[knownothing]

Philosophy is important. The fact that you're even asking that question indicates a deep ignorance of the history of ideas and thought. It's also slightly absurd because empiricism is itself a philosophy.

Empiricism, as a method, became important because Bacon wanted to replace Aristotle's logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baconian_method. That took about 2000 years to happen, just to give you a sense of scale. And it's what helped spur the scientific revolution so it's also why we've got our little laptops and Facebook today.

The scientific revolution and scientific method are a branch off of a long, long conversation about the world, the nature of it, and how we should understand it.

Now, that's not to say there's not a lot of silly, useless garbage being put out under the guise of "philosophy". That's definitely the case. The challenge is identifying productive or useful parts and using them in a coherent manner.

[gshulegaard]

Not that I got very deep into mathematics but higher level math is all formal logic and proofs. There are mathematical theorems that are proven to be true/closed for many years by mathematicians before they find commercial/practical applications.

For the HN audience, much of the power and usefulness of RDBMSs is derived from the relational model and the relational algebra it sits on [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra