Hasnain says:

Feel good story of the day: I hope this one works out. No patent burden is huge.

“Hotez said because the Corbevax vaccine is cheap, has no patents and uses traditional protein-based vaccine technology it will be easier for other countries to mass-produce and distribute it.
"It's a similar technology used to make the Hepatitis B vaccine that's been made locally and all over the world for three or four decades," he said. "It really does check all of the boxes you would want for a global health vaccine."”

Hasnain says:

I continue to be a huge fan of SQLite and use it for all my side projects. Beyond what's discussed in this article, you can also easily implement custom functions in your app directly to implement efficient queries that would be really hard to do otherwise.

"On the whole, I think using SQLite is a good tradeoff for a lot of projects, including webapps that expect to have a potentially large number of users. As long as you don't expect to need tens of thousands of small writes per second, thousands of large writes, or long-lived write transactions, it's highly likely that SQLite will support your usecase. It significantly reduces complexity and operational burden and eases testing, with the primary downside that it's somewhat harder to get levels of availability and uptime that almost no one needs in the first place."

Hasnain says:

Great read - I learnt a bunch of history from this one.

“What stunned Manning, an Egyptologist, was that the paper recalibrated earlier chronologies by seven to eight years, so that dates of the eruptions neatly coincided with the timing of well-documented political, social, and military upheavals over three centuries of ancient Egyptian history. The paper also correlated volcanic eruptions with major 6th century A.D. pandemics, famines, and socioeconomic turmoil in Europe, Asia, and Central America. The inescapable conclusion, the paper argued, was that volcanic soot — which cools the earth by shielding its surface from sunlight, adversely affecting growing seasons and causing crop failures — helped drive those crises.

Since then, other scholarly papers relying on paleoclimatic data— most of it drawing on state-of-the-art technologies originally designed to understand climate change — have found innumerable instances when shifts in climate helped trigger social and political tumult and, often, collapses.”

Hasnain says:

This was such a good movie.

“But more importantly, they get the message of the film backwards. One reason that these reviewers think that message is an obvious one is that they miss all the parts that are not necessarily obvious. Indeed, the film does depict a media that is more concerned with celebrity relationships than with climate (or rather, comet) science. But it does not have a nihilistic view of Americans. Not in the least, and this is critically important to understand. In fact, the film depicts an idealistic, diverse group of Americans who try their best to protect the planet. Their lives are destroyed not because we are idiots but because those with power choose to delay, deny, and mislead, more interested in their own short-term gain than the future of humanity—in part because these people know that the catastrophe they have wrought will not have the same consequences for them personally. “

Hasnain says:

“That scenario needs to be confronted immediately, Snyder says: "It's right in front of our eyes. The most interesting and the most distressing thing about American news coverage right now is that we don't treat the end of democracy in America as the story. That is the story."”

Hasnain says:

Insightful read on COVID testing and vaccination programs and how it all played out behind the scenes

“The fury with which public-health experts greeted Psaki’s comments reflected their longstanding frustration with an administration that, in their view, has put almost all its focus on vaccinating the American public, at the expense of other critical aspects of the response, from getting shots into arms overseas to making high-quality masks widely available. The rapid-test push, in particular, seems to have bumped up against the peculiar challenges of fighting COVID-19 in the 21st-century United States. Difficulties include a regulatory gauntlet intent on vetting devices for exquisite sensitivity, rather than public-health utility; a medical fiefdom in which doctors tend to view patient test results as theirs alone to convey; and a policy suspicion, however inchoate, that too many rapid tests might somehow signal to wary Americans that they could test their way through the pandemic and skip vaccinations altogether. “It’s undeniable that [the administration] took a vaccine-only approach,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a vocal advocate for rapid testing who attended the October White House meeting. The U.S. government “didn’t support the notion of testing as a proper mitigation tool.””

Hasnain says:

“So, what could this rethinking of “The Biggest Loser” story mean for the rest of us, if we hope to keep our weight under control? First and most fundamentally, it suggests that abrupt and colossal weight loss generally will backfire, since that strategy seems to send resting metabolic rates plunging more than would be expected, given people’s smaller body sizes. When people drop pounds gradually in weight-loss experiments, he pointed out, their metabolic changes tend to be less drastic.”

Hasnain says:

“But law enforcement doesn’t always make such a request, and many survivors of crime don’t have the money for a lawyer to investigate separately, said Dodge, the California lawyer. He said for now the best way to counter tracking devices is to be aware they exist and of how they work. “

Hasnain says:

Yikes. And great read. I’m glad they went above and beyond to add more documentation here.

“We are disclosing two bugs that affect Feldman’s verifiable secret sharing within different threshold signature scheme implementations. These bugs are not a result of some novel analysis that could not have been foreseen; on the contrary, these bugs stem from one of the few known weaknesses of secret sharing. We highlight them today not only due to the number of affected vendors but also because they are representative of a whole host of critical bugs that stem from the same recurring problem in non-standard cryptography: a lack of documentation and guidance.”

Hasnain says:

There are times I read HBR articles and really enjoy the content and nod along; and then I read stuff like this which says ML and AI are extremely useful while mathematics and statistics are not. I mean…

“At Filtered, we found that constructing this matrix helped us to make hard decisions about where to focus: at first sight all the skills in our long-list seemed valuable. But realistically, we can only hope to move the needle on a few, at least in the short term. We concluded that the best return on investment in skills for our company was in data visualization, based on its high utility and low time to learn. We’ve already acted on our analysis and have just started to use Tableau to improve the way we present usage analysis to clients.”