michaelochurch

Haskell isn't that much of an investment when you consider what is gained. See, learning any new code base takes 3-6 months, and if the code is great, you learn a lot. If the code is garbage, well... perhaps you learn what not to do. Compared to the slog of learning a new corporate codebase, the effort involved in learning Haskell isn't that much... and the hope with Haskell is that the next software project you write won't be unmanageable... and I think that even average-case Haskell realizes it. (I focus on the average case because, of course, you can write shitty code in any language and you can write good code in any language, but languages differ in what tends to happen on average.)

I know of about 20 companies with Haskell deployments and no one has regretted the move.

Haskell has past "made it". At this point it's an embarrassment of riches. It's easy to get tied up trying to figure out which great Haskell library to use when the fact often is that any one of them is usually better than the leaders in most other languages.

I'm not that old (31). I just happen to remember a time when air travel wasn't horrible.

Older people are actually far more tolerant of discomfort. They just suffer more bodily pain when conditions aren't right.

5% being $40-50 means an airfare of $800 to $1000. If domestic flights cost that much, then we should consider airlines forgone for domestic travel and elect officials who'll make competent train service (not necessarily government run, but with infrastructural improvements and revisions of right-of-way laws that enable passenger rail competition) a #1 priority. As for international flights, the reason you see four-digit fares is the very high taxes on those, and the monopolies that airports have, and various other weird factors involving pilot unions and seniority tiers. NYC-HKG really should only cost about $850.

In 2015, aside from the people with upgrades, most people in first-class don't want to be there (i.e. they're not there because they're wealthy, but because their disabilities or age make coach literally impossible) and most actual rich people fly private because even first class isn't great.

I find that the only thing that I can do on planes, these days, is take a pill, make sure I get 2 armrests (I'm 6' and 195 pounds) and nod off-- and I don't sleep very well. If we had 300 mph trains at competitive prices like Europe and Japan have, I'd rather take those.

In the past they were spread around or sometimes in research (Bell), now they're clustered in the big 4 (Google, Apple, Microsoft, FB) and SF.

The issue is that people are mostly context. Some programmers do well at Google and wouldn't do well in another corporate environment, and vice versa. "10x" is real-- hell, sometimes it's 100x or 1000x-- but it ignores the fact that it's not always the same people who are 10x. Drop an R&D innovator into a subordinate role where he's just expected to "get shit done, fast" and churn tickets, and you'll likely have a bored 0.3x or toxic -5x programmer.

10x is shorthand for "as important to the business as an executive", and good engineers often are more critical than many highly paid executives. The problem is that the terminology is a bit negative on "average" programmers and the idea that "10x" is a permanent identity is a bit silly.

Try putting your shoes on the table in Europe at the same time claiming credit for someone's else work in Paris or Berlin.

Taking credit is a dick move anywhere, and if you get called on it, no one will respect you. The credit-takers who get away with it are the ones who do it in a way hat they won't get called out.

Feet on the desk or table would definitely make a person disliked in most companies. Again, Silicon Valley is an outlier, and the obnoxious Wall Street culture is pretty much extinct because most of the "alpha trader" jobs have been automated.

Also, never have seen so much politics and self-praise as in the US.

There is more tolerance (if not requirement, to some degree) for self-promotion in the US, and that's especially true of Silicon Valley. It's fairly regional, to tell the truth. The sort of person who gets funded in the Valley would be considered an overconfident tool in New York and be actively disliked in Chicago (as in, presumably, most of Europe).

That said, I know some people who've worked at Rocket Internet companies and the Samwers seem to take the stereotypically American boorishness to a whole new level.

They're subcultures. Just because they're "normative and reactionary" doesn't make them less so. Sadly, they're cases of opposition to mainstream misogyny with extreme misogyny. (Not to say that all of MRA is misogyny. Gender injustice is such a complex topic that it's inaccurate to believe that it would fall entirely on one "side", or even that there are sides. That said, much that's under the MRA tent is pretty horrifying.)

The high school and college casual sex scene (and, perhaps, the young-professional one) is one where, as an emergent property, bad men ("chads") who objectify women get most of the sexual yield. This is an expression of the mainstream, traditional misogyny that lives in our society. Misogynist patterns (man as conqueror, woman as defeated "slut") have been absorbed by men and women both. In long-term romantic relationships, most of the misogyny has disappeared, but it's still quite prevalent on "the sexual marketplace".

What PUAs and "Red Pill" neo-misogynists miss is that they're extrapolating behaviors observed in small subcultures to all women, which is unfair and wrong (both in the sense of being morally wrong, and in the sense of being incorrect). Take the PUA playbook, which is build on running exploits that work against damaged women. Men who pick that stuff up, learn that it actually works at its intended goal of high-frequency sexuality, and start deploying it on a regular basis... are going to conclude (falsely) that most women are damaged, sexually confused, and attracted to superficially charming but toxic "bad boy" types. Then when they get bored of the high-frequency sexuality (most long-term PUAs are clinical sex addicts) and try to have long-term relationships, they're going to fail at it (because PUA skills don't work on any woman you'd want to have a long-term relationship with) and blame that on women too.

To make it more bizarre, the neo-misogynists blame the bad female behaviors resulting from traditional/mainstream misogyny on "feminism". To them, mainstream misogyny's superficial coddling and infantilization of women (and the female misbehavior-- flakiness, bad taste in men, disloyalty-- that results from it) is somehow lumped in with this "feminism" thing that they don't really understand but reflexively hate.

To be pedantic about it, Java has two type systems. It has a bottom-up, mostly static, ALGOL-inspired type system with primitives and arrays (e.g. int, char[], double[][]) and a top-down, semi-dynamic type system for object types.

Maybe, but then the objective isn't so much 'use a static type system' as 'make Haskell palatable to a decent percentage of programmers'. I'm not saying it's impossible to do that, just that it's a different challenge and needs to be understood for what it is.

I agree. What would you suggest?

The issue, I think, that Haskell has is not that the language is hard to use, but that the type signatures can be anywhere from obvious to counterintuitive and, to a beginner, horrifying. The issue is that the "best" (most general, most mathematically accurate) type signature isn't always the one that gels with what we want from it.

An example would be the Lens type signature. It takes some on-paper, figure-it-out work to understand why this is the right type signature. It's this Rank-2 beast:

    type Lens s t a b = forall f. Functor f => (a -> f b) -> s -> f t

    type Lensish s t a b = L {get :: s -> a, set :: s -> b -> t}

Then there are the names. Personally, I don't find "monad" or "functor" to be that bad. They're new concepts that must be learned, but they're a lot easier (and more useful!) than OOP's 23 design patterns, most of which are horrible.

I feel horrible about joining a young business as an albatross instead of an asset.

Don't. It's not your fault. You don't even know that you're going to have any effect on their premiums and even if that happens, it's going to be a small effect in comparison to everything else that startups have to deal with.

If I start at my new job I'm afraid I will endanger the business and raise everybody's premiums.

Don't worry about that. You shouldn't feel guilty about anything... unless you're a health insurance lobbyist or executive or a legislator who fought healthcare reform, which you're obviously not.

Just focus on getting well and giving the people around you, your job, and most importantly, yourself, your best. Seriously, fuck everything else. This is your life.

Besides, an 18-person company that can't survive one employee getting cancer (and I suspect that it can) is a company that doesn't deserve to stay in business.

So: take the job, get covered, and work when you can.

I left my old job on good terms but have no idea how they could justify re-hiring an employee who left and may not be productive / able to work.

You'll be able to work, although not at 100%. It's not like life stops when you undergo chemo or radiation. Yes, those therapies are brutal (my mother had cancer, twice) and you'll probably need to take a few days off for each one, but you can still be productive some of the time.

Let's say that you need 6 cycles of chemotherapy (over 18 weeks) and that each involves three days during which you can't work. (There's a lot of variation. Some people drive themselves to chemo. Some people need a week to recover. Three days seems to be average, from what I've heard.) That's only 18 sick days. It's nowhere close to a deal breaker.

Focus on getting well. Don't feel guilty because you didn't do anything wrong.

Interesting way to put it.

I like to tell people that they program in languages where every type signature is "Any -> IO Any". It's technically true, but it gets some weird looks.

Scala and Clojure proved that far better languages than Java could actually be practical, even in "the enterprise" where Java reigned, but there are a lot of reasons why it's even better to be off-JVM and Haskell seems like a natural step. Also, as programmers get further along and more experienced, they tend to prefer static typing because dynamic typing simply doesn't scale on multi-developer projects unless you have a very disciplined and competent team-- which is not all that rare, but it's hard enough to make happen that the (perceived) negatives or difficulties of static typing are a rounding error in comparison.

VCs can probably tell a 5 apart from a 3, but it doesn't matter because neither a 3 nor a 5 is someone you want to fund. They can't tell a 7 from a 9, is what I'm saying. If they're not dealing with people of similar pedigree and experience, they may not be able to tell a 9 from a 5, even.

Driving across the street to Stanford "to identify and build new teams after seeing interactions" to scout talent isn't being proactive. It's what the rest of Sand Hill Road is already doing. If you're really serious about finding the best talent, broaden your search. Don't count the white Stanford males out, of course, but look in the "flyover" states, or for older programmers, or for women, or for parents who might be interested in programming because of the remote-work possibilities. Look outside of the US, even.

VCs are good at telling the 7s Who Look Like Them apart from the 5s Who Look Like Them, and that's about where it ends. That makes them better at assessing talent than a great many in the business world, but they're missing out on an incredible amount of information.

One-day crashes make headlines but aren't that damaging to the underlying economy unless it's already very brittle.

People in the Hacker News sphere both exaggerate the proportion of rich people who got there in decent ways (in reality, it might be 10% in the U.S. and 2% globally) and the degree to which Silicon Valley is an exception.

Not all wealth comes about because a 28 year old IPO'd their billion dollar social flimflam startup.

Worse yet, most of the 28-year-olds who are able to get the introductions and press support necessary to make a flimflam unicorn are the offspring of those resource extractors and corrupt officials and health insurance lobbyists. It's like money laundering, but with social assets (connections, pedigree) rather than financial ones.

The last one, in the 1920s, was caused by ill-managed prosperity, I would argue. You had sudden gains in agricultural productivity, which led to crashing commodity prices, which eventually led to rural poverty. One might have "expected" farmers to move into the cities and become the new middle class, and some did, but that doesn't work out so well when thousands or millions of poor, hungry people are doing the same thing. What was just "rural poverty" (of course, half the country was still rural) in 1925 became more widespread by 1927-28 (noticeable slipping demand for consumer products) and finally was recognized as a Great Depression after it tanked the stock market in 1929-32.

We have, in 2015, a lot of ill-managed prosperity. We have a culture in Silicon Valley that glorifies ill-managed prosperity. (What else do you call funding Clinkle?) And the same thing that happened to food prices in 1900-30 (slow at first, accelerating toward the end) is happening to almost all human labor in 1985-2015.

It may not end well. Including the damage brought by the war, I'd argue that most of Europe didn't get out of the Depression (manifest somewhat differently over there, especially in the fascist countries) until the late 1950s.

Nope. It really doesn't. It wants to be perceived as a meritocracy. That's a different goal entirely. It's the same privileged, well-connected "MBA culture", but in the 21st century, MBA stands for "Meritocracy By Assertion".

VC doesn't want not to be a clubby, relationship-based business, because who-you-know cultures are great at giving the well-connected an extortive power that they wouldn't otherwise have. ("Those who question the meritocracy will be de-meritized.") Sure, there are Silicon Valley engineers who want to live in (and believe in) meritocracy, but they're not the people with the power. You can get an employee position on merit, but if you want to ascend to the founder or investor ranks and get real equity in the Valley... you still have to be a child of the old empire.

It was hard to read the rest of this article after this critical miss.

Hell, how did you even knkw a bad reference was given?

I was able to find out what was said. Again, if all someone had said was "I don't like him", that wouldn't have been an issue. This person made negative, fraudulent claims about me and my past work performance in front of enough people that it was impossible for him to hide his tracks.

People who do bad things are usually awful at keeping secrets. There are exceptions, of course, but generally the traits that incline a person toward malice and petty conspiracy are not traits that make a person good at keeping secrets.

The person was able to hurt me because he, through a certain station, had the credibility that made what he might say about other people (such as me) matter. His opinions would be taken seriously. After taking a hit, I fixed the problem. It wasn't about vengeance. It was about doing just enough to fix the problem, then moving on. He didn't lose his job per se but I made him enough of a laughingstock that no one would take his word over anyone else's, thus making me safe from him.

After being attacked, it's not unreasonable to think that such defenses are needed in order to protect the future.

I wouldn't do that sort of thing after a "things didn't work out" situation, even if things ended badly or I got fired. I'm an adult; I'll move on. Likewise, I wouldn't retaliate against someone just for saying that I was a jerk or that he didn't like me. (Plenty of people say that I'm a jerk. That's fine.) There has to be a lot more, like fraudulent negative claims about past work performance... something that sounds objective and can be damaging... before I'm ready to fuck up someone's life. People have the right not to like me and to say that they don't; what they don't have the right to do is to deliberately damage my reputation with fraudulent or inaccurate claims.

This was a case where someone deliberately tried to damage me after I had moved far away from him. There was an act of war, and I fought back with force, and I won. I don't believe in starting fights but I do believe in ending them.

Word gets around, and people doing things that are inappropriate tends to get around faster. Obviously, you're not guaranteed to know about it every time that this happens. Sometimes you find out, sometimes you won't. It's when you do find out that you can try to do something about it (not that there's any change of getting the job back, but in terms of revenge on the people who got involved in your business).

Several times, I thought an interview went really well, and then they never got back to me. They don't give a reason.

Of course. That's typical, and usually the reason doesn't matter. It's rarely something scandalous that merits anything other but "eh, guess that didn't happen". Most of the time, getting turned down for a job is just a regular lack-of-chemistry thing not worth getting bent out of shape over.

If you pass on a candidate (before the offer stage) based on a back-channel reference, then you're being unethical but you probably won't get caught, because people rarely probe (or are even able to do so) into why someone pased. If you actually rescind an offer over a bad reference... you'll have to cut a sizable hush fee to come out safe.

That said, I can't tell at this point if your fascist schtick is trolling or serious, but it's disturbing either way.

Now that I'm older, I don't feel that way, because I know how the sausage is made and what the territory looks like. The people becoming "instantly rich and famous" are either (a) rich kids whose parents are laundering the family connections and wealth through VC or acqui-hire, or (b) deserving hard-working people whose "overnight" success took 10 years (we're just noticing them now, so it seems "instant", but there was a decade or more of hard work and sacrifice behind it) or (c) statistical outliers who can be likened to lottery winners.

I've looked into the soul of Silicon Valley and there is no there there. Don't get me wrong: there are individual companies and people doing great work and advancing the state of humanity, but the intersection between Real Technology and the celebrity personalities that dominate Silicon Valley is almost the empty set.

Most of the easy money is going to investors, upper management, and talentless celebrity hacks. People doing real work have a shot at some of the hard money, but it's not guaranteed that there will be any reward. (That's why it's called "hard money".)

As for "a big party going", well... there are a few things to keep in mind. From the ground, you might see "a cloud" as a concrete thing, but inside that cloud is just fog, and from the point of view of a water droplet there is just a semi-formless mist of other droplets. Things look different from outside than inside. Most people "in the party" are miserable about not being part of a more exclusive inner party. There's a certain fractal self-similarity to material striving that keeps at a constant level of misery (if they're inclined that way) no matter how far they rise.

Most likely, you were never invited to "the party" and you'll never get in, because it will have dissipated by the time you'd be eligible. The $5M/person acqui-hires (which, by the way, deliver 3 orders of magnitude less than that figure to the rank-and-file engineers actually building the shit) are favors to the well-connected parents of the founders, and the people making new discoveries in physics (or, in truth, doing just about anything that actually matters) are just as far away from the party crowd as you are.

If you're trying to get into the "startup scene" in 2015, my advice is, don't. Climbing the ladder this late is pointless because if you're not already most of the way up it, it'll dissipate before you've ascended. Focus on gaining lasting knowledge. Take the hard CS courses that pre-startup kids avoid because the workload interferes with "investor networking" events (that won't be fruitful, if you're doing real work, anyway). I'm not saying that you should dismiss CS or technology or programming or hard work (on the contrary, I'd say the opposite) but I think that you have no chance of getting into this bubble world (and who knows when the next one will rise? I can't predict that) if you're coming into it this late.

What you're seeing is like Vegas at night. From 20 miles out, it's a glamorous and almost magical city in the desert, brilliant and alluring at all hours. Then you get there and it's seedy and pushy and unpleasant. Then morning comes, the whole world goes to sleep, and now you're alone in this hot, sun-ravaged ghost town.

What you envy is not real. At least, not for people like you and me. Making things is real, but you don't need to be in "the scene" to do that.

I am not the most socially skilled person in the world. On the field, I doubt I'm even 50th percentile. Probably 35th, to be honest.

That said, judging from everything you've posted, you're a fucking poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect. So... I lolt. Nice job. You got a chuckle and two-thirds out of me.

To tell the whole story... "you should see the other guy." :)

I did eventually get my revenge. Six months later when I had the money, I hired a PI to figure out who gave the bad back-channel reference (it wasn't even someone I worked under) and found out that he was sleeping with one of his subordinates. Had the news dropped at his work, to his wife, and at his kids' school on the same afternoon. God works through people.

By giving a negative back-channel reference, you and your employer might be susceptible to a lawsuit. However, actually suing a former employer for something like that is probably a bad idea, because (1) it'd be hard to prove it (2) it would make you even less employable when other people find out about the lawsuit.

A termination lawsuit makes you less employable. I don't know that the same holds over a bad reference, because pretty much anyone would sue someone who damaged their careers in such a lasting and petty way. Getting fired is something that happens to everyone and while most of us aren't fired in an illegal way or for illegal reasons, most people will be fired in an unjust way at least once in a 40-year career, so the prevailing attitude (right or wrong) is that a successful, competent person will just dust himself off and find another job. Bad reference issues are much less common and most people (the rhetorical "reasonable man") would agree that you have to do something permanent and brutal about that.

Wrongful T lawsuits are dangerous to your career because (a) every company or manager will have to fire someone, given enough time, so it's far from clear that your opponent did anything wrong (b) they bring a lot of dirty laundry (on you and the company) into the public, and if there's no dirt on you, they make something up, and (c) your odds of winning aren't good unless you can easily prove discrimination.

When you sue over a bad reference, you're suing an individual (not "an employer") and you're also suing over something that would lead pretty much anyone to lawyer up, so the air about you isn't "he got let go and sued his company" but "someone tried to fuck up his reputation and he fought back".