Are there a lot of women using Urbit or something?
Urbit: a personal cloud computer
151–160 of 281 posts
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#152When I read through the urbit git page and it finally clicked to me what this is and what it could mean, I literally said out loud in my room "Oh, that's really fucking cool."
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames... There are hundreds of lines of noise. This makes perl and forth look absurdly readable. What on earth do the directory and file names mean? I dunno how familiar people on HN are but the original author of urbit is Mencius Moldbug, a neoreactionary blogger. His style of writing is absurdly obfuscated and purposely impenetrable if containing some interesti…
He does have really odd political views. I know HN shouldn't be about politics, but this was a really interesting read: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ It looks like he thinks that the benevolent-dictator-for-life model is how countries should be run. And Peter Thiel seems to agree with him.
I thought it was pretty common to think that a benevolent dictatorship was a great way to run a country. The problem is in making sure your dictator is benevolent. Nobody knows how to do that, so we try non-dictatorial systems instead.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you, for example, spell out what you mean by "you really want your data model to be acyclic and not require GC"? What is cyclic about the "data model" in e.g. Go or Lua?
I can field that one. If a has A reference to B and B has a reference to C and C has a reference to A, then we have q cycle. Cycles play merry hell with garbage collectors and reference count destructors. Languages that force references to be a strict tree or DAG get cheap destruction in return - see C++ without pointers for example - I pop a local object off the stack and it's gone, along with all its children - no…
Did you mistype q cycle? I tried googling it, but found 0 relevant results.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#155The project is based on a fundamental insincerity, which makes me suspicious. All material about Urbit makes a big point of their minimal spec, again so in the linked piece: "The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes."
What do people expect when they read a thing like that? I don't know about you, bit I'd expect that I could ignore the obfuscated strangeness of their higher level languages etc and just implement stuff to that minimal spec.
So you expect you can do that. But you can't. That minimal spec might as well not exist; you can't just read it and go on to implement, say, a programming language on top of Urbit.
"But you can!" you might object. Try it. Read nothing but that spec and implement, say, a tiny BASIC on top of it. Compile some simple programs. Run them. Now, what happens? Nothing, for now. But look, my processor core is heating up. Something must be happening! Just wait. Wait. Wait. No, still nothing. Wait some more. Just a few years, maybe? No, still nothing (except heat). Etc.
So no, that elegant spec doesn't give you anything but a way to heat your computing cabinet.
Realizing this, I put Urbit in the "suspicious, may be a con" bin. Hasn't escaped from there, yet.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames... There are hundreds of lines of noise. This makes perl and forth look absurdly readable. What on earth do the directory and file names mean? I dunno how familiar people on HN are but the original author of urbit is Mencius Moldbug, a neoreactionary blogger. His style of writing is absurdly obfuscated and purposely impenetrable if containing some interesti…
He does have really odd political views. I know HN shouldn't be about politics, but this was a really interesting read: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ It looks like he thinks that the benevolent-dictator-for-life model is how countries should be run. And Peter Thiel seems to agree with him.
They even seem to have a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkEnlightenment/
The whole "ideology" is basically just fascism and institutional racism dressed up as something else. Despicable. I would never use any software from some Hitler-reboot type of person. Don't empower and feed such people. They are usually narcissistic megalomaniacs who think they are fit to rule and tyrannize others.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#157Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?... First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's destined to be the future, but I sure as hell hope it is. I had the privilege of interning at Tlon, the company working on Urbit's development, this summer. It owns most of the namespace (Personal cloud computer IP addresses, essentially.) and is where the architect of…
Wait, so they wrote their own bytecode, functional language (complete with compiler and libraries), functional operating system, TCP replacement, and distributed storage protocol? And will presumably write all their own apps, or some kind of interface layer that will allow non-Hoon code to run on their system efficiently? That has to be one of the most ridiculously ambitious projects I've ever seen. Good luck to them…
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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
He does have really odd political views. I know HN shouldn't be about politics, but this was a really interesting read: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ It looks like he thinks that the benevolent-dictator-for-life model is how countries should be run. And Peter Thiel seems to agree with him.
They even seem to have a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkEnlightenment/ The whole "ideology" is basically just fascism and institutional racism dressed up as something else. Despicable. I would never use any software from some Hitler-reboot type of person. Don't empower and feed such people. They are usually narcissistic megalomaniacs who think they are fit to rule and tyrannize others.
Before accusing someone of being a "Hitler-reboot type of person", perhaps you should, you know, actually read what they have to say about Hitler. For example:
Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design.
—Mencius Moldbug, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/09/gentle-...
In other words, an explicit design goal is to avoid Hitler-like outcomes (because, duh). Thus, the accusation that he's a "Hitler-reboot type of person" reflects either simple ignorance—which you can fix by doing a little reading—or outright mendacity—for which, I'm afraid, there may be no cure.
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#159This is fun stuff. Reading around a bit I found this: "While nowhere near the simplest such automaton known, and certainly not of any theoretical interest, Nock is so stupid that if you gzip the spec, it's only 374 bytes. Nock's only arithmetic operation is increment. So decrement is an O(n), operation; add is O(m * n)... " Don't they mean 'subtraction' rather than 'add'? edit: This is so fascinating, it has me total…
The "corporate tentacle" as they call it is actually called Tlön, not Tion, though you got the link right...
It is a reference to something out of Jorge Luis Borges
Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on what the n means in O(n). If n means anything other than "the number of digits of x" (i.e., n = log(x)), then this is absurdly slow.
The n is just n: it's the number you are subtracting from. Of course, it's impractically slow, but I believe it's just example code in a opening tutorial for the Nock language.
You are both right. Nock is not meant to be fast.
There are only 10 operators in Nock, and when you get to the last one, you see there's a space for a "hint" to the compiler. This is how Nock becomes fast in Hoon. You start with an extremely slow, naive implementation, and then you write something called a "jet" which is proven (I think usually a weak proof is considered sufficient, like by fuzzing) to be semantically equivalent to the nock that it replaces. Then you do your best to make sure you use that exact expression anywhere you mean that, and don't reinvent it again later.
Jets are currently written in C, since the vere platform is written in C. Learning how they work and how to write them is on my bucket list.