Hasnain says:

This article is adapted from “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014,” to be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

From a synopsis of the book: "Carlotta Gall has reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for almost the entire duration of the American invasion and occupation, beginning shortly after 9/11. She knows just how much this war has cost the Afghan people, and how much damage can be traced to Pakistan and its duplicitous government and intelligence forces. Now that American troops are withdrawing, it is time to tell the full history of how we have been fighting the wrong enemy, in the wrong country.

Gall combines searing personal accounts of battles and betrayals with moving portraits of the ordinary Afghanis who endured a terrible war of more than a decade. Her firsthand accounts of Taliban warlords, Pakistani intelligence thugs, American generals, Afghani politicians, and the many innocents who were caught up in this long war are riveting. Her evidence that Pakistan fueled the Taliban and protected Osama bin Laden is revelatory. This is a sweeping account of a war brought by well-intentioned American leaders against an enemy they barely understood, and could not truly engage."

Hasnain says:

This is pretty huge. Kudos to them for opening up their code and making it easier for the average indie developer to get started.

"Epic’s goal is to put the engine within reach of everyone interested in building games and 3D content, from indies to large triple-A development teams, and Minecraft creators as well. For $19/month you can have access to everything, including the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine’s complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development."

Hasnain says:

"It’s a great market to be an engineer, but finding the right job still requires a lot of time and effort. Spray applications anywhere and everywhere you like the look of, and see what sticks. A little organisation will go a long way, but a little over-thinking will quickly make you go insane. How best to conduct a technical interview process is a hot and very worthwhile topic of discussion at the moment, but just go with whatever is thrown at you, regardless of what you think is and isn’t a good hiring strategy."

Hasnain says:

"Now, more than a week after the story's publication, it seems clear that Newsweek fingered the wrong man. So the question now turns to Newsweek and the level of irresponsibility they displayed in publishing this at all."

Hasnain says:

How can they mention all he did and not even make a passing reference to LaTeX?

Hasnain says:

"It’s time for us to start making the news a little nerdier."

This is a very good read on journalism, and FiveThirtyEight's goal to make journalism much more quantitative.

Hasnain says:

It's sad that it only lasted 4 days.

Hasnain says:

As someone who saw way more than his fair share of car accidents growing up ... this rings true.

"In 2012, automobile collisions killed more than 34,000 Americans, but unlike our response to foreign wars, the AIDS crisis, or terrorist attacks—all of which inflict fewer fatalities than cars—there’s no widespread public protest or giant memorial to the dead. We fret about drugs and gun safety, but don’t teach children to treat cars as the loaded weapons they are."

Hasnain says:

This is a very good writeup on how to easily work with concurrency in Go.

Hasnain says:

This is an interesting paper on face recognition.

"Our method reaches an accuracy of 97.25% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, reducing the error of the current state of the art by more than 25%, closely approaching human-level performance."