Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Urbit is now in open developer beta

urbit.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 163 posts

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#121

Post by Myrth »

prostoalex wrote: post #114
krautsourced wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but this... madness. Referring to return codes, which are completely arbitrary in nature, as being intuitive and thus, 0 as true being intuitive, feels like a complete logic breakdown. Yes, if this language were to exist in a complete vacuum, where no other languages are existing, and nobody learnt anything else before, then sure, 0 as true and 1 as false would be fine I guess. Still not more or less intuit…

> Referring to return codes, which are completely arbitrary in nature, as being intuitive and thus, 0 as true being intuitive, feels like a complete logic breakdown. Does the opposite approach make sense though? Generally, something being "true" means a program can happily move along. Something being "false" generally requires more introspection on why exactly it's false, i.e. error handling, exception handling, with…

It makes sense because it's de facto standard, and intuition is experience, and intuitive is what we're used to. I'm not sure how it can be explained more basically.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#122

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

vertex-four wrote: post #88
jacquesm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet. That's not weird if you look at it from the perspective of artificial scarcity. It took three decades but now IPV4 addresses are worth cold hard cash.

Sure, but as a global personal computing infrastructure, the idea of absolutely ensuring that some people's identities will be worth more than others (not only in terms of monetary worth, but in terms of trust, etc) based on an artificial limit is a bit weird.

> the idea of absolutely ensuring that some people's identities will be worth more than others ... artificial limit is a bit weird

One of the driving forces behind the 'Dark Enlightenment' is the idea that some people are worth more than others.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#123

Post by dwaltrip »

hodwik2 wrote: post #104
patrickg_zill wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intelligence is produced by the brain, which is a physical organ...

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#124

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

zamalek wrote: post #75
randallsquared wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are intentionally scarce.

> 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?

Addresses are transferred through agnatic selection.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#125

Post by defen »

_m19m wrote: post #113

Just a reminder, you can learn more about the folks behind Urbit, their objections to democracy, women's suffrage, and general agenda at http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

So if you were around in the 50s, would you have argued against using transistors because Bill Shockley was a racist and eugenicist?

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#126

Post by jackfoxy »

Camillo wrote: post #44
tree_of_item wrote: post #10

Urbit is purposefully obfuscated. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the docs: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ There is no reason to gensym all of your concepts like this. It is different just for the purpose of being different: apparently you can't sell people on a "revolutionary technology" without appearing to be extremely different. Nock is also not a good virtual machine. Recognizing blessed sequ…

There is what amounts to a direct claim of purposeful obfuscation here: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... > We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.

I think there is sound theoretical basis to pronounce inverting the traditional true/false bit identification a mistake. Yarvin as much as admits this in his Lambda Conference recording on YouTube.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#127

Post by kaoD »

imron wrote: post #26

> An Urbit identity, or "ship," .... is actually just a 32-bit number, like an IP address 32-bits huh? That's brave.

They are intentionally scarce and many are reserved by the Urbit owners.

This is like premined cryptocurrencies. I don't understand how anyone would invest money or effort in this.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#128

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #106
lisper wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stati…

[deleted]

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#129

Post by kodablah »

sigusr1 wrote: post #47
avip wrote: post #42

>We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right. This kind of sums up the approach taken here. I'm out. I'm too dumb for this project.

He said in his recent talk about urbit if he were doing it over he probably wouldn't have done that.

Is beta too late to change?
Post reply on HN