Hasnain says:

“Judge Du is right about the bigotry inherent in our immigration laws, but conservatives like the bigotry and liberals will be afraid that trying to stop it will just piss off the conservatives.

But at least this opinion exists now. It’s out there, and future lawyers and judges can read it and maybe think differently about the core assumptions at the heart of our immigration system. A lone federal judge cannot stop 100 years of bigoted policies, but if you want to know what a truly progressive legal analysis looks like, Judge Du just spelled one out.”

Hasnain says:

“Try thinking about precautions in non-pandemic terms, Kirk Sell advises. Every day, people follow safety rules that might not be personally necessary for them, but that also aren’t onerous enough to be harmful—doing so is simply part of living in a society in which you share norms and risk with those around you. “I can swim, but when I go out kayaking, I still wear a life jacket, because it’s required as a general safety approach,” she explained. “Just because you are safe doesn’t mean you don’t have any rules to follow anymore.” This is, perhaps, somewhat understating it: Before Kirk Sell was a scholar, she was an Olympic-medalist swimmer who held the world record in the 100-meter breaststroke. There are few people on Earth at less personal risk from tipping out of a kayak. So, yes, you can probably find it within yourself to continue to wear a mask at the grocery store if the infection rate is growing in your area. You probably do other stuff on that same logic all the time.”

Hasnain says:

“Weeks later, Ms. Reveillac was abruptly pushed out of the company and locked out of her work accounts. “Team, I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye. I love and miss you,” she tweeted. Ms. Reveillac and Twitter declined to comment on her departure.

In a staff meeting shortly after, two people who attended said, Mr. Davis told employees that they should not assume Ms. Reveillac had left the company because of conflicts with him. But without a clear explanation, employees were left wondering about whether her sudden departure was a response to going to Mr. Dorsey with her concerns”

Hasnain says:

This is such a messed up and horrifying situation. What’s really horrifying is the realization that for some of the perpetrators this is probably just an average day, because as a society we just let this go on unpunished. Despite what people may say, this (by that I mean harassment and worse against women) is the norm and not the exception, and major changes are needed.

“Pakistani women deserve better than being made into examples of why women deserve rights. We shouldn't need examples of why we should protect women, it should be a forgone conclusion. How many women will it take for people to realise that we have a big problem in the way we view and treat women? And for our government officials who don't want issues to be highlighted lest we "tarnish" Pakistan's image — our image is being tarnished by the assaulters, not the people crying out for protection for our citizens or the victims.”

Hasnain says:

Some nice little compiler magic here.

“The code is in C++, but the essence of the algorithm is an iterative ascent to the input number from base case 0 (which is even), switching the boolean result at each iteration. It works, but you get a linear time O(n) isEven function compared to the obvious constant time O(1) modulo algorithm.

Surprisingly, Clang/LLVM is able to optimize the iterative algorithm down to the constant time algorithm”

Hasnain says:

I have no words. This is why data privacy is so important - this data is can now be used to identify and harm Afghans who worked with the US.

““I don’t think anyone ever thought about data privacy or what to do in the event the [HIIDE] system fell into the wrong hands,” said Welton Chang, chief technology officer for Human Rights First, himself a former Army intelligence officer. “Moving forward, the U.S. military and diplomatic apparatus should think carefully about whether to deploy these systems again in situations as tenuous as Afghanistan.””

Hasnain says:

““There’s a slightly humorous stereotype about computational complexity that says what we often end up doing is taking a problem that is solved a lot of the time in practice and proving that it’s actually very difficult,” said Goldberg.”

Hasnain says:

The original paper’s authors respond at the end, but this is a really detailed analysis of what does appear to be a fraudulent dataset - invalidating an influential paper. Also really ironic that the paper itself was about studying people’s dishonesty.

“We have worked on enough fraud cases in the last decade to know that scientific fraud is more common than is convenient to believe, and that it does not happen only on the periphery of science. Addressing the problem of scientific fraud should not be left to a few anonymous (and fed up and frightened) whistleblowers and some (fed up and frightened) bloggers to root out. The consequences of fraud are experienced collectively, so eliminating it should be a collective endeavor. What can everyone do?

There will never be a perfect solution, but there is an obvious step to take: Data should be posted. The fabrication in this paper was discovered because the data were posted. If more data were posted, fraud would be easier to catch. And if fraud is easier to catch, some potential fraudsters may be more reluctant to do it. Other disciplines are already doing this. For example, many top economics journals require authors to post their raw data [16]. There is really no excuse. All of our journals should require data posting.”

Hasnain says:

Some fun math and performance optimization tricks here.

“The goal of the article is to both show how trascendental functions are computed, and how to micro-optimize guided by looking at the assembly. However, if you don’t care about how we compute atan2, you can skip the second section while still understanding the optimizations process.

As usual, everything is presented without assuming much previous knowledge — in this case just basic trigonometry and C programming.”

Hasnain says:

I was pretty skeptical when I started reading this - but then recalled that most of my (book) reading is fiction. Rereading this with the intended context in mind, this is quite on point.

“Now, if you’re only reading for fun, or if you don’t want to remember what you read, this article doesn’t apply. Sometimes reading is entertainment, and that’s wonderful. But if you want to get some valuable knowledge out of a book, the first step to getting more out of what you read is being active.”