Comment by reilly3000
7 years ago
I’ll never understand why obvious marketing makes it to the front page, only to get shat upon by 95% of the comments.
Of course we can do better than SQL. We could obviously do better than Javascript. It’s globally understood that we could all do better than English.
We sometimes struggle to express ourselves with language. We can blame the language, try to fix it, or invent a new language and try to get people to speak it.
I would rather spend my time refining my elocution than learn a new language. That said, there are words and phrases that simply work better in other languages. I don’t know a single-word corollary to ‘Simpatico’ in English.
I wish the best to those who would make programming more expressive, and the worst to those who would try to streamline away subtlety.
Performance is quite loosely linked to language, given sufficient abstractions and optimizations. I submit NumPy as an example. We humans have lots of ways to say what we want, and we want lots of different things in myriad ways. As an analyst I often wish for a richer language, some way I could transcend tabular data thinking to find and make associations around real-world state. I’m certainly self-satisfied when my nested subqueries return what I’m expecting, but I may be able to add more value if I had a better way of expressing my questions.
If we can do better than SQL, it ought to bring more people closer to the reality that lies behind the data, and further from the methods used to obtain it. Maybe I don’t have the words for what I’m looking for yet...
The article was still useful. I don't mind an ad at the bottom if there's genuine value. I am not experienced in SQL so learning of its shortcomings (especially the NULL part) will be useful when I write the odd query here and there.
>I’ll never understand why obvious marketing makes it to the front page, only to get shat upon by 95% of the comments.
Posts have an upvote button, but no downvote button, so dissenters can only use comments to express disagreement.
And people often upvote based solely on the post title.
> I don’t know a single-word corollary to ‘Simpatico’ in English.
"amiable"? "congenial"? "affable"?
I wonder what the parent meant by "corollary"? Simpatico is actually an English word now..
Is that USA English? Never heard/read it at all in UK, not even in a crossword. Nor, ever online (here, reddit, etc.) or from other global sources.
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> I’ll never understand why obvious marketing makes it to the front page, only to get shat upon by 95% of the comments.
Upvote manipulation maybe? Then once it is on the front-page it gets lots of exposure. So the probability to get upvoted becomes higher.
It's another clever feature of Hacker News, in my book.
Perhaps YCombinator omitted the downvote button because it can be abused. For example, if there is a story that is bad news for a certain company, that company could organize a downvoting campaign to hide it. But the upvote button can also be manipulated, as you say.
However, which is worse? (A) To write a silly story and have it rightfully downvoted into obscurity, or (B) To write a silly story, have it upvoted into the limelight, but be littered with comments that expose its flaws.
I think that as long as I remember that just because a story is on the front page doesn't mean it's right, then Hacker News has a nicely curated set of moderation rules.
>For example, if there is a story that is bad news for a certain company, that company could organize a downvoting campaign to hide it.
That's how story flagging currently works though, and is significantly more effective