shae

I think cost is a large factor because retirees have fixed income. If insurance pays for a two thousand dollar hearing aid that lasts three years, you get it. If insurance doesn't pay, you become socially isolated.

Do you know of other hearing aid options cheap enough to not require being covered by insurance?

While writing this blog post I've discovered that way more people have hearing problems than actually buy hearing aids. The largest part is the expense, but another part is the stigma. No one wants to wear a hearing aid if they're under the age of forty or so.

I asked Tympan about this, they said they've partnered with Boys Town National Research Hospital and with the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders.

Those two powerful partners are working on relaxing the laws some so that small companies/teams could create something like the Tympan.

I'm still not sure if the Tympan is a "human use approved hearing aid" or if it's just for research purposes. Hopefully I'll have discovered that before I publish part 2.

But how do you type when your fingers are on top of the keys? I suggest braille display keycaps instead of LED screen keycaps!

The workman layout seems to have the most thought behind it: https://workmanlayout.org/

If I put in effort to tune the markov keyboard, I'll use the workman approach, right now the code isn't as smart as it could be.

Well I certainly enjoyed this, it was great fun to write!

If you have any suggestions or ideas, I'm always happy to hear them!

I have such a thing in Haskell: https://github.com/shapr/sporkle/blob/master/app/Main.hs

It's not Rust, but it is a really crappy exercise tracking app I wrote for teaching a class.

Thing different about my code: I build the HTML in the source itself, and I don't use React

Haskell + Spock + Postgres, turns out I'm more productive there than with Python/Flask/postgres, even though I have far more experience in Python.

So, create crisis, stress, and confusion... then hire media to make you appear charismatic, and you could be the next president?

My favorite use of TidalCycles is in the Canute performances: http://canute.lurk.org/

My favorite description of monads is "decorators for function composition". You write a chunk of code to compose functions in one place.

That turns out to be extremely useful in many cases.

Even so, I don't believe that monads are the only way to write good code.

Yes, I had no problems getting permits, I was describing the business culture.

I'm a US Citizen who was self-employed in Sweden for about six years (1999-2006). I was very frustrated at how hard it was to get things to 1. where I was approved to do work and 2. get feedback so I could 3. get paid.

On the other hand, now that I'm back in the US I get tired of the continual rat race and wish I had as much vacation as everybody else got in Sweden. The US doesn't give decompression time, but Sweden didn't allow for as much deep focus time.

Mind you, I also had communication problems. I expected people to clearly say yes or no and then stick to that. The Swedish politeness took awhile to interpret.

Anecdotally, I see much commercial and personal use of Haskell. Have you looked at the other comments in this thread?

Alternatively, why do you think there aren't small fun toys and/or commercial usage of Haskell?

This past weekend I wrote a program to read from Atlanta's mass transit JSON feed and display the times of upcoming trains in my tmux status line:

https://github.com/shapr/tmuxmarta/

I'd argue we're still working for hours rather than accomplishments.

I spent a few years self-employed, I would bid a money cost for an accomplishment based on how many hours it would require. If my bid was accepted, I was then immediately motivated to find a more efficient approach so I had more of both time and money.

Every iteration of that approach improved my ability to accomplish tasks in smaller amounts of time.

Get out of your comfort zone, pursue novelty. I'm 45, I have all my hair. In my 20s I taught myself the dvorak layout, In my 30s I learned mountain unicycling and guitar, in my 40s I learned to knit and play drums. Learn new skills, stretch your body and your mind. One day I'll learn how to use semicolons!

I'd pay $1k a month for quality higher education on topics that interest me. My interests have a wide range, but I mostly want to learn math and physics and university classes are too expensive for their quality.

I've been teaching programming to someone with zero computer experience. This person had difficulty with mutating variables in Python, so I switched to teaching them Haskell. This person has found the equational reasoning/substitution of Haskell much easier to mentally model.

I'd say about two thirds of the people I teach have no difficulties learning Python, and one third do much better learning Haskell because then variables don't vary!

I'd like to go get a PhD and teach, but it pays less than half of what I make as a software dev. I wish I could somehow teach science & tech and also make money.

Isn't this obvious because if you are friends with someone, it's likely they have more friends? A friends graph would end up with many branches and just a few roots, right?

Are citizens also allowed to hack into government computers as part of this decision?