boothead

Optimal would be sailing round the Caribbean with plenty of runs ashore in exotic locations. Subobtimal would be somewhere in the Southern Ocean in a force 10. :-)

I'm a former Royal Marine, and I don't think ever played uckers. Not sure how widespread it is nowadays, but I think it might still be played at sea.

I bought the 1st or 2nd gen (over 2 yrs ago now) It's a really good machine, but I found Dell pretty terrible to deal with. I want there to be an alternative for that reason, but the latest XPS 13 ubuntu machine still looks about the best bet for a linux development laptop.

Anyone else got the latest one? Or can anyone suggest alternatives to the latest one?

I think you mean "The Machine Stops". I just did a search for The Machine Sleeps and I got a bunch of white noise generators and a book about sleep apnea :-)

I would guess that you'd corroborate my characterization of hiring Haskellers as an embarrassment of riches then? :-)

It would seem that for people reasons Haskell isn't a good choice. However I would say that right now, for people reasons, Haskell is one of the best choices you could make.

Haskell is a very good flag for the kinds of people that make good programmers:

* It's hard to learn.

* Chances of getting a job are minimal, therefore people learn it mostly for their own self edification, and have the kind of grit that keeps them studying for a year or two with not external reward.

* Learning Haskell teaches you some fundamentals that aren't readily discoverable elsewhere.

No one is hiring Haskellers right now, so what you have is a pool of very able programmers, who would love to do Haskell (in fact many would love the chance to use Haskell so much that they'd take a pay cut to do so) and very few people offering them what they want.

If you're a start up, you want to hire a stellar team (possibly at a bit of a discount) and your domain is a good fit then you should seriously consider hiring some Haskellers and letting them write Haskell.

I'm not defending anyone - I'm seeking to understand your point of view better. But language like "Marshaled his supporters" makes me wonder if there's something else I've missed. I use XMonad and quite like it other haskellers I know have moved on to i3. Not sure I've ever seen it being "spammed".

The if it compiles works thing... That's unfortunately overblown and hyperbolic, but in my experience of the Haskell community in London, it's usually uttered as a tongue in cheek joke. I'm not sure I'd characterize it as condescendingly spewing falsehoods.

However, let me tell you about my first experience building a little thing while learning Haskell: As a total newbie, I wanted to pull some timeseries from a database and plot them on a UI. It took me days of grabbing some time here and there, learning which DB library I should use and how the diagrams package worked. I finally got it to compile without any errors. As a python programmer this was a completely new way of programming for me, and I now fully expected the real work of making it run to begin. The VERY first time I ran it - up popped a timeseries visualization. Mind. Blown!

So as you state it, "if it compiles it works" might be a falsehood, but there's more than a grain of truth there.

As for your other comment. What Tim actually said was:

> An institution that teaches Python under the banner of computer science, certainly loses prestige in my opinion

He didn't say that he "can't respect" it, nor did he say that CS should exclusively be taught in Haskell. He said, that teaching it in python lowers its prestige (and later clarifies that he means that as a vehicle for teaching CS rather than programming).

As I mentioned, I'm a self taught programmer, beginning with python. Since then I've worked at hedge funds and investment banks in python and built a startup on Haskell. My opinion is built on my own direct experience, and I find it somewhat disrespectful that you dismiss it as "drinking the Haskell Kool-Aid".

The thing is that it's not a "weak response", it really is people's opinion.

I've experienced some cases where I've been spoken to a bit sharply, and some where people have come across a bit impatient when I haven't "got" something they understand. The thing is that I don't process it as people coming across as a dick, so my subjective experience is that the community is helpful. As to the three examples [1] you picked out of Haskellers coming across as pricks, I honestly, truely, completely don't see anything in any of these comments beyond forthright assertions of opinion. Would you be able to maybe break down what you find objectionable?

[1] As disclosure: I currently work with dons, and I also know willtim.

What do you make of LVars? [1]

Programs written using a deterministic-by-construction model of parallel computation are guaranteed to always produce the same observable results, offering programmers freedom from subtle, hard-to-reproduce nondeterministic bugs that are the scourge of parallel software. We present LVars, a new model for deterministic- by-construction parallel programming that generalizes existing single-assignment models to allow multiple assignments that are monotonically increasing with respect to a user-specified lattice.

LVars ensure determinism by allowing only monotonic writes and "threshold" reads that block until a lower bound is reached. We give a proof of determinism and a prototype implementation for a language with LVars and describe how to extend the LVars model to support a limited form of nondeterminism that admits failures but never wrong answers

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4823

> * recalling C++ & Java, not crazy about the idea of going back to having to specify types for everything.

This is a big misconception. The type system in Haskell becomes much more of a tool than a hindrance. Although you will tend to write type signatures for all your top level functions, type inference is very good and it's not necessary most of the time.

The reason you should consider writing at least the top level signatures is that when you do the compiler will help you fill in the banks with type holes. See

* https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/19aj9t/holedriven_...

* https://wiki.haskell.org/GHC/Typed_holes

Once you learn these tricks, it can really feel like magic sometimes. :-)

Which is why I view haskell's community as one of its main, less tangible qualities. :-)

edit clarity - Apparently my brain is too Haskelled today for writing English

I think this is because the abstractions are so abstract. When functionality is glued together with very general combinators and operators there's not really much to grab hold of unless you understand the abstractions.

Why would you do down this route now that elastic search exists? The article doesn't seem to mention alternatives so I'd be interested to know if the two approaches were compared or if some limitation of ES led to going down this route?

Great to hear that Leksah is coming along. I'm a happy emacs user, but I think a good IDE environment can only help adoption.

I try not to let positive feed go to my head by focussing on people better than me and knowing how much room there is for improvement. I try to take negative feedback as a gift pointing to the right improvements to aim for.

... Indeed you do :-)

Looks like the weather is going to be too overcast in the south of England :-(

I didn't explain properly. I meant that I think the things that should be stored are things like.

  CustomerCreated { stuff }
  CustomerMadeOrder { custId, stuff }
  ItemAddedToOrder { orderId, stuff }

  etc..

This is the event sourcing view of the world.

I have come to believe that storing your data as the semantic events that happen rather than the state at a given point in time is the way to go. From what I've seen change data capture is the opposite process of trying to extract an event stream from the data changes.

I'm currently listening to an account of the de-centralized command structure Gen Stanley Mcchrystal put in place to combat Al Quaeda in Iraq and the taliban in Afghanistan. One thing that is clear is that in a fast paced environment (be that the theater of war or a start up) top down rigid command doesn't work. All this is really saying that the the organization that gets through a feedback loop as fast as possible wins. You can call that the OODA loop, lean, holocracy or whatever you want.

I'm strongly in favor of giving up centralized control in the interests of allowing emergent behavior to tackle opportunities as fast as possible. Leadership to me should be:

* Set the direction

* Gather smart, motivated people

* Create an environment that gets everyone on the same page

* Get the fuck out of their way.

E A very interesting mental brute force process to work it out though. How did other people work it out, is there a more elegant method?

Josh is a revelation: Making smaller circles (there's an article on this on his blog and in the book that is a great read). Also, everything he learned, he's able to apply to something from a completely different field to speed up his progress.

It's more that things are changing faster and faster. At the same time, my life is progressing (wife, kids, commute) and I have less time to focus and devote to learning.

At some point, I feel like I have to focus on the whole package and being a rounded human instead of knowing all the new hotness. Thats what I really feel Tims podcast fosusses on; doing less with more and optimising life with whatever advantage is at hand.

I'm really getting a lot out of Tim Ferriss' podcast http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast/ lately. Especially the episodes with Kelly Starrett, Josh Waitzkin, Sam Harris, Peter Attia, Pavel Tsatsouline and Whitney Cummings.

I think at a certain point you start to recognize that more tech isn't helping as much as it was (diminishing returns perhaps) and that a more holistic approach to improving is necessary.

The critical distinction here is popular with the people who have to use it or most widespread? :-)

It isn't all that - I didn't mention that I feel pretty scared about the prospect of hanging that noose around my neck for ~ 25 years. Once I'm on the hook for this much money I'm pretty much tied in to a certain type of job for a certain type of (big) company in a small geographic area that mostly necessitates a long commute. I haven't yet convinced my self that I'm making the right choice vs the frugal/simple life with more freedom.

Time will tell I guess.

Bad terminology: I meant food and utilities.

I have a small deposit :-)

My mortgage is nearer £600k

It's a small independent primary school founded 80 years ago and still located in the original founder's house (and out buildings). It's a non-profit so all fees go to the upkeep of the school. Classes are about 15 students. Those fees don't include any trips or uniforms I don't think, and it's about a mile from the house we're buying so it's definitely day :-)

The main thing that's attractive about it is the focus on the "person development" side of the child's education (in addition to excellent academics). Last time I went to my oldest daughter's parents evening the whole content was: "Well, she's at so-and-so percentile for this subject and such-and-such metric this and that". Nothing at all about how she is as a person, or anything beyond the metrics that Ofstead judges schools on. She's 7!

Devops contract rate seems to be around £450/day (at the low end). Assuming 21 days per month and 2 months off per year, you'd be looking at £94500 revenue. As a contractor you could expect to pay as little as 25% total tax, but if we assume 30% you're looking at taking home £5.5k per month. Which is a grand more than an £80k salary (with an extra month off).

If you're married and have your SO as a shareholder, thus splitting the tax load you can almost match a £200k salary on a day rate of ~£700 (I have seen a few devops type roles getting up towards that figure).

So, I agree that £250k salary is very top end, but there are certainly contracts in the finance industry that pay enough to get you close if you change the way you're paid.