Hasnain says:

"Ricardo Perez-Truglia, associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, points to Denmark, where the government required mid-sized companies to share information about the pay gap between men and women. Soon after, data shows the gaps at those companies got smaller. “In Canada, there was a similar mandate for academics,” he adds. “What happened was the gender pay gap for faculty positions in Canadian universities shrunk from 10% to, like, 9%. It wasn’t a magical solution, but it moved things in the right direction.”

It’s likely, Perez-Truglia hypothesises, that the simple act of forcing companies to go public is enough to make them re-evaluate their pay scale. “The leadership is thinking: this looks really bad, and I’m worried the employees will be demoralised if they found out. Or it might leak, and it’ll be a scandal, and we’ll lose clients and it’ll be terrible. So, as soon as they’re mandated to release the information, they start giving raises and trying to fix the problem.”"

Hasnain says:

Enlightening read on the Delta variant and how it’s spreading.

“The original Coronavirus variant has an R0 of ~2.71. Alpha—the “English variant” that caused a spike around the world around Christmas—is about 60% more infectious. Now it appears that Delta is about 60% more transmissible yet again. Depending on which figure you use, it would put Delta’s R0 between 4 and 9, which could make it more contagious than smallpox. “

Hasnain says:

This goes into the extent of really bad weather patterns in the last few weeks across the world - caused by climate change.

““I am surprised by how far it is above the previous record,” Dieter Gerten, professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said. “We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed.””

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting read on product thinking and how to avoid the death by a thousand papercuts problem.

“I recently shipped two things at GitHub that had an impact beyond my wildest dreams. The amount of gratitude and love that spilled out of the community is like nothing I’ve seen before. But the things I shipped weren’t these huge, meaty projects. They were tiny.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t even…

“Awadallah, who is well-known in the cloud industry, also posted his manifesto on YouTube and Twitter in attempts to decry antisemitism by recounting how he became enlightened after he "hated all jews." In an awkward attempt to decry hate amid the Israel-Palestinian conflict, he listed all the Jews he knew that were good people. “

Hasnain says:

So relatable and very solid advice. I can relate to the given example of triaging a large backlog of issues - sometimes my best work and ideas have come through looking at every single bug (out of hundreds) looking for patterns and improvements. There is a fine line between pointless grind and useful grind but most folks seem to shy away from both - at a large cost.

“I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.”

Hasnain says:

Very interesting read on something I didn’t have much visibility into before.

“One of the web's geekiest corners, the W3C is a mostly-online community where the people who operate the internet — website publishers, browser companies, ad tech firms, privacy advocates, academics and others — come together to hash out how the plumbing of the web works. It's where top developers from companies like Google pitch proposals for new technical standards, the rest of the community fine-tunes them and, if all goes well, the consortium ends up writing the rules that ensure websites are secure and that they work no matter which browser you're using or where you're using it.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t even know where to begin with this.

“The last two statements is where the interesting thing happens. In case the password equals row[password] the login will fail. However, in the case that all checks failed, it would default to an else clause that sets “loginOK” to true.

Because no password was provided in the request, the “password” variable would be NULL and loginOK would end up being true. When loginOK is set to true, the application sends the login session cookie and will eventually (if no other parameters are provided like in the attacker’s request) end up in an if clause that returns 302 redirect to the userPortal.”

Hasnain says:

This is a really motivating read. Definitely shows the importance of persistence and hard work. It’s a common tendency especially amongst engineers to spend forever automating something to avoid doing just a bit of “grind” - and put off getting things done that way. I know I’ve run into that before too. But showing up and making slow and steady progress always works.

“We did not quit our day jobs to start working on Typesense full-time immediately. We did not seek venture capital or attempt to “corner” the market by chasing hyper growth. We did not have personal brands or wide networks to tap into. We did not even earn the first dollar till the 5th year.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on systems and eventual consistency. Also, +1 for modeling your APIs after Stripe’s!

“In general, you can't rely on webhooks alone to keep two systems consistent. Every integration I've ever worked on has realized this fact by eventually augmenting webhooks with polling. This is due to a few problem areas.”