Hasnain says:

Really looking forward to the next post in this series.

“This has been a deep dive into the world of branch simplification, with an emphasis on how we engineered Cranelift’s new backend to provide very good compilation speed taking control-flow handling and branch lowering/simplification as an example. We believe that there may be other significant opportunities to rethink, and carefully engineer, core algorithms in the compiler backend with specific attention to maximizing streaming behavior, minimizing indirection, and minimizing passes over data. This is an interesting and exciting engineering pursuit largely because it goes beyond the world of “theoretical standard compiler-book algorithms” and calls on problem solving to find clever new design tricks.”

Hasnain says:

“Delivering his judgement, Lord Leggatt said that the Supreme Court unanimously dismissed Uber's appeal that it was an intermediary party and stated that drivers should be considered to be working not only when driving a passenger, but whenever logged in to the app.”

Hasnain says:

Shitty software UX leading to large money losses again, take #28581. The exposition of the actual bug as it happened and the screenshot of the software are scary. Also interesting was the callout from the judge that the recipients thought the payment was legit because they only started joking about it on their internal chat a day later - after they found out it was a mistake.

I should probably start subscribing to Bloomberg since Matt Levine’s columns are always solid.

“Last August, Citigroup Inc. wired $900 million to some hedge funds by accident. Then it sent a note to the hedge funds saying, oops, sorry about that, please send us the money back. Some did. Others preferred to keep the money. Citi sued them. Yesterday Citi lost, and they got to keep the money. I read the opinion, by U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, expecting to learn about the New York legal doctrine of finders keepers—more technically, the “discharge-for-value defense”—and I was not disappointed. But I was also treated to a gothic horror story about software design. I had nightmares all night about checking the wrong boxes on the computer.”

Hasnain says:

This leaves me with a lot of mixed feelings. It's a blogpost by the founder of Waze on his experience at google and why they left N years later.

I was first nodding along with agreement as a bunch of things matched my experience at a bigco (for better or worse). But then some of the later sections around work-life balance, compensation, and transparency/directness left me with a bad taste in my mouth - in some cases I'd expect the author here to have more control over the things they are complaining about; and in others... well, I don't think 'd enjoy working with them.

"If I had to summarize it, I would say that the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers. You need to be able to answer the "what have I done for our users today" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech. I guess that's just not me. As the tech regulation / anti trust heats up - the noise will continue to get louder than the signal. The innovation challenges at Corp-Tech will only get worse as the risk tolerance will go down. Soon, Lawyers > Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new companies."

Hasnain says:

"The ultimate learn-by-doing experience might be a lesson from Japanese parachutist Yasuhiro Kubo, who holds the world record in the activity's banzai category. The sky diver tosses his chute from the plane and then jumps out after it, waiting as long as possible to retrieve it, put it on and pull the ripcord. In 2000, Kubo—starting from 9,842 feet—fell for 50 seconds before recovering his gear. A safer way to practice your technique would be at one of the wind-tunnel simulators found at about a dozen U.S. theme parks and malls."

Hasnain says:

Pretty great read on business models for a (small) open source company to consider.

“Running your own business, especially one based on open source software, is enormously rewarding, but it’s a big step and requires a lot of commitment. Make sure you put the time in ahead of time to determine which model, if any, is right for you.”

Hasnain says:

“The law is clear enough, what we need is regulatory enforcement. Just because this practice is widespread doesn't mean it's correct and acceptable."

Mr Walshe noted that the ICO had used a pixel within its own e-newsletter.

The watchdog told the BBC it was used to track email openings, but not users' locations, adding: "We're working with our provider to remove the pixel functionality and this should be completed soon."

Hasnain says:

I knew Bitcoin energy consumption was bad for the world but this really makes the scope of the problem cleared - and it’s so much worse.

“As we will see below, the more than 2 million machines used in Bitcoin mining alone consume as much energy as Egypt or the Netherlands consumes each year. And they do so while simultaneously only securing a relatively small amount of payments less than $4 billion last year. “

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting read on the whole mess that started after the NYT piece was published the other day. I haven’t been following things closely (and I had read some SSC here and there but not regularly) - the perspective here was quite useful to understand what’s going on.

“This demand for unalloyed positivity is exacerbated by a reactionary grievance culture in some corners of the tech industry that interprets critique as persecution, in part because of a widespread belief that good intentions exculpate bad behavior. Why be critical of people who are just trying to change the world? (Through their casual gaming app that allows people to group digital candy in sets of three, or their gig economy platform that has the effect of driving wages well below standard minimums, or their social network that may be responsible for an active decision to algorithmically distribute disinformation because that’s what the customer apparently wants?) Why be so negative all the time? Why be negative at all?”

Hasnain says:

Memory allocators are hard!

“Usage of an allocator which is not optimal for a workload can cause a huge waste of memory. If you have a long-running application with a lot of threads and care about memory usage then glibc malloc is probably not your choice. Allocators that are designed for multithreaded services, like TCMalloc, jemalloc and others can provide much better memory utilization. So be conscious of this factor and go and check how much memory your application wastes.”