Comment by ambicapter
5 hours ago
I once saw a job ad for a company selling a horoscope app that required Haskell. An unusual conjunction for sure.
5 hours ago
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.
For what it's worth, one of my classmates pivoted into astrology, and we majored in Applied Mathematics.
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.
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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.
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> 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
> An unusual conjunction for sure.
I see what you did there
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
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