Jan Tojnar jtojnar

On hiring Haskellers

Recently I noticed the number of the same two questions being asked again and again on different Haskell resources. The questions were “How to get a Haskell job” and “Why is it so hard to find Haskellers?” Although these two are coming from the opposite sides of the hiring process, the answer is really just one. There is a single reason, a single core problem that causes difficulties of hiring and being hired in the Haskell community, and we should clearly articulate this problem if we want to increase the Haskell adoption.

We all know that there are many people wishing to get a Haskell job. And a visible increase of Haskell jobs looks like there should be a high demand for Haskellers. The Haskell community has also grown like crazy past years. But still, why is it so difficult to hire and to be hired? Why can’t companies just hire any single person who demonstrates a deep knowledge of Haskell in blog posts, in chats, on forums, and in talks? And why do Haskell companies avoid hirin

Please don't include minified builds in your npm packages!

There's quite a few libraries on npm that not only include the regular build in their package, but also a minified build. While this may seem like a helpful addition to make the package more complete, it actually poses a real problem: it becomes very difficult to audit these libraries.

The problem

You've probably seen incidents like the event-stream incident, where a library was compromised in some way by an attacker. This sort of thing, also known as a "supply-chain attack", is starting to become more and more common - and it's something that developers need to protect themselves against.

One effective way to do so, is by auditing dependencies. Having at least a cursory look through every dependency in your dependency tree, to ensure that there's nothing sketchy in there. While it isn't going to be 100% perfect, it will detect most of these attacks - and no

In response to a request on Reddit, I'm writing up my thoughts on PVP upper bounds. I'm putting this in a Gist since I don't want to start yet another debate on the matter, just provide some information to someone who asked for it. Please don't turn this into a flame war :)

For those unaware: the Package Versioning Policy is a set of recommendations covering how to give version numbers to your packages, and how to set upper and lower bounds on your dependencies.

I'll start by saying: I support completely with the PVP's recommendations on how to assign version numbers. While there are plenty of points in this design space, the PVP is an unobjectionable one, and consistency in the community is good. On multiple occasions, I have reached out to package authors to encourage compliance with this. (However, I've always done so privately, as opposed to a statement on Reddit, as I believe that to be a more likely route to successful convincing.)

The issue aro

Installation of NixOS with encrypted root

These are my notes on instaling NixOS 16.03 on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (4th generation) with an encrypted root file system using UEFI.

Most of this is scrambled from the following pages:

Nginx FastCGI response buffer sizes

By default when Nginx starts receiving a response from a FastCGI backend (such as PHP-FPM) it will buffer the response in memory before delivering it to the client. Any response larger than the set buffer size is saved to a temporary file on disk.

This process is outlined at the Nginx ngx_http_fastcgi_module page manual page.

Introduction
Determine actual FastCGI response sizes
Setting the buffer size
Verifying results

	# Created by @PhilippIRL
	# This script patches Spotify's offline.bnk file (this file caches the remote config) to trick Spotify into thinking that your account is enabled for dev tools.
	# Spotify will automatically revert this local change after some time when it next fetches the remote config.
	# Of course you will have to completely close Spotify before running this script.

	import os, sys, platform

	systemPlatform = platform.system()

	if systemPlatform == 'Windows':

	{-# LANGUAGE MagicHash, UnboxedTuples #-}
	module Main(main) where

	import GHC.Exts ( addrToAny# )
	import GHC.Ptr ( Ptr(..) )
	import System.Info ( os, arch )
	import Encoding
	import ObjLink

	main :: IO ()

	// https://benjeffrey.com/greasemonkey-script-for-wikipedia-subheading-links
	// Available under the MPL 2.0
	// ==UserScript==
	// @key value
	// @name Wikipedia Subheading Links
	// @namespace com.benjeffrey.wikipedia-subheading-links
	// @description Add links to subheadings on Wikipedia pages.
	// @include http://.wikipedia.org/
	// @include https://.wikipedia.org/
	// ==/UserScript==

	from osgeo import ogr
	from osgeo import osr

	source = osr.SpatialReference()
	source.ImportFromEPSG(4326)

	target = osr.SpatialReference()
	target.ImportFromEPSG(3857)

	transform = osr.CoordinateTransformation(source, target)

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby
	require 'openssl'

	if ARGV.length == 0
	puts "This quickly gets ed2k links for anidb crequing."
	puts "Usage: #{$0} [files]"
	exit
	end

	def ed2k(file_name)