Hasnain says:

facepalm moment

“"Thousands of people [were] blissfully unaware they've been exposed to Covid, potentially spreading this deadly virus at a time when hospital admissions are increasing," he told the House of Commons.
"This isn't just a shambles. It's so much worse."
To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap.”

Hasnain says:

This is so depressing and a great example of why change must be made to the systems and it’s not about any one person. However in this case there’s at least one person that needs to go to jail.

TLDR: to defend themselves from an eviction a tenant needs to show up in court. To know they have to show up to court they have to be served by a process server in person - who has to try twice and only upon failure can they give a sworn affidavit that they tried, and then leave a notice at the door. Enter some people that took money and never bothered serving notices, leading hundreds of people to get unfairly evicted.

“Oddly, however, the two men almost never managed to find the tenants they were hired to serve. Despite the requirement that he make a diligent effort to serve tenants in person—visiting their apartments twice, on different days, if no one answers the first time—Buck reported, in roughly 990 eviction cases, that not a single person answered the door. According to affidavits that Stephens filed, out of roughly 1,660 cases in the first two months of 2019, he only managed to serve 11 people in person.

And in one instance, Stephens swore that he contacted more than 15 D.C. tenants in a two-hour period, when he was actually in a courtroom in Maryland, facing a charge of driving while impaired.”

Hasnain says:

On its own this is a reasonable article that's not too outstanding. But it links to a great number of sources and is worth a read

"“Transparency is a really key part of fairness for reward,” emphasises researcher McWha-Hermann. For instance, in some cases “what we found is that national staff were OK with international staff getting different salaries and benefits; it was the secrecy that was the problem.” As it will be impossible to hit upon a salary policy that pleases everyone, an abundance of information will at lease ease some friction."

Hasnain says:

Oof. This bug...

"A couple of years ago it made headlines when Grindr was found to be sending HIV status off to third parties and given the sensitivity of this data, rightly so. This, along with many of the other fields above, is what makes it so sensational that the data was so trivially accessible by anyone who could exploit this simple flaw."

Hasnain says:

On algorithms, math, and the ever important question of code readability.

“I chose Lemire’s algorithm because it is brilliant. When I read Lemire’s code I get that kind of brain-tingling and gawk at the sheer “How on earth did someone think of this” of it all. Lemire has a mastery of code and how code is executed, and then pairs that with transcendent creativity and concision. Lemire also writes well, and the papers that accompany his code and algorithms are easily some of the most cogent and approachable you’ll find in academia. They are short and clear and avoid the jargon and obtuseness that plagues the field, while containing just enough formalism to be rigorous.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting take on the process of producing open source software and the benefits thereof.

“Many companies hope that releasing an open-source project will pay dividends in the form of code contributions from people outside the organization—but I’ve never seen that work in practice. Responding to issues, answering usage questions, carefully planning release schedules: It all takes time. Even code contributions, despite their reputation as the big reward that’s supposed to make corporate open source worthwhile, are rarely the panacea they’re made out to be. Because new contributors have neither as much context on the existing code nor as clear an understanding of the project’s larger vision as the core team has, their contributions almost always need revisions before they can be accepted. Even the better pull requests often need several rounds of review, and as a reviewer you can’t be sure when (or whether) to expect each update. It’s usually faster to write the code yourself.”

Hasnain says:

Excellent read on how to wield influence as an engineer and get things done, in companies large and small.

"One final thought. You can have a lot of say in what gets built and how it gets built, if you cultivate your influence and spend it wisely. But you can’t have a say in everything. It doesn’t work that way."

...

"And once you have influence, don’t forget to use it on behalf of others. Pay attention to those who aren’t being heard, and amplify their voices. Give your time, lend your patronage and credibility, and most of all teach the skills that have made you powerful to others who need them."

Hasnain says:

Interesting take on developing and testing systems in production; and on how to structure code and systems across organizations.

"The ideal developer experience starts off with "runs in seconds" unit tests to "runs through minutes" integration tests to "runs overnight" load tests in a production-like environment before moving to a canary rollout and production experiments. Developers also need the safety of being able to write buggy code and test edge cases for a single component in an isolated production-like environment without worrying about feature flags, running through a full CI deployment process, having to reserve access to a shared system, or being paged."

Hasnain says:

This was a long and interesting read on the tradeoffs of being in academia vs (potentials of) being in industry.

"With that being said, I know that someone may be actually interested in hearing these thoughts and my experience. When I was a PhD student and I needed to take the notorious academia vs. industry decision, I would have paid big bucks to read more thoughts on the various pros/cons. One of the stupidest things you can do is to take big decisions based on what other people do and think, but reading about other people's thought process has helped me a lot. It is time I do my part."

Hasnain says:

Kept nodding along as this was quite relatable.

"There’s no way around it: life is a fight against entropy. There's this line I like about how most of Western philosophy is about doing and most of Eastern philosophy is about being. In order to live a good life we have to learn how to reconcile the two. To believe we don't need anything from the material world to feel joy—to perceive the essential luminousness of everything around us, which continues with no effort on our part—and then still to choose to attend, to maintain, to force our way upstream."