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East African Housekeepers Face Rape, Assault and Death in Saudi Arabia

East African leaders and Saudi royals are among those profiting off a lucrative, deadly trade in domestic workers.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

This is a horrifying article. Unfortunately treatment like this is too often swept under the rug and an open secret.

“Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.

There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of the labor committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.

But Mr. Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.””

Posted on 2025-03-16T23:26:33+0000

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Tokio + prctl = nasty bug

Recently I encountered a bug so cute that I immediately knew that I will want to share it on my blog. It was one of those bugs that even Rust can’t save you from. It occurred in HyperQueue (HQ), a distributed task scheduler written in Rust that I work on.

Click to view the original at kobzol.github.io

Hasnain says:

"Funnily enough, this commit was added to HyperQueue in an enormous pull request that essentially backported most of my benchmarking experiments that I have done over the summer. The PR almost exclusively contained changes only to benchmarks, so it should have been safe to merge without a lot of scrutiny. But it also contained two teeny tiny changes. The PR description that I wrote is quite funny in retrospect:

> This backports the benchmarks that I prepared for my PhD thesis back into the HQ repository. Almost all changes are to the benchmarks repository, and they thus shouldn’t need a lot of review. There are a few changes in HQ though: command spawning optimization and the option to disable authentication for benchmarking.

Well, guess what, the “command spawning optimization” managed to break HyperQueue’s primary functionality for a bunch of users. That’s what I get for sending +3,458 -601 diff pull requests, sigh…"

Posted on 2025-03-16T17:04:08+0000

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Don't call yourself a senior until you've worked on a legacy project

Everybody hates working on legacy projects, me as well. Working on one, however, helped me get a deeper understanding of the dev process.

Click to view the original at infobip.com

Hasnain says:

"We couldn’t change the project we were assigned to, and these were the cards that we were dealt. What we could change is our attitude towards the legacy project. Instead of feeling resigned, we saw it as a place to ask questions and learn. "

Posted on 2025-03-16T17:03:32+0000

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I found a ‘dead’ person on Social Security in Seattle

“Dead” Ned Johnson turns out to be very much alive. It took him weeks to convince the system he was breathing and to start clawing his benefits back.

Click to view the original at seattletimes.com

Hasnain says:

“Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled. He also learned that when you die, your credit score gets marked as “deceased, do not issue credit,” which makes it tough to get a loan.

“The good news is I don’t think it can go any lower than that,” he said cheerfully.

He called the bank first, and they said an electronic notification had been triggered on Feb. 18 that he had died back in November. But I’m on the phone with you right now, he told them. Also, what did I die of? Take it up with Social Security, they said.”

Posted on 2025-03-16T13:15:22+0000

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Meta stops former Facebook director from promoting critical memoir

Social media company wins US emergency ruling preventing ex-director from publicising her book.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

Hasnain says:

I haven’t read the book yet but man the Streisand effect is in full swing here and I don’t understand the PR strategy by Meta here.

Looking at some of the claims (especially the one where Sheryl played with the assistant's hair and the one where she invited the author into her bed on a private jet) - they’re so outlandish that I feel either:

1. The author is out of touch with reality and needs mental help
2. They’re true

(It’s hard to imagine an in between here)

“Following the decision, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X: "This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams' false and defamatory book should never have been published."”

Posted on 2025-03-16T13:12:11+0000

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‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture | Quanta Magazine

The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a whole crop of related problems.

Click to view the original at quantamagazine.org

Hasnain says:

“The conjecture’s resolution is a seismic shift for the field of harmonic analysis, which studies the details of the Fourier transform.
A tower of three monumental conjectures in harmonic analysis rests atop the Kakeya conjecture. Each story in the tower needs to be sturdy for the stories above it to stand a chance themselves. If the Kakeya conjecture had been proved false — if Wang and Zahl had found a counterexample — the entire tower would have come tumbling down.
But now that they’ve proved it, mathematicians might be able to work their way up the tower, using Kakeya to build up proofs of these successively more ambitious conjectures. “All these problems that [mathematicians] dreamed about someday solving, they all look approachable now,” Guth said.”

Posted on 2025-03-16T05:53:25+0000

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Career advice in 2025.

Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many e...

Click to view the original at lethain.com

Hasnain says:

“I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged.”

Posted on 2025-03-16T05:46:57+0000

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How Slack Transformed Cron into a Distributed Job Scheduler

With help from Kubernetes, Golang and Kafka, Slack's crontab drives 2,000 tasks an hour. Monster Scale Summit had all the details.

Click to view the original at thenewstack.io

Hasnain says:

“Adams’ takeaway? Use what you have. In their case, it was an existing job queue, Golang and Kubernetes. “You decrease the maintenance burden while getting huge-scale wins,” she said.

And even the lowly cron box held a lesson or two.

“Slack ran key functionality for 10 years on one node. That’s a long time to deal with this less-than-ideal system. But it was good enough. It got the job done. And I think that is really a key takeaway,” she said. “It’s okay to keep it really simple, even if it’s kind of janky, for a long time.””

Posted on 2025-03-16T05:43:49+0000

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Opinion | Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.

A journey through the front lines of global poverty shows that when the world’s richest men slash aid for the world’s poorest children, the result is sickness, starvation and death.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

These numbers are astonishing and mind blowing. But they don’t get talked about enough. 2-3 million people a year saved for literal pennies on the dollar.

“I recognize we cannot save every hungry child around the world. I agree that U.S.A.I.D. is imperfect and should be reformed. I appreciate that helping people is harder than it looks. I understand that there are difficult trade-offs in allocating tax dollars.

Yet I think most Americans would both welcome some reforms and also be proud to see how we save the lives of hungry children and sick orphans around the world by allocating just 24 cents of every $100 of national income to aid. And I find it odious when the world’s richest man cackles about America shoving programs for needy children “into the wood chipper.”

When you meet those dying children and look into their eyes and hold their hands and feel faint heartbeats flutter, you can’t bear the gleeful laughter. You see children just like your own and hang your head in shame.

Posted on 2025-03-16T01:37:54+0000

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First They Came for Columbia | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson

We must learn from the past. We cannot remain silent in the face of authoritarian attacks on our peers, even if they have not yet come for us.

Click to view the original at thecrimson.com

Hasnain says:

“As schoolchildren, many of us read the German pastor Martin Niemoller’s poem “First They Came.” Written just after the Holocaust, Niemoller’s poem highlights the moral and practical cost of allowing fear (or indifference) to prevent us from speaking out when others are targeted.

We must learn from the past. We cannot remain silent in the face of authoritarian attacks on our peers, even if they have not yet come for us.”

Posted on 2025-03-15T16:37:10+0000