases.

But if you tune in during Super Bowl week, be ready to ingest an unrelenting stream of carnival barker ads. They will gush over how you can wager during the game on everything from the coin toss to who will be the first receiver to catch a pass. They will hype the fun of parlay bets and so-called risk-free bets, which are not risk free at all.

There’s a cost. It can devastate.”

Hasnain says:

Great article on why *good* one-on-ones are so important. It’s sad that very few people put in the time and effort needed to do them well.

“One is that grad schools are really dysfunctional. If I, a person whose sole qualification is caring a lot, could help Eve speed up her dissertation by ~25%, then her philosophy department is leaving a lot of productivity on the table. But that was last week’s rant.

On the flip side, I also now think the “caring a lot” qualification is way more important than I used to.”

Hasnain says:

Generally agree with all the points here even though I think the tone is more positive and excited than I’d use myself. I’ve used wasm for some side projects now and it’s been great - and a lot of the listed benefits are super appealing. RLBox on its own is quite revolutionary.

“WebAssembly has been deployed in a fairly impressive list of places and serves an assortment of use cases, but these represent isolated pockets of activity within the broader tech world. Among my friends, the small fraction who have heard of WebAssembly think it’s really exciting in principle, but are not building with it because it isn’t quite mature yet. However, many of these issues are being actively worked on and will probably reach an acceptable state within the next year or two. As such, it seems we’re on the brink of an explosion in WebAssembly activity, ecosystem, and community.”

Hasnain says:

I did not see this coming. On the balance I’m happy - this is great for the author and does a good job of promoting products that are nice and sustainable and bring joy to people - without focusing on growth hacking or other negative things.

“The purchase, announced by The Times on Monday, reflects the growing importance of games, like crosswords and Spelling Bee, in the company’s quest to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025.

Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” The Times said. The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.”

Hasnain says:

“Giving every parent the option of enrolling their kids in a free, government-run pre-K program (i.e., day care center) sounds like a pretty good idea. It won’t force kids to enroll in pre-K if their parents decide their alternatives are better. But it would relieve any parent of the financial burden of paying for child care, if they so choose. That would allow more poor and working-class parents to go into the workforce, earning more money to feed and educate and help their families. And it would increase national output in the bargain, since day care leverages those all-important economies of scale (and in fact, measured output would go up by even more than actual output, since unpaid parenting labor isn’t counted in GDP).”

Hasnain says:

Great read on optimizing (web) games. And I have another game to add to my list now!

“That’s all the optimization I’ve done in this iteration. Even though all examples are from my game with a relatively non-mainstream tech stack, the principles can be applied to elsewhere as well.”

Hasnain says:

This story is both inspirational (in how Andrea overcame so many challenges in life to get where she was and make meaningful impact on immigrants) and depressing (in how much she had to over come and the constant resistance in the administration to treat people like humans).

“She recalled many times in her career when someone had politely but firmly told her that she needed to be more dispassionate on immigration issues. “My name is Flores, and on the first impression many people believe that my family recently arrived in the United States,” she told me. “That caused doubts. People assume I’m a bleeding heart before they hear my ideas, and that’s always been a challenge.””

Hasnain says:

Come for the food, stay for the great human interest stories, inspirational community building stories, and lessons into America’s super racist past.

“Today, chefs are thinking about marketing; they’re trying to get customers in the door, and they’re being deliberate about the flavors and culinary traditions they’re combining. But for Rasul’s El Ranchero, catering to Punjabi Mexicans born in the first half of the century, the roti quesadilla was more than just something new and different — it represented the organic community of Punjabis and Mexicans brought together by a confluence of immigration policies, labor laws, and cultural similarities. “We love food. So whatever the inspiration, it’s all good,” English says, when asked about restaurants selling the food she ate at home without acknowledging the history. “But there is something to be said for family comfort food recipes.””

Hasnain says:

Great reporting and a scary read. Goes into geopolitics, warfare, and just how important cyber security is becoming these days as a military strategy. And even as a diplomatic tool!

“NSO had recently offered the F.B.I. a workaround. During a presentation to officials in Washington, the company demonstrated a new system, called Phantom, that could hack any number in the United States that the F.B.I. decided to target. Israel had granted a special license to NSO, one that permitted its Phantom system to attack U.S. numbers. The license allowed for only one type of client: U.S. government agencies. A slick brochure put together for potential customers by NSO’s U.S. subsidiary, first published by Vice, says that Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to get intelligence “by extracting and monitoring crucial data from mobile devices.” It is an “independent solution” that requires no cooperation from AT&T, Verizon, Apple or Google. The system, it says, will “turn your target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.””