BellsOnSunday

That doesn't seem like something a compiler should care about, I think it would be better to add it to something like hlint.

I think most people would need to write some code to really grok it, I would anyway. It's a simple enough idea in context, but there's no royal road to understanding.

The explanations I know of (all from the Haskell community) are either

1) formal, referring to ideas from category theory,

2) metaphorical, conveying the ideas by intuitions you may already have about burritos or whatever, or

3) pragmatic, focused on how and why you use them in code.

I think this last category, pioneered by byorgey's wonderful TypeClassopedia [1], is by far the most useful in teaching people about monads but it depends on observing them yourself. (Ditching the metaphors actually seemed quite radical to me at the time -- I presumed they were necessary because everyone else did.) It builds up from understanding what a Functor is, then the next abstraction up, and so on until Monads seem like an obvious idea. The same approach is used in Learn You a Haskell for Great Good [2] but you need to doing the exercises to follow the book. sigfpe's classic explanation [3] is also by example and goes into a bit more depth. It still contains exercises for the reader though :)

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Typeclassopedia

[2] http://learnyouahaskell.com/functors-applicative-functors-an...

[3] http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...

It's a name which is confusing and difficult to search - almost as bad as calling the (Haskell) build tool 'stack', but with added negative connotations.

> The UK is a net payer to the EU

This is true in all areas except research funding. That's because researchers can take part in EU-funded projects (e.g. Horizon 2020) where the funding was awarded to a multi-national project team and so doesn't form part of the UK entitlement.

It wasn't a general election and I didn't vote for either of the sides. If "Leave" (as if that were one organisation) said "it" was going to do something, how could that be guaranteed, unless they were able to form a government? If you believed them then it must be disappointing but welcome to UK politics.

I gave my answer to the question on the ballot slip, something I had a settled view on before the campaign began and I don't think I'm that unusual. I think that claims about the £350m etc made as much difference as claims that brexit would bring on the apocalypse by lunchtime.

> The native working class are subterfuged for the non native working class

Subterfuged isn't the right word there but I'm not sure what is -- "passed over"?

There has been so much snobbery about Leave voters. I find it almost as disturbing as the (media magnified) hate speech from the other side.

Yes, and there is an appendix on gdb in the Bartlett book which will get OP started.

Sounds like a great idea if you want to visit a war-torn area to make a protest about sexism and Sharia, not to mention risk getting mixed up in an international incident or worse. Not so much if you want to run a hackathon which actually improves the lives of those that took part.

> sild is herring in Norwegian

And in English!

Wariness and a generally circumspect attitude to what is revealed predominate in the relationships between workers and bosses in workplaces like that. At least, that's in my limited personal experience of working in factories, big post offices, that sort of place...it's more to do with capitalism than class I think.

When it comes to being examined there are also the prerequisites to advancing the state of the art, which include demonstrating you've learned how to do research and have deep critical knowledge of the field you're working in (so you know what needs to be done to move it forward).

    > Serve the time and irrespective of the results they give you a degree

I don't know what you are basing that on and maybe you've had a bad experience with this but it isn't true in my experience (which is of having a PhD from a UK university and now being an academic supervising doctoral students). Yes, there is a difference in the expectations of PhD students at a top UK university and somewhere like Reading or, for that matter, the university I work at but we still have standards I consider to be high and by no means a joke. PhDs are examined externally and the external examiner must be someone who has no ties with the supervisor, so it isn't possible for the university to give you a degree "irrespective of the results". My students publish at international events, in competition with US graduate students and whoever else, so a lot of people must be in on the "joke".

Given that, this does seem like a very weak project and I agree that a part-time PhD is, or should be, pretty much impossible really.

[EDIT] Also, bear in mind he hasn't been examined yet! It could well be knocked back at that stage, the possible outcomes usually being Accept, Minor Corrections (no need for another viva), Major Corrections and resubmit, Reject.

Most British people have never heard of those two but Attenborough is about as recognisable as the Queen and with far more positive associations. He has been on the telly since the 1950s and his broadcasting is part of the shared culture, like the footage of him hanging out with gorillas...Less of a thing nowadays of course, but if you are British and old enough to remember when there were only a couple of TV channels, Attenborough is the Don.

Why not just use AUCTeX?

TIL MIT graduates quite frequently (from the sound of it) go on to work in tech support. Does it pay well enough to make sense as the outcome of what must be the most expensive higher education in the world?

It's not a stretch at all, it's true that he invented that particular technology. Nobody said he invented the idea of passing a message from one place/person to another.

I don't think frisson is that unusual, or that it means the same thing as "gives me the chills" -- the latter implies that you're frightened, IMO.

No accounting for taste but you have got a peculiar sense of humour if that makes you laugh. Give me Professor Stanley Unwin any day.

My point was that there are exceptions to the rule. I don't think the exceptions (scientists with, generally speaking, open minds who pass these habits on to students) are as rare as people reading Kuhn might think. I don't think there is a correlation with doing brilliant work or sparking a paradigm shift, but not everyone is small minded and protective of their territory. Maybe it just seems that way to me because I'm not very ambitious, but I notice quite a few people who don't fit the Kuhnian stereotype.

Unless you want to put the word some in there your hypothesis/belief is easy to falsify/repudiate.

Because being listened to in a reddit discussion isn't a right that anyone has and not having it doesn't hold anyone back in any way. My views wouldn't go down well on a religious forum. Am I bothered? Do I look bothered?

It depends on the topic of the discussion, I'd have thought - it might be Hands up who believes in God.

I was brought up amongst and by religious people too, so I don't automatically assume people are stupid for having beliefs. But I'm aware that is really just a rhetorical position on my part, and when faced with someone who claims to be a scientist, living in the west in the 21st century, and who actually believes this stuff (e.g. the afterlife) then it is just difficult to take them seriously. That makes me vulnerable to accusations of having a closed mind, etc, I know...but I stopped believing in those things (if I ever did) around the same time I stopped believing in Father Christmas, so you'll have to cut me some slack :) And you actually make it worse when you justify your beliefs by saying that they make the Universe a "nicer" place to live in, which is just juvenile (I can imagine even nicer universes, would you like to believe in them instead?). I would stop at your previous statement about not needing to rationalise belief (in fact it's a category error to do so).

I don't recognise the prejudice against practical skills in my neck of the woods (CS dept in a UK university) but religious colleagues are quietly looked down upon and sometimes mocked. (Not that there are many of them.) I try as hard as I can not to judge such people myself but will admit to finding it hard to take someone seriously who believes in such stuff. Being able or unable to change a tyre doesn't come close to the epistemological facepalm of trusting in the dove from above.

> When the victorious Athenian generals returned home, the citizens voted to execute them for failing to rescue these [stranded Athenian] soldiers.

Tough crowd.

Nobody ever fought over Rockall.

It doesn't sound like Sacks had a "life-long enjoyment of this area of mathematics" from the article:

> Sacks mentions another algorithm to test numbers for > primeness. But his description only shows that he has no > real mathematical knowledge that matters in this case.

The article is about people who use things like wordpress and maybe write little plugins for them, rather than designing the frameworks in the first place. Those types of work are, undeniably, very different, one common analogy being the difference between car mechanics and automotive engineers. I don't see the author's work as brain-dead (neither is the work of car mechanics), and the author clearly implies he doesn't either. But he is surrounded by people that sneer at it -- that certainly seems believable to me.

I got:

    > By the way, which country do you inhabit (or which United States state)?

    > England.

    > I don't have a good sense of navigation, so I don't know exactly where you live, but it seems to be Where I Live network. 

    > By the way, which country do you inhabit (or which United States state)?

> If you're really lucky and you're top of your field you can hit assistant professor by 30-35 in the UK.

This role doesn't really exist on the UK, the equivalent is that of Lecturer/Senior Lecturer. I think you're overstating the barrier to entry -- it's not that high unless you're fixed on a top university. In CS,I know lots of people younger than 35 with SL jobs. Getting to the level or prof after that is another matter but on the whole I think that should be hard.