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What Urbit is

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Re: What Urbit is

#171

Post by yarvin9 »

lisper wrote: post #151
state wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! I'm one of the Urbit devs. 1. Has this ever actually happened? I'd be quite disturbed by that. We're more than happy to have people learning about Urbit, although we're not particularly active on social media. 2. Curtis is certainly controversial. None of us share his views, but we do enjoy working together. I'd like to think we live in a world where people who don't agree can still collaborate professionally.…

> Hello! I'm one of the Urbit devs. Can you please explain to me what a "non-lambda interpreter" is and why it matters?

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 concepts that belong in the high-level language, not the low-level interpreter. (I think Shen is one example of a typed Lisp that targets an untyped Lisp, but obviously I know nothing about Lisp.)

So the lambda calculus is a classic layer violation.

Where I went to school in operating systems, which was Brown and Berkeley, we were taught to avoid layer violations and always separate mechanism from policy. Not sure what Lisp people are or were taught -- honestly, there were not a lot of them left, even in the '90s -- but it never seemed to include this.

I always look at a stateful Lisp machine, or Emacs, or whatever, and see a giant structureless blob of symbols. That said, this is probably a totally unjustified prejudice on my part, and at this point I really have no excuse except lack of time for refusing to learn more.

Re: What Urbit is

#172

Post by yarvin9 »

rspeer wrote: post #158
ZenoArrow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider what you would do with a personal server. Now imagine it's easy enough for anyone to use and maintain. Now imagine everyone's personal server could connect and communicate with each other seamlessly and securely, transferring data of any type. That's the promise of urbit.

If you ended with "That's the promise of the Information Superhighway", it would be an MCI commercial from the '90s.

I remember that commercial!

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

Re: What Urbit is

#173

Post by Gaelan »

urbit wrote: post #136
tzs wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. A problem with disposable identities as usually implemented is that they are too cheap and easy to make. This makes it easy to make a new identity every place you want to be an asshole. The end result is that places get tired of this, and ban such identities from their spaces. I think what we might nee…

This is exactly the way Urbit works. (It's sincerely hard to tell from your post whether you've read the documentation, or you just had the same simple idea yourself.) Anyone can create a 128-bit comet. But once the comet system starts being abused by assholes and bots, signs will go up all over Urbit. These signs will say "humans only" and deny admission to comets -- essentially blocking anyone who has not invested…

There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale?

BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)

Re: What Urbit is

#174

Post by tjbiddle »

lisper wrote: post #154

Hmmm... "Addionally, we're creating an open political and economic process, with a small, fixed-price public presale of Urbit address space." Why does an "open political and economic process" require (or even allow) a "pre-sale of address space" by a central authority?

Maybe it's for vanity names?

Re: What Urbit is

#175

Post by chriswait »

TruthAndDare wrote: post #82
zardgiv wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Controversial" is the pinnacle of weasel words. How do you feel about his belief that some ethnic groups are genetically better slaves, and do you think that his views would make people from those ethnic groups feel welcome in your community?

> his belief that some ethnic groups are genetically better slaves I'm curious, do you take that to speak well or ill about the ethnic groups in question?

It's a shame you were downvoted here, you're asking a pretty interesting question.

Re: What Urbit is

#176

Post by kazinator »

yarvin9 wrote: post #170
kazinator wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Hoon did have macros, however, they would be inherently hygienic, without anything like a gensym Everything we know about hygienic macros is mainly the result of research in Lisp dialects. Everything that has syntax has macros. Just not necessarily user definable macros. Syntax takes some clumps of symbols and converts them to some other symbols. When that is user-defined, we call it a macros; when it is hard-wi…

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). The advantage of fixing the set of hardwired macros is that, when reading code, everyone knows exactly what every line is doing, without having to indirect through the local macro e…

> everyone knows exactly what every line is doing

At least, until you start to define functions, whereby a line now says "something happens according to a definition elsewhere which is just invoked here".

Oh wait, that's also what a piece of syntax or macro also says, pretty much.

> I hope you can see the UI advantage to functional programming in an environment of controlled evaluation complexity

What I do know is that big programs written in C can be pretty difficult to understand, even though most of their bulk hardly uses much more than what's covered by the operator precedence table on page 53 of Kernighan and Ritchie, 2nd ed. A lot of that has to do with the fact that foo_bar(ptr_widget, 42, gadget_struct) can mean anything whatsoever, even though it isn't a special operator or macro call. The small assurance that three word-sized chunks are passed somewhere by value doesn't actually buy a whole lot of understanding.

(Brain* * * * * * has a nice, small, inextensible set of operators. Does it help?)

The dictionary you have to comprehend is not that of the language, but of the language, plus that of the code base written in it. What good is it if some language has 20 entities rather than 30, if the code base you're grappling with has 10,000.

Re: What Urbit is

#177

Post by yummyfajitas »

cwyers wrote: post #121
Karunamon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean aside from the project under discussion? Why are his personal views even relevant here?

Because there are a great fewer purely technical decisions in the world of software than some people around here seem to believe, and people's beliefs, worldviews, experiences and identities matter. They matter a lot. And to the extent that software is, as they say, "eating the world," the kinds of people who are writing software and the kinds of people that aren't has a profound impact on our society. If you look at…

It shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone that the sort of people who are at Hacker News are likely more white than the rest of America,...

White like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, you mean?

Google is 60% white. Facebook is 55%. Microsoft is 59%. USA is 63%. Do you have any evidence that HN is whiter than Google and Facebook? Why not say what you really mean, namely that there are too many Asians?

Or machine learning algorithms that courts use to predict recidivism rates in determining sentencing have much higher false positive rates for African-Americans than whites.[4]

Not according to the R script written by the very authors of the piece you cite. That script is unable to find statistically significant evidence of bias. They found very strong evidence (p https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....

It's silly to say that by focusing on a technology project and ignoring the people involved, we alienate people. Where I work we have similar views - "meritocracy" is one of our core values, not the dirty word it's become in the valley. As the only member of my race at this company this makes me feel welcome - I'm as valuable as the things I build, who cares about my race?

[1] This means that higher score means higher recidivism rate, but a 60% score doesn't necessarily mean 60% recidivism probability. Probably should have run isotonic regression or something like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotonic_regression

Re: What Urbit is

#178

Post by yarvin9 »

tjbiddle wrote: post #174
lisper wrote: post #154

Hmmm... "Addionally, we're creating an open political and economic process, with a small, fixed-price public presale of Urbit address space." Why does an "open political and economic process" require (or even allow) a "pre-sale of address space" by a central authority?

Maybe it's for vanity names?

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 one is too old to want a secret codename. And human beings of a more grownup character can interact pseudonymously through dignified, impersonal synthetic names -- instead of retarded juvenile handles as on Wikipedia etc, or real names as on Facebook.

Re: What Urbit is

#179

Post by kaid »

aaroninsf wrote: post #74
state wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! I'm one of the Urbit devs. 1. Has this ever actually happened? I'd be quite disturbed by that. We're more than happy to have people learning about Urbit, although we're not particularly active on social media. 2. Curtis is certainly controversial. None of us share his views, but we do enjoy working together. I'd like to think we live in a world where people who don't agree can still collaborate professionally.…

Shame on you. Why are you and other devs are collaborators in behavior that should _never_ be tolerated? I don't give a FF how 'smart' (sic) Curtis is. When he crosses the line, YOU have a moral choice, and you should and will be judged accordingly. Do nothing to reinforce the line, enforce no consequences? _You are a coward, you are complicit, and your place should be removed from the table as well._ _Smart (sic) do…

You aren't going to enforce your judgement to everyone else, right?

Re: What Urbit is

#180

Post by yarvin9 »

Gaelan wrote: post #173
urbit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the way Urbit works. (It's sincerely hard to tell from your post whether you've read the documentation, or you just had the same simple idea yourself.) Anyone can create a 128-bit comet. But once the comet system starts being abused by assholes and bots, signs will go up all over Urbit. These signs will say "humans only" and deny admission to comets -- essentially blocking anyone who has not invested…

There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale? BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)

~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, the population keeps growing. Eventually either people have to learn to share, or the price will go up, or humanity will learn how to stop expanding exponentially.

Think of a planet as a unit of autonomy and reputation, not of personality. The global supply of autonomy is 2^32 units. That's not perfect in any sense, but if the supply is infinite the network is ungovernable, and the value of each unit is zero.

It's also an improvement on a world in which there's one unit of autonomy, and its name is Mark Zuckerberg. Urbit does a lot for digital freedom, but we're not in the miracle business here. No one can do infinity for digital freedom.

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