Hasnain says:

“Consider the adjective “hungry” in English, a concept conveyed with the noun hambre in Spanish. By imposing Spanish grammar on the English sentence, you get the phrase: “I have hunger.” Pretty, maybe, but odd. Similarly, someone attempting to recreate a foreign cuisine may find that their native grammar sneaks into their conception of the meal. As a result, trying your home food abroad can prove disorienting: Parisian restaurants may serve a hamburger with a fork and knife; a Japanese restaurant serving yoshoku, or “Western food,” might place croquettes and cabbage rolls in a bento-like box along with tiny portions of pickled vegetables and miso soup. In China, explains Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, rice is served after the main and before the soup, making the American-Chinese tradition of serving white rice alongside the main seem as odd to Chinese diners as an English-speaker hearing a foreigner say “old silly fool” instead of “silly old fool.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting postmortem of the Slack outage from a while back.

“Slack’s annual traffic pattern is a little unusual: Traffic is lower over the holidays, as everyone disconnects from work (good job on the work-life balance, Slack users!). On the first Monday back, client caches are cold and clients pull down more data than usual on their first connection to Slack. We go from our quietest time of the whole year to one of our biggest days quite literally overnight.”

Hasnain says:

This was exciting, and I probably need to go and read the linked series.

“But a second consequence is that, if we want human-originated sentience to spread across the universe, then the sooner we get started the better! Just like Bill Gates in 1975, we should expect that there will soon be competitors out there. Indeed, there are likely competitors out there “already” (where “already” means, let’s say, in the rest frame of the cosmic microwave background)—it’s just that the light from them hasn’t yet reached us. So if we want to determine our own cosmic destiny, rather than having post-singularity extraterrestrials determine it for us, then it’s way past time to get our act together as a species. We might have only a few hundred million more years to do so.”

Hasnain says:

“Expectations run high for software that makes real-world decisions, particularly when money hangs in the balance. This edition of Drill Bits shows how well-designed software can effectively create wealth by finding subtle opportunities for gains from trade. We'll unveil a deep connection between auctions and a classic problem from our school days, we'll see that clearing an auction—allocating resources based on bids—resembles a high-stakes mutant Tetris game, and we'll learn to stop worrying and love an NP-hard problem that's far from intractable in practice.”

Hasnain says:

““The health-care software industry is enormous, and it exists largely because it’s privatized, it’s not standardized,” says Stone. “There are a lot of free-market inefficiencies. And the country doesn’t have a public health infrastructure, so there isn’t any real drive to fix it.”

“You think about the industries that have been transformed by technology—someone said, How do we get a pizza to your house faster? That’s a competitive advantage,” he says. “That has not happened in American health care.””

Hasnain says:

This is pretty damning. Good examples for why you should listen to the team and inspire folks and let them do their best.

“Then, according to numerous current and former employees of Frazzini’s game studios, he ignored much of their advice. He frequently told staff that every Amazon game needed to be a “billion-dollar franchise” and then understaffed the projects, they say. Instead of using industry-standard development tools, Frazzini insisted Amazon build its own, which might have saved the company money if the software ever worked properly. Executives under Frazzini initially rejected charges that New World, an Amazon game that would ask players to colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans, was racist. They relented after Amazon hired a tribal consultant who found that the portrayal was indeed offensive, say two people who worked on the project. The game, previously planned for release last year, is now scheduled for this spring.”

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty good example of nerding out over just how fast modern hardware has become.

“Why would you even need such IO throughput in a single machine? Shouldn’t I be building a 50-node cluster in the cloud “for scalability”? This is exactly the point of my experiment - do you really want to have all the complexity of clusters or performance implications of remote storage if you can run your I/O heavy workload on just one server with local NVMe storage? How many databases out there need to sustain even “only” 1M disk IOPS? Or if you really do need that sweet 1 TB/s data scanning speed, you could do this with 10-20 well-configured cluster nodes instead of 200. Modern hardware is powerful, if used right!”

Hasnain says:

Pretty interesting case study of applying ML to an infrastructure problem, realizing some cost savings on a heavily used code path while maintaining the same user experience.

“Cannes is now deployed to almost all Dropbox traffic. As a result, we replaced an estimated $1.7 million in annual pre-warm costs with $9,000 in ML infrastructure per year (primarily from increased traffic to Suggest Backend and Predict Service).”

Hasnain says:

This was really interesting and I’m glad for the scientific process by which they (failed to) reproduce past research and thus come up with improvements and novel insight.

Wonder how long this will take to be as popular as the original study though

“Past research has found that experienced well-being does not increase above incomes of $75,000/y. This finding has been the focus of substantial attention from researchers and the general public, yet is based on a dataset with a measure of experienced well-being that may or may not be indicative of actual emotional experience (retrospective, dichotomous reports). Here, over one million real-time reports of experienced well-being from a large US sample show evidence that experienced well-being rises linearly with log income, with an equally steep slope above $80,000 as below it. This suggests that higher incomes may still have potential to improve people’s day-to-day well-being, rather than having already reached a plateau for many people in wealthy countries.”

Hasnain says:

Moving from a low trust society to an (uncomfortably) high trust society was an interesting eye opening experience and this was quite relatable.

“We can create trust by contributing to existing communities and creating new ones. The more we show up and are willing to have faith in others, the more we’ll get back in return.”