Hasnain says:

“In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28 000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58 260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85 750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024”

Hasnain says:

“The required quantities are unenviably vast. Each rider consumes close to 1.5kg of rice or pasta every day and in the region of 120g of carbohydrates per hour when on the bike - the equivalent carbohydrate content of five hourly bananas.

One EF rider once went through four tubs of maple syrup during the three-week race.”

Hasnain says:

“Moyer-Nocchi points out that coriander is not the only herb whose popularity has ebbed and flowed in Italy over the centuries. Marjoram was once widely used, but “no one necessarily associates that with Italy anymore,” she says. On the other hand, some of the flavors modern Italians use to express themselves have not actually been “Italian” for very long. Basil, which originated in Asia, has only been part of Italian cuisine for a few hundred years. “It’s very young, and yet seems so Italian,” Moyer-Nocchi says.

From Thailand with chilies to Belgium with chocolate, many modern nations have embraced once-foreign ingredients, folding them into their culinary identity until their absence becomes unthinkable. The curious history of cilantro in Italy shows that the reverse is also true. Sometimes, an ingredient becomes so unpopular that we forget it’s been there all along.”

Hasnain says:

“After learning Coq, mei began looking for an open problem to test it out. That’s when they found the Busy Beaver Challenge. A few weeks later, they’d translated several of the team’s proofs into Coq, including Ligocki and Kropitz’s proof that Skelet #1 never halts — Ligocki could finally be sure about it. Suddenly, an even higher standard of rigor than Stérin’s emphasis on reproducibility seemed possible. And it had all started with someone who had no formal training at all — an amateur mathematician.
“Let’s remember that means a lover of mathematics,” Moore said. “It is not a pejorative term.”

The Dam Breaks

Around the same time, a graduate student named Chris Xu made a breakthrough on the second monstrous machine — Skelet #17. It was usually easy to summarize the behavior of even the most fiendish five-rule Turing machines once you figured out how they worked. “Then you encounter some bullshit like Skelet 17, and you go, ‘Nah, the universe is trolling us,’” mei said. Understanding Skelet #17 by studying the patterns on its tape was like deciphering a secret message wrapped in four layers of encryption: Cracking one code just revealed another totally unrelated code, and two more below that. Xu had to decipher all of them before he could finally prove that the machine never halted.”

Hasnain says:

As an HN commenter alludes, this is why hashmaps should explicitly always randomize iteration order (at least in test mode) so people don’t rely on this behavior. It was surprising how many bugs shook out when we did this at FB

“Thanks to CxByte, Gunnar, Andrew and Brian for their help with debugging this, and their helpful tips. Gunnar in particular was the one who uncovered this bug, and despite my satirical jab in the commit message helped uncover this very interesting bug, so he’s the one who made this post possible.

Also, thanks to the person who introduced this bug (the commit log gets a little fuzzy, so I’m not quite sure who did) and hope he buys a lottery ticket. :^)”

Hasnain says:

Kept nodding while reading this.

“Healthy laziness begets agility - you have way less code, less systems, less everything, and therefore way more ability to maneuver and actually change things with a small number of motivated people - and there’s always a small number of motivated people in any place, and this place might even keep them, if they learn to bargain for raises. And you also don’t need to grow as much, because you don’t need to be adding people to take care of all these sprawling systems that you quickly come to depend on.”

Hasnain says:

“All this provides a read-only SQL queryable data in a single file representing OpenStreetMap metadata. The project evolved from merely transferring format migration to optimizing it for efficient search. This highlights the importance of iterative refinement and the power of combining different technologies to solve problems.”

Hasnain says:

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of professionals suddenly began working from home, some employers rolled out software that captured screenshots of their employees’ computers and algorithmically scored their productivity. It’s easy to imagine how the current boom in generative AI could build on these foundations: For example, large language models could digest every email and Slack message written by employees to provide managers with summaries of workers’ productivity, work habits, and emotions. These types of technologies not only pose harm to people’s dignity, autonomy, and job satisfaction, they also create information asymmetry that limits people’s ability to challenge or negotiate the terms of their work.

We can’t let it come to that. The battles that gig workers are fighting are the leading front in the larger war for workplace rights, which will affect all of us. The time to define the terms of our relationship with algorithms is right now.”

Hasnain says:

“Their assessment of the resultant reality is equally dark: Respondents describe Israeli actions in damning terms, with 41% saying they constitute major war crimes akin to genocide, nearly 34% saying they constitute genocide, and 16% saying they are not akin to genocide, but are still major war crimes. While these views may seem surprising, they are not markedly different from the views of some segments of the American public, especially Democrats, with one recent poll showing a majority of Democrats saying Israeli actions amounted to genocide.”

Hasnain says:

Yay for caches. And simplicity.

“We demonstrate that a cache often experiences a higher one-hit-wonder ratio than common full trace analysis. Our study on 6594 traces reveals that quickly removing one-hit wonders (quick demotion) is the secret weapon of many advanced algorithms. Motivated by this, we design S3-FIFO, a Simple and Scalable cache eviction algorithm composed of only Static FIFO queues. Our evaluation shows that S3-FIFO achieves better and more robust efficiency than state-of-the-art algorithms. Meanwhile, it is more scalable than LRU-based algorithms.”