Viewing profile — yarvin9

I was in the top cohort and I'm an Internet supervillain. Or something. You get what you select for, I guess!

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 Joh…

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 Urb…

This is a pretty good thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851849

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-l…

"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 programm…

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…

Urbit too. Thanks!

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 a…

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 environm…

"I'm not a communist, but..."

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 vie…

~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 a…

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 p…

I remember that commercial! Exactly right. Just think of Urbit as the Information Super-Duperhighway, and you can't go wrong.

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 target…

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 su…

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 h…

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 pro…

#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 r…

Sorry: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA

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 criminaliz…

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 …

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 a…