Hasnain says:

Gotta admire this guy's approach to business.

"Yes, Healthchecks.io is still a one-man business. Until 2022, I was part-time contracting. Since January 2022 Healthchecks.io has been my only source of income, but I work on it part-time.

At least for the time being I’m not looking to expand the team. A large part of why I’m a “solopreneur” is because I do not want to manage or be managed. A cofounder or employee would mean regular meetings to discuss what’s done, and what’s to be done. It would be awesome to find someone who just magically does great work without needing any attention. Just brief monthly summaries of high-quality contributions, better than I could have done. But I don’t think I can find someone like that, and I also don’t think I could afford them."

Hasnain says:

"This blog post shows a basic approach for programmatic packet capture and how it's then easy to plot the captured time series metrics in Python and Polars.

You also had a chance to see the techniques we use inside QuestDB itself to obtain great ingestion performance."

Hasnain says:

While all the media is still calling this abuse (it's rape - even the Likud member arguing it refers to actions which qualify as rape) - it's insane that *this* is what is causing riots -- soldiers got arrested for this and they are rebelling for the right to continue to rape prisoners.

What even...

"But the operation triggered an angry confrontation between the military police and IDF soldiers at Sde Teiman, captured on video by a reporter from Israel’s public broadcaster Kann News.

The detentions also prompted outcry from members of Israel’s far right, including a coalition of extreme-right members of parliament and their supporters who attempted to storm the military base in protest. Late on Monday, protesters also targeted a second base where the soldiers were being questioned, with violent confrontations continuing into the evening."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading.

"The main idea here is that A* can be fast if you give it (a) a good graph, (b) a good heuristic. You might be used to using the grid as the input graph, and a distance function as the heuristic. Both of these are easy (and what I use in my tutorials) but not the fastest. The L1 library analyzes the grid map and constructs a smaller graph. It then analyzes the new graph and constructs a better heuristic. The combination of these two makes A* much faster than if you use a grid with a distance heuristic. Jump Point Search is well known for being faster than A* with a grid input and distance heuristic, but ordinary A* with an optimized input and optimized heuristic is even faster than Jump Point Search. See the comparison chart on the project page for numbers. Jump Point Search’s main advantage is that it works without preprocessing, which is useful for maps that change frequently."

Hasnain says:

Lots of useful insights here / this one really stood out though

“I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.”

Hasnain says:

“In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”

The rampant copying fueling the explosive growth of consumer computers meant that by 1990, the desktop user interface was ubiquitous; it was impossible to determine who originated any part of it, or who copied who. The quest to stake their claim nearly consumed Apple. But when they emerged, they had learned a thing or two. Today, Apple holds more than 2,300 design patents.

Apple's design patent for a device with rounded corners
Apple's design patent for a device with rounded corners
This story ends in 2011, with Apple suing Samsung for copying the design of its software and hardware products. One of the most remarkable claims: Samsung broke the law when it sold “a rectangular product with four evenly rounded corners.”“

Hasnain says:

Lots of deep thoughts in a tough and decisive topic, but this is required reading. Charity always threads the needle and makes great points.

“We’ve all watched companies become wildly successful under assholes, while waves of employees leave broken and burned out. I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. People’s lives and careers are just another externality as far as the corporate books are concerned.

Many live through this nightmare and emerge dead set on doing things differently. And so, when they become founders or leaders, they put culture ahead of the business. And then they lose.

Most companies fail, and if you aren’t hungry and zeroed in on the success of your business, your slim chances become even slimmer.

I don’t believe this has to be either/or, cultural success or business success. I think it’s a false dichotomy. I believe that healthy companies can be more successful than shitty ones, all else being equal. Which is why I believe that leaders who care about building a workplace culture rooted in dignity and respect have a responsibility to care even more about success in business. Let’s show these motherfuckers how it’s done. Nothing succeeds like success.”

Hasnain says:

“The solution for these irreducible representations came to Raskin at a moment when his personal life was filled with chaos. A few weeks after he and Færgeman posted their paper online, Raskin had to rush his pregnant wife to the hospital, then return home to take his son to his first day of kindergarten. Raskin’s wife remained in the hospital until the birth of their second child six weeks later, and during this time Raskin’s life revolved around keeping life normal for his son and driving in endless loops between home, his son’s school and the hospital. “My whole life was the car and taking care of people,” he said.

He took to calling Gaitsgory on his drives to talk math. By the end of the first of those weeks, Raskin had realized that he could reduce the problem of irreducible representations to proving three facts that were all within reach. “For me it was this amazing period,” he said. His personal life was “filled with anxiety and dread about the future. For me, math is always this very grounding and meditative thing that takes me out of that kind of anxiety.””

Hasnain says:

“Hopefully you have gained a little bit of an intuitive understanding of abstract interpretation. Last year, being able to write some code made me more comfortable with the math. Now being more comfortable with the math is helping me write the code. It’s nice upward spiral.”

Hasnain says:

“Hilbert was asked in 1934 by the minister of science under the Nazi regime whether mathematics in Göttingen had suffered from the departure of the Jews and friends of the Jews. He replied: “Suffered? It hasn’t suffered, Mr. Minister. It doesn’t exist anymore!” Hilbert was right. Only one of the pre-Nazi full professors stayed past 1934.

The center of mathematics shifted quickly during the Nazi era and in the wake of World War II. Courant, Weyl and others helped move it to the U.K. and the U.S., where most of the top-ranked mathematics programs are located today.

These countries’ mathematical heritage is in Göttingen. Its story is their story.”