Hasnain says:

Learned so much about so many things from this one. Gotta love when you see something like this a few thousand words into a post you already thought was quite interesting

“Now that the boring stuff is behind us, let’s start the fun part. Again, just as a reminder on how the intersection works: we do two phases of intersection, one for the conventional intersection and another for the bits that would cross the group boundary, and in the end, we merge these two.

In this section, we will take a look at assembly, some cool tools to analyze this assembly, AVX-512, differences in the microarchitecture of AMD and Intel chips, emulation of instructions, and a lot more. So again, sorry to bother you with all of the previous stuff, but it was important.”

Hasnain says:

“Moving data serialization format used by the Issue Service to Protobuf resulted in many improvements, including faster response time and reduced resource consumption (CPU, storage). Even though there were some challenges we had to solve during the migration, the final results were absolutely worth the effort. As we continue our work in the Issue Service and progress to handling more traffic and data, the impact of these relative improvements will continue to grow.”

Hasnain says:

“Inflation has lots of causes, it's true. But when an industry is consolidated enough to take advantage of a data brokerage or just engage in tacit collusion, any source of inflation – war, disease, weather – allows whole sectors to raise prices together, and keep them high, long after the shock has passed.”

Hasnain says:

“We need to build in the ability to reconfigure our systems in advance, without knowing exactly what sorts of changes we’ll need to make. The Canva engineers had some powerful operational knobs at their disposal through the Cloudflare firewall configuration. This allowed them to make changes. The more powerful and generic these sorts of dynamic configuration features are, the more room for maneuver we have. Of course, dynamic configuration is also dangerous, and is itself a contributor to incidents. Too often we focus solely on the dangers of such functionality in creating incidents, without seeing its ability to help us reconfigure the system to mitigate incidents.

Finally, these sorts of operator interfaces are of no use if the responders aren’t familiar with them. Ultimately, the more your responders know about the system, the better position they’ll be in to implement these adaptations. Changing an unhealthy system is dangerous: no matter how bad things are, you can always accidentally make things worse. The more knowledge about the system you can bring to bear during an incident, the better position you’ll be in to adaptive your system to extend that competence envelope.”

Hasnain says:

This was a fun read, reminding me I need to go back and keep up with the latest in succinct data structure research.

Also kinda timely quote given the recent hoopla around DeepSeek:

“Even though modern spell checkers use different techniques like edit distance and language models, the engineering insights from Unix spell remain valuable. It shows how deep understanding of theoretical concepts combined with practical constraints can lead to efficient and elegant solutions.

Most importantly, it demonstrates that some of the best innovations happen when we are resource constrained, forcing us to think deeper about our problems rather than throwing more hardware at them.”

Hasnain says:

“In 1872, Weierstrass published a function that threatened everything mathematicians thought they understood about calculus. He was met with indifference, anger and fear, particularly from the mathematical giants of the French school of thought. Henri Poincaré condemned Weierstrass’ function as “an outrage against common sense.” Charles Hermite called it a “deplorable evil.””

Hasnain says:

“The Real Culprit: setenv and getenv

setenv is not a safe function to call in a multithreaded environment. This is often a problem, and occasionally rediscovered as developers like us hit weird crashes in libc’s getenv [9], [10], [11], [12].”

Hasnain says:

This was chock full of great advice.

“Choose happiness. If you’re unhappy in life, success is much harder to achieve. When I was growing up, the American mantra was that happiness requires wealth. Wealth and happiness are two different goals; we have unhappy billionaires today! I always picked happiness over wealth when there was a choice, and I’m very glad that I did.”

Hasnain says:

TIL over half of LA’s fire trucks were out of commission during the recent fires and a nontrivial amount of the blame here goes to… private equity

“While AIP’s consolidation of economic power over fire truck manufacturing is appalling, it is not some unsolvable, intractable problem we just have to live with. State and federal antitrust laws already prohibit the kind of monopolistic roll-up that AIP perpetrated — they just need to be enforced. State AGs can bring lawsuits to force REV Group to divest the manufacturers it illegally acquired and to pay damages to fire departments for the harm that its (attempted) monopolization of the fire-truck industry has caused. Fire departments and other fire-apparatus purchasers can bring their own lawsuits to do the same. So can the FTC and the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. If state legislators or members of Congress want to pave the way for such lawsuits, they can launch their own investigations into the fire apparatus industry. And if anyone wants guidance on what a lawsuit against AIP could look like, Lina Khan left us a roadmap just before she stepped down from the FTC last week — when she sued private-equity giant Welsh Carson for rolling up Texas anesthesiology practices to drive up the price of anesthesia services to Texas patients.

We have all the tools we need to check AIP’s greed and abuse and restructure the fire-truck industry so it serves the public interest. The only question is whether our political leaders have the will.”

Hasnain says:

“The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says the building was targeted because it was a Hezbollah "terrorist command centre" and it "eliminated" a Hezbollah commander. It added that "the overwhelming majority" of those killed in the strike were "confirmed to be terror operatives".
But a BBC Eye investigation verified the identity of 68 of the 73 people killed in the attack and uncovered evidence suggesting just six were linked to Hezbollah's military wing. None of those we identified appeared to hold a senior rank. The BBC's World Service also found that the other 62 were civilians - 23 of them children.”