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Urbit is now in open developer beta

urbit.org

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Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#101

Post by chris_st »

wolfgke wrote: post #96
cronjobber wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> difficult to understand for non-native english speakers Au contraire! They managed to almost eliminate any advantage that programmers who speak english usually enjoy.

> Au contraire! They managed to almost eliminate any advantage that programmers who speak english usually enjoy. What are those advantages? When I was young and my English was really bad, I simply learned the keywords just as mathematical terms (i.e. if, else, for, while, break, next, goto, gosub, signed, class etc.) - I mean, they aren't that many (say 40 and you've covered most mainstream programming languages that…

> documentation is only available in English

As a native english speaker, I'd like to politely disagree with this phrase! (and that was the GP's joke... since they're using so many made-up terms, it effectively isn't english).

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#102

Post by __s »

corv wrote: post #51
jcrites wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your criticism. I read through the Urbut whitepaper [1] a while ago, and there's some meat and novel ideas there. As far as a concise description, here's my attempt, followed by some content from the whitepaper. The key idea that distinguishes Urbit is its focus on deterministic computing. Urbit is a computing environment, like a virtual machine, with the distinction that the entire computationa…

I don't see how a clean-slate approach brings them closer to their goal of "make hosting this virtual machine easy enough to do that anyone could". Decentralized "cloud" computing is a necessity and I commend them for their efforts but this seems like a case of NIH syndrome if I ever saw one.

There's an alternative purely functional distributed virtual machine out there?

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#103

Post by knubie »

dingaling wrote: post #77
zamalek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By keeping addresses scarce, we make spam and abuse expensive The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up. Just over half could. What happens in 50 years when all of those 4.2 billion people are dead? Does the entire infrastructure die along with those who were "lucky" enough to win the lottery?

> The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up They also have freely-available 128-bit identities, called 'submarines', that can be created on whim. The 32-bit identities are 'destroyers', both being subsets of 'ships'. Like everything else associated with Urbit, it's back-to-front. Real-world destroyers hugely out-number submarines.

They've changed the nomenclature since then. submarines -> comets, destroyers -> planet. along with 64 bit moons, 16 bit stars, and 8 bit galaxies.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#104

Post by hodwik2 »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #67
hodwik2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe IQ is heritable -- racially, or otherwise . Full stop. Intelligence is, by my estimation, entirely a function of nurture, not nature. Those exceptions are in situations where it is lacking due to handicap. Which is to say, everyone's brain has the same chance at brilliance (barring fetal alcohol syndrome, neglect, etc.) if they are not intellectually handicapped, and are provided the same child-reari…

So all other physical characteristics, even things to do with domestication of dogs, that are more "soft" like temperament, are hereditable? But not IQ? What's the exception? If your view is that genetics in terms of the science is flawed, then, don't beat around the bush, state your case.

>"But not IQ? What's the exception?"

I don't think intelligence, outside of unusual situations, is a physical characteristic. So I'm not sure how to answer your question.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#105

Post by VLM »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #67
hodwik2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe IQ is heritable -- racially, or otherwise . Full stop. Intelligence is, by my estimation, entirely a function of nurture, not nature. Those exceptions are in situations where it is lacking due to handicap. Which is to say, everyone's brain has the same chance at brilliance (barring fetal alcohol syndrome, neglect, etc.) if they are not intellectually handicapped, and are provided the same child-reari…

So all other physical characteristics, even things to do with domestication of dogs, that are more "soft" like temperament, are hereditable? But not IQ? What's the exception? If your view is that genetics in terms of the science is flawed, then, don't beat around the bush, state your case.

To provide some clarity and background to the problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

The left, even across cultures and vast geographic distances, has an unusual constitutional weakness against that specific mental disease.

Not implying, that the right has no unusual mental illness susceptibilities of its own, although that's a bit off topic.

Arguing with someone suffering from a bad case of Lysenkoism is about as effective as trying to argue my coworker out of being a type I diabetic. You can tell him all day long that its long term ineffective or environmentally wasteful or wrong or unhealthy or non-vegan or unpopular to inject insulin, but all that hot air talking is never going to wake up his pancreas. Ditto pointing out to people suffering a bad case of Lysenkoism that they're diseased is not an effective way to cure them. What does work is curing their political views, when that's possible, most of the time the patient regains their lost scientific reasoning capacity in that specific corner of genetic research.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#106

Post by kazinator »

lisper wrote: post #69
kazinator wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero is good for "absence of failure". It's a "yes" in the sense that "this worked". Whereas any one of the myriad non-zero codes is "no, it didn't work". If we have a situation in which there are many numeric codes, exactly one of which means "success", it's probably best if that one is assigned zero.

Except that Curtis strongly (and snarkily) claims that Hoon is a typed language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11819810 item #3 (and subsequent discussion) So why are they punning integers and booleans in the first place?

Punning means that we have two types, and we somehow interchange them; use an object of type A, as if it were of type B. We thereby leave behind the type system and take responsibility for that being correct.

If a language doesn't have a Boolean type, and some other type serves for indicating truth/falsehood, then that is a representational technique distinct from punning.

A language with no Boolean type can be statically typed. It just means that the conditional operators work with some non-Boolean, like integer, yet according to well-understood rules. For instance if we have some "if expr foo bar" such that either foo or bar is evaluated based on whether or not expr is zero. This would be statically well-typed if expr has integer type and foo and bar have the same type.

Of course, we can't do pattern-matching whereby a value is classified as Boolean or integer in separate cases. (Unless we use the language's type construction ability to define a Boolean type which wraps integer, or whatever).

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#107

Post by VLM »

A good summary of some unhappy comments is that its an experimental reboot of a vast new system. Most of the people who are unhappy went into it expecting something very small like "uber for the jvm" or "the twitter of functional programming" or similar.

Progress in IT / CS has dramatically slowed over my life. Urbit feels much like 80s home computing, where forklift upgrades of everything you know was "normal" in the extremely rapid transition from Altair CP/M to an Amiga to a SunOS box or whatever path. Nothing is new in the last 20 years, at least compared to the incredibly rapid pace of change in the first 10 years I was into computers. I'm just saying that however unthinkable a forklift upgrade is culturally in 2016, in 1986 it was considered to be "great fun" not a problem or a downside.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#108

Post by hodwik2 »

Throwaway585250 wrote: post #78
hodwik2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Heritability of traits can be measured by twin studies." No, correlations between traits can be measured in twin studies, but they do not prove a causal link. In the realm of intelligence, it could be (and I would argue) that looking like a nerd generally proceeds becoming one. People become social outcasts, and then become intelligent as a defense mechanism. That is,once in that nerd social caste, a greater percen…

How about torsion dystonia? Increased IQ can be observed before the onset of the disease, even when matched to comparable members of the same population. What evidence would falsify your position?

A few things on torsio dystonia.

One, Torsion Dystonia could just as easily be effecting something else which effects IQ.

Two, the studies on Torsion Dystonia decided to only study people who were not showing symptoms. This means they were selecting around heredity, since those who show symptoms and those who don't were not divided on gene expression -- there is only one allele in play as far as we know.

Three, the study was 14 persons. Removing a single person from the sample could have swung the data to say the opposite.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#109

Post by zekevermillion »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #2

This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a pr…

Urbit people make too much effort to justify urbit extrinsically. Hey, we can use it to make P2P facebook, and to render websites that resemble a ruby-powered startup launch site. OK but urbit is also good for urbitting. Why stoop to using the idiom of today's crappy browser apps, and why bother justifying urbit to people who are apparently happy with the way things are on Earth now? Forget them, I say!
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