mjhoy

I love Purescript, but I think in some ways it is even more arcane than Haskell for a beginner.

e.g.,

    > :t (+)
    forall a. Semiring a => a -> a -> a
    
    > :t (&&)
    forall a. HeytingAlgebra a => a -> a -> a

There are also the monoid "laws" (not checked in Haskell):

    empty `smash` x = x -- left identity
    x `smash` empty = x -- right identity
    (x `smash` y) `smash` z = x `smash` (y `smash` z) -- associativity

Your definition doesn't fit any of these. (Edit: you've rewritten to meet the first two; but it is not associative.)

I moved to Minneapolis a few years ago from Boston.

I felt a good deal safer biking in Boston, where the infrastructure is terrible, drivers are generally much more aggressive, and yet, I felt, more accepting of cyclists.

In Minneapolis cars seem to be frightened, angry, or just not paying attention with regard to cyclists.

The latter. That’s my point.

> You can't always give a wide berth because bike lanes in the US are usually very narrow.

That doesn't mean you can't give wide berth. Take the lane if the bike lane puts you too close to car doors. If there's one thing I've learned from biking in US cities, it is to never trust bike lanes to be safe.

Especially with an explicit warning sent out about the eclipse.

Interesting. I was in Wyoming and noticed this as well. During the partial eclipse it was impossible to tell that the sun was dimming except that I could measure this with my camera's light meter. My friend hardly believed me when I informed her the sunlight had been halved three times (losing three stops) -- except that we could feel this difference in how chilly it had become. It is only as the last bit of sun is obscured that the world goes dark in any noticeable way.

This is what I have found. When I travel, I want to travel deep, so to speak, and suck out all of the marrow. I have tried to do work while touring by bicycle and, while work could easily finance my trip indefinitely, I was seeing much, much less by bringing it along. Better to save up for shorter trips, free to wander as I will.

The keyboard is... different. I would recommend anyone try it out at an Apple store before buying, absolutely. I actually love it.

> but significantly weaker

Just curious, could you expand on this? What makes it weaker? Is it that affine types allow either consuming or not consuming a type?

Other than getting papers from contributors, are there ways in which Magit becoming part of Emacs would significantly change the development workflow?

> represent emails with meaningful formatting

For basic formatting (bold text, headings, lists, links, etc etc), Emacs can render using its built in web browser. The "richer" it is, the more screwy the formatting gets. Usually you can at least read the emails.

You can easily pipe an email to your web browser of choice. This works fine but isn't exactly what you want to be doing all the time.

For my work, I am mostly dealing with plain text and attachments. The rich stuff is usually the email I care less about anyway. I don't think I'd want to use mu4e if I was dealing with rich content often. You can do it but it definitely slows you down.

> There is absolutely no need in wasting time scoring nerd points.

Well said.

But: I have been using mu4e + Emacs for email for about two years now. I would seriously recommend anyone who already uses Emacs -- and especially if you use org-mode -- to look into it. Not because you score nerd points for reading & composing email in Emacs (frankly, you look ridiculous) but because it might just hook in perfectly with your workflow. I hardly touch any of the power user features, I do very little customization, and still it is by far the best way for me to manage my email. I also use it side by side with a web client (both Fastmail and Gmail) and switch if I need to.

I have not! Thank you.

I think you've got to try different meetups and find ones that work for you, especially if you are more interested in learning things than in networking. The few Ruby meetups I've been to, for instance, were well attended, but they seemed more industry/newcomer focussed and talks were not particularly engaging for me. In contrast, the Boston Haskell and Vim meetups were super vibrant and full of energy and interesting talks. One presentation by John Wiegley changed my whole development workflow. In Minneapolis I'm struggling a bit more to find vibrant programmer meetups, it seems to be a much more quiet, conservative tech scene here.

Right. My point is I only use instant on a very specific occasion, maybe once every two years, so a subscription turns me away. I'll still probably try it, though!

As someone who would love to buy this for long bicycle trips, I'm a bit turned off by the subscription model.

I know you want to hook me with a steady supply of superior coffee that's quicker to make, but I love the ritual of brewing my own pour-over coffee too much to think I'd give that up.

This reminds me somewhat of an interesting recent video from GM Simon Williams [1], analyzing a queen sac from a real game. He disagreed with the computer's favoring black, and my very uneducated guess about this is that the position is odd enough -- white is down a queen and an exchange, but all of black's pieces are tied up in defense -- that a GM can better understand the implications.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YX17fljs4E

I've done a little of this with 9-12 year olds. The most important thing is quick feedback and keeping it simple. They absolutely loved making websites. I taught them enough HTML to get started and set them up with a editor and preview window. I wrote a little web app for this, so that they were editing a "live" site they could show their parents when they went home (or keep working on it, on another computer). It was super simple and just had the functions they needed. Also, as someone else suggested, using the inspector tool to mess around with existing websites was really fun for them.

Another project was using arduinos -- and I even got them writing C, which more or less worked. You didn't need too much code to blink a light and they loved that. The mix of coding and the hands-on wiring up their breadboards kept it engaging. We did a little project where the light blinked with a frequency related to a temperature sensor, so when you put your finger on it, it would blink faster. One kid had the grand idea of having it blink faster when cooler and slower when warmer, and watching him figure out the math was great.

The trick is that he was under time pressure and if he miscalculated faced a mate in one, so it was somewhat risky (and why Svidler was surprised he played it).

Ah, but when you're young and have many carless friends, #2 can be a very good thing!

I read through the links in the comment above, and I'm not convinced by many of the arguments, including the theoretical voting situations, because it seems they are quite unrealistic in practice, while the current two-party system has many times given us a bad result that would have been solved by ranked choice. I'm thinking about actual Maine politics here. (Although I grant that this has the potential to change the existing liberal/conservative dynamics entirely.)

I'm much more convinced about the argument against complexity, because I don't trust the state government much to design something clear and simple, and it's not yet clear to me that ranked choice is "simple".

I hope they do.

In any case I'm very excited to see what happens.

How often is this sort of thing actually a problem? Are there examples of elections that turned out this way?

I'm also very proud of Maine.

We had record high turnout this year, when much of the country had low turnout. Perhaps because of the important ballot items such as this one. I also think Maine's splitting up our electoral votes helps, too. I say this as someone from the 2nd district who hates that Trump got our vote!

I remember visiting Olot, in Catalonia, and thinking the mountains must trap pollution in the valley. It certainly looked striking:

http://mjhoy.com/images/barca/10122014-P1200997.jpg

Well. org-mode has its own extensible URI system of sorts.

My email links are formatted mu4e:msgid:<message identifier>. My git links are magit:<project path>::commit@<git SHA>. Remote files are just file:/ssh:<user>@<server>:<remote path>. You could write your own for whatever you want, gmail links say (although then you could just use a plain old HTTP link).

> nothing else seems to work as far as productivity

What doesn't work, exactly?

If you're trying to replace note taking on paper, you might want to dip a toe into Emacs and org-mode land and see how it feels. (My suggestion is to just start out slowly and play around with it.)

If you don't feel productive in just manipulating text, I'd check out vim. It really is the superior text editor!

Personally, I think you should begin with plain ole emacs, and start with the emacs tutorial, and work your way up from there. Once you're comfortable navigating buffers, creating files, and reading emacs manuals, check out the org mode manual. If you find yourself intrigued, you'll dig deeper.

For 1: I think the best way to start is to simply schedule your important TODOs (C-c C-s), so that you see them on the weekly agenda view. This is how I started, and then I slowly started to incorporate things like tags when I realized I needed some more organization. (And make sure to add your org files to `org-agenda-files`.)

I love Org mostly for its ability to link to stuff. In my mind it's the big feature that sets it apart from using, say, a separate application to do my task management. For instance:

- When I'm reading email (in emacs), I can quickly create a TODO that links back to the current email I'm reading (most of my TODOs, in fact, link to an email, so this is very useful),

- For my org file where I keep notes about the servers I'm running, I might link to a specific line on a remote apache config,

- For a bug report I might link to a specific git commit in a project to look at later

Any TODO that is important gets scheduled, so that it is linked to from the agenda view. In this way it's very hard for me to lose track of anything, despite most of my work communication happening through email. In fact I now prefer email over using something like Basecamp, because org makes it easier for me to manage!

You can, but strictly speaking you have to say, "big theta of the average case"!