Hasnain says:

I did not know much about the history of professional bowling. I now know a little bit.

"Indeed, these gambling events attracted more than the best bowlers -- mobsters often got in on the bets and threw down “huge wads of cash” on their favorites for the evening, often placing local bowlers in hairy situations. In one such instance, bowler Iggy Russo fixed his match and bet a ton of money on his opponent to win. During his last frame, in which he was positioned to either win or lose the match with a spare, he learned that some “”unsavory characters” were betting on him to win.

He was caught in a catch-22: if he won, his financial backer would kill him; if he missed the spare, the “unsavory characters” would. Instead, he avoided the entire predicament by faking a heart attack."

Hasnain says:

This is an excellent piece of writing and has some good advice (though some parts need to be taken with a grain of salt, as it's slightly dated).

"In that blunt answer lies the substance of my experience, and what I believe to be the real secret of business achievement. So sure am I of the soundness of this philosophy that I have five very simple rules for hiring men, which are the outgrowth of it! ......

4. Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do. I look very critically into little things respecting the men I hire; the details of their dress, their handwriting, their record of tying up a job and leaving no loose ends. The biggest men of my acquaintance in business are "detail men" to an amazing degree. Often the president of a company is the only man in it who knows the little things about every department."

Hasnain says:

"The candy weighing demonstration, or, the unwisdom of crowds"

This beautifully illustrates why it's important to have a random sample in a survey.

Hasnain says:

"It used to be the case that governments funded a lot of development of breakthrough technologies. The bad news is that they have mostly stopped; the good news is that the leverage of technology is such that now small startups can do what used to take the resources of nations"

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.