Hasnain says:

I miss the open web. Also super ironic that this came with a full blown ad for the guardian app.

“Apps have burrowed their way into seemingly every aspect of our lives and there are lots of reasons why companies are pushing us to use them. With an app, it is often “one click and you’re in”, rather than having to faff around online finding the website and remembering passwords. It is also for the “push notifications” that mobile apps send to grab our attention and get us to buy stuff. Many tech experts also argue that apps are generally more secure than websites and allow banks and others to carry out sophisticated ID verification using face, voice and fingerprint biometrics.

But millions of people who cannot afford a smartphone or have an older device that does not support some services are increasingly being locked out of deals, discounts and even some vital services, say digital exclusion and pro-cash campaigners.”

Hasnain says:

This was fascinating. Especially the part about the bear attacks. TIL.

“By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.”

Hasnain says:

Powerful words here.

“It is a source of great confusion first, then growing rage, among establishment Democrats that there might exist a sizable group of people in this country who quite simply cannot condone a real, ongoing genocide, no matter how much worse an alternative ruling party may be or do. This stance boggles a particular kind of liberal mind because such a conception of political affairs, applied with any regularity, forces the establishment to stand for something. It suddenly becomes insufficient to say: Elect us or else they will abolish abortion rights; elect us or they will put more migrants in concentration camps; elect us or they will make your lives so much worse. What is the use, once elected, of doing anything of substance when what was necessary, the negation of some other hypothetical outcome, has by definition already been achieved?”

Hasnain says:

Apps are deceptively easy to make.

Great apps hide all that complexity behind the scenes.

TIL Boehm (yes, that guy, of Boehm GC fame) wrote the android calculator app and went through some reasonably advanced math to get it right.

“With this representation, they're in the sweet spot:

All the digits shown on the screen are always correct. And they almost never show more digits than necessary.

A "computer algebra system" would have accomplished a similar goal, but been much slower and much more complicated”

Hasnain says:

“Cornish views Compact as a “low-probability, high-reward” proposition. “If I had to bet, I don’t think they’re going to find anything,” he said. “But the question is so important,” he added, that it ought to be explored “to the fullest extent.””

Hasnain says:

“Noether was an assistant in name only. She was already a formidable mathematician when, in early 1915, Hilbert and Klein invited her to join them at the University of Göttingen. But other faculty members objected to hiring a woman, and Noether was blocked from joining the faculty. Regardless, she would spend the next three years prodding the fault line separating physics and mathematics, eventually setting off an earthquake that would shake the foundations of fundamental physics.”

Hasnain says:

“Bethe ansatz methods show up in so many places, said Pedro Vieira (opens a new tab), a professor at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “It seems like nature appreciates beautiful things.””

Hasnain says:

Because of course

“The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.””

Hasnain says:

Gotta love new breakthroughs. This was really cool and interesting and I’ll have to read the paper

“Farach-Colton, Krapivin and Kuszmaul wanted to see if that same limit also applied to non-greedy hash tables. They showed that it did not by providing a counterexample, a non-greedy hash table with an average query time that’s much, much better than log x. In fact, it doesn’t depend on x at all. “You get a number,” Farach-Colton said, “something that is just a constant and doesn’t depend on how full the hash table is.” The fact that you can achieve a constant average query time, regardless of the hash table’s fullness, was wholly unexpected — even to the authors themselves.”

Hasnain says:

“ARRAF: It was really surreal because you don't see anything living in that part of Deir al-Balah, which has been heavily hit. I mean, really, it - from what we were seeing, it was just rubble. And it's important to note that Israel prevented us, according to the Jordanian authorities, from taking photographs on the ground of what we were seeing. The only thing we could take photos of once we landed were the buffer zone and the helicopter. But to actually see it real, in real life, was really unreal.”