Hasnain says:

“The only solution to this is to think early and often about the systems of accountability you have to set up. This is much, much harder than micromanaging details, because every system of accountability you set up will eventually be gamed. So in addition to accountability, you need to foster a strong, ethical company culture that encourages transparency while allowing for some mistakes.”

Hasnain says:

“Founders seeking to internalize Graham’s advice should recast it by asking themselves how they can foster mutual trust – and how they can build the systems that allow trust to be strengthened even as the team expands. For us at Oxide, writing is the foundation upon which we build that trust. Others may land on different mechanisms, but the goal of founders should be the same: build the trust that allows a team to kick a Jobsian dent in the universe!”

Hasnain says:

Great technical read as always. But I couldn’t help but chuckle at this bit

“Now, let’s explore potential optimizations. One of the first adjustments you might consider is disabling locale support. All the formatting in {fmt} is locale-independent by default (which breaks with the C++’s tradition of having wrong defaults)”

Hasnain says:

“The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.”

Hasnain says:

“What might it mean for knowledge workers to fanatically pursue virtuosity in these fundamental skills, in the way that athletes seek in their fundamental skills?”

Hasnain says:

“Delving into specific papers, Bloom et al (2013) ran a randomized controlled trial (an RCT) on Indian textile firms, where some firms were randomly chosen to receive management training. The management advice was as simple as “record inventories”, yet this led to staggering increases in productivity – within the first year, treated firms saw a 17% increase in productivity, or a gain of $300,000 in productivity. This gap in productivity persisted, even nine years later on, in a follow-up study. “

Hasnain says:

No wonder the founder was asking for Lina Khan to be fired a few weeks ago. She continues to be my favorite government official

“The complaint cites one 2021 Care ad campaign on a third-party site saying “Childcare jobs from $18/hr,” while at the same time saying on its own website that, “On average, the national pay rate for babysitting jobs” and “The average rate for babysitters on Care.com” was between $13 and $14.25 per hour.”

Hasnain says:

I was somewhat in the general vicinity of this work so it’s really cool to see how it has evolved over time. The lessons in particular are cool

“Initially, we developed Policy Zones for batch-processing systems with some basic use cases. However, we realized that our designs for function-based systems were quite abstract and the adoption for a large-scale use case resulted in significant challenges, consequently, requiring considerable effort to map patterns to customer needs. Furthermore, refining the APIs and building missing operational support made it work effectively end-to-end across multiple systems. Only after addressing these challenges were we able to make it more generic and proceed with integrating Policy Zones across extensive platforms.”

Hasnain says:

“Although it took a while and a good bit of effort, I'm very glad I spent time time to get this bug fixed. It was very unique compared to the kind of development I've done in the past, and it was cool to experience how software gets built at Chromium's scale.

One of the main things motivating me to do this was the knowledge that if I succeeded, code I wrote would be part of an application that eventually makes its way onto millions (billions?) of devices.
Even though the change itself is niche and concerns developer tooling rather than the main browser, that kind of impact is very alluring to me.

Now that I've gained this experience contributing to Chromium, I'll certainly be on the lookout for more bugs that I might be able to fix in the future. I don't think I'll go out of my way to seek them out, though, due to the huge amount of time it takes to tackle the Chromium codebase from scratch.”

Hasnain says:

Another case where I read an article and think “there should be jail time involved here right?”

“Millions of surgeries were conducted across the US and Europe during the years from 2009 to 2013 when those misguided guidelines were in place. One provocative analysis from cardiologists Graham Cole and Darrel Francis estimated that there were 800,000 deaths compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner. While that exact number is hotly contested, a 27 percent increase in mortality for a common procedure for years on end can add up to an extraordinary death toll.”