externalreality

How appropriate to post this on hacker news. In my time as a software developer I have seen code and software architectures that would surely give even Reuben himself a chuckle.

Doesn't this boil down to the "I am willing but unable" situation? The man in this case was the "unwilling but able" situation. My question is wouldn't the man be shifted into the former situation if he just claimed to be now willing but to have forgotten his keys.

Bogus defense IMHO. Acquiring the ability to query a database is enough to constitute surveillance. I wonder if my land lord could use the same logic to legally record me in the shower.

We have to understand that, much like it's a military's responsibility (and desire) to go to war, it is the goal of spy agencies to gather all the intelligence it possible can. In both cases it is up to law making bodies comprised of "the people" to check these agencies' ambitions.

Why do we find it fascinating when open minded researchers show us what we all know to be true anyway, that is, our view of history (and the literature their in) are horribly skewed by extreme ethnocentrism. Yes, the first mathematics comes from the same place the fist civilizations come from which is the first place people found that could support grand scale civilization -- old Mesopotamia, the Nile, and so on. Ideas, like people, spread from there on out to the rest of the world. Fringe science instead like to divide and talk about how advances in science can be linked to (get this) mixing with and extinct sub-human species which has never been conclusively proven to even use tools more sophisticated than what can be picked up off the ground.

Most articles like this have a big ol' elephant in the room that only the bravest dare to approach.

Pay me not the statistician! I'll just take a survey and talk to a sample of individuals over coffee and will likely be able to give you a better estimate of who is most likely to quit. No need for a machine learning algorithm here.

Cool stuff though. I'm not a hater, just seems like overkill to me.

Not sure what the man's crime is here. Does he even remember his keys after sixteen months in the slammer? I don't even remember my Gmail password after 16 days of vacation. Basically, like the article says, it like not opening a safe for an inquisitor: you are damned if you do, you are damned if you don't. Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe.

We have a tendency to misconstrue, willfully misinterpret, or altogether ignore the law when it comes to prosecuting individuals who we believe to be standing on much lower moral ground. We do so because we want so badly to punish the accused that we are willing to reduce or eliminate greater good that some privacy laws are aiming to provide (i.e. Trumps silly travel ban which is based on his hatred of Muslims built upon imaginary news stories and personal exaggerations of particular recent events -- all laws out the window)

Brilliant! I often tell myself I was a better programmer when I was sixteen. Back then I would code directly to the problem only stopping to re-factor when things got so out of control that I couldn't make progress without getting distracted by the mess. Back then I would create video games, implement complex algorithms, things that seem too hard or time consuming for me now that I have 12 years experience as a real developer.

I think this is all because of years of brain-washing by programming media personalities who tell you what is best. What is best is getting your program to work! Yes, keep an eye on maintainability, readability, unit test your stuff and so forth but as the article suggests don't over-engineer. After all the idea is to get the thing to work and to be able to easily get it out to people (CI/CD).

Sometimes I think the sixteen year old me would be too bored to come to work -- he would be scared off by the fact that he has been working for six days and only manged to get a charting library working with react in a way that wouldn't fire up the local Bob Martin wannabe.

All developers think they are smart and have skills that are hard to acquire. Reality Check - anyone can be a programmer. If you want to be a part of an exclusive club go become a doctor or a lawyer or take up some other career that requires a professional degree -- think about it 3 years from now you can be a lawyer and about 7 years from now you could be well on your way to being a doctor -- or you could be a blue collar programmer with 3 years or 7 years experience respectively. What's the problem? You say you're too smart for a blue-collar job right.

In short programmers need to get over themselves. Just because your job requires reading (Rails tutorials) doesn't make you a genius that deserves $170,000/yr salary. Its funny because this haughtiness and ego of the average programmer is what sometimes makes otherwise wonderful work environments miserable places to work. I can't tell you how many job offers I've turned down because I encounter the 26 year old who introduces himself as the "Lead architect" of a simple monolithic rails application but now I digress.

The article describes something more akin to communism than socialism. Socialism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive . The (fictitious) professor's class room already ran much like the United States does before the (fictitious) experiment, that is, everyone is guaranteed at least the same lesson (socialism) and what you do with that lesson to benefit yourself is up to you (capitalism).

In reality and to follow the articles misguided analogy, most top universities curve (inflate) student grades much like the United States' overly capitalist system has established what is akin to corporate well-fair. In fact the U.S has gotten to the point where the only entities with rights are businesses and the wealthy - if you want rights and well-fair in the U.S. start a business its the only way. This is evidenced by the fact that only 2% of civilian legal issues in the U.S. ever see trial or legal mediation while the majority of all business legal situation get the full attention of the judiciary system.

More social programs in the U.S. in the U.S. apply to businesses not people.

I was debating whether on not to put that last sentence because I knew that it would lead to a technical discussion that was aside from the meaning of the question. My question is more -- why choose an `IO ()` as an example of something being called for its value (especially since the article isn't aimed at a Haskell audience)

I tried to ask the author the follow: (kept getting deleted as spam). Perhaps he will see it here but its unlikely due to the fact there are many comments as it is.

Hi John,

Are you familiar with Jackson Structured Programming?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_structured_programming

Notice how the focus in on using control flows that are derived from the structure of the data being processed and the processed data. Notice how the JSP derived solution in the Wikipedia example lack if-statements.

Pattern matching allows ones to map control flow to the structure of data. What are your thoughts on that? I think inversion of control has other benefits but I don't think it has much to do with elimination of `if` conditionals, the pattern matching does that.

Also, I noticed one thing:

In the article you mention `doX :: State -> IO ()` as being called for its value and suggest that if you ignore the value the function call has no effect. Isn't it the case that a function of that type usually denotes that one is calling the function for its effect and not for any return value? Its value is just an unevaluated `IO ()`.