Hasnain says:

It's always interesting watching the intersection of startups moving quickly/trying to disrupt markets, and industries that are tightly regulated for a good reason.

"Dubbed the “infinite money cheat code” by users of Reddit Inc.’s WallStreetBets forum, the bug is being exploited, according to users on the forum. One trader bragged about a $1 million position funded by a $4,000 deposit."

"One trader managed to turn his $2,000 deposit into $50,000 worth of purchasing power, which he used to buy Apple Inc. puts. He subsequently lost that money and posted a video of the wipe-out on YouTube."

I wonder who the SEC will go after. The traders, Robinhood, or both?

Hasnain says:

Interesting analysis of financial and corporate incentives that lead to Boeing getting where it is and the resulting root cause of the 737-MAX saga.

I would take some pieces of this with a grain of salt though as the author appears to have an axe to grind.

“In 2005, Boeing hired its first ever CEO without an aviation engineering background, bringing in James McNerney, who got his training in brand management at Proctor & Gamble, then McKinsey, and then spent two decades at General Electric learning from Jack Welch how to erode industrial capacity in favor of shareholders. He brought these lessons to Boeing, and...”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read covering how focus engineering projects to optimize business metrics (cost reduction). Goes from the top down, from goal setting to measurement to execution (lots of technical engineering data!).

I also really appreciate the attention towards making things measurable and repeatable so they don’t just regress right after. That avoids the “death by a thousand paper cuts” problem of inefficiencies and costs coming just due to technical debt.

“Instead of creating a one-time fix, we’ve now put the systems and monitoring in place to repeatedly forecast the areas of biggest spend and help save our pipeline in the future.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future use. List of *aaS services with free tiers (not just trials) for smaller developers/users

Hasnain says:

I agree with the author here. Great commits matter. This is a practice that seems to only exist in certain projects or teams, but I really wish it was more universal.

The number of times I’ve been debugging something for hours straight and found the solution in a well written commit message is too damn high (in a good way)

“I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really solid technical read covering a bunch of topics that usually interest me: Rust, operating systems, atomics/concurrency, scheduling, and async/await.

Well worth reading to understand how these things work under the hood.

I also found it quite interesting and exciting that the Rust implementation here was able to borrow ideas from a lot of solid engineering that had gone into Go’s implementation

Hasnain says:

This was a great read into modern distributed database implementations. It starts off by discussing single node LSM databases (RocksDB) and what they provide, and then how to build a performant distributed databases on top, and for composing an SQL database on top of a K/V one. Worth a read.

"If you surveyed most NewSQL databases today, most of them are built on top of an LSM, namely, RocksDB. You might thus conclude that this is because modern applications have shifted to more write-heavy workloads. You would be incorrect."

Hasnain says:

This was a moving read on how just getting folks into college with scholarships isn't enough - that often is just the beginning of another, difficult struggle. The author walks through their own story from being a first-generation college student, to a first generation graduate student, to becoming a professor at Harvard.

"By my junior year, I had secured four jobs in addition to monitoring and cleaning the gym. My financial-aid officer didn’t understand why I worked so many jobs or why I picked up even more hours at times. That fall, right after Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, I was called in to the financial-aid office. They wanted to discuss my work schedule and to tell me that they would be reaching out to my bosses to let them know I needed to cut back hours. I was working too much; that’s what the work-study rules said.

I pleaded with them not to. I needed the money. More truthfully, my family and I did"

Hasnain says:

Great read on software engineering. Author is the Singaporean prime minister's son and this is born out of years of experience in both the private and public sector.

So many great quotes. I'll pick a few:

"The root cause of bad software has less to do with specific engineering choices, and more to do with how development projects are managed."

"There is no such thing as platonically good engineering: it depends on your needs and the practical problems you encounter."

"Beware of bureaucratic goals masquerading as problem statements. If our end goal is to make citizens’ lives better, we need to explicitly acknowledge the things that are making their lives worse."

"Building software is not about avoiding failure; it is about strategically failing as fast as possible to get the information you need to build something good."

Hasnain says:

This was a harrowing read into abuses of law enforcement and the criminal justice system, carried out by insurance companies.

Kudos to Buzzfeed for doing some high quality, hard-hitting investigative journalism.

"BuzzFeed News examined 27 cases around the country in which people were falsely charged with felonies based in whole or in part on evidence insurers provided to law enforcement. In Indiana, State Farm helped detectives craft an arrest warrant for a contractor who was charged with 14 felonies. All charges were ultimately dropped when the evidence turned out to be deeply misleading — but not before the insurance giant’s allegations had destroyed his business. In Georgia, a local prosecutor relied on lab tests provided by an insurer to charge a woman with arson, resulting in a three-year ordeal in which she ended up homeless, only to drop the charges when the test results proved unreliable. And in Wisconsin, a man spent nearly three years in prison based on now-discredited science used by an insurance investigator until his conviction was overturned."