Hasnain says:

Really good read on performance optimizations, and some cool data structure work on CRDTs

“A decade ago Google Wave really needed a good quality list CRDT. I got super excited when the papers for CRDTs started to emerge. LOGOOT and WOOT seemed like a big deal! But that excitement died when I realised the algorithms were too slow and inefficient to be practically useful. And I made a big mistake - I assumed if the academics couldn't make them fast, nobody could.

But sometimes the best work comes out of a collaboration between people with different skills. I'm terrible at academic papers, I'm pretty good at making code run fast. And yet here, in my own field, I didn't even try to help. The researchers were doing their part to make P2P collaborative editing work. And I just thumbed my nose at them all and kept working on Operational Transform. If I helped out, maybe we would have had fast, workable CRDTs for text editing a decade ago. Oops! It turned out collaborative editing needed a collaboration between all of us. How ironic! Who could have guessed?!

“

Hasnain says:

“We have lionized the founders, CEOs, and disruptors who nevertheless have intra-office reputations as abrasive geniuses who treat their workers as eminently replaceable. Because most private companies don’t share revenue, we frequently tie headcount and real estate to success. Removing the physical office forces modern businesses to start justifying themselves through annoying things such as “profit and loss” and “paying customers.””

Hasnain says:

At first glance this is just one of those satisfying political articles justifying one side over the other. But this is definitely a bit more than that - going into the history of polarization in America, this digs into some data around various sources of polarization to land on the conclusion that it’s likely Fox News and *not* other causes.

Yes, correlation is not causation, but this makes a solid argument.

“The recent battle over critical race theory is an instructive example of how all roads lead to Fox News. Turning a decades-­old critical framework deployed mostly in grad school into the latest culture war was originally the brainchild of a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo, who appeared periodically on Fox last year to promote his cause. But it remained bubbling under the surface until early this year, when—facing flagging ratings and increased competition from the even more far-right outlets Newsmax and OAN—Fox suddenly decided to put it into heavy rotation. Starting in March, Fox mentioned CRT 1,300 times in the space of just three months. Six weeks after its campaign started, CRT began trending on Google. By the end of June, 26 states had introduced legislation that restricted or banned teaching CRT and related topics. Fox may not have invented this most recent conservative culture war, but it didn’t really go anywhere until Fox decided to make it the latest outrage of its white viewers.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting comparison of browsers past and present; analysis of developer incentives and how safari is slowly causing havoc.

“It's not accurate to describe Safari's approach as protecting the web, and right now it looks more likely that it is making the web worse for everybody.”

Hasnain says:

This is going to be brutal.

“But only 6.5% of that money has been delivered, and advocates are concerned evictions will rise next week when renters are suddenly on the hook for months, if not a year, of unpaid rent.
Roughly 12.7 million renters told the census in late June and early July that they had no or slight confidence in being able to make next month’s rent payment.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on scientific paper evaluations across various communities.

And a harrowing indictment of one security conference. I can’t speak to the details here but the argument rings true.

“The papers I reviewed for CCS were all about finding bugs, and each and every paper bragged that they found more bugs than the state of the art. But none of my submissions came with even a whiff of discussion on whether the results would be generalizable, or why the algorithms would be correct. Not a single one would discuss statistical significance or effect size. Data sets, replication packages, threats to validity or even discussions of limitations were all absent.

“At any SE or PL conference, these CCS papers would have sunk in an instant””

Hasnain says:

Very insightful read on social media, the culture war, and recent polarization.

“Maybe the best way to view the Biles controversy and every other controversy is through this intractable culture war lens. Maybe this garbage trending feature is actually a service that offers us a reliable indicator of how angry and fucked up we are as a country. It’s possible. But I’m curious what we gain, as a society, from engaging this way. I’ve stared into the toxic, beating heart of culture war Twitter for years, and I don’t believe I’ve ever received anything in return that has made me a better, more empathetic person. Instead, the process has stolen a great deal of my optimism and a bit of my trust in fellow humans. I’ve been able to temper this feeling by living in spaces that aren’t Twitter or social media. But it’s a lie to say there hasn’t been some damage.”

Hasnain says:

The new prosecutor uncovered past prosecutorial misconduct (paying off a witness to lie) that sent an innocent man to jail for 40+ years.

The prosecutor moved to overturn the conviction. Other prosecutors tried to dismiss saying this person had used up all his appeals. The state court agreed that his innocence doesn’t matter and he must stay in jail.

I can’t even…

“Sean O'Brien, a law professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City, said, "I do know that the Attorney General's office, for a long time, has had a practice of opposing every case regardless of its merit. They think that their duty is to defend every judgment, no matter the justice of it."

"Even with new evidence that shows that the wrong person was convicted?" asked Moriarty.

"Even with new evidence," he replied.

Gardner appealed, but this past March, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against her, stating that, "This case is not about whether Johnson is innocent … This case presents only the issue of whether there is any authority to appeal … No such authority exists."”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later rereading - this was great, and the two articles it links to upfront are also great. Love the ideas - especially the mobile killswitch.

“Because I like attempting to coin phrases, I propose we call these PAGNIs — short for Probably Are Gonna Need Its.

I love this concept! It applies really well to security engineering: many risk mitigations are difficult to implement and address unlikely threats. You don’t want to over-invest in security engineering versus feature work early on: if you fail to get any customers it doesn’t matter how secure your app is. However, there is also some security engineering that is worth doing up-front: basic security mitigations that are easy to do at the beginning, but get progressively harder the longer you put them off.”

Hasnain says:

I should probably pick up Elixir at some point.

“The result of all this is that we can support thousands of clients on a single off-the-shelf cloud VM instance, with great reliability. Developer productivity has never been better, either—I went into this knowing zero Elixir, and by the time I had worked through the official Getting Started tutorial, I felt confident enough in the language to dive in.”