We model local demand for each night by modeling hotel prices, flight data, conference attendance & more.
God forbid you could just set what you think is a reasonable price for your rental, and have somebody else come along and think your price is reasonable, too.
Stuff like this makes me sad. When I first used Airbnb three years ago, it was easy to find a real person letting out their room or apartment to make some extra money. Nowadays, it's very difficult to tell who is a real person and who is just like this guy: an absentee landlord for a place they've never lived in. It's an abuse of the system, and it's people like this who are going to get Airbnb shut down. Blame them when it happens.
< 2) You can usually find quiet if you want to rather easily.
What are you basing this on, exactly? About half the people on this thread a) have been reduced to wearing sound-canceling or over-the-ear headphones; b) work in open office setups where there is no quiet to be had; or both.
That might be your experience, but it certainly isn't the experience of the people on this thread; of the author of the original post; or of most people I know.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is that web development is often not a one-man endeavor. At its most basic, you commonly have separation between front- and back-end. So unless you plan on doing it all yourself, you will need to find a front-end developer who is either familiar with Clay, JMacro and Fay; or who is willing to learn; and frankly, I don't think that's a very likely scenario, given the scant usage of Haskell as a web development language.
Also, the example of the compiled JavaScript from Fay is horribly obfuscated:
Oh, God, my eyes. Any idea at all what that does? I can tell you one thing: I would not want to debug that on a Friday night. Or a Tuesday afternoon. Or ever, really.
Kind of have to agree with a few of the other commenters here who are saying things along the lines of "You can do anything with a hammer, if a hammer is what you have."
Also: this reminds me of a "LISP for Web Development" talk I went to a few years ago. The speaker was talking to a bunch of web devs about how LISP has an undeserved reputation for being domain specific (academia, astronomy, whatever). He then went on to explain how you could use it for calculating the results of some kind of physics experiment and output it as an HTML table. Uh-huh. My buddy and I walked out after about 25 minutes.
Am I being unfair?
> As an example of we’ll use JMacro to implement a simple translator for the untyped typed lambda calculus.
My favorite part of this writeup is the revelation that the "TIMESTAMP" type in MS SQL Server is not what 99.9% of reasonable, non-insane people would consider it to be – namely, a timestamp. From the MS SQL Server documentation the author links to:
"The timestamp data type is just an incrementing number and does not preserve a date or a time. To record a date or time, use a datetime data type."
Seriously? In what way is that even remotely acceptable? How many PMs and QA engineers saw that and were like, "Cool makes sense SHIP IT."?
If MS SQL Server were a person, he'd be a colossal asshole.
> I think the problem is that the OP is labeling what he's arguing with as "web development" when it's really more of a subset of startup culture that he's referring to, not all web developers
You hit the nail on the head. I'm a web developer, and what I do is build websites and other online solutions for non-profits. They range from the very small, to the very large (many millions of dollars in budget). I'm paid less because most of our clients pay less, but I'm happy with my contribution to society, and that's what matters to me.
It's not the job, it's the context in which that job is performed.