Hasnain says:

This was a really well written and engaging human interest story about someone who grew up in Cambodia in the age of Pol Pot. It’s hard to describe but worth reading. It manages to evoke all the emotions: from love to heartbreak to pity to hope.

“Recipe: Little-Girl Heaven

Ingredients:

one older brother

a moto

a carefree girl, small enough to stand on the front

a beautiful city

night wind

Combine one spoiled little girl, a shiny Vespa, and a worshipped older brother. Weave through the bustling streets of pre-war Phnom Penh at night. Grin like mad into the onrushing wind and drink the night air through your teeth. Savor this feeling, as all the ingredients will soon be extinguished, save the night wind.”

Hasnain says:

Yikes. Goes to show how rolling your crypto is always hard and how you must always carefully follow the spec (the spec mandated checking for this case...)

"Therefore, a signature (r, s) = (0, 0) is deemed valid by the code for any message, and under any public key."

Hasnain says:

Definitely interested in seeing how this plays out over the long run and whether more outlets pick this up. I think overall this would improve reporting and increase trust in media if done by more places (so that the outlets doing this don’t get crowded out).

“This list could go on and on — the clear pattern is that tech companies have uniformly adopted a strategy of obfuscating information behind background. It’s also easy to see why companies like to abuse background: they can provide their point of view to the media without being accountable for it. Instead, journalists have to act like they magically know things, and readers have to guess who is trustworthy and who is not.”

Hasnain says:

Great example of this thought process it takes to build software and why it’s never that easy.

“I've started using it as a thought experiment exercise for project management. Whenever I think something is extremely simple, I walk through it step by step to uncover the complexities, design decisions, use cases, and potential features that I missed.”

Hasnain says:

This is some pretty cool work enabled by new state of the art compression algorithms.

“When all was said and done we observed the following impact:

* Total storage usage reduced by ~21% (for our dataset, this is on the order of petabytes)

* Average write operation duration decreased by 50% on our fullest machines

* No observable query performance effects”

Hasnain says:

What I’m surprised by is the fact that someone kept these tapes and recordings for 20+ years and only now released them. That takes some dedication. But also: why not release them earlier?

“In addition to mapping out their national strategy, NRA leaders can also be heard describing the organization's more activist members in surprisingly harsh terms, deriding them as "hillbillies" and "fruitcakes" who might go off script after Columbine and embarrass them.”

Hasnain says:

It really seems out of whack to me just how strongly Starbucks is fighting against 100 employees in 3 stores unionizing. Are they that worried of this spreading?

So far they’ve sent their founder and their North American president (separately) to speak to these employees, held many anti union presentations, doubled staff at these stores by bringing in other workers (one source says that bit is illegal) and asked to delay the vote.

“But Workers United’s NLRB election effort remains a gamble. While U.S. law promises employees the right to collectively bargain if a majority of their co-workers cast ballots in the affirmative, the law also gives companies wide latitude to campaign aggressively against unionization. Companies generally face only minimal penalties for engaging in illegal efforts to stymie the union or obstruct negotiations once a union is victorious.”

Hasnain says:

Great read covering psychology, happiness, depression, and overwork.

“The first step is an admission that as successful as you are, were, or hope to be in your life and work, you are not going to find true happiness on the hedonic treadmill of your professional life. You’ll find it in things that are deeply ordinary: enjoying a walk or a conversation with a loved one, instead of working that extra hour, for example. This is extremely difficult for many people. It feels almost like an admission of defeat for those who have spent their lives worshipping hard work and striving to outperform others. Social comparison is a big part of how people measure worldly success, but the research is clear that it strips us of life satisfaction.”

Hasnain says:

This was a very well written human interest story discussing a manager and a group of employees at a McDonalds who walked out - and through this story it talks about the economy, the pandemic, and the labor shortage.

“He had not been back to see his father or siblings since arriving in Bradford. His job at McDonald’s was his refuge. His co-workers had become his family. Sometimes he and the rest of the night shift crew would finish work around 2 a.m. and walk two miles to the Sheetz coffee shop, where they would talk and eat mozzarella sticks, boneless chicken bites and burritos until dawn.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on a world of software I knew basically nothing about.

“I once described Minerva's "vouch" system, briefly, to another programmer who had never seen it. I explained that when you had a code change, you just had to convince any one of the code owners for the file in question to sign it off. If the change was very urgent, they might sign off your change sight unseen, based on your reputation alone. As soon as they clicked that "vouch" button - bang - your new change was in prod: after all, there is no such thing as a deployment step when your code is stored in a database. Disbelieving me, he asked who in the world would trust such a bank. The answer is a lot of people. They are a very big bank. You have certainly heard of them.”