Hasnain says:

Very good take on open source ecosystems; support; and the whole Rust fiasco going on with python’s cryptography package.

“I put this one last because it’s flippant, but it’s maybe the most important one: outside of hobbyists playing with weird architectures for fun (and accepting the overwhelming likelihood that most projects won’t immediately work for them), open source groups should not be unconditionally supporting the ecosystem for a large corporation’s hardware and/or platforms.”

Hasnain says:

This is a technically engaging read, the author got annoyed at really long load times in GTA:O and decided to do something about it.

I’m also surprised, given that this game is such a huge cash cow, that no one from Rockstar thought to ever profile this code given that their load times were >6 minutes and this would have stuck out like a sore thumb in any profiling.

“If this somehow reaches Rockstar: the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve. Please do something about it :<

You could either switch to a hashmap for the de-duplication or completely skip it on startup as a faster fix. For the JSON parser - just swap out the library for a more performant one. I don’t think there’s any easier way out.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading.

“I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the distributed systems area. (I focused on the core distributed systems area, and did not cover networking, security, distributed ledgers, verification work etc. I even left out distributed transactions, I hope to cover them at a later date.) “

Hasnain says:

Inspirational story.

“I chose Google because they will send me to Europe for the internship. Having the chance to spend the summer in Europe will be life-changing for me. I’ve never been on an airplane before. My only time out of Gaza was when I went to RBK in Jordan! And I think I will learn a lot at Google.”

Hasnain says:

“It is miraculous that successful large-scale games get made at all, anywhere. A big-budget game can be beautiful, but does the “jump” feel good? It can piece into a popular genre, but is it too same-y? Does the plot make sense? Are the characters balanced? And, most of all, is it fun? There is no potion to drizzle into the fizzing cauldron of game development to produce a hit; it takes all kinds of people channeling their personal inspiration into one multitudinous commodity. It’s crazed and human. That’s the alchemy that tech giants still can’t solve for.”

Hasnain says:

Who blames an intern?!

Hasnain says:

“Some of those who spoke to Recode recounted what they saw as biased interactions inside Amazon’s corporate offices, including a white male manager who told a Black female employee, unprompted, that his ancestors “owned slaves but I’m pretty sure they were good to their slaves.””

Hasnain says:

I’m at a loss of words for explaining how insanely cool this is.

A static website + web server distributed as a single zip file you can add your content to and it’ll serve it. The zip file is a valid executable. That runs (without modification) across Linux, Mac, and windows.

“redbean makes it possible to share web applications that run offline as an single-file αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε zip archive which contains your assets. All you need to do is download the redbean.com program below, change the filename to .zip, add your content in a zip tool like Windows 10 or InfoZIP, and change the extension back to .com.”

Hasnain says:

Absolutely infuriating, especially when you get through so much of the slowly building rage and then get to this quite, having internalized the full context of the situation:

“Another manager wrote in the review: “Management definitely recognizes his efforts and successes but these can be overshadowed when he displays what some might perceive as a sense of entitlement. He needs to be subtler when it comes to voicing his opinion about his compensation.””

Hasnain says:

:|

On one hand, I’m happy they tried to work on this problem. On the other hand, bungling the execution like this can do more harm than good. On the third hand, I don’t believe any other large silicon valley employer would be able to do better either because the problem is so structural.

There are too many quotes to pick out - I’ll pick the one that struck me the most:

“"It was like nobody had seen an African American person before," said 2018-19 student Saraah Cooper, describing her everyday experience on Google's campus.

"A regular Google employee came into the game room and asked us for all of our IDs and we were kind of confused because he wasn't security or anything," said 2018 scholar Afeeni Phillips.

"There was this lady in front of me in line for a food truck and she turned around, looked me in my eyes and said 'this line is only for Google employees — you can't eat here,'" Tolbert recalled, adding that he considered the incident a symptom of broader issues not exclusive to Google's campus. "So I grabbed my badge and lifted it up to my face because apparently that's the only place she was looking."”