Hasnain says:

This is the same guy who’s said a lot of disgraceful stuff about Palestinians in the past. And even he’s calling it like it is.

““There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re now operating in Jabaliya. They’re basically cleaning the territory of Arabs,” he said, referring to towns and cities in northern Gaza where a renewed Israeli offensive against the militant group Hamas has caused extensive damage in recent months. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began in response to the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023.”

Hasnain says:

“In the meantime, Broden, Nazareth and Voth have all graduated high school. Only Broden has decided to continue working on the tetrahedron problem — when he’s not busy with college coursework — but all three are considering math careers. “It feels meaningful that I’m trying to contribute to something bigger than myself, to the nature of truth,” Nazareth said. It all starts with asking the right question.”

Hasnain says:

“Looking at the incoming Trump administration, his Republican governing trifecta, and the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, Rabin-Havt says: ”The truth is, we are condemned to the future we are going to be forced to live in because two octogenarians had egos too big to know when they had to quit: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Joe Biden.””

Hasnain says:

“Let me finish with this, and it hurts: Most companies just need basic bash / make knowledge, a single instance SQL processing engine (DuckDB, CHDB or a few python scripts), a distributed file system, git and a developer workflow (CI/CD). Everything else is sugar and enterprise stuff. Not saying these last ones aren’t important, but the basics should be well covered, otherwise you’ll have a huge mess. I’m still surprised by how quickly we forget about the good practices we have learned over the years in software engineering (testing, deployment, collaboration, monitoring and so on)”

Hasnain says:

Susan’s powerful speech at Oxford Union the other day during which they passed a resolution declaring it apartheid (and I believe genocide). Worth reading in full. Powerful words. There is a super long segment I felt like quoting but it was a bit too long

“It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.”

Hasnain says:

TIL lots of fun optimization math

"Taking a look back at all of the hardware-specific optimizations, we can see an orders-of-magnitude improvement over our initial naive implementation and stock NumPy implementation. Utilizing and exploiting hardware features has delivered performance boosts from 10 MB/s to 60.3 GB/s on Intel hardware, and 4 MB/s to 29.7 GB/s on Arm hardware. It underscores the absolute importance that specialized hardware acceleration libraries have on even the simplest of computational algorithms."

Hasnain says:

This is the most MBA speak sentence I've heard in a while

"Chris Hayward, policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, said the decision represented a "positive new chapter" for the markets as it "empowers traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their long-term business goals"."

Hasnain says:

"While talking to the CEO of Microsoft, Pratchett asked what would happen if a writer disseminated on the internet something atrocious and libelous, say a pseudo-academic work of Holocaust denial. “There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net,” said Pratchett, “there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.” Predictably, Gates denied the threat of any sort of epistemological collapse. Without offering any mechanism for doing so, the billionaire told the author that “you will have authorities on the net… The whole way that you can check somebody’s reputation will be so much more sophisticated.” Google was three years into the future—Facebook would be founded in nine years—Twitter in eleven. If Pratchett seemed sardonic and cynical in 1995, then Gates’ pollyannish, Panglossian exuberance appears positively psychotic three decades later."

Hasnain says:

"HR veteran Steve Cadigan says his thinking—that PIPS are almost always a bad idea—was shaped when he worked at Cisco early in his career. “We did a five-year lookback at every PIP and found that 90% of people who were placed on a formal PIP, whether or not they survived it, left within a year of that warning. Which to me suggests there’s a fundamental break in the trust of that relationship,” says Cadigan, who went on to be the HR chief at LinkedIn and now advises companies on HR strategy.

So he sets out to avoid them. “We give you two envelopes,” Cadigan says. The first is a PIP. The second offers generous severance with a separation agreement and Cobra, or continued health insurance. “Seventy-five percent of the time people take option two. So we circumvent the whole PIP process and just say, for whatever reason it’s not working out.”

This approach is increasingly popular, particularly in tech. It’s used in some form, and sometimes on a case-by-case basis, at companies including Amazon and Meta."

Hasnain says:

Insightful read on promo packets. Once you’re in the know this seems fairly obvious, but it’s not obvious at all from the outside. Focus on impact, folks!

“Regardless of the narrative structure you choose, before typing a single word into your promo packet draft, try to tell someone (yourself even), verbally, your bunny story. How bad was your Dark Lord’s reign? What were your weapons of battle? And just how happy were your bunnies in the last chapter of your hero’s journey?”