Hasnain says:

"When I first started Keygen, I had this idea in my head that I could create a company where I never had to get on a sales call — or any call. Being an introvert, I absolutely hated calls. They're not only awkward, but a 30 minute call takes up hours of my headspace. I quickly learned that I didn't want to do them, and so I decided that I wouldn't.

I instituted a bonkers 'no calls' policy at work.

(Even I thought I was being crazy.)"

Hasnain says:

Great read on how to build larger projects over the long term. Some of the advice resonated with my past experiences; and the rest is stuff I’ll start applying immediately

“Instead of splitting a project up into arbitrary milestones, consider delivering incremental value by shipping concrete stepping stones. Stepping stones can serve to de-risk a project by minimizing dependencies and providing standalone checkpoints. Most importantly however they help to simplify a complex project by providing a means to structure deliverables around eliminating unknown unknowns. Formulating useful stepping stones is an art and often requires an intense focus on simplicity to avoid deviating out of the cone of strategy along the way to an end goal.”

Hasnain says:

So much great advice here. I haven’t listened to the whole thing but I did read the full summary. It’s great.

“A consequence of the interview process not changing much, but the job market becoming more competitive is how the bar to do well on these interviews went up. This is because there are more and better preparation materials, so the “average” candidate does better on these interviews than years before. Preparing for interviews at Big Tech companies and scaleups is no longer a “nice to have:” it’s a necessity for even strong engineers, who want to get a job offer.”

Hasnain says:

“The top reason those non-voters cited, above the economy at 24 percent and immigration at 11 percent, was Gaza: a full 29 percent cited the ongoing onslaught as the top reason they didn’t cast a vote in 2024.”

Hasnain says:

Cautiously optimistic here. There will be lots of gotchas and caveats. But a pause in the fighting is very welcome at this stage.

If it does turn out, as initial reports suggest, that this was because Trump pushed harder than Biden (with associated headlines / news tidbits that have been, interesting, to say the least), I will have to give credit where credit is due because at least he's stopping a genocide (even if it's for self serving aims). Hoping to learn more.

"Trump pledged last month that “all hell will break out” if Hamas doesn’t promise to release hostages by Jan. 20 and his Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, joined talks in the region to push for a deal."

Hasnain says:

I spent way too much time on this.

(well, the ~40 or so minutes needed to finish it)

Hasnain says:

Jeff has always been one of the great ones. This whole post is admirable and worth reading. When a few people win, we all lose. We need to uplift everyone around us.

“I think many of the Americans who did vote are telling us they no longer believe our government is effectively keeping America fair for everyone. Our status as the world's leading democracy is in question. We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as state and local election boards, as well as the Federal Election Commission.

It was only after I attained the dream that I was able to fully see how many Americans have so very little. This much wealth starts to unintentionally distance my family from other Americans. I no longer bother to look at how much items cost, because I don't have to. We don't have to think about all these things that are challenging or unreachable for so many others. The more wealth you attain, the more unmistakably clear it becomes how unequal life is for so many of us.

Even with the wealth I have, I can't imagine what it would feel like to be a billionaire. It is, for lack of a better word, unamerican.”

Hasnain says:

“Even more important, the work demonstrates that the Gowers norm can act as a powerful tool in a new domain. “Because it’s so new, at least in this part of number theory, there is potential to do a bunch of other things with it,” Friedlander said. Mathematicians now hope to broaden the scope of the Gowers norm even further — to try using it to solve other problems in number theory beyond counting primes.

“It’s a lot of fun for me to see things I thought about some time ago have unexpected new applications,” Ziegler said. “It’s like as a parent, when you set your kid free and they grow up and do mysterious, unexpected things.””

Hasnain says:

I've never seen a name put to this, though in hindsight I've seen it a lot. Worth pondering.

"In general, I think well-designed tools (and systems) should aim to minimize this effect. This can be hard to do in a fully general manner, but some things I think about when designing a new tool:

* Does it need to be configurable?
* Does it need syntax of its own?
* As a corollary: can it reuse familiar syntax or idioms from other tools/CLIs?
* Do I end up copy-pasting my use of it around? If so, are others likely to do the same?"

Hasnain says:

“The formatting function used by std.debug.print in the examples is a powerful generic function. Lots of languages parse their format strings at runtime, and possibly add some special validators to the string format to catch errors early. In Zig, the format string is parsed at comptime, creating efficient output code while also performing all validation at compile time.”