Hasnain says:

Great read on text algorithms, some fun data structures and algorithms. The complexity analysis was a fun aside. I now have a good example to show now when talking about “who needs to use data structures like this in practice?!”

“Efficient bracket pair colorization was a fun challenge. With the new data structures, we can also solve other problems related to bracket pairs more efficiently, such as general bracket matching or showing colored line scopes.

Even though JavaScript might not be the best language to write high performance code, a lot of speed can be gained by reducing asymptotic algorithmic complexity, especially when dealing with large inputs.”

Hasnain says:

“A sense of obligation to provide for parents and sometimes extended families burdens the finances of many millennials with roots in immigrant communities, said Shellise Rogers, 30, who grew up in Trinidad and New York City and has gone to Score for advice. She now lives in New York and has her own business as an accountant and business coach.”

Hasnain says:

This is some really cool work done by folks in my org.

"MT is designed to be able to scan large mobile codebases and flag potential issues on pull requests before they make it into production. It was built as a result of close collaboration between security and software engineers at Facebook who train MT to look at code and analyze how data flows through it. Analyzing data flows is useful because many security and privacy issues can be modeled as data flowing into a place it shouldn’t."

Hasnain says:

Great read on in house expertise and the value of building vs buying in the right scenario.

“Before the patch, if you profiled our Scala code, you would've seen an unreasonably large amount of time spent in Future/Promise, including in cases where you might naively expect that the compiler would optimize the work away. One reason for this is that Futures use a compare-and-swap (CAS) operation that's opaque to JVM optimization. The patch linked above avoids CAS operations when the Future doesn't escape the scope of the method. This companion patch removes CAS operations in some places that are less amenable to compiler optimization. The two patches combined reduced the cost of typical major Twitter services using idiomatic Scala by 5% to 15%, paying for the JVM team in perpetuity many times over and that wasn't even the biggest win Flavio found that year.

I'm not going to do a team-by-team breakdown of teams that pay for themselves many times over because there are so many of them, even if I limit the scope to "teams that people are surprised that Twitter has".”

Hasnain says:

Well written article highlighting a lot of problems with the academic journal and publication system.

“Whatever happens to Sci-Hub or Elbakyan, the fact that such a site exists is something of a tragedy. Sci-Hub currently fills a niche that should never have existed. Like the black-market medicine purchased by people who cannot afford prescription drugs, its very being indicts the official system that created the conditions of its emergence.

The cost of individually purchasing all the articles required to complete a typical literature review could easily amount to thousands of dollars. Beyond paying for the articles themselves, academics often have to pay steep fees to publish their research. Meanwhile, most peer reviewers and editors charged with assessing, correcting, and formatting papers do not receive compensation for their work.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting bug and analysis.

“Sawtooth up and down graphs aren't THAT interesting...but look at the x-axis. This isn't showing minute by minute or even millisecond by millisecond ups and downs like you may have seen before. This x-axis uses months as its unit of measure. Read that again and drink it in.”

Hasnain says:

Surprised the FT went out swinging

“We could have stayed in the EU and improved pay and conditions in these sectors. We could have left the EU and improved pay and conditions in these sectors. But the government insisted we would “have our cake and eat it” rather than acknowledge trade-offs and plan for them. This has precipitated a crisis which may mean the country ends up reliant on low-paid migrant workers after all — just different ones, who are even more vulnerable to exploitation. If there is any cake left, I don’t know who’s eating it.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting and thoughtful analysis.

“Whatever the case, it seems clear that the current state of affairs is making everyone miserable. So today I want to expand my argument: Not only should Facebook commit to doing more research like the Facebook Files, it should release the Facebook Files, period. And not just the Instagram-related ones, as Nick Clegg suggested Monday. Whatever documents the Journal relied on, Facebook should make them publicly available. Redact them as needed to protect users’ privacy, if need be. Add context, where context is missing.

But release them, and soon.

Here’s my rationale.”

Hasnain says:

!!!

I rewatched the whole thing (saw S5 for the first time though) earlier this year and it was so good.

“Original series creator J. Michael Straczynski is onboard to write the project. He will also executive producer under his Studio JMS banner. Warner Bros. Television, which produced the original series, will produce the reboot.”

Hasnain says:

Only read the intro so far and the data is staggering.

“Not only did the pandemic lead to the closure of schools in many countries, often for several weeks, it also accelerated the digitalization of education and amplified the role of parental involvement in supporting the schoolwork of their children. Thus, beyond the specific circumstances of the COVID-19 lockdown, we believe that studying the effects of the pandemic on academic inequalities provides a way to more broadly examine the consequences of school closure and related effects (for example, digitalization of education) on social class inequalities

…

Data from non-Western countries highlight a more general digital divide, showing that developing countries have poorer access to digital equipment. For example, in India in 2018, only 10.7% of households possessed a digital device, while in Pakistan in 2020, 31% of higher-education teachers did not have Internet access and 68.4% did not have a laptop”