Hasnain says:

I learnt a lot about economics and finance from this one.

“Competition for the business of business travelers caused one of the most important innovations in both consumer banking and the travel industries ever: cross-subsidization of credit card customer acquisition with travel company loyalty points. This economic engine became so massive that it is now worth strictly more than the airlines themselves, and it sparked a change of practice across U.S. cards: competing aggressively for customers by rebating interchange in the form of either rewards (such as airline loyalty points) or cash back (a post-transaction discount).”

Hasnain says:

This article takes the argument to the extreme and one interpretation of this is that it’s a great rant. However there’s a lot of useful nuggets of information here around how software development has evolved over time. Goes deep into dependency management, patching, and development and deployment models.

“When you're telling your colleagues that you can't really work because Windows or JetBrains IDEs need to install some updates, they'll give you understanding, yet annoyed glances. When you tell clients that you cannot ship software because first you need to spend a few days or weeks refactoring software to keep up with the latest library releases, they will express their displeasure at you and will probably look elsewhere for someone who won't care about updates. When your company won't be the first to market, because about 20% of your total development capacity needs to spent on keeping up with the technical debt, which is slowly forced upon by the industry, while another 20% of the effort needs to go to writing and maintaining a test suite, the company will suffer as a result. And once you actually do get the buy-in to update the components and when it turns out that migrating from Spring to Spring Boot is actually a herculean effort that means carrying over about 50 dependencies of a legacy Java project that has about 1 million SLoC, during which you also discover that at least 20-30 of those are painfully out of date, then you'll just start writing blog posts like this”

Hasnain says:

This was a great bio, discussing Tracy’s experience in big tech, Silicon Valley fundraising, activism, and on making the world a better place. This quote was definitely optimistic, and tops off an inspirational story nicely:

“When you get her talking, Chou is thoughtful and nuanced, and even a little optimistic.

“What am I gonna do about that, if I’m really depressed about the state of the ecosystem?” she says, when I note that her optimism doesn’t exactly square with her own experiences. “Do I complain on Twitter about it? Do I try to get people to do something differently? Or do I just change my mindset? Even if it is bad, I just have to keep going. The only way it will get better is if I keep a more positive mindset and keep pushing forward. So it’s a little bit of a psychological trick on myself, too. If I let myself be overcome with the pessimism, then maybe nothing changes at all.””

Hasnain says:

Very interesting analysis of what the author calls “tweens”: the numbers in between twin primes. There’s a lot of interesting patterns that I was not aware of before and it was a nice refresher on some number theory and probability concepts.

“When I first began to ponder the tweens, I went looking to see what other people might have said on the subject. I didn’t find much. Although the literature on twin primes is immense, it focuses on the primes themselves, and especially on the question of whether there are infinitely many twins—a conjecture that’s been pending for 170 years. The numbers sandwiched between the primes are seldom mentioned.

The many varieties of highly composite numbers also have an enthusiastic fan club, but I have found little discussion of their frequent occurrence as neighbors of primes.

Could it be that I’m the first person ever to notice the curious properties of twin tweens? No. I am past the age of entertaining such droll thoughts, even transiently. If I have not found any references, it’s doubtless because I’m not looking in the right places. (Pointers welcome.)”

Hasnain says:

Still wondering why this doesn’t get considered as much in all the “people don’t want to work anymore” discourse.

“A recent US Census Bureau survey estimated that 3.7 million Americans are out of work because they're either caring for someone or sick themselves with coronavirus symptoms. The survey also found roughly 2.5 million people aren't working because they're concerned about getting or spreading Covid.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting well sourced read on the recent CRT panic. Lots of (valid) critiques of the modern newsroom here.

“Largely if not entirely missing from the coverage of “critical race theory” as a political issue is reporting on what children are actually being taught in school. Do the facts support the contention that children are being indoctrinated into thinking white people should feel guilty all the time? Or is this description, from Elie Mystal of the Nation, more accurate?

An essential project of that education system is to absolve present-day white people of any need to reckon with the horrors that made their world possible—and still make their world possible—by assuring them that whatever sins this country committed were redeemed or corrected by the efforts of previous Americans. As often as not, those sins and horrors are covered up to protect young white minds from ever knowing the truth about our country. This project is designed to leave white Americans feeling that they have nothing to atone for, so they can blithely continue doing the work of white supremacy and reaping the rewards of white privilege with a clear conscience. All historical tragedies, the ones that are mentioned at least, are framed through the eyes of some American (usually white) who fought against evil forces. Children are supposed to believe, as most kids are inclined to do anyway, that the forces of good eventually triumphed.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting mathematical read.

(from 2018)

“Seven years ago a different pair of researchers imagined that it might be possible to use such polynomial techniques to segregate autonomous cars from places they shouldn’t go. But at the time, computational speed made the idea a pipe dream.

Ahmadi and Majumdar’s new approach provides a way for carrying out such rapid-fire calculations. So, if and when self-driving cars are able to navigate the world safely, we’ll have Google and Tesla to thank — and also David Hilbert.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting take, though I don’t fully agree with it. I’m personally a fan of the show, it’s a good portrayal that’s inspired by the novels. It’s definitely too hard to make the source material into something that has mass market appeal, and we’re still left with an exciting story.

“The Apple TV+ series could have tried to craft a new template to encompass these constellations. Instead, it falls back on a sturdily familiar one: a ragtag band facing down a mighty empire, with the fate of the universe pivoting on the actions of a gifted few. It’s an approach that would have appealed to Asimov’s Lord Dorwin, a dilettantish dignitary obsessed with identifying humanity’s original solar system. Rather than search for it himself, though, Dorwin relies on the findings of long-dead archeologists. When Salvor suggests that he do his own field work, Dorwin is incredulous: Why blunder about in far-flung solar systems when the old masters have covered the ground so much better than we could ever hope to? ♦

“

Hasnain says:

Sage advice.

“It is a LOT easier to scale code from a cardinality of 2 to 3 than it is to refactor from a cardinality of 1 to 2. This is a fundamentally under-appreciated nonlinearity. In other words, Preemptive Pluralization can make the difference between "sure, I'll add that today" and "this is going to take us 2 months and we'll introduce merge conflicts with every other in-progress feature."”

Hasnain says:

I knew salmonella was bad but I hadn't learnt about the extent of just how bad it was and how prevalent it is in the US.

Also, I'm glad ProPublica has launched a site where you can put in a number from your packet of chicken and get a rating for how bad/good the source is in terms of salmonella outbreaks. This is pretty cool.

"Today, food poisoning sickens roughly 1 in 6 Americans every year, according to the CDC, and salmonella hospitalizes and kills more people than any other foodborne pathogen. Each year, about 1.35 million people get sick from salmonella. While most recover, more than 400 people die and 26,500 people are hospitalized. Some are left with long-term conditions like severe arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome. Salmonella costs the economy an estimated $4.1 billion a year, more than any other type of food poisoning."