Hasnain says:

“This denialist rhetoric is occurring at almost every level. Like India’s see-no-evil approach to malaria or tuberculosis, its Covid obfuscation suppresses “bad news” in order to buoy the country’s international image and the government party’s domestic standing. Not all countries with struggling health systems do this. Some actually at times overcount deaths from other viruses in order to get more humanitarian aid. But undercounting disease is, in many ways, far more sinister. Modi’s government had a choice between saving face and saving lives, and has chosen mass death.”

Hasnain says:

So messed up.

““I decided to do exactly what was done in the article,” Duffy said. “I took down every photo of my family from my house. … I took every piece of ethnic artwork out, so any African artwork, I took it out. I displayed my degrees, I removed certain books.”

Duffy asked a white male friend to sit in on the home appraisal and did not declare her race in her application or communications with the appraisal company. The new appraisal came back at more than double the first two, valuing her home more than $100,000 higher.”

Hasnain says:

From a 60 minutes special on this: ““Are we going to go all the way back to Native Americans [and give their land back]? Where does that stop?” says a White resident of Manhattan Beach, shedding light on the local opposition to returning land taken from a Black family one century ago”

From the article:

““We’re still suffering for what their ancestors did. Somebody needs to rectify this injustice,” he said. “They’re still benefiting from the generational wealth of their ancestors while we don’t have a dime coming in.””

Hasnain says:

Really great read on how the Econ and law cabal can hurt society - especially the Chicago school of thought.

“Quantitative disciplines – physics, math, and (especially) computer sci­ence – make a pretense of objectivity. They make very precise measure­ments of everything that can be measured precisely, assign deceptively precise measurements to things that can’t be measured precisely, and jet­tison the rest on the grounds that you can’t do mathematical operations on it.

This is the quant’s version of the drunkard’s search for car-keys under the lamp-post: we can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide qualitative elements, so we just incinerate them, sweep up the dubious quantitative residue that remains, do math on that, and simply assert that nothing important was lost in the process.”

Hasnain says:

This is full of fire and such a good takedown. I won’t quote Santorum’s extremely bigoted remarks (they’re linked to early on in the article) but suffice to say they were pretty bad.

“Meanwhile, CNN has yet to make a comment about Santorum's latest outburst.

The lesson from all these examples is crystal clear for most commentators of color: You can be a nativist, a bigot, an Islamophobe, a homophobe, a creep and a liar, but as long as you’re good for the bottom line and you don’t piss off the right-wing outrage mob, you are good for cable news. If you happen to be a white conservative, like Rick Santorum, you’ll always have a blank slate to birth new controversies.”

Hasnain says:

More on the basecamp aftermath. Great reporting.

“Over the next hour, employees continued to come forward to discuss Basecamp’s new policies and what would be like going forward. But before the meeting ended, one employee spoke up to address Singer’s remarks directly in a way that Fried and Hansson did not.

“Racism [and] white supremacy are not things that are so convenient that they only happen when full intention is present, or true malice is present,” the employee said. “Evil is not required. We’re not so lucky as for this to come down to good and evil. It’s as simple as creating a space where people do not feel welcome.”

The employee continued: “The silence in the background is what racism and white supremacy does. It creates that atmosphere that feels suffocating to people. It doesn't require active malice. It's not that convenient.””

Hasnain says:

This is not the story I expected I’d be reading tonight but it’s really interesting.

“The Taliban was so annoyed by their constant fighting that they threw them in jail. But they eventually kicked them out when they continued to fight inside the prison. Levi died in 2005.”

Hasnain says:

This is so cool. When I had to do something similar ages ago (holy crap, I feel old) I ended up sharding the dataset into static flat files and filtering on the client. While that’s still held up, this is just much more flexible and easier to update.

“I was writing a tiny website to display statistics of how much sponsored content a Youtube creator has over time when I noticed that I often write a small tool as a website that queries some data from a database and then displays it in a graph, a table, or similar. But if you want to use a database, you either need to write a backend (which you then need to host and maintain forever) or download the whole dataset into the browser (which is not so great when the dataset is more than 10MB).”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future investigation of the code itself so I can contrast it with my own implementation of something similar.

“I've worked with enough companies and teams to imagine several different approaches to build a system like this. Those approaches would all require large multi-disciplinary teams like a front-end JS team, a backend team, a DevOps team, and more. In contrast, I set out to do this by myself, in my spare time, and with a whole lot of "life" happening too.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty good read on database systems.

“In this post, we’re going to talk about some of the philosophical differences between how pull and push based query engines work, and then talk about the practical differences of why you might prefer one over the other, guided by these questions we’re trying to answer.”