boothead

I just about to buy a house outside of London. I'm also about to send my 2 kids to private school as all the decent local state schools are full with waiting lists (thankfully a lot cheaper than the figures mentioned here). I had a look at one of the options for commuting into London. This is the quickest option from where I am (via HS1). I'm already up to the following monthly expenses:

Mortgage: £3200

School Fees: £1375

Travel: £450 (next cheapest is £300)

Insurance: ~£300 (Critical Illness, Life insurance)

Bills: £1500 (guestimate)

These are a mix of expenses I'll have to pay personally, and some that I can pay as business expenses.

So I'm up to £7k monthly outgoings already, without even trying. In reality I'll need to add another £3k ish for loan repayments and other bits. As a contractor I'm able to be quite tax efficient, but as a single salary earner, http://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php tells me I'd need to be earning > £200k to cover this.

I could economize. I could get a cheaper car for example and I could have bought a cheaper house - the one I'm buying certainly isn't a palace though.

But, yeah - London is expensive!

Please - do enlighten me.

Almost every black cab ride I've ever had has been great - and they most certainly know how to get round London better than a newly minted uber driver with google maps. However if you've never had a black cab with the driver spouting racist/misogynist/anti immigration rhetoric they whole journey, then you haven't lived ;-)

It was almost certainly a pirate taxi.

I guess my point was that using the same app I use in London and knowing that I'm not going to get ripped off in a strange* city was quite nice

* that's strange as in unfamiliar ;-)

You're right - all of these things are of concern.

The incumbents never really seem to make an argument beyond shrieking that their protected racket is being disrupted though. I remember one hilarious picture on the news of a cabbie f-ing and blinding to a reporter out of his window at a protest against uber. Just behind him in his cab was a sign saying "cash only".

When an innovation comes along and starts stealing your lunch, screaming that you were here first isn't really going to help you much!

I'm pretty sure that the taxi that was being touted for the first time was also unregulated, so it's extremely unclear here what 3x my money was going to get me.

Quality of black cabs and mini-cabs in London in also wildly variable. At least with uber you can actually leave a bad review (I'm not sure what comes of those) but I get a response on bad reviews at least.

I took my wife to Paris last year. When I turned up a taxi tout (I assume for an un-licensed taxi) offered to get us to our hotel (about 6 km away) for 100 euro. When I demurred he kindly lowered the price to 60 euro. I ordered an uber, which picked us up in ~10 mins and the total cost was 20 euro.

So while I sympathize with taxi drivers, they really can't expect consumers to not prefer something that's manifestly better for them.

BTW in London, before uber a black cab might cost me £60-70 to get home if I'd missed a train. An uber now can be as little as £25, which is low enough that I can just not worry about the terribly unreliable and sparse trains and plan my trip home that way.

Sometimes restrictions are useful...

Aside from that in Haskell the type system isn't usually a restriction. Experts in Haskell tend to use the type system to guide them towards a correct solution.

I'm not sure it possible to say that we couldn't have built something quicker in another language or stack. What I will say was that the underlying abstraction that we built our system on (streams of events) is very well suited to a Haskell implementation, and I can say with some certainty that building a solution that is as "correct" as the one we built would have been extremely challenging. The code also held together for longer than has been my experience in some other languages and communities.

Softcover looks awesome. Thanks!

Anyone got a similar resource for self publishing ebooks? I had some stuff hacked together with org-mode and some other bits a while ago, but would like to know of anything better.

Why all the down votes at an honest attempt at dialogue?

You're right, my meme-trolling was a bit childish. However I have read some of Britain First's facebook pages and the comments there are hateful, vitriolic and most of the time barely literate.

I actually agree with most of what you said here. I believe that Islam does have some serious structural problems, along with many other religions. Muslim friends say that indeed the Quran is pretty transparently calling for non-muslim's death, and it seems to be seized upon readily as the raison d'être for many of these terrible groups.

As for the asian sex grooming, this is exactly this kind of thing that far right groups jump on. Suddenly it's muslim grooming gangs vs a group of men abusing children. Don't forget that within the Catholic church there has also been widespread abuse that's been covered up by the church. Somehow there isn't a pervasive implication that being Catholic means that you're more likely to be a child abuser. In case there was any doubt, yes grooming children for sex slavery is more despicable than whipping up hatred for an entire religion based on said abuse.

I believe the way to counter "lumping people together, generalizing and stereotyping" or othering is precisely to point out the flaws in logic and call it bigotry and hatred when you see it.

The thing is that I'm genuinely interested in how people of certain groups regard themselves. I follow both of those individuals on twitter and they seem to an outsider to be talking sense. I would however like to know the opinion of people who are Muslim before I decide that though.

I agree that HN isn't the forum for this, but surely the best place to rebut such thinking is when it arises? You can hopefully see from my other comments on this thread that I certainly don't condone what the op said..

Actually it's more like a small subset of Group A intends to kill us all (highly doubtful that they actually have the capability to actually kill us all).

Group B is using the undeniable fact that some factions of Group A intend us harm to claim that all of Group A is responsible for all the the worlds evils. (The deleted post claimed that Islam was responsible for all the human trafficking in the world for example).

Some members of Group B (the despicable Britain First in the UK) have some completely bonkers beliefs that credulous idiots like the op retransmit without apparently giving them a nano seconds critical thought - e.g. "TEH MUSLAMISTS WANT TO MAKE ARE WATER HALAL" or "TEH AVERAGE MUSLAMIC WOMAN HAS XX CHILDREN - THERE TRYING TO BREED US OUT" (spelling mistakes intentional).

So therefore, while I don't disagree the Islam has some serious problems as a religion and an ideology, I reject as bigotry and narrow minded hatred the message that the OP originally posted.

That's nonsense frankly. I've worked with an excellent team of Haskellers before I don't think we'd have been anywhere near as good without the type system. I'd agree that having an awesome team gives you a lot of other advantages, and actually FP is a huge opportunity to build that team for start ups. FP tends to attract the kind of people who make up a great team. It's for this reason that I think the conclusions of the flub paradox article are wrong http://steved-imaginaryreal.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-flub-...

ameen, may I ask how you regard people who call themselves reformers such as Maajid Nawaz https://twitter.com/maajidnawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali https://twitter.com/Ayaan?

Oh noes it's all teh muslamics fault!

I don't know how much of an idiot you have to be to fall for this right wing fear mongering bullshit. It's not politically incorrect - it's just incorrect!

Making smaller circles in action: http://theartoflearningproject.org/resources/make-smaller-ci...

If you're going to do this, a lot of the guts are already available in the form of http://hledger.org/ or http://ledger-cli.org/. (Can't remember the license offhand, but you might be able to build on them)

Clearly we have worked in some of the same places! Very accurate!

If we ever split up, I'd give her at least half of my money to look after my children :-)

I agree that we do need more of that. I balk at the bombastic talk from the government, (who make the laws in the first place) that it's somehow immoral to optimize your tax affairs. I would much rather see them put simpler legislation in place that means that large companies pay their "fair" share of tax, and tax is easier to deal with for small companies. If I ended up paying a bit more tax under that regime and the current large tax avoiders ended up paying a lot more that could be put towards social infrastructure, that would make me happy.

You disagree with following the letter of the law and taking home extra thousands of pounds per year? Personally my attitude it that I'll apply whatever optimizations my accountant says I can without being too creative :-)

Also, some companies that masquerade as umbrellas are doing some pretty shady things. If they promise some un-feasibly large percentage of take home pay (over 80%) they're probably doing some dodgy Isle of Man scheme and you'll be left holding the can.

In general the big ones suck and have a boiler room mentality. Good ones in my experience:

Oxford Knight

Functional Works

GQR

Hays (They're big but have been good to work with)

I'll add more as I think of them.

If you're looking for work in finance - you will almost certainly be going through a recruiter.

Good advice, especially the bit about crunch. First time I contracted I let my accountant talk me into using their horrible spreadsheet. I couldn't make my self use it it was that bad and my accounts were a mess. Now my accountant (nimble jack) bundles freeagent (which when I looked into it was better than crunch and has an API) and keeping on top of things is much easier.

One additional thing: If you're married make sure your spouse is a director of the company as well (especially if they're not working). You can be hugely tax efficient in this manner and can extract nearly £80k per year from the company with no personal tax to pay (there will still be corporation tax to pay on profits).

I think it's important to make a distinction between over engineering "features" and "properties".

I completely agree that over engineering that takes the form of "this feature will be cool, lets build it" without validation or demonstrated need from the market is generally a bad idea.

However taking time to understand the fundamentals of a system and build a robust core on strong principles is almost always a good idea.

If you're interested in this domain and Haskell and have some free time, you might find hailstorm interesting [1]

From what I understand of it - it's an implementation of apache storm in Haskell.

[1] http://hailstorm-hs.github.io/hailstorm/demo/#1

Nice! I've got ligatures in my Haskell with the default spacemacs set up, this font looks really nice.

How is it implemented? One of the problems with Haskell code is that there are quite a few instances where the examples given are within a larger infix operator for example:

>-> from pipes looks like this >→

Still a net win, but is there anything that could be done about it?

I came here to ask for a comparison between the two. I'll add the request here instead instead of starting a new top level thread.

Both look really interesting!

I looked at this a couple of days agao and I swear it was in the 470s... The US police have killed more civilians in 6 months than the UK forces lost in the whole of the Afghanistan campaign which lasted 14 years.

I mentioned this on twitter a couple of days ago when I first looked and some guy popped up making comparisons with the number of people who fall off ladders. You guys have a serious problem!