Hasnain says:

Yay for more Rust adoption stories!

“If you’re new to Rust, start small and build on top of that. We ran a large number of experiments when we were getting started to try and find the edges of what a Rust-based solution could provide. When your experiments pan out, try to reimagine the ways you used to work with other languages and see if your code can benefit from Rust’s philosophy.”

Hasnain says:

"I think most CEOs, it's not that they're bad people, they're just cowards. They're like, "Yeah, I would like to take a stand, but I can't because of investors, customers and things like this." It basically comes down to, "I care more about hitting the next quarter results than preventing a civil war," which is so fucked up. They're more afraid of their investors than they are of militants. I'm in a lucky position where I don't have to be afraid of my investors. I'm super profitable. I can't get fired. There's no majority on the board that can fire me. So I think that I am in a position [where] I can take these stands much more than others."

"I think that CEOs need to have the courage to actually step up for things that matter, and be less sort of afraid of the impact on their businesses. Because most customers, especially the people who are actually buying the software, they care about stability, they care about democracy."

Hasnain says:

“That combination of personnel roster and management culture was simply smarter than the market. From 1988 through 2018, Renaissance’s flagship Medallion Fund had an average annual return of about 40% after fees, with almost no money-losing years; before fees, its returns were even more eye-popping. Although Medallion’s trading strategies do eventually get discovered by the market, forcing the company to find and exploit new inefficiencies, their profitability tends to last for decades rather than mere months. That steady outperformance has earned Simons an estimated fortune of $22.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.”

Hasnain says:

Good technical read on standing up a new API gateway and how to build shared infrastructure.

“If you’re working on an infrastructure team, you should do all in your power to avoid being the “gatekeeper” for the teams you service. Also, people often don’t think about User Experience when building infrastructure services and that is a huge mistake, infrastructure services still have user interfaces and you have to think about how you’re going to expose that for users, including providing sane defaults (real timeouts instead of the infinite timeouts in Golang’s default HTTP client and server) and blocking operations that might be syntactically but not logically correct.”

Hasnain says:

This is a pretty good read on engineering practices within and across companies - though it could do without the constant put downs of factory work.

“The expectation from developers at traditional companies is to complete assigned work. At SV-like companies, it's to solve problems that the business has. This is a huge difference. It impacts the day-to-day life of any engineer.”

Hasnain says:

Insightful and engaging read on the making of one of the most recognizable game maps ever.

“Ultimately, it’s hard for me to claim I knew what I was doing as I pieced Dust together. I attribute its success more to incredible luck and lack of imagination more than any skill I possess. If anything, I learnt more from Dust post-release (and in writing up these memories!) than I knew when I was making it.”

Hasnain says:

What the actual... I’m not surprised, just disappointed.

“According to new data released Friday, employers cut 140,000 jobs in December, signaling that the economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is backtracking. Digging deeper into the data also reveals a shocking gender gap: Women accounted for all the job losses, losing 156,000 jobs, while men gained 16,000.

Meanwhile, a separate survey of households, which includes self-employed workers, showed an even wider gender disparity. It also highlighted another painful reality: Blacks and Latinas lost jobs in December, while White women made significant gains.”

Hasnain says:

The international obfuscated C competition entries are always crazy but this year’s winner has to take the cake. Tic tac toe implemented in one call to printf - because of course printf is turing complete.

“This program consists of a single print statement wrapped in a while loop. You would not think that this would amount to much, but you would be very, very wrong. A clue to what is happening and how this works is encoded in the ASCII art of the program source.”

Hasnain says:

“ARONCZYK: At that point in time, Wendell is working for an insurance company. He's working for Cigna.

POTTER: Our internal polls showed us that a majority of Americans were favorable to the idea of a Canadian-style health care system. And that scared us to death.

ARONCZYK: They were going to need a bigger playbook.”

Still kinda sad there won’t be mass jailing for everyone involved in this large scale corruption, both within the government and within the medical industry.

Hasnain says:

This is an interesting human interest story on passwords.

I'm genuinely surprised so many people gave up their passwords over the phone to a reporter, and also equally surprised a company was able to recover most of their passwords with a mix of bruteforce and just talking to family.

Also, making those calls right after 9/11...

"Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the world’s largest financial-services firms, still cries when he talks about it. Not long after the planes struck the twin towers, killing 658 of his co-workers and friends, including his brother, one of the first things on Lutnick’s mind was passwords. This may seem callous, but it was not.

Like virtually everyone else caught up in the events that day, Lutnick, who had taken the morning off to escort his son, Kyle, to his first day of kindergarten, was in shock. But he was also the one person most responsible for ensuring the viability of his company. The biggest threat to that survival became apparent almost immediately: No one knew the passwords for hundreds of accounts and files that were needed to get back online in time for the reopening of the bond markets. Cantor Fitzgerald did have extensive contingency plans in place, including a requirement that all employees tell their work passwords to four nearby colleagues. But now a large majority of the firm’s 960 New York employees were dead. “We were thinking of a major fire,” Lutnick said. “No one in those days had ever thought of an entire four-to-six-block radius being destroyed.” The attacks also knocked out one of the company’s main backup servers, which were housed, at what until that day seemed like a safe distance away, under 2 World Trade Center."