Hasnain says:

"At Qonto, the billing project was supposed to be completed by a single backend engineer in only two months. One year later, two backend engineers were still working on it full time.

Then the team of two backend engineers grew into a team of 20 people, including product managers, backend engineers and frontend engineers as well. Hiring, onboarding and retaining people to take care of our billing system was a constant challenge. They would have preferred to work on our core product, and our management team also wanted to downsize the team."

Hasnain says:

I’ve been seeing a lot of news lately and it’s so depressing. I wonder how history will judge everyone’s actions (or lack there of) in this moment.

“In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm”

Hasnain says:

How is this not illegal?

“The leaked documents show what customer service reps are being trained to tell users. Instead of saying the price is going up, reps will say, "We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost." That's the talking point customer service reps are supposed to use if a customer mentions that they saw commercials "about how T-Mobile won't raise the price of my plan."

Customers will be switched to a newer plan if they're on any of the following packages offered in previous years: Simple Choice/Select Choice, Magenta, Magenta 55, ONE Plan, and Simple Choice Business.”

Hasnain says:

“Whether it’s at work or in my open source travels, I routinely come across developers who are the real deal: they’re conscientious and judicious in an unwavering way. They set a standard for themselves and do not compromise on it. Whether that’s a deliberate thing or whether they’re just built that way, it’s humbling to witness. If there’s a flaky test, they investigate it and fix it. If there’s a bug they spot in the wild, they make a ticket, and maybe even fix it then-and-there. If a new feature doesn’t gel well with the existing code, they refactor the code first rather than hacking the feature in. They’ll dive as far down the stack as necessary to get to the bottom of something. None of these things are necessary but great developers know that if they don’t address a problem early, and properly, it will only cost them more time in the long run.”

Hasnain says:

“Still, Ben-Zvi planned to use his 2018 sabbatical visit to the IAS for research squarely on the geometric side of the Langlands program. His plan was disrupted when he went to listen to a talk by Venkatesh.

“My son and Akshay’s daughter were playmates, and we were friends socially, and I thought I should go to some of the talks Akshay gave at the beginning of the semester,” Ben-Zvi said.”

Hasnain says:

Yay open source.

“Looking back at what got us to this point, it seems that almost every single thing we did in running this contest so far has been load-bearing. We’re not quite sure what to make of this! Perhaps that progress is more fragile and success is more contingent than it often seems in retrospect.”

Hasnain says:

I hate this hostile design. I hit this myself in a webapp the other day where I couldn’t scroll right on a wide table because chrome doesn’t show the scroll bar unless you’re already scrolling… until someone taught me shift + scroll wheel scrolls right on a Mac. Just give me a scroll bar!

““The simple fact that these skinny scroll bars exist are evidence that designers do not sit with non technical users to conduct usability testing. Because if they did that they would immediately discover the problem.

People with dexterity and hand control challenges have a difficult time with these skinny scroll bars.

People with eye sight challenges suffer with these skinny scroll bars.””

Hasnain says:

“But that reality of the job can also colour the way veterinarians view human lives – including their own – and for those already experiencing suicidal ideation, it can provide a simple justification: death is preferable to suffering. In a 2021 survey by pharmaceutical company Merck, 12.5% of the veterinarians surveyed said they were "suffering". And nearly half of the respondents were not receiving mental health care.

"There's an idea that veterinarians work on the belief that it's right to euthanise a hopeless case," says Volk, "and we are seeing ourselves, emotionally, as hopeless cases."

Death is a routine and repeated part of the job, and while it's never easy to end a life, Volk adds that it is easy to start seeing it as an option to alleviate their own distress.”

Hasnain says:

“The IRS says Microsoft owes an additional $28.9 billion in tax for 2004 to 2013, plus penalties and interest. “

Hasnain says:

“and eventually peaked just above 201 million requests per second. This was nearly 3x bigger than our previous biggest attack on record.

Concerning is the fact that the attacker was able to generate such an attack with a botnet of merely 20,000 machines. There are botnets today that are made up of hundreds of thousands or millions of machines. Given that the entire web typically sees only between 1–3 billion requests per second, it's not inconceivable that using this method could focus an entire web’s worth of requests on a small number of targets.”