21 ms·

Why Co–Star Uses Haskell

142 points by _query 5y ago

quantified 5y ago
Something lovely here about leveraging formal correctness for delivering astrology.
- plafl 5y ago
  If it compiles your predictions are bug free
- pxc 5y ago
  Mathematically-inclined people surviving by calculating outstandingly accurate and precise charts for producing superstitious bullshit is an ancient tradition
  - 3maj 5y ago
    The Day trading quant gets cold sweats as he reads this.
    - pxc 5y ago
      this made me laugh out loud in public
  - dudeinjapan 5y ago
    One of my favorites is Jantar Mantar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jantar_Mantar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jantar_Mantar
  - uptownfunk 5y ago
    Perhaps you are referring to the traditional sun-sign astrology found in tabloids/magazines? There are claims that you can get much more precise by looking at ascendant-based astrology which varies down to the minute and lat/long of the place you were born. Or are you referring to both? Are there sources out there in the literature proving/disproving modern Astrology? There is this article on Gauquelin's Mars effect for instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      You mean "selection bias shows statistical significance whereas a larger study that eliminated this bias showed no correlation" precise looking?
- abeppu 5y ago
  On their front page: > Most horoscopes ask what month you were born. Co–Star asks what minute. > Access to astrology this accurate has historically been restricted to those with access to personal astrologers—now these predictions can be anyone's. I mean, anyone can _ask_ what minute you were born. But what on earth can "accurate" mean in this context? I'm sure there's some modern tech we can use to measure your skull with great precision and detail, but I'm guessing that doesn't improve the predictions of phrenology.
  - amznbyebyebye 5y ago
    Methods requiring minute level precision have been in use for centuries.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
This is illegible with that background (in portrait mode on an ipad pro).
- adhoc_slime 5y ago
  same with chrome 95.0.4638.69. whatever they intended it to look like, they failed. edit. Its a dark mode issue, styling not being applied to the background rendering
- mpweiher 5y ago
  Lucky you.
- 0xcoffee 5y ago
  On desktop the background follows the mouse. I couldn't focus on anything else, I move my mouse around while I read. If the author is reading these, please consider using a static background.
  - babelfish 5y ago
    I couldn't finish anything past the first paragraph because the background made me nauseous
    - magicalhippo 5y ago
      Firefox reader view FTW...
  - pxc 5y ago
    I only see that weird background stuff if I have my global dark mode browser extensions on when I turn that off, I can't see any background effects at all
platz 5y ago
A fairly low quality article, imho. The points listed could almost as easily apply to Java or C#
- bachmeier 5y ago
  > You don’t mutate by default. > makes illegal states unrepresentable Maybe recent versions of Java are different, but I don't recall either of those statements applying when I used Java.
  - odyssey7 5y ago
    The whole idea of OOP is you have mutable data coupled with the methods that mutate it.
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      You can do immutable data structures with OOP. The problem is that you can also do mutation.
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        Compilers / runtimes for most OOP languages don't really put the same level of optimization into operations with immutable structures as they do with mutable ones, because the mutable paradigm is largely how the languages are (intended to be) used. There are exceptions, of course, but you are leaving a lot on the table when you try to shoehorn one into the other.
  - twic 5y ago
    Java doesn't force you to do either of those, but it allows it, and doing so has been standard programming advice in Java for at least a decade. See item 13, "Favor immutability", in Effective Java, the bible of Java programming, published in 2001: https://www.pascal-man.com/navigation/faq-java-browser/java-concurrent/Effective_Java.pdf https://www.pascal-man.com/navigation/faq-java-browser/java-... I can't find a concrete citation for "makes illegal states unrepresentable" (does anyone know the history of this phrase?), but it was certainly part of conversations i was having in 2012.
claytonjy 5y ago
I appreciate and agree with the attitude/approach here. I suspect the author may be a bit removed from modern python, as the community is increasingly taking a similar stance. Python is not Haskell, but Python in 2021 with tools like type-hints, mypy, (frozen)dataclasses, Pydantic, etc. is trying to address at least the latter two points here (type-driven & illegal-states-unrepresentable). I'm not aware of ways to enforce function purity in python (do any linters complain about input modification or out-of-scope references?), but I try to make functions as pure as possible regardless of language or domain anyways. I don't mean this as a flamewar, Haskell seems like the right choice for OP. I love how a language like python is making more of these benefits available to a wider audience and I wish more folks embraced these recent advances.
- named-user 5y ago
  >tools like type-hints, mypy, (frozen)dataclasses, Pydantic, etc. is trying to address at least the latter two points here (type-driven & illegal-states-unrepresentable) At some point you have to admit to yourself that it's the wrong tool for the job, when is this going to be? Dependency/environment management is poor as well given how popular the language is. I believe it's popularity is similar to that of PHP in the past; flooded with carefree users. I would strongly advise against using python for anything other than PoC/experimental endeavours. It's a scripting language, and should be used as such.
  - gmfawcett 5y ago
    I don't know. I like Haskell, but practically I would still choose a dynamic language "with benefits" over Haskell for BE development. [1] For example, Python frameworks like FastAPI can enforce type discipline at the system boundary, and frankly it feels like a development sweet-spot. Rigour at the API level, but fast-and-loose reasoning can proceed as normal in the implementation. It's a worse-is-better approach, to be sure, but it has a very appealing effort:result ratio. [1] with the normal caveats -- every project is different, everybody's notion of a "backend" is different, etc. Haskell might be the sanest solution to some backend challenges.
mpweiher 5y ago
The writeup appears to be about as well-founded as the domain. "Increased abstraction means that you can write things much quicker and more simply than in another language." Except for any other kind of higher level language. > [Haskell is much more bullet-proof than] IF NATALPLANET == “MARS” As is any other non-stringly-typed language, so everything other than Tcl. And even Tcl is misunderstood, it's actually pretty awesome for its intended purpose. And of course you can write stringly typed code in Haskell just as much as you can in any other language. and so on.
- projektfu 5y ago
  Comparing to Python and Javascript, referencing an unused name in source without reaching it in your execution path will not cause an error. a=4 3+a 3+a or 3+b in a strongly-typed language, that would break compilation. So, Java and C will not compile those, either, but the article doesn't go into other cases where Haskell types are more useful for preventing various errors, such as Data.Result, which can either be a result of the type you expect or an error type, and which the compiler requires you to handle both cases. I think the write up would have benefited from some of the more advanced cases like this.
  - mpweiher 5y ago
    This isn't due to static typing (you appear to be mixing up strong vs. static typing). This will also not compile in Smalltalk. Nothing to do with static typing at all.
- igouy 5y ago
  > [Haskell is much more bullet-proof than] IF NATALPLANET == “MARS” And perhaps there might be something like a Python Enum HOWTO https://docs.python.org/3.11/howto/enum.html https://docs.python.org/3.11/howto/enum.html
  - samhh 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with Python, but if those are traditional enums and not sum types then you're missing out on a lot in terms of domain modelling.
AreYouSirius 5y ago
ASTROLOGY.............
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
I see a lot of python and js/node as basis of comparison against Haskell which seems really odd. I would be comparing Haskell more to Scala/Elixir/etc if you're trying to make an argument for Haskell.
- romero-jk 5y ago
  To Scala yes, to Elixir? wut?
  - remexre 5y ago
    If you don't have experience with both, "Elixir is FP" and "Haskell is FP" makes it sound like "Elixir and Haskell are comparable" ig?
- dudul 5y ago
  Why? Anything can be compared to Haskell. It's ok to compare things that are very different.
_query 5y ago
Haskell is really an underrated super power for building backends and web apps. The ecosystem has improved quite a lot over the recent years. With the Haskell Language Server and the Haskell Plugin for VS Code there's now really nice editor support. The language itself is also improving at a good pace, e.g. the latest release of GHC (The haskell compiler) added support for dot-notation, so you can now write `someValue.someField` as you might know from other languages. If you're curious about giving it a try and are doing web dev, check out IHP, haskell's largest web framework: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ (Disclaimer: I'm founder of the company that makes IHP)
- toomanydoubts 5y ago
  I've been getting lots of ads about IHP on reddit lately. The ads are really bad, which led me to believe IHP would be of equally bad quality, but looking at IHP homepage now I'll just have to try it out sometime. Now, I have some questions. As a user, why should I use IHP instead of Yesod or Servant? Can I create rest and especially graphql apis or is it more focused on building old-school server side rendered pages?
  - _query 5y ago
    Thanks for the feedback on the ads! We've been experimenting a lot with different ad formats recently. I'll make sure this is fixed. (Update: Fixed now, thanks again for the honest feedback) In a comparison between IHP and Yesod I think that IHP is designed for people that have only very little to no haskell experience. IHP brings a lot of conventions and code generators to get you up and running very quickly, while Yesod gives you more flexibility (flexibility might be more challenging when you're just starting out with haskell. E.g. what DB library do you want to pick? In Yesod you have many options, in IHP we'll provide one out of the box). Check out the IHP documentation and compare it to the Yesod docs, you'll quickly see the difference :) Also if you want to check out some reviews of people already using IHP, you can find a few longer ones on our G2 page https://www.g2.com/products/ihp/reviews https://www.g2.com/products/ihp/reviews > Can I create rest and especially graphql apis or is it more focused on building old-school server side rendered pages? At the start IHP was focussed a lot on server-side rendering. Now you can also use it for building REST APIs. GraphQL is not yet supported, but it's coming in the future. We're also right now working on a generic REST API layer with a bundled JS SDK. It will allow you to query your database, create and delete models and keep everything in sync with a realtime sync engine. Here's a JS code example: const tasks = await query('tasks') .orderBy('createdAt') .fetch() On the backend we use Postgres Row-level-security Policies to make sure that a user can only access his own data. Here's a demo react component that uses the new JS APIs: https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp-datasync-demo/blob/master/frontend/app.jsx#L12 https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp-datasync-demo/blob/m... Docs are still in progress, but here's a draft https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/commit/39baa4aa23cc639d47e3c7d966c02a68bae7661d#diff-3a0b6ff3c4ed134f65d071e41dbdc6198d503082ddf9a27ffb33faa6f1dff8a7 https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/commit/39baa4aa23cc6... :)
teddyh 5y ago
Forgive me if I don’t want to read anything written by someone making an astrology product. I may be open-minded, but I have limits where it comes to people who I know are trying to influence me into believing stupid false things to their benefit. I mean, if they’re fine with claiming that astrology is real to enrich themselves, why should I believe anything else they say?
- odyssey7 5y ago
  Many consider astrology to be a creative and self-reflective process. Definitely would want to hear technical ideas from that kind of person. In any case, it’s up to the reader to decide where they will look for ideas and what they find valuable.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    In the current climate of censoring “misinformation”, astrology and its ilk should have been the first to go. Propagating superstitions and encouraging magical thinking is, if anything is, a destructive force on critical thinking.
    - odyssey7 5y ago
      On the other hand, astrology is decentralized and requires individuals to find their own values, and to actively interpret the meaning of things they read. I find that being this engaged with something enhances critical and creative thinking. And in the case of astrology, self-awareness.
      - throwamon 5y ago
        Oh, so it's just like philosophy and science, except without any philosophical or scientific backing.
        pxc 5y ago
        No. Astrology is a somewhat mystified, ritualized form of useful reflexive and social activities, namely thinking about personality and long-term thinking about life decisions. Just like how a funeral at a church is a somewhat mystified, ritualized form of the useful reflexive and social activities of remembering and grieving.
pphysch 5y ago
Two non-surprises here: > We currently have exactly two backend engineers. A single Haskell engineer can support a 2:3+:1 data:FE:BE developer ratio and still have free BE time. 1) That they have 1-2 Haskell developers. 2) That backend is very straightforward once you separate it from data engineering and frontend, because you don't have to deal with hardware or wetware (pesky "side effects") like those other poor sods. This applies to virtually any popular backend language. Yet another confirmation that pure functional langs work great when its just one or two buddies working on a "pure programming" project, but evidence remains scant of their real world utility beyond that.
- mjh2539 5y ago
  > Yet another confirmation that pure functional langs work great when its just one or two buddies working on a "pure programming" project, but evidence remains scant of their utility beyond that. Evidence is abundant if you look for it. FB, Microsoft, and Standard Chartered all have active internal haskell projects.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    Do any of these projects have more than 1-2 active maintainers?
    - bidirectional 5y ago
      None of them are individual projects, all of those companies have several projects in Haskell. Standard Chartered, for one, have their own custom implementation of Haskell and it is used by dozens of developers across different projects.
      - dllthomas 5y ago
        IIUC it's their own custom implementation of something a lot like Haskell, with the compiler implemented in Haskell.
dudeinjapan 5y ago
Sh*t... the horoscope I've been using all these years doesn't have functional correctness. So THAT's why I've made all the wrong decisions in my career and love life.
frozenport 5y ago
>> Co–Star is built by a small team of thirty. LOL thats giant. How much does it cost to run the show? 30 x $100,000 for an astrology app?
- bojo 5y ago
  I have strong feelings against astrology myself, yet I find it frustrating that is the HN takeaway here, and not the fact that there's a successful company making enough money to fund 30 people's salaries and is written in what a lot of us consider an interesting functional programming language.
  - dang 5y ago
    That's doesn't seem to be an accurate description of this thread. Maybe look again?
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
canjobear 5y ago
The biggest advantage of running a Haskell shop is probably that it imposes a strong intelligence filter on the devs you hire.
- tmcw 5y ago
  yikes
- teddyh 5y ago
  The fact that the product is an astrology product will also impose some kind of filter on the people who choose to work there.
  - twic 5y ago
    Maybe that's why they could only hire Haskell devs.
  - sullyj3 5y ago
    A cynicism filter?
- IshKebab 5y ago
  I agree. Two out of the three things listed here you can easily do with Typescript. But good luck getting web developers to not just use strings for everything.
  - golergka 5y ago
    Thankfully, with latest TS updates, all of those strings and their combinations can be safely typed, too.
ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
Off topic! I'm really curious about how hners think/feel about astrology. Do you "believe" in it or does it help in any meaningful way? I grew up thinking these kind of things are for the "uneducated" but I'm surprised by how many smart people I meet nowadays who really care about this stuff. So, I'm really curious!
- _bohm 5y ago
  I place zero stock in it as far as decision making or understanding myself/others goes, but it also doesn't really make me angry in the way that it seems to for a lot of other people. I think it's often quite fun to compare astrology charts or ask someone their sign as an icebreaker when getting to know them, etc.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I think it can be really damaging and there's a substantial proportion of the population that actually believes it and spends a substantial amount of time obsessing over it. I hear the couple next door to me in SF get in shouting matches through the wall about how she doesn't feel like he takes her seriously because he doesn't believe in astrology, about how there are some things that science doesn't understand, etc. etc. And she's like a PM at Stripe or something.
    - _bohm 5y ago
      I feel you, but at the end of the day I don't think astrology as a belief system is any wackier or more harmful than most mainstream religions. And my capacity for holding a grudge against people for having beliefs that lack an empirical basis is not very high.
      - bobthechef 5y ago
        > I don't think astrology as a belief system is any wackier [...] than most mainstream religions. Statements like these are problematic. Not only are there meaningful differences between religions that make them incommensurate in this context (e.g., a Catholic, while acknowledging that some glimmers of greater or lesser truth exist in all religions, will regard much of them as erroneous and even superstitious), but it seems you haven't done the philosophical due diligence here to make a sensible comparison. For example, we have no reason to suppose that the relative positions of the planets has any effect on how things pan out. And additionally, from a Catholic perspective, not only is astrology generally taken to be superstitious (on account of its irrationality), but the impulse behind astrology is also taken to be evil. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to 'unveil' the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone” (CCC 2116)[0]. (N.b. the catechism is not a defense of these beliefs. I cite it only to show the Catholic position. Defenses can be found elsewhere, as well as pedagogical treatments like those in the Summa[1].) The positions of the Church are rigorously defended over at least two millennia, some before that where natural theology and philosophy are concerned (the existence of God, for example, is knowable through unaided reason; the divinity of Jesus, on the other hand, requires faith in the sense that while the totality of evidence may be very strong in favor of that belief, it is not fully deducible in the way philosophical arguments for the existence of God are). To compare astrology to that intellectual tradition (I ignore here the petty superstitions particular Catholics might entertain) is ludicrous. And part of due diligence is also an understanding of what constitutes an "empirical basis" and where and how it is an appropriate to draw on empirical observation. For example, does the claim "a belief P is reasonable if and only if there is an empirical basis for it" itself have an "empirical basis"? If so, in what way? [0] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P7E.HTM https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P7E.HTM [1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3092.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3092.htm
StefanWestfal 5y ago
I am interested in functional programming. Without a CS background I was wondering, if Haskell can provide these guarantees, why is it not more adopted? If, on an enterprise scale, you can avoid the majority of bugs, would that not be a clear win?
- dunefox 5y ago
  > why is it not more adopted? "We use Java here. We have always used Java here and we will always use Java here. We're a Java shop. No other languages exist." My personal experience with companies. > If, on an enterprise scale, you can avoid the majority of bugs, would that not be a clear win? Yes, but then you wouldn't be using Java.
  - nesarkvechnep 5y ago
    Yeah... the Java monoglots.
  - yen223 5y ago
    I don't find this particular argument compelling, because there are other languages (e.g. Python and Golang) that have managed to make their way into the mainstream despite facing the same "we only use Java" challenge that hurts Haskell's adoption.
    - dunefox 5y ago
      Yes, Go, the Google language. Very surprising that it became mainstream. In the case of Python: it's imperative and somewhat object oriented and mostly without advanced features which makes it attractive for university courses, for example. Also sometimes languages just become popular, perhaps due to a certain library or sheer luck. That doesn't make it false for languages like Haskell.
      - yen223 5y ago
        > Yes, Go, the Google language. Very surprising that it became mainstream. It sure is. Dart, also a Google language, did not fare quite as well.
twic 5y ago
I came across this interesting post touching on Haskell just recently: https://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/on-haskell-ruby-and-cards-against-humanity/ https://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/on-haskell-ruby-and-cards-...
uncomputation 5y ago
Very interesting and well thought out write up on a high level. Shame on me for being surprised at the technical clarity of an astrology app I suppose. On a lower level, I’m interested in how they balance the purity of Haskell with the necessity of a server actually persisting state and dealing with IO.
- anchpop 5y ago
  Doing IO stuff is very well-supported in Haskell. Printing to the terminal just looks like: main = putStrLn "Hello World"
  - uncomputation 5y ago
    Doesn’t this “contaminate” the entire calling function though, as in you now have to specify it is impure?
    - samhh 5y ago
      Yes, impurity (or rather the representation thereof) is contagious. This is where the common "functional core, imperative shell" comes into play. You generally try to push side effects to the edge. There are other approaches you can take too, like encoding your effects in a monad which has a different runtime representation in tests. It's like mocking on steroids with type safety.
    - sullyj3 5y ago
      Yes, a significant chunk of Haskell code usually does end up living in whatever monad (the context that represents IO computations) the app is using. This doesn't negate the advantages of tracking effectful code in the type system, and there's still plenty of code that can be pure.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      No contamination, main has a type ‘IO ()’. A readline function would be ‘IO String’, so in a way you can think of them as “upon execution, we have this type”, or the “execution wraps this type”. You can’t touch the inner type of such function naively, so this purity is viral.
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
Astrology seems like such a strange thing for a Haskell developer to be spending her time on. I wouldn't think twice about it if the back-end was written in Python, but I just find it strange that she's sharp enough to be a Haskell pioneer, but still thinks the positions of stars influences what approach you should take in a relationship.
- nybble41 5y ago
  You probably don't need to believe in astrology to work there. Perhaps she just feels that this is a simple and mostly harmless way to separate some irrational individuals from their money. Which, on the whole, is probably a net benefit to society: If they weren't spending their discretionary funds on $20 astrology-themed in-app purchases they might instead put it toward something really dangerous.
- parafactual 5y ago
  It's possible to think that astrology is useful even if the positions of celestial bodies don't actually matter.
  - arrow7000 5y ago
    Useful in what sense then? The placebo effect?
    - aarpmcgee 5y ago
      I use it as a psychological projection tool. I use divinatory tools like astrology, tarot, or the I Ching to examine how I'm perceiving and processing my circumstances. Seeing what fits, what doesn't, what I want to fit, and what I want not to fit. imo, folks that say it "isn't real" are missing the point.
amznbyebyebye 5y ago
I see astrology as basically "folk data science". You make observations and try to find correlations (not causation, though some ancient literature does attempt to explain it). One simple one is Mercury goes into retrograde motion and takes down Meta with it. You can model intrapersonal dynamics (basically found by looking at findings between positions of transiting bodies and those of the natal chart, namely the positions calculated at the time/place of the individual's birth). For example the current position of Jupiter (which symbolizes growth/expansion) is now conjunct an individual's natal midheaven (represents career/how you are seen in society) and all of a sudden this person is being recognized in a very positive way by their community or workplace. You can also model the interpersonal dynamics, found by looking at the effects of just the transiting planets alone, say transiting Mars conjuncts the North Lunar Node or Pluto and all of a sudden you have these really violent transformational events that erupt. Maybe mass shootings, natural disasters etc. The other interesting thing about astrology is it stands to unify many disparate concepts together. For example Jupiter is at the same time connected to the liver, to growth, to happiness, to biology, etc. if I recall correctly. Where else could you find this idea of unifying together seemingly unrelated things into the notion of a planetary symbol. One thing I find sorely lacking is the complete lack of any statistical rigor applied to the predictions/indications given by astrological readings. I do find it fascinating that co-star is throwing technology and data science to the problem. It may not be far off to see them publishing findings that actually meet the level of rigor to at least show statistically significant correlations. I don't practice or believe these things personally, but my ancestors used to try to help their communities understand their problems better using tools like ancient Indian astrology.
- brokencode 5y ago
  Personally, I think astrology today is just an easy way to make money off of folks who don’t know any better. While it would surely be one of the most incredible scientific discoveries in human history to prove that the normal motion of objects in the solar system can somehow affect people’s lives through some unknown force, it is incredibly unlikely. To claim otherwise and sell some kind of product or predictions based on astrology is dishonest.
stefantalpalaru 5y ago
And you thought being associated with cryptocurrencies was bad :-)
nfw2 5y ago
The fact that there are only two backend developers seems like a big asterisk to me. It's admirable how productive their backend team has been, but tiny teams are often surprisingly productive. Communication costs and distributed decision-making often slow development a lot. What I'm wondering, as someone who doesn't know Haskell, is how well will it work if the team needs to scale? Will they be able to find quality engineers? Will those new engineers be able to easily pick up the pieces if one of the two engineers leaves unexpectedly? I certainly am biased here, but pure functional programming has always seemed unnecessarily abstract and constricted for the purposes of most applications. The communication of function and purpose to other engineers is an important responsibility of code. Using long sequences of poorly-labeled, nested arrow function returns is great fun until you have the task of deciphering someone else's. To be clear, I am not suggesting all Haskell code is poorly-written or hard to understand. But writing clear code is not a priority for a lot of engineers, and in my experience, functional programming can lead to especially opaque codebases.
- tome 5y ago
  > in my experience, functional programming can lead to especially opaque codebases. That's interesting because my first favourite language was Python, but I gave it up for Haskell because of the former's propensity to lead to especially opaque codebases.
- rgoulter 5y ago
  For one, yeah, I think in important part is that the choice of technical tools is made for good reasons. A default, boring choice is probably okay. A more exciting choice might be okay. For people who pick NodeJS.. for some, it may be the only thing they know, it might be something they dislike, or it might be something that seems practical. -- I dunno how many people pick Haskell out of practicality but would rather be using something else. It's lame if someone picks a technology for bad reasons, and then makes bad decisions to exasperate it. e.g. Kubernetes is not bad, but I think if you end up with 5x as many microservices as developers, you've made a mistake. All the same.. I think it's easy to write hard-to-understand code in any language.
- sullyj3 5y ago
goldenshale 5y ago
Haskell: recommended by the insight of human astrologers. There’s a poetry in the merging of two new-age religions stemming from different communities. Unfortunately I’m an atheist, and so are most of us here I’d imagine.
dsizzle 5y ago
> Powered by AI that merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers I honestly can't tell if this is parody.
jasonhansel 5y ago
From https://www.costarastrology.com/jobs https://www.costarastrology.com/jobs: > Every day, we generate millions of hyper-personalized horoscopes using rules-based natural language generation that combines state-of-the-art AI models like GPT-3 with the insights of staff poets. Co–Star is the first synthetic text to be called wildly beautiful, brutally honest, or comparable to therapy. So their horoscopes are largely auto-generated, and aren't even written by humans with knowledge of astrology? This seems like something you would only do if you knew astrology was a scam, and therefore that no real expertise was needed to engage in it. Makes you wonder...
- logicchains 5y ago
  >This seems like something you would only do if you knew astrology was a scam, and therefore that no real expertise was needed to engage in it. In theory someone could believe that astrology was real and could be learned by a machine learning model, no?
- amznbyebyebye 5y ago
  So the code is largely auto-generated, and aren't even written by humans with knowledge of coding? This seems like something you would only do if you knew coding was a scam, and therefore that no real expertise was needed to engage in it. Makes you wonder...
- pizza 5y ago
  Alternatively, that astrology is so real, aleatoric methods are even better than human ones.
- voldacar 5y ago
  At that point, why even do the astronomical calculations? You could just do them and throw them away, or rebrand as an AI therapy app
  - fabianhjr 5y ago
    Therapeutic, or psychiatric, applications would be regulated and subject to proving any claimed effectiveness.

142 points by _query 5y ago

quantified 5y ago

Something lovely here about leveraging formal correctness for delivering astrology.

plafl 5y ago
If it compiles your predictions are bug free
pxc 5y ago
Mathematically-inclined people surviving by calculating outstandingly accurate and precise charts for producing superstitious bullshit is an ancient tradition
- 3maj 5y ago
  The Day trading quant gets cold sweats as he reads this.
  - pxc 5y ago
    this made me laugh out loud in public
- dudeinjapan 5y ago
  One of my favorites is Jantar Mantar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jantar_Mantar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jantar_Mantar
- uptownfunk 5y ago
  Perhaps you are referring to the traditional sun-sign astrology found in tabloids/magazines? There are claims that you can get much more precise by looking at ascendant-based astrology which varies down to the minute and lat/long of the place you were born. Or are you referring to both? Are there sources out there in the literature proving/disproving modern Astrology? There is this article on Gauquelin's Mars effect for instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    You mean "selection bias shows statistical significance whereas a larger study that eliminated this bias showed no correlation" precise looking?
abeppu 5y ago
On their front page: > Most horoscopes ask what month you were born. Co–Star asks what minute. > Access to astrology this accurate has historically been restricted to those with access to personal astrologers—now these predictions can be anyone's. I mean, anyone can _ask_ what minute you were born. But what on earth can "accurate" mean in this context? I'm sure there's some modern tech we can use to measure your skull with great precision and detail, but I'm guessing that doesn't improve the predictions of phrenology.
- amznbyebyebye 5y ago
  Methods requiring minute level precision have been in use for centuries.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

This is illegible with that background (in portrait mode on an ipad pro).

adhoc_slime 5y ago
same with chrome 95.0.4638.69. whatever they intended it to look like, they failed. edit. Its a dark mode issue, styling not being applied to the background rendering
mpweiher 5y ago
Lucky you.
0xcoffee 5y ago
On desktop the background follows the mouse. I couldn't focus on anything else, I move my mouse around while I read. If the author is reading these, please consider using a static background.
- babelfish 5y ago
  I couldn't finish anything past the first paragraph because the background made me nauseous
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    Firefox reader view FTW...
- pxc 5y ago
  I only see that weird background stuff if I have my global dark mode browser extensions on when I turn that off, I can't see any background effects at all

platz 5y ago

A fairly low quality article, imho. The points listed could almost as easily apply to Java or C#

bachmeier 5y ago
> You don’t mutate by default. > makes illegal states unrepresentable Maybe recent versions of Java are different, but I don't recall either of those statements applying when I used Java.
- odyssey7 5y ago
  The whole idea of OOP is you have mutable data coupled with the methods that mutate it.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    You can do immutable data structures with OOP. The problem is that you can also do mutation.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      Compilers / runtimes for most OOP languages don't really put the same level of optimization into operations with immutable structures as they do with mutable ones, because the mutable paradigm is largely how the languages are (intended to be) used. There are exceptions, of course, but you are leaving a lot on the table when you try to shoehorn one into the other.
- twic 5y ago
  Java doesn't force you to do either of those, but it allows it, and doing so has been standard programming advice in Java for at least a decade. See item 13, "Favor immutability", in Effective Java, the bible of Java programming, published in 2001: https://www.pascal-man.com/navigation/faq-java-browser/java-concurrent/Effective_Java.pdf https://www.pascal-man.com/navigation/faq-java-browser/java-... I can't find a concrete citation for "makes illegal states unrepresentable" (does anyone know the history of this phrase?), but it was certainly part of conversations i was having in 2012.

claytonjy 5y ago

I appreciate and agree with the attitude/approach here. I suspect the author may be a bit removed from modern python, as the community is increasingly taking a similar stance. Python is not Haskell, but Python in 2021 with tools like type-hints, mypy, (frozen)dataclasses, Pydantic, etc. is trying to address at least the latter two points here (type-driven & illegal-states-unrepresentable). I'm not aware of ways to enforce function purity in python (do any linters complain about input modification or out-of-scope references?), but I try to make functions as pure as possible regardless of language or domain anyways. I don't mean this as a flamewar, Haskell seems like the right choice for OP. I love how a language like python is making more of these benefits available to a wider audience and I wish more folks embraced these recent advances.

named-user 5y ago
>tools like type-hints, mypy, (frozen)dataclasses, Pydantic, etc. is trying to address at least the latter two points here (type-driven & illegal-states-unrepresentable) At some point you have to admit to yourself that it's the wrong tool for the job, when is this going to be? Dependency/environment management is poor as well given how popular the language is. I believe it's popularity is similar to that of PHP in the past; flooded with carefree users. I would strongly advise against using python for anything other than PoC/experimental endeavours. It's a scripting language, and should be used as such.
- gmfawcett 5y ago
  I don't know. I like Haskell, but practically I would still choose a dynamic language "with benefits" over Haskell for BE development. [1] For example, Python frameworks like FastAPI can enforce type discipline at the system boundary, and frankly it feels like a development sweet-spot. Rigour at the API level, but fast-and-loose reasoning can proceed as normal in the implementation. It's a worse-is-better approach, to be sure, but it has a very appealing effort:result ratio. [1] with the normal caveats -- every project is different, everybody's notion of a "backend" is different, etc. Haskell might be the sanest solution to some backend challenges.

mpweiher 5y ago

The writeup appears to be about as well-founded as the domain. "Increased abstraction means that you can write things much quicker and more simply than in another language." Except for any other kind of higher level language. > [Haskell is much more bullet-proof than] IF NATALPLANET == “MARS” As is any other non-stringly-typed language, so everything other than Tcl. And even Tcl is misunderstood, it's actually pretty awesome for its intended purpose. And of course you can write stringly typed code in Haskell just as much as you can in any other language. and so on.

projektfu 5y ago
Comparing to Python and Javascript, referencing an unused name in source without reaching it in your execution path will not cause an error. a=4 3+a 3+a or 3+b in a strongly-typed language, that would break compilation. So, Java and C will not compile those, either, but the article doesn't go into other cases where Haskell types are more useful for preventing various errors, such as Data.Result, which can either be a result of the type you expect or an error type, and which the compiler requires you to handle both cases. I think the write up would have benefited from some of the more advanced cases like this.
- mpweiher 5y ago
  This isn't due to static typing (you appear to be mixing up strong vs. static typing). This will also not compile in Smalltalk. Nothing to do with static typing at all.
igouy 5y ago
> [Haskell is much more bullet-proof than] IF NATALPLANET == “MARS” And perhaps there might be something like a Python Enum HOWTO https://docs.python.org/3.11/howto/enum.html https://docs.python.org/3.11/howto/enum.html
- samhh 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with Python, but if those are traditional enums and not sum types then you're missing out on a lot in terms of domain modelling.

AreYouSirius 5y ago

ASTROLOGY.............

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago

I see a lot of python and js/node as basis of comparison against Haskell which seems really odd. I would be comparing Haskell more to Scala/Elixir/etc if you're trying to make an argument for Haskell.

romero-jk 5y ago
To Scala yes, to Elixir? wut?
- remexre 5y ago
  If you don't have experience with both, "Elixir is FP" and "Haskell is FP" makes it sound like "Elixir and Haskell are comparable" ig?
dudul 5y ago
Why? Anything can be compared to Haskell. It's ok to compare things that are very different.

_query 5y ago

Haskell is really an underrated super power for building backends and web apps. The ecosystem has improved quite a lot over the recent years. With the Haskell Language Server and the Haskell Plugin for VS Code there's now really nice editor support. The language itself is also improving at a good pace, e.g. the latest release of GHC (The haskell compiler) added support for dot-notation, so you can now write `someValue.someField` as you might know from other languages. If you're curious about giving it a try and are doing web dev, check out IHP, haskell's largest web framework: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ (Disclaimer: I'm founder of the company that makes IHP)

toomanydoubts 5y ago
I've been getting lots of ads about IHP on reddit lately. The ads are really bad, which led me to believe IHP would be of equally bad quality, but looking at IHP homepage now I'll just have to try it out sometime. Now, I have some questions. As a user, why should I use IHP instead of Yesod or Servant? Can I create rest and especially graphql apis or is it more focused on building old-school server side rendered pages?
- _query 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback on the ads! We've been experimenting a lot with different ad formats recently. I'll make sure this is fixed. (Update: Fixed now, thanks again for the honest feedback) In a comparison between IHP and Yesod I think that IHP is designed for people that have only very little to no haskell experience. IHP brings a lot of conventions and code generators to get you up and running very quickly, while Yesod gives you more flexibility (flexibility might be more challenging when you're just starting out with haskell. E.g. what DB library do you want to pick? In Yesod you have many options, in IHP we'll provide one out of the box). Check out the IHP documentation and compare it to the Yesod docs, you'll quickly see the difference :) Also if you want to check out some reviews of people already using IHP, you can find a few longer ones on our G2 page https://www.g2.com/products/ihp/reviews https://www.g2.com/products/ihp/reviews > Can I create rest and especially graphql apis or is it more focused on building old-school server side rendered pages? At the start IHP was focussed a lot on server-side rendering. Now you can also use it for building REST APIs. GraphQL is not yet supported, but it's coming in the future. We're also right now working on a generic REST API layer with a bundled JS SDK. It will allow you to query your database, create and delete models and keep everything in sync with a realtime sync engine. Here's a JS code example: const tasks = await query('tasks') .orderBy('createdAt') .fetch() On the backend we use Postgres Row-level-security Policies to make sure that a user can only access his own data. Here's a demo react component that uses the new JS APIs: https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp-datasync-demo/blob/master/frontend/app.jsx#L12 https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp-datasync-demo/blob/m... Docs are still in progress, but here's a draft https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/commit/39baa4aa23cc639d47e3c7d966c02a68bae7661d#diff-3a0b6ff3c4ed134f65d071e41dbdc6198d503082ddf9a27ffb33faa6f1dff8a7 https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/commit/39baa4aa23cc6... :)

teddyh 5y ago

Forgive me if I don’t want to read anything written by someone making an astrology product. I may be open-minded, but I have limits where it comes to people who I know are trying to influence me into believing stupid false things to their benefit. I mean, if they’re fine with claiming that astrology is real to enrich themselves, why should I believe anything else they say?

odyssey7 5y ago
Many consider astrology to be a creative and self-reflective process. Definitely would want to hear technical ideas from that kind of person. In any case, it’s up to the reader to decide where they will look for ideas and what they find valuable.
- teddyh 5y ago
  In the current climate of censoring “misinformation”, astrology and its ilk should have been the first to go. Propagating superstitions and encouraging magical thinking is, if anything is, a destructive force on critical thinking.
  - odyssey7 5y ago
    On the other hand, astrology is decentralized and requires individuals to find their own values, and to actively interpret the meaning of things they read. I find that being this engaged with something enhances critical and creative thinking. And in the case of astrology, self-awareness.
    - throwamon 5y ago
      Oh, so it's just like philosophy and science, except without any philosophical or scientific backing.
      - pxc 5y ago
        No. Astrology is a somewhat mystified, ritualized form of useful reflexive and social activities, namely thinking about personality and long-term thinking about life decisions. Just like how a funeral at a church is a somewhat mystified, ritualized form of the useful reflexive and social activities of remembering and grieving.

pphysch 5y ago

Two non-surprises here: > We currently have exactly two backend engineers. A single Haskell engineer can support a 2:3+:1 data:FE:BE developer ratio and still have free BE time. 1) That they have 1-2 Haskell developers. 2) That backend is very straightforward once you separate it from data engineering and frontend, because you don't have to deal with hardware or wetware (pesky "side effects") like those other poor sods. This applies to virtually any popular backend language. Yet another confirmation that pure functional langs work great when its just one or two buddies working on a "pure programming" project, but evidence remains scant of their real world utility beyond that.

mjh2539 5y ago
> Yet another confirmation that pure functional langs work great when its just one or two buddies working on a "pure programming" project, but evidence remains scant of their utility beyond that. Evidence is abundant if you look for it. FB, Microsoft, and Standard Chartered all have active internal haskell projects.
- pphysch 5y ago
  Do any of these projects have more than 1-2 active maintainers?
  - bidirectional 5y ago
    None of them are individual projects, all of those companies have several projects in Haskell. Standard Chartered, for one, have their own custom implementation of Haskell and it is used by dozens of developers across different projects.
    - dllthomas 5y ago
      IIUC it's their own custom implementation of something a lot like Haskell, with the compiler implemented in Haskell.

dudeinjapan 5y ago

Sh*t... the horoscope I've been using all these years doesn't have functional correctness. So THAT's why I've made all the wrong decisions in my career and love life.

frozenport 5y ago

>> Co–Star is built by a small team of thirty. LOL thats giant. How much does it cost to run the show? 30 x $100,000 for an astrology app?

bojo 5y ago
I have strong feelings against astrology myself, yet I find it frustrating that is the HN takeaway here, and not the fact that there's a successful company making enough money to fund 30 people's salaries and is written in what a lot of us consider an interesting functional programming language.
- dang 5y ago
  That's doesn't seem to be an accurate description of this thread. Maybe look again?
dang 5y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

canjobear 5y ago

The biggest advantage of running a Haskell shop is probably that it imposes a strong intelligence filter on the devs you hire.

tmcw 5y ago
yikes
teddyh 5y ago
The fact that the product is an astrology product will also impose some kind of filter on the people who choose to work there.
- twic 5y ago
  Maybe that's why they could only hire Haskell devs.
- sullyj3 5y ago
  A cynicism filter?
IshKebab 5y ago
I agree. Two out of the three things listed here you can easily do with Typescript. But good luck getting web developers to not just use strings for everything.
- golergka 5y ago
  Thankfully, with latest TS updates, all of those strings and their combinations can be safely typed, too.

ahmedfromtunis 5y ago

Off topic! I'm really curious about how hners think/feel about astrology. Do you "believe" in it or does it help in any meaningful way? I grew up thinking these kind of things are for the "uneducated" but I'm surprised by how many smart people I meet nowadays who really care about this stuff. So, I'm really curious!

_bohm 5y ago
I place zero stock in it as far as decision making or understanding myself/others goes, but it also doesn't really make me angry in the way that it seems to for a lot of other people. I think it's often quite fun to compare astrology charts or ask someone their sign as an icebreaker when getting to know them, etc.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I think it can be really damaging and there's a substantial proportion of the population that actually believes it and spends a substantial amount of time obsessing over it. I hear the couple next door to me in SF get in shouting matches through the wall about how she doesn't feel like he takes her seriously because he doesn't believe in astrology, about how there are some things that science doesn't understand, etc. etc. And she's like a PM at Stripe or something.
  - _bohm 5y ago
    I feel you, but at the end of the day I don't think astrology as a belief system is any wackier or more harmful than most mainstream religions. And my capacity for holding a grudge against people for having beliefs that lack an empirical basis is not very high.
    - bobthechef 5y ago
      > I don't think astrology as a belief system is any wackier [...] than most mainstream religions. Statements like these are problematic. Not only are there meaningful differences between religions that make them incommensurate in this context (e.g., a Catholic, while acknowledging that some glimmers of greater or lesser truth exist in all religions, will regard much of them as erroneous and even superstitious), but it seems you haven't done the philosophical due diligence here to make a sensible comparison. For example, we have no reason to suppose that the relative positions of the planets has any effect on how things pan out. And additionally, from a Catholic perspective, not only is astrology generally taken to be superstitious (on account of its irrationality), but the impulse behind astrology is also taken to be evil. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to 'unveil' the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone” (CCC 2116)[0]. (N.b. the catechism is not a defense of these beliefs. I cite it only to show the Catholic position. Defenses can be found elsewhere, as well as pedagogical treatments like those in the Summa[1].) The positions of the Church are rigorously defended over at least two millennia, some before that where natural theology and philosophy are concerned (the existence of God, for example, is knowable through unaided reason; the divinity of Jesus, on the other hand, requires faith in the sense that while the totality of evidence may be very strong in favor of that belief, it is not fully deducible in the way philosophical arguments for the existence of God are). To compare astrology to that intellectual tradition (I ignore here the petty superstitions particular Catholics might entertain) is ludicrous. And part of due diligence is also an understanding of what constitutes an "empirical basis" and where and how it is an appropriate to draw on empirical observation. For example, does the claim "a belief P is reasonable if and only if there is an empirical basis for it" itself have an "empirical basis"? If so, in what way? [0] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P7E.HTM https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P7E.HTM [1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3092.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3092.htm

StefanWestfal 5y ago

I am interested in functional programming. Without a CS background I was wondering, if Haskell can provide these guarantees, why is it not more adopted? If, on an enterprise scale, you can avoid the majority of bugs, would that not be a clear win?

dunefox 5y ago
> why is it not more adopted? "We use Java here. We have always used Java here and we will always use Java here. We're a Java shop. No other languages exist." My personal experience with companies. > If, on an enterprise scale, you can avoid the majority of bugs, would that not be a clear win? Yes, but then you wouldn't be using Java.
- nesarkvechnep 5y ago
  Yeah... the Java monoglots.
- yen223 5y ago
  I don't find this particular argument compelling, because there are other languages (e.g. Python and Golang) that have managed to make their way into the mainstream despite facing the same "we only use Java" challenge that hurts Haskell's adoption.
  - dunefox 5y ago
    Yes, Go, the Google language. Very surprising that it became mainstream. In the case of Python: it's imperative and somewhat object oriented and mostly without advanced features which makes it attractive for university courses, for example. Also sometimes languages just become popular, perhaps due to a certain library or sheer luck. That doesn't make it false for languages like Haskell.
    - yen223 5y ago
      > Yes, Go, the Google language. Very surprising that it became mainstream. It sure is. Dart, also a Google language, did not fare quite as well.

twic 5y ago

I came across this interesting post touching on Haskell just recently: https://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/on-haskell-ruby-and-cards-against-humanity/ https://www.drmaciver.com/2015/04/on-haskell-ruby-and-cards-...

uncomputation 5y ago

Very interesting and well thought out write up on a high level. Shame on me for being surprised at the technical clarity of an astrology app I suppose. On a lower level, I’m interested in how they balance the purity of Haskell with the necessity of a server actually persisting state and dealing with IO.

anchpop 5y ago
Doing IO stuff is very well-supported in Haskell. Printing to the terminal just looks like: main = putStrLn "Hello World"
- uncomputation 5y ago
  Doesn’t this “contaminate” the entire calling function though, as in you now have to specify it is impure?
  - samhh 5y ago
    Yes, impurity (or rather the representation thereof) is contagious. This is where the common "functional core, imperative shell" comes into play. You generally try to push side effects to the edge. There are other approaches you can take too, like encoding your effects in a monad which has a different runtime representation in tests. It's like mocking on steroids with type safety.
  - sullyj3 5y ago
    Yes, a significant chunk of Haskell code usually does end up living in whatever monad (the context that represents IO computations) the app is using. This doesn't negate the advantages of tracking effectful code in the type system, and there's still plenty of code that can be pure.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    No contamination, main has a type ‘IO ()’. A readline function would be ‘IO String’, so in a way you can think of them as “upon execution, we have this type”, or the “execution wraps this type”. You can’t touch the inner type of such function naively, so this purity is viral.

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

Astrology seems like such a strange thing for a Haskell developer to be spending her time on. I wouldn't think twice about it if the back-end was written in Python, but I just find it strange that she's sharp enough to be a Haskell pioneer, but still thinks the positions of stars influences what approach you should take in a relationship.

nybble41 5y ago
You probably don't need to believe in astrology to work there. Perhaps she just feels that this is a simple and mostly harmless way to separate some irrational individuals from their money. Which, on the whole, is probably a net benefit to society: If they weren't spending their discretionary funds on $20 astrology-themed in-app purchases they might instead put it toward something really dangerous.
parafactual 5y ago
It's possible to think that astrology is useful even if the positions of celestial bodies don't actually matter.
- arrow7000 5y ago
  Useful in what sense then? The placebo effect?
  - aarpmcgee 5y ago
    I use it as a psychological projection tool. I use divinatory tools like astrology, tarot, or the I Ching to examine how I'm perceiving and processing my circumstances. Seeing what fits, what doesn't, what I want to fit, and what I want not to fit. imo, folks that say it "isn't real" are missing the point.

amznbyebyebye 5y ago

I see astrology as basically "folk data science". You make observations and try to find correlations (not causation, though some ancient literature does attempt to explain it). One simple one is Mercury goes into retrograde motion and takes down Meta with it. You can model intrapersonal dynamics (basically found by looking at findings between positions of transiting bodies and those of the natal chart, namely the positions calculated at the time/place of the individual's birth). For example the current position of Jupiter (which symbolizes growth/expansion) is now conjunct an individual's natal midheaven (represents career/how you are seen in society) and all of a sudden this person is being recognized in a very positive way by their community or workplace. You can also model the interpersonal dynamics, found by looking at the effects of just the transiting planets alone, say transiting Mars conjuncts the North Lunar Node or Pluto and all of a sudden you have these really violent transformational events that erupt. Maybe mass shootings, natural disasters etc. The other interesting thing about astrology is it stands to unify many disparate concepts together. For example Jupiter is at the same time connected to the liver, to growth, to happiness, to biology, etc. if I recall correctly. Where else could you find this idea of unifying together seemingly unrelated things into the notion of a planetary symbol. One thing I find sorely lacking is the complete lack of any statistical rigor applied to the predictions/indications given by astrological readings. I do find it fascinating that co-star is throwing technology and data science to the problem. It may not be far off to see them publishing findings that actually meet the level of rigor to at least show statistically significant correlations. I don't practice or believe these things personally, but my ancestors used to try to help their communities understand their problems better using tools like ancient Indian astrology.

brokencode 5y ago
Personally, I think astrology today is just an easy way to make money off of folks who don’t know any better. While it would surely be one of the most incredible scientific discoveries in human history to prove that the normal motion of objects in the solar system can somehow affect people’s lives through some unknown force, it is incredibly unlikely. To claim otherwise and sell some kind of product or predictions based on astrology is dishonest.

stefantalpalaru 5y ago

And you thought being associated with cryptocurrencies was bad :-)

nfw2 5y ago

The fact that there are only two backend developers seems like a big asterisk to me. It's admirable how productive their backend team has been, but tiny teams are often surprisingly productive. Communication costs and distributed decision-making often slow development a lot. What I'm wondering, as someone who doesn't know Haskell, is how well will it work if the team needs to scale? Will they be able to find quality engineers? Will those new engineers be able to easily pick up the pieces if one of the two engineers leaves unexpectedly? I certainly am biased here, but pure functional programming has always seemed unnecessarily abstract and constricted for the purposes of most applications. The communication of function and purpose to other engineers is an important responsibility of code. Using long sequences of poorly-labeled, nested arrow function returns is great fun until you have the task of deciphering someone else's. To be clear, I am not suggesting all Haskell code is poorly-written or hard to understand. But writing clear code is not a priority for a lot of engineers, and in my experience, functional programming can lead to especially opaque codebases.

tome 5y ago
> in my experience, functional programming can lead to especially opaque codebases. That's interesting because my first favourite language was Python, but I gave it up for Haskell because of the former's propensity to lead to especially opaque codebases.
rgoulter 5y ago
For one, yeah, I think in important part is that the choice of technical tools is made for good reasons. A default, boring choice is probably okay. A more exciting choice might be okay. For people who pick NodeJS.. for some, it may be the only thing they know, it might be something they dislike, or it might be something that seems practical. -- I dunno how many people pick Haskell out of practicality but would rather be using something else. It's lame if someone picks a technology for bad reasons, and then makes bad decisions to exasperate it. e.g. Kubernetes is not bad, but I think if you end up with 5x as many microservices as developers, you've made a mistake. All the same.. I think it's easy to write hard-to-understand code in any language.
sullyj3 5y ago

goldenshale 5y ago

Haskell: recommended by the insight of human astrologers. There’s a poetry in the merging of two new-age religions stemming from different communities. Unfortunately I’m an atheist, and so are most of us here I’d imagine.

dsizzle 5y ago

> Powered by AI that merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers I honestly can't tell if this is parody.

jasonhansel 5y ago

From https://www.costarastrology.com/jobs https://www.costarastrology.com/jobs: > Every day, we generate millions of hyper-personalized horoscopes using rules-based natural language generation that combines state-of-the-art AI models like GPT-3 with the insights of staff poets. Co–Star is the first synthetic text to be called wildly beautiful, brutally honest, or comparable to therapy. So their horoscopes are largely auto-generated, and aren't even written by humans with knowledge of astrology? This seems like something you would only do if you knew astrology was a scam, and therefore that no real expertise was needed to engage in it. Makes you wonder...

logicchains 5y ago
>This seems like something you would only do if you knew astrology was a scam, and therefore that no real expertise was needed to engage in it. In theory someone could believe that astrology was real and could be learned by a machine learning model, no?
amznbyebyebye 5y ago
So the code is largely auto-generated, and aren't even written by humans with knowledge of coding? This seems like something you would only do if you knew coding was a scam, and therefore that no real expertise was needed to engage in it. Makes you wonder...
pizza 5y ago
Alternatively, that astrology is so real, aleatoric methods are even better than human ones.
voldacar 5y ago
At that point, why even do the astronomical calculations? You could just do them and throw them away, or rebrand as an AI therapy app
- fabianhjr 5y ago
  Therapeutic, or psychiatric, applications would be regulated and subject to proving any claimed effectiveness.