Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-01-29T08:15:50+0000

Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-01-29T08:13:27+0000

Hasnain says:

Space is mind-bogglingly big.

"52! is the number of different ways you can arrange a single deck of cards. Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.

Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps.

After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. Continue until the ocean is empty.

When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean. Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun.

Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063 × 10⁶⁷ more seconds to go. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385 × 10⁶⁷ seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.

Well, the volume of the visible universe is 3.4 × 10⁸⁰ m³ and therefore another factor of 4.2 trillion larger than 52!. And then the entire universe is estimated to be at least another 150 or 250 times larger than the visible universe. In diameter, not volume."

Hasnain says:

A really great read on engineering and how it's not just about code

Hasnain says:

A good overview of basic income

Hasnain says:

Damn, this is worse than I thought

Hasnain says:

This is really exciting

Hasnain says:

This is one of those few rare threads on HN that's almost at 1k comments

Hasnain says:

"And yet eight years later I did basically exactly the same thing myself. I was back in San Francisco. This time though I was there as an advisor to the Entrepreneur First cohort. These were all 20-something, first-time, unfunded entrepreneurs. I’d organised for us all to go out to dinner in the Mission. We weren’t at a particularly expensive place but when the bill came, every single one of the fifteen people there wanted to split it item by item. I found it intensely annoying to end the meal in such a tedious way and dismissed it suggesting that we just divide by the number of people.

But then I remembered that each of them was only making about $3,000/month. They had to use that money to fund both both themselves and their companies. Meanwhile I was making $1,000/day contracting. So whether I was up or down on a $30 meal didn’t really matter to me. I wasn’t empathetic to them."

Hasnain says:

These tools look really awesome.

"After finding the cause, an engineer found that this was happening on 25% of disk servers at Google, for an average of half an hour a day, with periods of high latency as long as 23 hours. This had been happening for three years. Dick Sites says that fixing this bug paid for his salary for a decade. This is another bug where traditional sampling profilers would have had a hard time. The key insight was that the slowdowns were correlated and machine wide, which isn’t something you can see in a profile."