Posted by matijs
31/01/2010 at 12h18
Today I got an email from someone using a hotmail account. At the bottom was the following text:
Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection.
Sign up now.
The text “Sign up now” links to a URL that is completely opaque. Not in the old-style non-Web-2.0 company website way, where at least the domain name would tell you it’s a legitimate link to one of the company’s websites. No, it’s domain part was clk.atdmt.com.
If we/they/whoever expect people to click such links, how can we ever expect people stop clicking links like http://hotmail.com.xdfsf.cn/please/hack/me/totally?
It’s almost as bad as training people to give their email login and password to any site that asks them to.
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Posted by matijs
29/01/2010 at 12h47
Learning about monads is hard, and there seems to be no magic pill. Probably one reason is that they have several different uses. Many articles focus on one of those uses, making it hard to get the whole picture. On the other hand, articles that try to directly explain what monads are leave the reader wandering what they're good for. Some links.
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Brent Yorgey argues that any shortcut by focusing on a particular metaphor (e.g., monads are like burritos) will not work.
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Mark Dominus argues why monads are indeed like burritos.
- [Monads as Containers][cont] fits in nicely by abstracting away from burritos (or space suits) to containers. It goes on to talk about how this relates to IO and other uses for monads. I'm still working on reading through this article.
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sigfpe starts from the other end, showing how certain needs could automatically lead to monads. I haven't finished that one either, but so far it's been very insightful.
- I also found The Continuation Monad in Clojure very insightful. Again, it focuses more in the use and implementation, rather than abstract theory. I'm not yet sure whether the insights I myself got from it are actually correct. More on that later, perhaps.
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