Hasnain says:

“Their failure teaches us something. Civilization matters. When a society gives up on the idea of being civilized, it collapses harder and faster than its most learned wise men often imagine. That is because no society can withstand a tidal wave of stupidity and violence. Is that where the West is headed?”

Hasnain says:

Written for a specific problem, this advice applies everywhere though.

“The last thing I’ll say is that keeping your procedural generation implementations as simple as possible has a nearly invisible long term benefit to your career as a creator. Doing so allows you to ship more things than you would otherwise. Actually putting work out into the world means your art will have viewers, your game will have players, your music will have listeners. You will probably get feedback on your algorithms, and you will discover ways that players interact with or perceive them that you could not have predicted.

This is real knowledge that you can take into your next project or your next iteration of the same project. If you spend five years building what seems like the perfect content generator, I guarantee that no matter how much testing you do you will not learn as much about its shortcomings as you will when you release it into the world.

“

Hasnain says:

All aboard the rust hype train. This was a good intro on how to get acclimatized to Rust coming from different views of thinking.

"Plenty of ink has been written about ownership and the borrow checker. It follows the most unprecedented feature would have the most said about it. There seems to be a common refrain: "It's really hard at first, but stick with it. You'll see, it changes everything". Sounds suspiciously like Vim or Emacs users (please don't fight me). Is it the promised land or just a severe case of Stockholm syndrome?
Nevertheless, extensive reading had prepared me to expect a big ol' messy fight with the borrow checker. We did tussle, but it went better than expected. Ironically, after years of C# game development, performance concerns have taught me much of the internal dialogue needed to reason about memory lifetimes: "Is this allocated on the stack or heap? Is this going to create allocation (garbage collection) pressure? Is this copying data or mutating it in place?"
In this sense, when the borrow checker complained I could at least appreciate what it was trying to protect me against. And as to be expected, it may be a while yet before I fully grok lifetimes. Controversially though, "Rust's expressive type system" put up a stiffer fight than I anticipated."

Hasnain says:

This gets close to productivity porn territory but was quite relatable.

"Themed days could be super useful if you already have a day job and are trying to make time for your side hustle. Instead of trying to work on it one hour each day after your day job when you already feel exhausted, you dedicate a whole day for your side project.

With the one hour a day approach, the chance you could skip the scheduled hour is higher; with themed days, maintaining self-discipline is much easier."

Hasnain says:

This is definitely written in traditional white-paper style, but the observations are somewhat interesting even if I don't agree with all of them.

"And yet, despite all of this energy and momentum, we’ve found that there is still a tremendous amount of confusion around what technologies are on the leading end of this trend and how they are used in practice. In the last two years, we talked to hundreds of founders, corporate data leaders, and other experts – including interviewing 20+ practitioners on their current data stacks – in an attempt to codify emerging best practices and draw up a common vocabulary around data infrastructure. This post will begin to share the results of that work and showcase technologists pushing the industry forward."

Hasnain says:

So much truth in this article that needed to be said.

“I suspect the reason this type of structural analysis isn’t more popular is that it makes demands that are decidedly unpalatable to supporters of American capitalism. Plus, it doesn’t make for particularly clicky articles. Once one comes to the conclusion that mental health problems are structural, not individual, one must then propose solutions in the same vein. If the problem is that people are stressed because they don’t have enough money, then it follows that wages should be raised and wealth taxed to more equitably distribute profits. If people don’t have enough power in the workplace, perhaps sectoral unions are in order. If people are anxious about paying for health care, perhaps we should have Medicare for All. If people are overworked, perhaps there should be a federal mandate that all workers must receive five weeks of paid vacation, as France has. The purpose of the Covid self-help genre, then, is to quell dissent by way of telling people that they can figure out how to cope all by themselves (or perhaps with their therapist, should they be lucky enough to afford one). It’s incredibly patronizing.”

Hasnain says:

“He'd purchased them back in 2012 for sentimental reasons when he heard that Hostess Brands was going bankrupt and Twinkies might disappear forever.

"When there's no desserts in the house, you get desperate," says Purrington, who went down to the basement and retrieved the old box of snack cakes, fully intending to enjoy several.”

Hasnain says:

Whoever did the marketing here deserves a promotion.

“"We've sold more in the last three days than in the last five years," said Mr McLean, adding they are also now listed under "sexy onions" on the company website.”

Hasnain says:

This is a pretty cool move

“We recognize that some employees are required to be onsite and some roles and businesses are better suited for working away from the worksite than others. However, for most roles, we view working from home part of the time (less than 50%) as now standard”

Hasnain says:

Read this a while back and came across this again. A good read on how async functions can make composition hard without good language design to back it up.

"You’ve still divided your entire world into asynchronous and synchronous halves and all of the misery that entails. So, even if your language features promises or futures, its face looks an awful lot like the one on my strawman."