Hasnain says:

Okay this is pretty nuts, wonder what would have happened if cameras like this were not a thing.

“On Tuesday, however, when the hiker was spotted on the Dumpling Mountain camera, only a handful of viewers were online, making the sighting even more remarkable. On Saturday, when the Guardian checked the camera, only 19 people were watching the live feed.”

Hasnain says:

There’s some interesting anecdotes here about working in big tech and career growth but I cannot get past the fact that the author just… took code from one employer to another, then open sourced it at the second employer (without permission) when the project got canned. And even now just says the companies are welcome to contact him about this if they like.

Like….

“You won’t have the opportunity to take lessons away from the project if you see the sunsetting of the project as a failure: there’s often much to learn about what non-technical aspects of the project broke down. Perhaps there aren’t any, and maybe management is just a group of fools! But often that’s not the case; your delicately milled cog wasn’t ripped out of the machine because it was misunderstood, it was ripped out because it didn’t operate smoothly as a part of the larger system it was installed in”

Hasnain says:

“A mere zipfile with a csv in it seems so diminutive, but in fact an enormous mass of financial applications use this particular zipfile every day. I'm pretty sure that's why they've left those commas in - if they removed them now they'd break a lot of code.

When open data is made really easily available, it also functions double duty as an open API. After all, for the largeish fraction of APIs in which are less about calling remote functions than about exchanging data, what is the functional difference?”

Hasnain says:

Goodwill and trust: so hard to build, so easy to lose it all and never recover. Case in point right here.

“Despite the partial walkback, some developers say they still plan to move from Unity to another engine. Aaron San Filippo of Whisker Squadron developer Flippfly, for instance, said he doesn't care if Unity reverts the new pricing scheme completely: "They’ve made it clear it’s not safe to work with this engine."”

Hasnain says:

Great and insightful read. For all you think of Romney, there’s information here that’s new.

“He joked to friends that the Senate was best understood as a “club for old men.” There were free meals, on-site barbers, and doctors within a hundred feet at all times. But there was an edge to the observation: The average age in the Senate was 63 years old. Several members, Romney included, were in their 70s or even 80s. And he sensed that many of his colleagues attached an enormous psychic currency to their position—that they would do almost anything to keep it. “Most of us have gone out and tried playing golf for a week, and it was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna kill myself,’ ” he told me. Job preservation, in this context, became almost existential. Retirement was death. The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power. One of his new colleagues told him that the first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?” (The second and third considerations, the colleague continued, should be what effect it would have on his constituents and on his state.)”

Hasnain says:

I’ve been watching TikToks for food and diet advice here and there so this is quite scary.

“The analysis of thousands of posts found that companies and industry groups paid dietitians for content that encouraged viewers to eat candy and ice cream, downplayed the health risks of highly processed foods and pushed unproven supplements — messages that run counter to decades of scientific evidence about healthy eating. The review found that among 68 dietitians with 10,000 or more social media followers on TikTok or Instagram, about half had promoted food, beverages or supplements to their combined 11 million followers within the last year.”

Hasnain says:

“The degree to which these problems just aren’t a thing in other languages can’t be overstated either. In Haskell or Go, “async code” is just normal code. You might say this isn’t a fair comparison—after all, those languages hide the difference between blocking and non-blocking code behind fat runtimes, and lifetimes are handwaved with garbage collection. But that’s exactly the point! These are pure wins when we’re doing this sort of programming.

Maybe Rust isn’t a good tool for massively concurrent, userspace software. We can save it for the 99% of our projects that don’t have to be.”

Hasnain says:

“Which means that people like me spend a lot of time studying these crashes to figure out what is going on, only to conclude that they were caused by other people abusing the system.”

Hasnain says:

“Some believe the true answer to Heilbronn’s triangle problem won’t be a whole lot bigger than his original guess of 1/n2. “If I put points in a structured way, I fail; if I put points in a random way, then I fail. It can’t be too structured, it can’t be too random, therefore it probably doesn’t exist,” Bloom said. But Zakharov is hoping for a different answer. The intuitions that support an answer of 1/n2 are “kind of boring,” he said. “I would very much prefer if it was n3/2.””

Hasnain says:

I remember poking at some of the code here back in the day and being excited - this is great to see.

“So there you have it. We kicked the tires on Static Hermes a bit, played around with a micro-benchmark, and even managed to soup it up — way up. Turns out, understanding a little bit about how Static Hermes (or any compiler, really) thinks can go a long way in making your code faster. But it’s not like you need to pull out all the stops for every piece of code you write.”