Hasnain says:

“When it comes to designing a system with GC, don’t count out conservative stack scanning; the tradeoffs don’t obviously go one way or the other, and conservative scanning might be the right engineering choice for your system.”

Hasnain says:

“These updates should be backwards compatible with any other version of Visual Studio 2022. It would be madness to make a change to Visual Studio 2022 that breaks compatibility with Visual Studio 2022's own runtime libraries. However, Microsoft did exactly that.

In Visual Studio 2022 v17.10.0, Microsoft made a non-backwards compatible change to std::mutex::lock. This was reported to Microsoft, however, the issue report was marked as "Closed - Not a Bug". Apparently this was intended!”

Hasnain says:

“It’s like walking into a movie halfway through—you can’t understand the plot because you missed the beginning.

The same goes for learning complex subjects like math, CS, whatever.”

Hasnain says:

Chock full of golden advice here. Bookmarking for the future

“You are lucky if 99.999% of the time network is not a problem.
ACID has many meanings.
Each database has different consistency and isolation capabilities.
Optimistic locking is an option when you can’t hold a lock.
There are anomalies other than dirty reads and data loss.
My database and I don’t always agree on ordering.
Application-level sharding can live outside the application.
AUTOINCREMENT’ing can be harmful.
Stale data can be useful and lock-free.
Clock skews happen between any clock sources.
Latency has many meanings.
Evaluate performance requirements per transaction.
Nested transactions can be harmful.
Transactions shouldn’t maintain application state.
Query planners can tell a lot about databases.
Online migrations are complex but possible.
Significant database growth introduces unpredictability.”

Hasnain says:

“Update, Sept. 5, 3:30pm: A reader has claimed that the default Starlink SSID is actually... "STINKY." This seemed almost impossible to believe, but Elon Musk in fact tweeted about it in 2022, Redditors have reported it in the wild, and back in 2022 (thanks, Wayback Machine), the official Starlink FAQ said that the device's "network name will appear as 'STARLINK' or 'STINKY' in device WiFi settings." (A check of the current Starlink FAQ, however, shows that the default network name now is merely "STARLINK.")

In other words, not only was this asinine conspiracy a terrible OPSEC idea, but the ringleaders didn't even change the default Wi-Fi name until they started getting questions about it. Yikes.”

Hasnain says:

One can hope

““One goal of this research, and vaccinology in general, is to work toward a universal vaccine that can generate antibodies and create an immune response with broad protection to a rapidly mutating virus,” said Will Voss, a recent Ph.D. graduate in cell and molecular biology in UT’s College of Natural Sciences, who co-led the study.”

Hasnain says:

Can confirm greppability is underrated, in logs too.

“When I’m working on maintaining an unfamiliar codebase, I will spend a lot of time grepping the code base for strings. Even in projects exclusively written by myself, I have to search a lot: function names, error messages, class names, that kind of thing. If I can’t find what I’m looking for, it’ll be frustrating in the best case, or in the worst case lead to dangerous situations where I’ll assume a thing is not needed anymore, since I can’t find any references to it in the code base. From these situations, I’ve derived some rules you can apply to keep your code base greppable”

Hasnain says:

“This notion lies at the heart of what the late British physicist Peter Higgs, namesake of the Higgs field, and his competitors pointed out in the 1960s: that one field can stiffen other fields, thereby permitting their ripples to vibrate in place with a resonant frequency, and thus giving their particles mass.”

Hasnain says:

“I think a lot of the patterns in MiniJinja are useful for projects outside of MiniJinja. Quite is quite a bit more hidden in it that I have talked about before such as how MiniJinja is abusing serde. If you have a need for a Jinja2 compatible template engine I would love if you get some use out of it. If you're curious about how to build a runtime and object system in Rust, you might also find some utility in the codebase.

I myself learned quite a bit about what creative API design can look like in Rust by building it. At this point I am incredibly happy with how the public API of the engine shaped out to be. The engine is extensively documented both internally and publicly and you can read all about it in the API docs.”

Hasnain says:

Decade old but still super relevant and the first time I’m reading it

“I’ve often regretted that I hadn’t kept fighting with the lawyers, working harder to balance all the legal requirements (many of them well-intentioned but designed for a top-down command and control culture) with my vision of how a company really ought to work. I focused my energy on product, marketing, finance, and strategy, and didn’t put enough time in to make sure I was building the organization I wanted.

Reading recently about the HR practices at Valve and Github, so reminiscent of early O’Reilly, I’m struck by the need to redefine how organizations work in the 21st century. I’m not saying that Valve or GitHub’s approach is for everyone, but they indicate a deep engagement with the problem space, and fresh approaches to the questions of how to manage an organization. Google’s People Analytics may be a more scalable application of new HR thinking to a company of serious size.”