Hasnain says:

Such a good read. Charity’s advice is always worth following.

Bookmarking so I can read this again later.

“They suggested that my thoughts and my voice mattered (one of my most consistent flaws is that I guess wrong about when it does matter and when it doesn’t all the time). We figured out how to talk to each other. We figured out how to make sharing the easy stuff truly easy, so that only the hard stuff needed to be hard. We established that baseline of what normal sounded like, so we could tell when things got off track.”

Hasnain says:

Props to this guy for having integrity and doing what's right.

"Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison."

Hasnain says:

This was humbling. And terrifying. If you read one take on coronavirus this week, read this one (in its entirety).

The author put up a hash a month ago with a bold claim and just backed it up with a white paper justifying predictions on the coronavirus in Japan - which were mostly correct and went against prevailing opinion at the time.

This also isn’t your typical tech person piece about a field they have no experience in - this was well researched, experts were consulted, and the author is surprisingly humble.

“If I am wrong, then I will accept any consequences. My actions were my own actions.

This is a very different essay than my typical work. It may be judged to very different standards in very different quarters than usual. Please excuse my need to write more reservedly and participate less in subsequent commentary than I usually would. Some truths have social consequences, acknowledged or not.”

Hasnain says:

This is an insanely large collection of tips and tricks that can save you a bunch of time. I only just skimmed it and learnt a few new things already.

Bookmarking for future use

Hasnain says:

This was kinda sad and inspirational at the same time.

“You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.”

Hasnain says:

“Holloway received his death sentence with pure calm. While his family cried beside him, he complimented a doctor for having a nice wedding ring.”

Hasnain says:

Such a great read on the grind and hustling needed to publish a book.

This specific book in particular is a magnificent piece of art - and I've only read the first 2 chapters in depth. Waiting for the paperback edition to come out so I can internalize this. I highly recommend it for folks interested in PL/compilers, and as the HN commenters say, this should probably become a standard textbook at some point.

The author's prior book, Game Programming Patterns, was hands down one of the best software engineering books I've ever read. I'm fairly confident that this will top that book.

"My main overarching goal of the book is to pass on that feeling, to get readers to understand there’s no magic in there and nothing keeping them out. To nail that conceit, I wanted to include every single line of code used by the interpreters in the book. No parser generators, nothing left as an exercise for the reader. If you type in all of the code in the book, you get two complete, working interpreters. No tricks.

So not only did I need to break these two interpreters into chapters, I needed to do it without any cheating. I wanted a hard guarantee that at the end of each chapter, you had a program that you could type in, compile, run, and do something with. I knew I wouldn’t be able to verify this manually, so it was time to create some tools."

Hasnain says:

Interesting read and take on the toilet paper shortage. TLDR same amount of toilet paper; demand has just shifted from industrial purchasers to the regular public.

“In the meantime, some enterprising restaurateurs have begun selling their excess supplies of toilet paper, alcohol, and other basics. Last week I picked up takeout at a local restaurant with a side of toilet paper and bananas. The toilet paper was thin and individually wrapped. The bananas were puny. They’ll do just fine.”

Hasnain says:

This is just heartbreaking.

“The growing pandemic has tested paramedics physically and mentally, said Anthony Almojera, an E.M.S. lieutenant for the Fire Department who said he cried on the job for the first time in his 17-year career.

He and his team had responded to a cardiac arrest dispatch for a middle-age woman, a health care worker, who had been infected. When paramedics arrived at her home, the woman’s husband, who was also a health care worker, said she had been sick for five days.

The husband frantically explained that he had tried to stay home and tend to his ill wife, but his employer had asked him to work because their facility was overrun with coronavirus patients.

Grudgingly, the man told the medics, he went to work. When he returned home after his shift that day, he found her unconscious in their bed. For 35 minutes, Mr. Almojera’s team tried to revive the woman, but she could not be saved.

Usually, Mr. Almojera said, he tries to console family members who have lost a loved one by putting his arm around them or giving them a hug.

But because the husband was also thought to be infected with the coronavirus, Mr. Almojera delivered the bad news from six feet away. He watched the man pound on his car with his fist and then crumble to the ground.

“I’m sitting there, beside myself, and I can’t do anything except be at this distance with him,” Mr. Almojera said. “So, we left him.””

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting read on how animal populations have been affected over the years with a very unexpected source of data.

"Daniel Pauly, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has a way of describing these acts of creeping amnesia. He calls the condition "shifting baseline syndrome," and while he was talking about marine biologists' failure to see drastic changes in fish sizes over time, it's a bigger, deeper idea. "