John Ioannidis has dedicated his life to quantifying how science is broken
An interview with the author of the groundbreaking paper "Why Most Published Research Findings are False."
Heinous CPU bugs of 2015 and their implications for the future
2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every time. They continue to be the only game in town …
Hasnain says:
CPU bugs! Really interesting to see how FFTs can crash Skylake processors
"In part, that’s because “unpredictable system behavior” have moved from being an annoying class of bugs that forces you to restart your computation to an attack vector that lets anyone with an AWS account attack your cloud-hosted services, but it’s mostly because CPUs are now complex enough that they’ve become too complicated to test effectively. "
Posted on 2016-01-11T04:54:38+0000
The Scope of Unsafe
I’d like to talk about an important aspect of dealing with unsafe code, that still regularly seems to catch people on the wrong foot: When checking unsafe code, it is not enough to just...
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-01-10T06:55:47+0000
Writing high-performance servers in modern C++.
Firstly, thanks for all the feedback from my first post — Starting a tech startup with C++. Also a big shout-out to the …
How Nvidia breaks Chrome Incognito
When I launched Diablo III, I didn't expect the pornography I had been looking at hours previously to be splashed on the screen. But that's exactly what replaced the black loading screen. Like a sc...
Hasnain says:
"Google marked the bug as won’t fix because google chrome incognito mode is apparently not designed to protect you against other users on the same computer (despite nearly everyone using it for that exact purpose)."
Posted on 2016-01-10T00:35:57+0000
I made $1,000 an hour as an SAT tutor. My students did better without me.
Many parents believe their child is a "bad tester." The real problem is that the whole idea of a "bad tester" is bullshit.
Hasnain says:
"American students have become far too reliant on everyone and everything but themselves. When our children don't excel, we sign them up for classes, hire tutors, and, if all that fails, administer them amphetamines like M&Ms. Plummeting SAT scores stand as a blaring testament to the fact that this approach isn't working."
Posted on 2016-01-09T07:37:01+0000
How to C (as of 2016)
How to C (as of 2016) How to C in 2016 This is a draft I wrote in early 2015 and never got around to publishing. Here's the mostly unpolished version because it wasn't doing anybody any good sitting in my drafts folder. The simplest change was updating year 2015 to 2016 at publication time. Feel fre…
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-01-08T16:46:33+0000
You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition
Photographs by Anna Maria Barry-Jester As the new year begins, millions of people are vowing to shape up their eating habits. This usually involves dividing foods into moralistic categories: good/b…
Hasnain says:
This is a pretty great read on nutrition and scientific "studies", and p-hacking.
Posted on 2016-01-08T09:02:13+0000
The man who studies the spread of ignorance
How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.
Hasnain says:
"While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise. My worry is not that we are losing the ability to make up our own minds, but that it’s becoming too easy to do so. We should consult with others much more than we imagine. Other people may be imperfect as well, but often their opinions go a long way toward correcting our own imperfections, as our own imperfect expertise helps to correct their errors,” warns Dunning."
Posted on 2016-01-08T08:52:59+0000
Storing Passwords in a Highly Parallelized World
Why “Use bcrypt.” is not the best recommendation (anymore).