It doesn't even necessarily have to be IO heavy, just Functor and Monad heavy. But even that is reasonable to deal with just using traverse/sequence, fold, and fmap usually.
619 karma · joined August 12, 2014
As for what you say about haskell being "monad acrobatics", it can be equally true of F#, or any other typed functional language, because all monads/applicatives/functors/etc are, are just helpful functional design patterns. It would be like calling Factories in Java handcuffs. If you don't want to code using Factories or Monads in Java/Haskell, that's still your choice, but if a lot of libraries in that language are using that pattern, it's probably for a reason that makes it useful in that language's paradigm. Haskell just makes it easier to use these patterns than F#/OCaml/Elm/etc because of its typeclasses, so a lot more people use them. That's all there is to it. I'll grant you that F#'s tooling is a little bit better in places though, but I was never a huge fan of it's project/module system. OCaml probably has both F# and Haskell beat there.
That being said, F# is still a fine language, and I think it's probably a better stepping stone towards learning haskell (and typed functional programming in general) than haskell itself, just because it gives you the option of gradually easing your way into the ML style of programming if you've already had some imperative programming experience before. And that's key, because the issue here is one of shifting the way you think about your programming problems, and there's simply no quick/easy way to do that. In fact, I find that a lot a complete newcomers to programming have an easier time learning how to do things the haskell way, because they don't really have these issues of feeling restricted by the type system, since it's the only way they've been taught to do things.
So overall I would say just keep at it with F#, and check out the F# way of doing things like monads (or "computation expressions" [0] as they're called in F#) , monoids [1], "Railway Oriented Programming" [2], and other such patterns [3], then maybe try checking out Haskell again later and see if it seems a little easier. But there's really no reason to be bashing it regardless.
[0] https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/series/computation-express...
[1] https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/monoids-without-tear...
[2] https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/rop/
[3] https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/series/map-and-bind-and-ap...
I actually agree with this completely, but it's totally orthogonal to key points of the counter-arguments here. Some people thinking your project will cause them issues cannot be inherently bad, pretty much out of necessity, because you simply can never please everyone all the time. If it starts to become a sizable portion of your intended audience, maybe, but even then there will always be a sizable signal/noise ratio as well, which is the real issue here. It's not that people's concerns are unfounded, or that they should be ignored, it's that nothing is ever argued in favor of why this specific issue should be prioritized over all the other equally urgent issues in a project, nor more importantly, how this particular issue could be addressed.
The problem here isn't one of digging up issues, as anybody that's managed any kind of non-trivial project knows they are plentiful, it's a problem with finding solutions. Therefore, the main counter-argument that's been made here is that simply shouting and pointing at these things is not going to help your case as an end user. It's a pretty straightforward point, but people seem to forget that all projects need to make trade-offs, and that often their contributions aren't totally novel "insights" that the project maintainers aren't aware of.
For example, you state:
> if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience.
Which is true, but arguably anyone doing any kind of business would likely know that already. The trouble is actually coming up with such a short explanation, especially when as was claimed before, people don't like to read documentation. It's not exactly easy to explain Bitcoin in one paragraph, much less smart contracts, and even harder still to explain some etherium-based token, on top of explaining the business model and the reason behind it in such brevity. Which is why, even though I'm also not particularly in favor of this BAT project, I know I have nothing to contribute to it in terms of useful criticism because I acknowledge that it's a hard problem and that they're fighting an uphill battle anyway. The part that I am arguing against, is that many seem to implicitly believe that just pointing out that some project is fighting an uphill battle is enough of a worthy contribution to get their concerns addressed/acknowledged somehow.
The more concerning corollary to this, is not so much that these sorts of responses "discourage" active project developers anyway, but that they de-incentivize future projects from even attempting to bother with hard problems, just because they observe enough of a backlash against previous solutions that they deem the risk-to-reward ratio not worth it, instead of actively exploring the space, when that's exactly what's needed to gain any sort of traction on long-term hard problems.
We already see this happening, with so much manpower going towards developing relatively safe "problems" like scaling social networks and/or optimizing ad delivery mechanisms, instead of encouraging people to try out different/riskier things. And that's the real crux of the issue.
You didn't originally explain why it was a difficult problem at all, all you did was insinuate that most people are too lazy to read documentation, made hyperbolic statements about the difficulty of claiming money, and seemed to suggest that therefore this specific project is a failure or something.
While this post is a bit better at clarifying your argument, the post you're responding to is still 100% in the right here. You may have thought you were helping with it, but the fact is that all most people like to do, is poke holes in reasonable solutions, just because they don't exactly match whatever specific criteria they had in mind. You have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it's so easy to come up with criticisms, that even the people you're critiquing have probably thought of them already, much to everyone's astonishment probably. What's not easy, is coming up with any kind of alternatives or possible solutions to these holes, because if it were, they would've likely been implemented.
Believe it or not, all this does is demoralize people actively trying to solve the hard problems you claim to be trying to "help", thus hurting your own cause in the end, because there's no motivation to be gained by helping a bunch of entitled armchair know-it-alls. Despite what everybody may like to think, technological progress is fundamentally a people problem just as much as it is an actual technological problem.
EDIT: Just for full disclosure, as a cryptocurrency investor myself, I also am bearish on BAT. But that's just because I'm bearish on anything having to do with Etherium by default.
http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...
This depends on how you define "personality" and "values". Because for example, according to psychological research, personality traits (as defined by the Big 5 model of personality) are strongly correlated with things such as political beliefs (which could be argued is a subset of a person's values at least), and are largely stable over time. So it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suggest that the more similar the personalities between a couple, the higher the probability of them also having a large set of overlapping "values", however you choose to define them.
As a personality researcher, I feel obligated to chime in and clarify that the memo wasn't stating that women are "neurotic", neither in the colloquial nor clinical sense, but that they are on average higher in the trait of Neuroticism in the Big 5 personality dimensions[0], which is a very specific and well defined term, and the scientific literature actually does support that statement when it is presented using those academic definitions. There's nothing opinionated about this, just as much as saying that men on average test higher in the trait of 'Conscientiousness' according to the same model; they're just population statistics based on the most reliable personality measure we have in the field of psychology today. It is a plain misunderstanding of the academic term to suggest that the memo says women are "neurotic" in any other way.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
That's the important question here, especially since there have now been preliminary experiments in tech interviews suggesting such an outcome is not implausible:
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSbZM83_FycPZNJqcFYzW...
I was curious to see if this was actually the case, but the data doesn't really seem to support this claim. Meat consumption overall appears to have remained relatively stable over the past few years, but it's mostly been an increase in poultry intake that's made up for a simultaneous decline in red meat consumption.
http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/sta...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3045642/
http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/red-meat-consumption-decline/
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
It's not, but when it takes up the majority of your waking life at ~60-80hrs/wk, it's not an unreasonable expectation, especially for the mental well-being of the workers. And so long as the trend continues towards longer work hours, there really doesn't seem to be much of a humane way to deal with that added stress otherwise, despite all the obvious drawbacks you mentioned.
The ideal of course, would be to shorten the workday. Unfortunately, inertia seems to be working very much against that possible solution.
At least they're more generous than HN's downvote restrictions. But I suspect it's the upvote limitations on voat that turn newcomers off more than anything, since every other site encourages you to handout 'likes'/upvotes like candy, making it quite the culture shock when you run up against that wall.
That being said, it's hard to tell whether any of these voting mechanisms are actually any better at producing fruitful discussion than a plain old-school forum. Seems to me like having any kind of voting inevitably leads to amplifying the effects of group think.
Hence I wouldn't really expect legalization of any drug X to improve problems with any drug Y in most cases. But if legalization itself helps with drug problems in general, I might expect that only legalizing drug Y would help drug Y's problems.
Secondly, it seems odd to be pedantic about such a detail when the comment itself already defines the details relevant to the analogy, making it a self-contained statement even if you didn't know what warrantees were. An analogy doesn't have to map 1-to-1 to work, as that's what makes it an analogy as opposed to an equivalence. Saying that a dog is as big as a cat doesn't make it a flawed analogy just because the dog doesn't have sharp claws and pointy ears.
The parent was literally saying that he wanted to convey a different story to the ones commonly heard, in order to give a more balanced picture. Nowhere does that suggest anything about data points, just people sharing stories with different view points.
It's good to have a reminder that "anecdata" != real data every now and then, but in cases where you have a poster clearly acknowledging all that, bringing this up seems like little more than an out of place trope.
I highly recommend reading some of his writings [0] then, because having "a lack of self-awareness" is the last trait I'd use to describe that man.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Poor-Charlies-Almanack-Charles-Expand...
Right off the bat, it's worth noting that Soylent has an unusually large serving size of 106-142g [0], compared to the products listed above which have an average serving size of 30-40g, and therefore position themselves as being 'better deals' because they can claim to have more "servings". But otherwise the nutrient ratios are quite comparable and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
[0] https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/204409635-Preparin...
Soylent has 20g of protein per serving, and most of the products listed above are also in that 15-30g of protein range and share most of the same micronutrients, so functionally they're about equivalent. The only real differences between all these products are marketing, price, taste, "recommended" serving sizes, and small tweaks in nutrient ratios. Other than that, they're all pretty interchangeable.
And as for specific products...
- https://www.bodybuilding.com/store/vega/one.html
- https://www.bodybuilding.com/store/garden-of-life/raw-organi...
- https://www.iherb.com/pr/Madre-Labs-Zenbu-Shake-Meal-Replace...
- https://www.iherb.com/pr/Now-Foods-Tru-Food-Vegan-Natural-Be...
- https://www.iherb.com/pr/Nature-s-Plus-Source-of-Life-Vitami...
- https://www.iherb.com/pr/Orgain-Organic-Meal-All-In-One-Nutr...
- https://www.iherb.com/pr/PlantFusion-Phood-100-Whole-Food-Me...
- https://www.iherb.com/pr/MRM-Veggie-Meal-Replacement-Chocola...
- https://www.iherb.com/pr/Pure-Advantage-MRP-Meal-Replacement...
- https://www.iherb.com/pr/Vibrant-Health-Maximum-Vibrance-Ver...
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0038B1EOY/
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00KS6WUUE/
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0184DGHHO/
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B004VRGS7W/
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0088YQ8MO/
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N2M3RK0/
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N3Y7R1S/
And those are just a few results from a quick search for "meal replacement" across 3 different stores.
Now, I'm not against Soylent, and I'm definitely pro meal replacement products, but let's at least be honest here and call a spade a spade. Soylent's main differentiating factor is it's marketing pitch and that's ok, it doesn't have to be totally revolutionary to succeed.
EDIT: also, the btc bias comment was meant to generalize beyond just that example portfolio, because as a potential 'customer', I felt it should be made clear that btc is what I hold when I want liquidity, therefore it seems redundant to allocate any significant portion of my investment portfolio into an asset that I'm already going to be maintaining for everyday use and casual savings anyway.
> ... buy the top 10 coins weighted according to some measure, and rebalance once a week
As a relatively sophisticated investor myself, I'm not against the idea, but whether or not I'd invest in it would depend heavily on the implementation. And as of now with that example portfolio, I definitely wouldn't invest in it. Having a large btc bias when all the major cryptos are already highly correlated with btc seems redundant, and rebalancing once a week seems like overkill. Also, marketcap is a poor indicator of returns, in case you're considering using it for weighting.
Learning from somebody good doesn't automatically guarantee you'll end up being as good as them afterwards, for a variety of factors.
Morals and civic duty aside, it's hard to blame reviewers for skimming or 'phoning it in' under such conditions. With all these subtle politics and screwy incentive structures, I'm unfortunately not surprised at all that science is having a replication crisis.
On the contrary, it seems more likely that Musk would've not only thought about risks already for more than a couple hours, but that he would've consulted a lot of domain experts about such things before even deciding to take on such a project. Even the most optimistic business person isn't naive enough to take on something they see as a sure bet to fail. Not to suggest that there haven't been entrepreneurs attempting silly businesses before, but rather that one should pause and think about the possibilities of how something might work, before jumping to the conclusion that they already understand everything there is to know about a project, and that it definitely won't work.
As another comment mentioned elsewhere in this thread, a good entrepreneur's main skill is being able to figure out some unique/unorthodox way to make something work, and capitalizing on that. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone opposing these ideas are wrong or don't know what they're talking about, it just goes to show that a lot of people's default state is one of risk-aversion.
This is commonly said about speed reading, but it seems to me like a bit of a misunderstanding about what speed reading even is. Speed reading isn't about trying to retain the same level of comprehension on a single pass through a text as a normal speed pass through it. It's nothing more than an optimized skimming technique if you only take one or two passes through a text. But the idea is to leverage the time saved through 'speed reading', by putting that extra time into additional passes later on, thus making it more of an efficient spaced repetition[0] system than a reading technique. The idea being that you build your comprehension up with each pass, until you surpass the comprehension you would've had of it if you only took one normal speed pass through it, and in the end still use up about the same amount of time or less as a normal reading.
Continuing with the spaced repetition idea, speed reading also helps that along more than normal reading by making the things you've read more difficult to recall, which is good if you plan to review them again later to strengthen the memories. The book "Make It Stick"[1] has a pretty good overview of different scientifically proven learning techniques that are pretty interesting, and a lot of them overlap with the effects of speed reading + multiple passes.
Personally, since I'm dyslexic, I prefer applying this approach to audiobooks and listening to them at 3-4x speed, then re-listening to ones I liked later, all while taking notes as I go. And I have to say, that works out for me pretty well. My biggest issue is keeping track of which book I learned what from.
I'm not thoroughly familiar with monero's internals, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was well known that this was a deliberate design decision. Previously spent amounts don't actually run a risk of being double spent as they're only used anonymization purposes, as far as I understand. So why is this is considered "sloppy"?
Without a proper definition of what you're looking to be "explained", or a reproducible quantitative metric that you're using to to measure a successful "explanation" vs an unsuccessful one, no it isn't falsifiable. If you provide a detailed framework with clear quantitative conditions, then it might be falsifiable, but as of now, it is purely subjective and it is disingenuous to suggest that's an objective test.
For example, why would an explanation of functional programming (which could include any of a huge number of topics), have to explain to you why it exists? Since it is literally an extension of a specific branch of math, there need not be much more of a reason than 'for exploratory purposes', because often that's the only thing that drives many mathematical innovations.
Secondly, it's important to point out the implicit assumption in that argument, that an explanation of a topic is the only possible source for learning and understanding that topic, which is easily proven false by observing the way humans learn to walk. Do babies usually need a complete and thorough explanation of how to walk before they can master it? No, they go through trial and error and learn largely on their own via experience, and even if they could understand language that early, you'll still likely find it very cumbersome to try and explain to somebody how/why to walk in the kind of detail you seen to be asking of fp articles. Therefore, why can't a discipline/activity like programming or mathematics, also require experience learning to fully grasp? Is there a reason why the assumption was made that it can only be learned/understood via thorough explanation?
And while being able to explain something well is a decent rule of thumb to show competence in an area, it's not universal, as demonstrated by the learning to walk example. Similarly, you can't have a fixed minimum requirement for what qualifies as a good explanation to rate against, because understanding changes and evolves with time. For example, a "good" explanation of how the solar system works circa 300BC, would not be a very good explanation now.