I've had a Bellroy bag, they're not the most fashionable but super high quality and well thought-out. Just like Haskell code—maybe that's why they like it.
In the backpack community bellroy is often seen as “meh”. Eg. they frequently don’t live up to the guarantees they give and to the quality they promise. Also overpriced.
I bought a leather wallet from them in 2016 (the Hide & Seek) and it is still holding up well despite a few loose stitches. It’s much slimmer than my older wallet.
The starting point of casting a horoscope is calculating the apparent locations (this means "where you would have seen them had you looked up there and then") of a whole bunch of celestial objects at the time and place where a particular person was born.
You won't (write software to) do that without knowing a whole bunch of linear algebra and ODEs.
The fortune-telling part is not what needs the math degree.
Does the quality of the astrology depend on the correctness of celestial object positioning? I always assumed it had more to do with the "bedside manner" of the practitioner, and less to do with any measurable falsifiable phenomenon.
You can't do good astrology if the underlying math calculations are wrong. Most mainstream Western astrology uses Placidus houses and then places planets in signs within those houses. From the planetary placements aspects (angles) are calculated.
The sign that a planet is in, which house, and aspects between the planets are what enables astrological fortune-telling and prediction (the forecasting aspect of astrology is technically known as transits and progressions, this is the "predicting the future" piece).
The bedside manner of the astrologer obviously has an enormous influence. One astrologer will look at a chart and treat it as a fixed "you are this way because of your chart" as if you can't change. A more thoughtful (read: actually good) astrologer will treat the chart as an evolutionary blueprint for growth and change. In many ways astrology is really just a different version of psychology and counseling.
A great book to read if you're open-minded but also don't want a bunch of "woo" is to check The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest. The first chapter of the book is called "Why Bother?" For what it's worth I had my chart read by Steven and it has really helped me in my life.
Oh? So you're over there like super-rational-all-the-time life has no mystery in it?
> IOW, it's not an insult, it's a compliment.
Neither, just an indication that you're comfortable taking a completely dismissive attitude towards things you haven't actually taken the time to study and understand.
I found a great quote from the blog of someone who looks pretty smart:
The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing. --Socrates
Curiously from a blog post titled "Zen and the art of logging" - so clearly this person is open to mystical mumbo-jumbo? After all, does meditation work? Does zen work? Best not to have a strong opinion until you have "gone and seen for yourself."
Well friend, you sure didn't bring that up to start. Your initial statements gave me a strong sense that you had arbitrarily decided that astrology was bunk without making any intellectual effort.
But if you are now telling me that you have investigated astrology, and - after careful analysis and intellectual struggle - decided that it has nothing to offer? Then you have my respect. Because you actually did the work of going and investigating and making a judgment off your own conscience. If you've done that homework, then all I can do is say thank you for being a critical thinker.
Obviously, the follow-on is that we have a fundamental disagreement here because I have done the same work and concluded that there is signal with astrology. So I have found that it works for me, and pretty well at that. If the opposite is true for you, it is not right for me to try and coerce you to my point of view.
I was musing on your possible reply and remembered this wonderful video from Dr. Richard Hamming. Given our exchange so far, I think you will enjoy it.
Are you sure? I can see for Astronomy that's a branch of physics so sure, there's loads of tricky practical mathematics so if you're bad at mathematics you'll get stuff wrong, but surely for Astrology since it's just bullshit anyway you don't need to do mathematics as it wouldn't make a difference?
A horoscope is a fine mixture of fortune-telling bullshit and verifiable astronomical facts. The latter have the form of "where the celestial bodies could be seen at the hour of the client's birth", or "does Jupiter currently appear to be moving forward or backward in the sky".
The average Visual Basic programmer and the world's best mathematician are going to be about equally good at writing the fortune-telling part, but the mathematician will have a much easier time getting the factual part right.
Dunno. A lot of Wall St forecasting is honestly worse and less reliable than going to a watch doctor or playing roulette.
I'll confess I'm a little sad at this attitude but people miss out on good stuff all the time.
EDIT: thought about this one a little more. There are definitely better and worse astrologers out there. The good ones will treat your birth chart and transits/progressions as a template for growth, a map to your life. The bad astrologers will condemn you to your fate because of when you were born. There's an enormous world of difference.
Alright, you're on - post the place you were born, including date and time and I'll cast your chart and tell you what I see. Then you can tell me if you think it's bullshit or not.
I take downvotes as folks being intellectually not curious.
Homies - Silicon Valley is full of people who are into astrology. FFS, this is a community of people whose favorite thing on earth is Burning Man! People who drop acid and do art and experimental living in the desert usually aren't run-of-the-mill "the universe is just a big machine" type thinkers.
Most of the best programmers I know are serious meditators and mindfulness practitioners. There are reasons for this.
Astrology is a mixture of factual verifiable information (such as apparent positions of celestial bodies at the time and location a certain person was born) and random baseless divinations.
The "whale" users who account for a disproportionately large percentage of an astrologer's revenue tend to know the factual information surrounding their birth fairly well. An app/astrologer who doesn't get these facts right, even for a handful of clients, will get a bad reputation fairly quickly.
I reckon the same principle would hold in cultural bubbles where reading tea leaves is a customary means of divination. If the client recognizes recognize black tea, but the fortuneteller insists it is rooibos, there won't be much trust in the rest of the prophecy.
Advertising that the horoscope shop uses Haskell is actually a solid business idea. It pre-filters for the sort of dev who will be able to do the math.
OK, I replied elsewhere without realising where you were going with this.
My impression (not interested in pseudo sciences so I haven't looked into this hard) was that Astrology froze before Kepler explains how the planets move, and so the model used by astrologers is just wrong and won't actually tell you what was in the sky when you were born for example?
You don't need Newton (who figured out why they do that) but you do need Kepler or your physical data will be wrong surely? It won't matter because this isn't actually a way to divine the future, but it will be wrong AIUI
Astrology didn't really freeze. The apparent position of celestial objects was important for mundane reasons such as navigation until the 1970s, and the people who compiled nautical almanacs kept doing astrological fortune telling on the side for extra cash, using the very same math for both. Kepler himself cast horoscopes as a side hustle, including for the Holy Roman Emperor, using the same (back then cutting edge) techniques and data that he used for serious work.
Modern ascendant calculations are "correct", in the sense that they'll match what you see in the sky. Apps like AstroMatrix work from NASA data.
As you rightly observed, it doesn't make a difference when it comes to foretelling the future. But it does make a difference if your aim is to make money selling it. The big spenders on these applications often care a great deal about getting the particulars just so.
Very cool that the language allows specification of a type in this way.
I added a similar type — “non-empty-string” to a typechecker for PHP, and it’s been adopted widely in the PHP ecosystem. It turns out to be pretty handy, especially when there’s a full type system to support it.
> Very cool that the language allows specification of a type in this way.
Check out Idris 2. Dependent types can get very hairy to work with, but that language is an absolute playground for inductive type-level verification. And the standard library is like a nice Haskell standard library to me in a lot of ways, although the language itself is (unsurprisingly) not nearly as "production ready" as Haskell.
This example is not only wrong for what you intend to demonstrate but even if it wasn't, it's not problematic. In typescript the proper way to do this is using branded types and exporting only the safe constructor, making anyone who wants to violate the invariant go out of their way, which is no different from the situation in any number of programming languages or scenarios.
declare const brand: unique symbol;
type NonEmptyString = string & { readonly [brand]: 'NonEmptyString' };
// the ONLY non-cast way to produce one
export function nonEmptyString(s: string): NonEmptyString | undefined {
return s.length > 0 ? (s as NonEmptyString) : undefined;
}
export type { NonEmptyString };
Daily reminder that the unsoundness in Typescript's type checker is a practical compromise applied to a language that was never designed to be type checked in this way, and furthermore that many developers feel that it strikes a good balance between formal correctness and practical usability.
"Huh never heard of Bellroy... I wonder what they're using Haskell for..."
Turns out it's some kind of bags and accessories brand!
I've had a Bellroy bag, they're not the most fashionable but super high quality and well thought-out. Just like Haskell code—maybe that's why they like it.
In the backpack community bellroy is often seen as “meh”. Eg. they frequently don’t live up to the guarantees they give and to the quality they promise. Also overpriced.
What brands does the backpack community like the most?
I pondered for a while, it IS the company I used to know
I bought a leather wallet from them in 2016 (the Hide & Seek) and it is still holding up well despite a few loose stitches. It’s much slimmer than my older wallet.
I once saw a job ad for a company selling a horoscope app that required Haskell. An unusual conjunction for sure.
Astrology and Haskell are quite similar in that both are much much easier to do if you have a math degree.
Ok, I'll bite. How does a math degree help with astrology?
The starting point of casting a horoscope is calculating the apparent locations (this means "where you would have seen them had you looked up there and then") of a whole bunch of celestial objects at the time and place where a particular person was born.
You won't (write software to) do that without knowing a whole bunch of linear algebra and ODEs.
The fortune-telling part is not what needs the math degree.
Does the quality of the astrology depend on the correctness of celestial object positioning? I always assumed it had more to do with the "bedside manner" of the practitioner, and less to do with any measurable falsifiable phenomenon.
You can't do good astrology if the underlying math calculations are wrong. Most mainstream Western astrology uses Placidus houses and then places planets in signs within those houses. From the planetary placements aspects (angles) are calculated.
The sign that a planet is in, which house, and aspects between the planets are what enables astrological fortune-telling and prediction (the forecasting aspect of astrology is technically known as transits and progressions, this is the "predicting the future" piece).
The bedside manner of the astrologer obviously has an enormous influence. One astrologer will look at a chart and treat it as a fixed "you are this way because of your chart" as if you can't change. A more thoughtful (read: actually good) astrologer will treat the chart as an evolutionary blueprint for growth and change. In many ways astrology is really just a different version of psychology and counseling.
A great book to read if you're open-minded but also don't want a bunch of "woo" is to check The Inner Sky by Steven Forrest. The first chapter of the book is called "Why Bother?" For what it's worth I had my chart read by Steven and it has really helped me in my life.
> You can't do good astrology if the underlying math calculations are wrong.
So? The people who believe astrology readings would believe them even if the maths is wrong.
The readings themselves don't match outcomes anyway, so it's not like the buyers of readings can even tell that the maths was wrong!
The one thing I know from your comment is that you haven't seriously studied astrology.
> The one thing I know from your comment is that you haven't seriously studied astrology.
This is like accusing someone of not seriously studying the ouija board, or tarot cards.
IOW, it's not an insult, it's a compliment.
Oh? So you're over there like super-rational-all-the-time life has no mystery in it?
> IOW, it's not an insult, it's a compliment.
Neither, just an indication that you're comfortable taking a completely dismissive attitude towards things you haven't actually taken the time to study and understand.
I found a great quote from the blog of someone who looks pretty smart:
The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing. --Socrates
Curiously from a blog post titled "Zen and the art of logging" - so clearly this person is open to mystical mumbo-jumbo? After all, does meditation work? Does zen work? Best not to have a strong opinion until you have "gone and seen for yourself."
But you do you.
> Best not to have a strong opinion until you have "gone and seen for yourself."
I think this is the best part - the only way to know that voodoo is, indeed, voodoo, is to study it.
IOW, what makes you think I am unfamiliar with the various types of voodoo?
Is your mind that tiny that you cannot imagine that someone took a long look into something before dismissing it as voodoo?
Well friend, you sure didn't bring that up to start. Your initial statements gave me a strong sense that you had arbitrarily decided that astrology was bunk without making any intellectual effort.
But if you are now telling me that you have investigated astrology, and - after careful analysis and intellectual struggle - decided that it has nothing to offer? Then you have my respect. Because you actually did the work of going and investigating and making a judgment off your own conscience. If you've done that homework, then all I can do is say thank you for being a critical thinker.
Obviously, the follow-on is that we have a fundamental disagreement here because I have done the same work and concluded that there is signal with astrology. So I have found that it works for me, and pretty well at that. If the opposite is true for you, it is not right for me to try and coerce you to my point of view.
I was musing on your possible reply and remembered this wonderful video from Dr. Richard Hamming. Given our exchange so far, I think you will enjoy it.
How Do We Know What We Know? (If Indeed, We Know It) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEjt5PerpeY
For what it's worth, one of my classmates pivoted into astrology, and we majored in Applied Mathematics.
Are you sure? I can see for Astronomy that's a branch of physics so sure, there's loads of tricky practical mathematics so if you're bad at mathematics you'll get stuff wrong, but surely for Astrology since it's just bullshit anyway you don't need to do mathematics as it wouldn't make a difference?
A horoscope is a fine mixture of fortune-telling bullshit and verifiable astronomical facts. The latter have the form of "where the celestial bodies could be seen at the hour of the client's birth", or "does Jupiter currently appear to be moving forward or backward in the sky".
The average Visual Basic programmer and the world's best mathematician are going to be about equally good at writing the fortune-telling part, but the mathematician will have a much easier time getting the factual part right.
I don't think the kinds of people that believe astrology are actually verifying the astronomy though.
False. That's just your opinion. The best astrologers are heavily into astronomy and follow astronomy news very closely.
Fair enough. Feels weird to talk about "the best astrologers"! Like the most skilled witch doctors or elite roulette players.
Dunno. A lot of Wall St forecasting is honestly worse and less reliable than going to a watch doctor or playing roulette.
I'll confess I'm a little sad at this attitude but people miss out on good stuff all the time.
EDIT: thought about this one a little more. There are definitely better and worse astrologers out there. The good ones will treat your birth chart and transits/progressions as a template for growth, a map to your life. The bad astrologers will condemn you to your fate because of when you were born. There's an enormous world of difference.
> since it's just bullshit anyway
Alright, you're on - post the place you were born, including date and time and I'll cast your chart and tell you what I see. Then you can tell me if you think it's bullshit or not.
Free reading, you have nothing to lose.
Example: Milpitas, CA @ 4:52am January 24 1987
I take downvotes as folks being intellectually not curious.
Homies - Silicon Valley is full of people who are into astrology. FFS, this is a community of people whose favorite thing on earth is Burning Man! People who drop acid and do art and experimental living in the desert usually aren't run-of-the-mill "the universe is just a big machine" type thinkers.
Most of the best programmers I know are serious meditators and mindfulness practitioners. There are reasons for this.
Try to open your mind a little.
Using Haskell for a horoscope app is like hiring a mathematician to read tea leaves
Astrology is a mixture of factual verifiable information (such as apparent positions of celestial bodies at the time and location a certain person was born) and random baseless divinations.
The "whale" users who account for a disproportionately large percentage of an astrologer's revenue tend to know the factual information surrounding their birth fairly well. An app/astrologer who doesn't get these facts right, even for a handful of clients, will get a bad reputation fairly quickly.
I reckon the same principle would hold in cultural bubbles where reading tea leaves is a customary means of divination. If the client recognizes recognize black tea, but the fortuneteller insists it is rooibos, there won't be much trust in the rest of the prophecy.
Advertising that the horoscope shop uses Haskell is actually a solid business idea. It pre-filters for the sort of dev who will be able to do the math.
OK, I replied elsewhere without realising where you were going with this.
My impression (not interested in pseudo sciences so I haven't looked into this hard) was that Astrology froze before Kepler explains how the planets move, and so the model used by astrologers is just wrong and won't actually tell you what was in the sky when you were born for example?
You don't need Newton (who figured out why they do that) but you do need Kepler or your physical data will be wrong surely? It won't matter because this isn't actually a way to divine the future, but it will be wrong AIUI
Astrology didn't really freeze. The apparent position of celestial objects was important for mundane reasons such as navigation until the 1970s, and the people who compiled nautical almanacs kept doing astrological fortune telling on the side for extra cash, using the very same math for both. Kepler himself cast horoscopes as a side hustle, including for the Holy Roman Emperor, using the same (back then cutting edge) techniques and data that he used for serious work.
Modern ascendant calculations are "correct", in the sense that they'll match what you see in the sky. Apps like AstroMatrix work from NASA data.
As you rightly observed, it doesn't make a difference when it comes to foretelling the future. But it does make a difference if your aim is to make money selling it. The big spenders on these applications often care a great deal about getting the particulars just so.
Thanks, makes sense.
Sorry, I forget sometimes that humour doesn't translate well over text lol
> An unusual conjunction for sure.
I see what you did there
Very cool that the language allows specification of a type in this way.
I added a similar type — “non-empty-string” to a typechecker for PHP, and it’s been adopted widely in the PHP ecosystem. It turns out to be pretty handy, especially when there’s a full type system to support it.
> Very cool that the language allows specification of a type in this way.
Check out Idris 2. Dependent types can get very hairy to work with, but that language is an absolute playground for inductive type-level verification. And the standard library is like a nice Haskell standard library to me in a lot of ways, although the language itself is (unsurprisingly) not nearly as "production ready" as Haskell.
Empty strings are usually an artifact of lazy developers paying a minimal "empty" value for a type (just as 0 for numbers).
A type like NonEmptyString is a weak defense against that, as a lazy dev can just pass a single space character or something similar.
But that’s not an empty string
but just as useless
Language is not mentioned in a title, so my first thought was about TypeScript type wizardry. Turns out it's as simple as `Exclude<string, "">`.
https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/utility-types.h...
Edit: nevermind, LLM fooled me.
It's simple, and it doesn't work as `Exclude` only applies to union types. For type `string` it just returns the same type `string`.
yup, it's not possible to do it safely with a simple unparameterised type: https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?#code/C4TwDgpgBAcg9gOwK...
It is very much mentioned in the article title and the first sentence. It's just HN that's truncated the title.
Speaking of TS, there's stuff in there for typing strings / string formats: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/template-lite...
Daily reminder that TypeScript's type checker is not sound.
https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?#code/C4TwDgpgBAcg9gOwK...
It is true, but it wasn't meant to be sound, so it's okay.
You can do this trick for type-checking emptiness of string literals
https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?jsx=0#code/C4TwDgpgBAsg...
This example is not only wrong for what you intend to demonstrate but even if it wasn't, it's not problematic. In typescript the proper way to do this is using branded types and exporting only the safe constructor, making anyone who wants to violate the invariant go out of their way, which is no different from the situation in any number of programming languages or scenarios.
Daily reminder that the unsoundness in Typescript's type checker is a practical compromise applied to a language that was never designed to be type checked in this way, and furthermore that many developers feel that it strikes a good balance between formal correctness and practical usability.
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