What's in my Tabs? (Wed, 17 Feb, 2016)

Feb 17, 2016     

This is the start of a new post series titled “What’s in my Tabs?”

In it, I go through each of my open browser tabs and explain why its there. In the future I won’t repeat tabs that have been previously discussed unless their presence has a new significance. I’m also hoping that this will help me clear out old tabs that I’ve never got around to reading, and give me a higher-level understanding of the tabs that I have open.

Without Further Ado…

Index

  1. Personal Unread Email
  2. Silverpond Inbox
  3. Personal Calendar
  4. Silverpond Calendar
  5. Tax Return
  6. Google Keep
  7. Tidal
  8. Bows and Arrows Localhost
  9. Strongly-Typed Recurrent Neural Networks
  10. Basic Algebra, A W. Knapp
  11. Kan Extensions
  12. Freer Monads, More Extensible Effects
  13. Trust - Wikipedia
  14. Why the Assholes are Winning: Money Trumps All
  15. Monad transformers, free monads, mtl, laws and a new approach
  16. Decision Trees Are Free Monads Over the Reader Functor
  17. Tropical geometry
  18. Production Haskell
  19. Top Reddit Videos

Tabs

Tab 1 - (Sticky) Personal Unread Email

I generally keep my personal email open to a search of ‘unread’.

This is because I make my mailing lists skip the inbox entirely.

This stops me from getting email notifications about mailing lists.

Tab 2 - (Sticky) Silverpond Inbox

Work email. Just open to the inbox.

Tab 3 - (Sticky) Personal Calendar

What you would expect. Pick up the dry cleaning; friends coming over for dinner.

Tab 4 - (Sticky) Silverpond Calendar

Work calendar. Meetings,

Tab 5 - (Sticky) Tax Return

Oh my god I really have to do this. I thought that opening up the tab would help me get round to it…

Evidently not.

Tab 6 - (Sticky) Google Keep

I have a small collection of notes that I share between my devices. I use Google Keep for that purpose. It seems like a great simple solution. It has additional features such as uploads and reminders.

I like it a lot.

Tab 7 - (Sticky) Tidal

I thought I’d try out Tidal for a few reasons:

  • It has Hi-Fi options for audio quality
  • The interface looked slick
  • It has some exclusive content

I’m thinking about quitting it because:

  • The audio quality hasn’t made a noticible impact on me
  • A lot of the catalog doesn’t seem to be able to take advantage of increased output quality anyway.
  • The interface isn’t very well suited to the kind of metadata that comes along with classical music recordings.

Tab 8 - (Sticky) Bows and Arrows Localhost

The development address of this blog.

I’ve tried to use Bows and Arrows to help consolidate and structure my thoughts, so I have a constant stream of drafts being generated and it’s convenient to keep a development copy open.

The blog runs on Jekyll, which gets the job done, but I’m not completely happy with it. It has a lot of external support, so I’m content to go with the lowest-common-denominator static site generator here.

Tab 9 - Strongly-Typed Recurrent Neural Networks

Noon Silk linked me to this paper through SciRate.

SciRate is an interesting proposition - “Social Academic Paper Perusal”, or “Facebook for Professors”.

The paper talks about ways of structuring RNNs that allows for nice statically verifiable properties.

Once the networks have been constructed, they can then be run in a recognizable fashion.

Tab 10 - Basic Algebra, A W. Knapp

I’d love to level up my math skills. I thought this might help.

When you read “Basic Algebra” here… Well, I’m stuck at the preface for the time-being.

Tab 11 - Kan Extensions

At the most recent Haskell meetup we discussed Freer Monads (Tab 12). During the course of the meetup Ken Scambler lent his assistance in understanding some of the category-theoretic concepts involved and also provided some links giving deeper explanations. One of those concepts was Kan Extensions.

This is one of the links that Ken referred us to.

P.S. Ken is an absolute beast! Don’t pass up the chance to talk to him about this kind of stuff!

Tab 12 - Freer Monads, More Extensible Effects

This is the paper that we went over at the most recent Melbourne Haskell meetup.

It is a very interesting development of the Free-Monads idea, removing even the Functor constraint from the Monad instance. It turns out that when you do this, you expose a lot of deep connections to other category theory concepts.

As Marina Lehner says - “All Concepts are Kan Extensions”.

Tab 13 - Trust - Wikipedia

As part of an idea I’ve been having about why certain Agile practices become so cultishly ingrained into the software development landscape, I’ve come to believe that a lot of the fundamental drivers boil down to “Trust”.

Good old Wikipedia provides a nice survey of what else I should dig into in order to improve the foundation of my understanding of trust.

Tab 14 - Why the Assholes are Winning: Money Trumps All

This article’s premise can be summed up as “the multiple dimensions of corporate performance and reputation are not that highly correlated - why?”

Hypotheses range from the Just World fallacy, to Pavlovian conditioning.

Littered with paradoxical anecdotes and examples, you would expect the text to be entertaining, but this felt like a major slog to read.

The article also diverges into the evolution of organizational studies and how they have de-emphasized the human aspects of the workplace in favour of profitability and productivity. This is explained as and outcome of the decline of prominence of “Industrial and organizational psychology” within psychology departments. This is backed up by an anecdote.

The conclusion ends with quotes from the Pope, and the United Nations. With a call for changes in research and public policy.

Light on data and details, and falling back on emotional and anecdotal arguments while simultaneously lacking the persuasive or literary power to make such weak arguments bearable - I don’t recommend reading it. Thankfully I can close the tab now.

Tab 15 - Monad transformers, free monads, mtl, laws and a new approach

This blog post mainly acts as a survey of the history of effect encoding techniques in Haskell. Presumably with something new at the end. I’m reading it to make sure that I haven’t missed anything that connects the dots to my current understanding of the landscape.

It’s a good read and nicely presented. I recommend it!

Tab 16 - Decision Trees Are Free Monads Over the Reader Functor

This is an interesting idea - That decision trees emerge when you construct a free monad over the reader functor… The why part is straight-forward, but the implications are more interesting. This provides us with insight into new methods of construction and interaction with decision trees, as well as raising questions about what the canonical form of a decision tree is, and what the generalization of a Free Reader implies about the abstraction of the concept of decision trees in general, and how this relates to recursion schemes and combinators.

I feel like I’ll have to read this a few times.

Tab 17 - Tropical geometry

Tropical geometry is the algebra of minimums and maximums.

I’ve been exploring the concept as an interpretive technique in conjunction with a new concept I’ve been constructing that I call perceptive graph theory. I think this should allow for the projection of value-determination systems onto abstract action-perception systems.

Stay tuned!

Tab 18 - Production Haskell (YouTube)

I opened this from a Reddit /r/haskell thread.

I’m very interested in other people’s experiences with running Haskell in production, so I try to hunt down as much information on the topic as I can.

Tab 19 - Top Reddit Videos (YouTube)

There was another /r/haskell thread by someone who had put together a simple Haskell program to scrape the top Reddit YouTube video links, and create weekly play-lists. The application runs on Heroku and is simple and focused. I like it!

This is the channel where those play-lists are created.