Hasnain says:

““Gaia’s [new data release] is providing us with a secure foundation,” said Madore. Although a series of papers by Madore and Freedman’s team aren’t expected for a few weeks, they noted that the new parallax data and correction formula appear to work well. When used with various methods of plotting and dissecting the measurements, data points representing Cepheids and other special stars fall neatly along straight lines, with very little of the “scatter” that would indicate random error.”

Hasnain says:

You can’t make this shit up. This guy has balls of steel.

“Bellingcat can now disclose that it and its investigative partners are in possession of a recorded conversation in which a member of the suspected FSB poison squad describes how his unit carried out, and attempted to clean up evidence of, the poisoning of Alexey Navalny. The inadvertent confession was made during a phone call with a person who the officer believed was a high-ranking security official. In fact, the FSB officer did not recognize the voice of the person to whom he was reporting details of the failed mission: Alexey Navalny himself. “

Hasnain says:

“Super Covid is something that never needed to exist. It was something that allowed to happen because, in Britain, the virus was allowed to spread. And when you let a pandemic spread, it will mutate.”

:/ scary times ahead

Hasnain says:

“In other words, become the solution to a problem the company was still causing.

Indeed, seemingly only once in the messages viewed by The Ink did the thought occur to a member of the family that they could solve the problem by sacrificing their own profits. “

Hasnain says:

Damn. And I’d liked and recommended this before. Kudos for issuing a retraction and returning awards (though I am not sure if that’s too warranted - I don’t know if NYT kept denying it until this was unavoidable)”

“The Times did not remove the episodes from its site or feeds. Asked whether its actions constitute a retraction, Baquet pauses and says, "I guess for the parts that were about Chaudhry and his history and his background. Yeah, I think it is. Sure does."

Baquet also acknowledges that Murphy's review will yield additional corrections of Callimachi's past work. However, he says nothing rose to the level of the mistakes in judgment made in Caliphate.”

Hasnain says:

So many things had to go wrong in the perfect combination here. Always fun reading engineering outage post mortems.

Note that this is the cloud outage from last week and not the gmail outage the day after (still waiting to read that one!)

Hasnain says:

Pretty good read on what it takes to design a clean, simple, powerful API

“We locked ourselves in a conference room for three months with the goal of designing a truly unified payments API. If successful, a developer would only need to understand a few basic concepts in order to build a payments integration. Even if they hadn’t heard of the payment method, they should be able to just add a few parameters to a few specific points in their integration. To enable this, the states and guarantees of our APIs had to be extremely predictable and consistent. There shouldn’t be an array of caveats and exceptions scattered throughout our docs.”

Hasnain says:

correlation != causation and all other biases not withstanding, this is pretty insane

“The 30-day mortality rate (defined as death within 30 days after surgery) for the “surgeon’s birthday” group was 6.9%. This was 23% higher than the 5.6% rate for the “other day” group.”

Hasnain says:

This story just got more depressing by the paragraph.

“The photographer who got sick after shooting the COVID-positive groom said her experiences throughout the pandemic have left her a little depressed. She recalled one conversation from that wedding, before she left the reception. “I have children,” she told a bridesmaid, “What if my children die?” The bridesmaid responded, “I understand, but this is her wedding day.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting bug investigation- though I’ll admit I saw “extra 40ms” and like every hacker news commenter I immediately went “wait how does someone at Netflix not know about the Nagle algorithm delay?”