Hasnain says:

“I have now run out of layers: before this point, clocks were set more straightforwardly by watching stars cross the sky

so, to summarise my talk, where does my computer get the time from?

it does not get it from the Royal Greenwich Observatory!”

Hasnain says:

“I can see both side of the arguments on many topics, such as vim vs. emacs, tabs vs. spaces, and even much more controversial ones. Though in this case, the costs are so low compared to the benefits that I just don't understand why anyone would ever choose not to use types.

I'd love to know what I'm missing, but until then: Strong typing is a hill I'm willing to die on.”

Hasnain says:

“The Rust compiler is pedantic. It is the most obsessive code reviewer you have worked with5. If you pass a 32-bit integer to a function that expects a 64-bit integer, it will not let you. If you try to share a non-threadsafe data structure across threads your compile will fail. Ignore the fact that filesystem paths may be arbitrary bytes and try to use them as UTF-8 strings? Straight to compiler jail.

Some people will love this about Rust. Others—who just want to get something working dammit—will hate it.

Put me in the first camp. I've spent enough time in my career debugging hard-to-reproduce bugs in production. This involves more upfront design work, and some frustration fighting with the compiler. But once you've satisfied it, the code ends up being correct an astonishingly high fraction of the time.”

Hasnain says:

““My paternal grandmother’s legacy lives on in the khatta-meeta nimbu achar [salty-sweet lemon pickle] she made a month before she passed away in September 2001,” said Vernika Awal, a food writer based in the Delhi National Capital Region who has only 250 grammes (8.8oz) left in a 1kg (2.2lb) bottle that is now 22 years old.

From what Vernika recalls of the process, her Punjabi family uses lemons with a slightly hard peel. They are mixed with ajwain, khand (powdered jaggery), black salt and table salt. Mustard oil, heated to smoking point, is added. The mix is then put out in the sun.

“We eat this sparingly … and through it recall the memory my grandmother, feeling her presence even after two decades. … It’s a physical form of memory, savouring something made so long ago,” she added.”

Hasnain says:

“This means that a court can be satisfied that a relevant fact can be established just by computer records, unless there is evidence that the computer is not working properly.

And so when the computer record shows, for instance, a financial shortfall by postmaster or postmistress, the court will accept that as evidence of an actual shortfall - unless the defendant can show that the computer was not operating correctly.

In short, when the computer record is the essence of a prosecution case: computer says guilty.”

Hasnain says:

Looking forward to the next post! Learnt a lot about Java from this one.

“In this article, we’ve looked at a bunch of things that Java 21 allows us to do (I haven’t covered certain things like how generics interact with switch patterns, however). In the next one, I’ll show you some interesting quirks and a few practical examples of how we can leverage these functional building blocks to improve how we write Java code.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. From 2011 but still holds up and I found myself nodding along.

“Software often stays in use longer than anyone expected when it was written — until recently I supported a law office billing system that was written in 1986 using OMNIS 3 and wouldn’t run on any Macintosh newer than an SE/30. Clients who depend on legacy systems will pay plenty to keep those systems running, because they can’t risk their business on new software, and they can’t afford to fund new software development and the subsequent data migration and training. There’s a rich vein of maintenance work out there that most programmers turn up their noses at, preferring ground-up development projects that neither they nor their client are well-suited for.”

Hasnain says:

“Each suit corresponds to a different type of meat. Feeling fishy? Deal the clubs to learn to how to gut a salmon or dismantle a lobster. The diamonds were for fowl, from duck to pheasant to pigeon (which shouldn’t be carved, but simply “cut through the middle from the rump to the neck”). The hearts featured “flesh of beats,” from the “Sir Loyn of Beef” to a haunch of venison—“begun to be cut near the buttock”—and a boars’ head, which “comes to the Table with its Snout standing upward and a sprig of Rosemary tuck[ed] in it.” Coney, or rabbit, was “most times brought to the Table with the Head off” and placed alongside the body. Instructions for carving “baked meats,” such as pies and pasties, were on the spades.”

Hasnain says:

Did not know this. This is super scary and eye opening.

“As underlined by Innocence Project cofounder Barry Scheck in the book’s foreword, it is essential that the public and all professionals involved in these cases comprehend the forensic unreliability of determinations of SBS/AHT. That does not mean that suspicions of child abuse shouldn’t be reported, that cases of children with unexplained traumatic injuries shouldn’t be investigated, that intentional head trauma does not occur or does not cause severe injuries. However, healthcare professionals should recognize that child abuse is a legal determination, not a medical one. While physicians have a duty to report suspicions of child abuse, asserting the “certainty” of a hypothesis without disclosing to the courts the unreliability of its scientific foundations is unethical and unacceptable.”

Hasnain says:

Some great benchmarking and database insights here.

“Insert speed games are revealing of database performance characteristics, but are themselves impractical. The fastest tests all involve insertion into unindexed tables. As soon as indexes are applied, their costs dominate.
Rapidly inserting millions of unindexed rows is only useful when later read sequentially, perhaps as part of a data pipeline. A SQLite format does add some conveniences for this role, but if you are trying to emit rows as fast as possible, consider the database only sinks integer rows at a rate of about 40 MiB/s; In comparison the same computer's unremarkable SSD has a sustained write rate of 454 MiB/s for regular files.”