10 ms·
Have you read it? It is more about the connection of database engineering and "the real world" than about gay marriage.
by Sujan 18y ago
Have you read it?
It is more about the connection of database engineering and "the real world" than about gay marriage.
- kirse 18y agoI did, in fact, read the article before posting this, and would have been entirely fine with the article if it just objectively looked at the database issues without injecting... -- This: It's asinine to do it this way. However, there is a good reason why I haven't just skipped schemas (schemae?) One to Six. There are a lot of people in the world who actually think like this. This is their for-real, no-joking conception of "marriage". They do not grasp that men and women are interchangeable, as a result of which homosexual marriages create repulsive integrity problems in their heads. "But if they're both guys, which one is the wife?" How sad. -- And this: Finally we are reaching something which is non-stupid and non-sexist enough that it might actually exist somewhere in reality. This schema is reasonably sensible assuming you live in a fairly God-fearing administrative district. -- And this... As an aside, I have actually considered that laws against (or implicitly disallowing) gay marriage are, actually, sexist. For example, suppose I lived somewhere with antihomonuptial legislation. As I am a man, any woman in that district has the right to marry me. (As well they should.) But any man in that district who wanted to marry me does not have that right. The women have a right which the men do not have. Likewise, if there was a nubile woman nearby, I (and any other man) would have the right to marry that woman. But any nearby woman would not have that right. The men have a right which women do not have. Sexist! Anti-gay-marriage laws throw a very real legislative dividing line between two sets of people on the world, and say, "all marriages must cross this line". But any law which divides men from women is clearly sexist, and, as I've stated above, closed-minded towards unconventional gender assignments who don't clearly fall on either side. And there's plenty more I won't quote for the sake of brevity. The article has a full freaking ASIDE with personal opinion weighing into the issue of gay marriage, it's pretty damn obvious this is just political opinion. Political opinion with an Engineering slant, NOT something Hacker News worthy.
- IsaacSchlueter 18y agoAre you saying that hackers don't have political opinions, or that we don't like discussing them? Either way, the fact that you have such a strong opinion about it seems to disprove your own argument, don't you think? I'm finding this article very entertaining. And it's clearly stimulating some rousing commentary on this board already. The great thing about HN is that you can just ignore anything you think shouldn't be here. Don't vote it up, don't comment on it, and if others agree with you and do the same, it'll fall off. Lots of articles never make the front page. If you were intrigued enough to read it, and then moved enough to comment on it, then that proves it should be here.
- axod 18y agoI agree. It's just a political rant disguised as a database article. "They do not grasp that men and women are interchangeable" - sure, because men can give birth too. Right?
- Sujan 18y agomarriage isn't about giving birth.
- axod 18y agoI agree. But you can't claim that "men and women are interchangeable", when for some things, they are clearly not.
- Sujan 18y agoI understood his point was that in marriage (without the stuff culturally connected to it) they are. And this sounds valid to me.
- cousin_it 18y agoWhoa there. Marriage is not so much a right as a societal mechanism with many purposes. For the female: make sure the provider doesn't run away. For the male: monogamy gives non-alpha males a chance of having offspring. For the child: life support. For government: bind people into clumsy units that you can tax, threaten etc. at will. For ethnic and religious groups: arranged marriage is a way around natural selection, letting you enforce "proper" genetics and upbringing of the next generation. When people start talking about gay marriage, all of this gets instantly forgotten.
- potatolicious 18y agoI find it very interesting because the solution he came to is actually how it works in many cultures - i.e. binary marriages. Different cultures have different contexts when it comes to marriage. Some are monogamous, but even more are polygamous, where the husband marries the wives, or the wife marries the husbands... It all screams "graph", and I think in the end that's the only way we can represent it. Which is funny, because that's already how we represent any other form of human relationships - romantic or otherwise...
- yters 18y agoI think a graph is too static and either/or ish. Instead, there should be links defining the relationship between everyone and everyone, where the links' values are a function of something; such as time, or the values of other links, etc. But then this raises the question of how this maps to the legal/social realm? Well, first we have to chip everyone. Then, once we've extracted the global social network, we can define, in real time, the legal and social value and rights a person has at any given instant.
- silentbicycle 18y agoThere's a combinatorial explosion if you do that - the point is to focus on modeling relevant information. Note that the author throws out the fields for sex and gender identity, because they complicate things, and aren't really needed when just creating a database for who is married to whom for (presumably) tax purposes.
- yters 18y agoAnd what do we do with combinatorial explosions? Stochastic algorithms and metaheuristics!