yarvin9

7 ms·

1.
by yarvin9 10y ago
I was in the top cohort and I'm an Internet supervillain. Or something. You get what you select for, I guess!
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by yarvin9 10y ago
By "in his post announcing his talk," I assume you mean "in his post defending himself and explaining his perspective, after being attacked by HUAC, Red Channels and the entire John Birch Society." I shouldn't post.
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A happy moment for neuroscience is a sad moment for science(medium.com)
3 points by yarvin9 10y ago|0 comments
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by yarvin9 10y ago
A similar design is Proquint, which IPFS uses: https://www.npmjs.com/package/proquint Proquint (5 letters per 16 bits) is tighter than Urbit's `@p` (6 letters per 16 bits). The Urbit form was designed for synthet
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by yarvin9 10y ago
This is a pretty good thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851849
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by yarvin9 10y ago
You're very eloquent and also learned. But for every programmer who knows what an ANSI Lisp "boa constructor" is, there are 100 who know what a C++ constructor is. And it's an 11-letter word that means something complet
7.
by yarvin9 10y ago
"Constructor" already got used by C++ for something different. A Hoon mold is more like a C++ struct than a C++ constructor. And if you saw a file of Hoon molds, in normal programmer English, you'd say, "these are type
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by yarvin9 10y ago
Mainly because (as Vitalik says) "the whole Ethereum network has the power of a 1999 cell phone." Although Urbit (like Ethereum) is precisely defined without dependencies, Urbit is not a consensus computation platform. It's
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by yarvin9 10y ago
Urbit too. Thanks!
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by yarvin9 10y ago
Ha! I can assure you that by the time Urbit is ready to compete with Facebook, it'll be as easy to sign up for as Facebook. That's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. It ain't happening any time soon, neither. Met
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by yarvin9 10y ago
When I say "the browser for the server side," what I mainly mean is the isolation layer between the browser and the OS. For example, suppose someone designing the first JS environment at Netscape had suggested that since JS is so
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by yarvin9 10y ago
"I'm not a communist, but..."
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by yarvin9 10y ago
The difference between a language with symbolic names, and a language with names and macros, is a difference between one level of indirection, and two levels of indirection. My view is that one is hard enough. Macros aren't functions.
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by yarvin9 10y ago
~bitret, I remember you from a while back! A planet is like a car -- it's not a toy, it's a tool for a responsible grownup. There are about 4 billion adults in the world. And not all of them are even Internet users. Of course, t
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by yarvin9 10y ago
Urbit ships are synthetic names that sound like human names in a foreign language. Eg, ~sondel-forsut. This is just a 32-bit number in a phonemic base-256. Our experience is that people rapidly bond with their ship names. Apparently no o
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by yarvin9 10y ago
I remember that commercial! Exactly right. Just think of Urbit as the Information Super-Duperhighway, and you can't go wrong.
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by yarvin9 10y ago
It's an axiomatic interpreter not based on the lambda calculus. It matters because gensyms suck. More generally, if you are building a two-layered system in which a compiler targets the interpreter, symbols, functions, and scopes are
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by yarvin9 10y ago
Hoon is mainly built on a fixed set of hardwired, built-in macros. This is how I can be so confident about not needing anything like gensyms (what eliminates gensyms is having a subject which is navigated geometrically, not symbolically).
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by yarvin9 10y ago
Actually, if you watch the video of the LambdaConf talk, I believe you'll see me deride Lisp as having (and needing) dynamically typed atoms. I had no idea the concept of an atom had indeed degenerated all the way into complex numbers,
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by yarvin9 10y ago
Learning Lisp is easy. Learning Haskell is hard. But unlearning either is next to impossible. So anyone writing a new functional language would be best advised to not have that problem. Now, one might feel differently if Lisp, or Haskell,
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by yarvin9 10y ago
#1 is a pretty serious charge. You posted this four hours ago and haven't posted any evidence to substantiate it. Maybe you confused Urbit with another project, and would like to retract? It's certainly an understandable mistak
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Sorry: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA
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by yarvin9 11y ago
As a practical matter? You censor yourself. And/or practice the great art of Ketman [1]. Criminalizing points of view is harder to implement, as a practical matter, than criminalizing behavior that most people today see as actual, vi
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by yarvin9 11y ago
It's certainly a tradeoff which admits no perfect success. Yes, any network that isn't hosted on the FBI's own servers can be used for some sort of crime. Fortunately, in our real republic as it stands, there's a relat
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by yarvin9 11y ago
As I hope TFA makes clear, "republic" is not a synonym for "democracy." [1] If it's possible to build something useful and effective with "lots of online voting," I don't know of any examples. Success
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Yes. And the same is probably true of the browser you used to post this. Also, the OS it's running on. It's the price of being "evergreen." It's worth thinking about why we've accepted this tradeoff. The co
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Thanks! The appropriate authorities have been contacted :-)
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by yarvin9 11y ago
I don't know that anyone has tried to build a practical system on top of SKI combinators, which are certainly simpler than Nock. It's probably quite hard. You can build a practical system around the lambda calculus, which is ar
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by yarvin9 11y ago
How could anyone not be familiar with Ted Nelson's work? In the broad sense, anyway. I think the crucial layer that we need to implement... a lot of things... is a global immutable (aka referentially transparent) namespace. Urbit is
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by yarvin9 11y ago
You can certainly blame our (old) doc for that. Sorry for the bad experience -- we're definitely still at the stage where I wouldn't expect people to be playing with Urbit and not asking for handholding. Even more so this spring

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