Hasnain says:

I prefer the phrasing an anti-zionist I follow on twitter used instead of the quote at the bottom because this is just ridiculous media complicity.

“"German Chancellor Adolph Hitler is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to the Warsaw Ghetto in an attempt to starve out socialist & communist militants, a plan that could trap hundreds of thousands of Jews without food or water.”

This is what the piece says:

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that, if implemented, could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.”

Hasnain says:

Always speaking truth to power. Her words are always so powerful. I do have to note that PEN refused to link to her speech when it announced the award on its social media.

So hard to pick one quote from here. Read the whole thing.

“Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator. Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting stuff. This bit in particular was an idea I hadn’t heard of before.

“Even when running in a degraded mode, it is able to continuously and reliably ingest data. Because of this, our data ingestion layer (written in Rust) has been designed to have as few responsibilities as possible. Its sole job is to get data into some semi-persistent storage as quickly as possible, with several cascading storage options in the case of failures or outages.
Even in the event of an auth service outage, it will still record requests, but with a flag to authorize the request async in the processing layer.”

Hasnain says:

Great read as always

“While writing this piece, a friend told me a story about when he became an engineering manager a decade ago, and soon noticed that his two women engineers were the lowest paid and the lowest leveled people on the team, which didn’t seem to correlate with their actual skills or experience. He asked his own manager what was up with this, and the response he received was: “Well yeah, neither of them has ever been a flight risk.”

This kind of attitude is, to put it politely, a fucking cancer on our industry.”

Hasnain says:

Long and rambles at times but there’s useful advice here - and I certainly needed some on prioritization.

“Being purposeful is also the secret to agility. Purpose can help move faster and in times of crisis, rally the team together. It helps avoid analysis paralysis and avoid the delays inherent in waiting for numbers to emerge before taking a decision. When employees are in a quandary due to a fork in the road, purpose can guide them to choose which way to move without escalating up the hierarchy or awaiting further direction from their hierarchy. In situations where it really matters, we tend to become data driven when we should be doing the opposite, pause and then reflect on why the business or product exists.”

Hasnain says:

“Keep an eye on your dicts. Don’t let them take control of your application. As with every piece of technical debt, the further you postpone introducing proper data structures, the more complex the transition becomes.”

Hasnain says:

“A year after October 7, no one seriously believes there will be peace between Israel and the Palestinians in our lifetime. The bombed and starved children of Gaza will never forget what they’ve been subjected to, nor the world’s general indifference; while it’s not on the same scale, their counterparts in Israel will never forget the national trauma of the attacks. The “two-state solution” that liberal Zionists have verbally supported for years as the only possible just outcome is an obvious fantasy. Other, far more disturbing outcomes seem likelier; at present, it is hard to see what consequences Israel will face from continuing to kill and displace Palestinians on all fronts while seizing and occupying more and more of their land. If there is one lesson to be taken from the past dismal year, it’s this: the liberal Zionist interpretation of the conflict has no predictive value, no analytical weight, and no moral rigor. It is a failed dream of the previous century, and it is unlikely to survive this one.”

Hasnain says:

“The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.”

Hasnain says:

Long, detailed read on distributed systems and retries. Worth reading and internalizing.

“A couple of months after the incident review was completed, the platform team adopted the retry budget technique with a threshold of 10%. Over the following year, there were other incidents, but no amplification from retries was observed.
Thanks to the incident review, Ben learned that “when encountering transient errors, add retries” is a risky approach. He gained an in-depth understanding of the risks involved, even with exponential backoff. He learned about exponential backoff and jitter techniques, Little’s Law and closed-loop systems, the concept of metastable failure state, the problem of retry amplification and techniques like retry circuit breaker and retry budget, as well as circuit breaker and deadline propagation mechanisms.
Ben now has an even more exciting journey ahead of him, delving deeper into retries. But that’s the subject of another post.”

Hasnain says:

“As the project progressed, they got "a bigger and bigger pile of proof that Rust does actually work well".

There were regular cross-team meetings where team leads could discuss their problems. As time went on it became more and more noticeable that Julius didn't bring up many issues at all and when he showed his results, his colleagues were often left impressed.”