Hasnain says:

""We recommend that you locate your office where the household income is $30,000 or less," the Instant Tax manual counsels. Each franchisee attends a week of training sessions where "unbelievable emphasis was put on poor minorities," according to former franchisee Habtom Ghebremichael, who recalls a trainer telling his group, "We cater to the 'hood." His archetypal customer, Ogbazion says, is an assistant manager at a fast-food restaurant earning $19,000 a year. "They've burned the banks," he says. "They've bounced too many checks. They've mismanaged their finances.""

Hasnain says:

"“I learned quickly what football meant in the South,” said Mr. Ruiz, who grew up in New York State. “Clearly, it meant a lot. And with respect to this case I learned that keeping players on the field was a priority.”"

Hasnain says:

"Here’s a study that may surprise you. A group of eight-year-olds practiced tossing beanbags into buckets in gym class. Half of the kids tossed into a bucket three feet away. The other half mixed it up by tossing into buckets two feet and four feet away. After twelve weeks of this they were all tested on tossing into a three-foot bucket. The kids who did the best by far were those who’d practiced on two- and four-foot buckets but never on three-foot buckets."

Hasnain says:

This is a really good read.

"I’ve gone back and forth on whether managers should code and my opinion is: don’t stop coding. Each week that passes where you don’t share the joy, despair, and discovery of software development is a week when you slowly forget what it means to be a software developer. Over time it means you’ll have a harder time talking to engineers because you’ll forget how they think and how they become bored."

Hasnain says:

Another viewpoint on Piketty's new book which is likely to bring around some major rethinking of economics and discussions relating to wealth distribution and inequality.

Hasnain says:

This is really really well written. Reads like a story. It talks about how an engineer on the MSN messenger team would keep trying to reverse engineer the AOL client and how AOL tried to stop his efforts.

"This was tricky, vastly trickier than anything they’d done so far. It was also a bit outside the realm of fair play: exploiting a security hole in their own client that our client didn’t have!"

Hasnain says:

This is a ten-year old story on a twenty-year old disaster in which 850 people lost their lives. It recounts the last moments of various people on that ship, reconstructed from the stories of the few survivors.

Well worth reading, especially in light of the current Korean disaster.

Hasnain says:

The OpenBSD team making funny comments as they rip out tons of cruft from openssl.

I love "Do not feed RSA private key information to the random subsystem as entropy. "

Hasnain says:

I like how dota2 is off the charts in terms of total hours played; yet football manager 2014 kicks its butt in terms of hours played.

It's also scary how dota2 has a mean of 147.7 hours played and a median < 19.

(graphs at http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/introducing-steam-gauge-ars-reveals-steams-most-popular-games/2/)

Hasnain says:

This is a really insightful article. Especially:

"A quick grep aes /proc/cpuinfo showed that the aws c1.xlarge box I was on lacked these. After finding another machine in the same class with them, throughput increased by 50-65% and strhash's prominence was drastically reduced in the profiles."