mbrock

53 ms·

541.
by mbrock 9y ago
Suboptimal smart contracts directly incur unnecessary transaction costs for users, and it's hard to imagine that Haskell as a source language would translate to efficient EVM bytecode. For one, do you really want to have a lazy evaluat
542.
by mbrock 9y ago
https://president.ee/en/media/interviews/13471-our-citizens-... Article by Estonia's current president, Kersti Kaljulaid. "As the President of Estonia, I represent the only truly digital society whi
543.
by mbrock 9y ago
a majority of clients agree that the longest chain of blocks is the correct one If you squint, that's kind of true for Git repositories, too. The version with the most "proof of work" on it is likely the master branch. Of c
544.
by mbrock 9y ago
I don't claim that Bitcoin is a winner according to the criteria set out by Hayek, in fact it's obviously problematic as a unit of account as you explain. The various decentralized stablecoin projects (disclaimer: I'm involve
545.
by mbrock 9y ago
In 1965, Peter Landin presented the groundbreaking paper "The Next 700 Programming Languages" at the ACM Programming Languages and Pragmatics Conference in San Dimas. It described a family of languages called ISWIM, with a stagger
546.
by mbrock 9y ago
Multiple competing privately issued currencies is also a trope of libertarianism; people refer a lot to Hayek's The Denationalization of Money .
547.
by mbrock 9y ago
I'm not sure the EU directive will open up APIs to everyone. More likely it will be to a regulated class of businesses, right? If it really means I will be able to directly access and manipulate my own personal and business bank accou
548.
by mbrock 9y ago
Looks neat, but it'll be years before that's widely available worldwide. Monzo has a waiting list and probably don't offer business accounts. Blockchains right now enable everyone in the world to open however many "accou
549.
by mbrock 9y ago
So, if we could set aside our selfishness and try to snap out of the getting-rich craze, and ask "Can we possibly stop this?" it would probably be one of the most impactful ways you could spend a few minutes. Asking humanity in
550.
by mbrock 9y ago
And that's a huge indicator of why blockchain finance is attractive. The banking system is AWFUL. Exchanges are bridges between banks and blockchains, and it's quite reasonable to want to keep your money in cryptocurrency just for
551.
by mbrock 9y ago
Put differently, it's like a branching DAG with economic incentives to always treat the longest path as "master." Quite a lot like a Git repository: you usually want to follow the branch with the most cumulative work on it.
552.
by mbrock 9y ago
LumiGuide is Haskell based. https://lumiguide.eu/
553.
by mbrock 9y ago
The original poster is saying "somehow in my head HN posters appear as male". That doesn't really mean the poster is assuming that HN is actually 100% male. It's a description of his or her imaginative process, which is
554.
by mbrock 9y ago
Maybe all the ones you see with a public profile seem to be male. Could be that everyone they've met in person who's on HN is male. You could argue there are more subtle cultural clues in something like typically male styles of in
555.
by mbrock 9y ago
Lenin, 1918, in an article called "Left-Wing Childishness": Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. [...] Only those are worthy of the name of Commun
556.
by mbrock 9y ago
That's what happens in e.g. the Maker stablecoin project. Decimal fixed point to give sub-wei precision when prorating per-second compounding fees. Other than the normal simple arithmetic operations, we use "exponentiation by squa
557.
by mbrock 9y ago
I don't know if I'm making this up, but doesn't overengineering classically refer to the engineering practice of having wide safety margins or "unnecessarily" high performance? Like, making the bridge twice as stron
558.
by mbrock 9y ago
It is not a universal premise that anything formally voluntary is good and proper. That's more of a libertarian axiom, isn't it? Most people recognize that behaviors that can be seen as voluntary agreements between independent par
559.
by mbrock 9y ago
For most people, "seeing inefficient code" is basically hallucinating. There's real truth to the mantra about premature optimization. I've seen people so many times worry about the performance of something, thinking that
560.
by mbrock 9y ago
Okay, that's premature speculation because I don't have anything concrete in mind! It's just a premonition I have of Haskell getting more complex while still tied to backwards compatibility and suddenly there's a new kid
561.
by mbrock 9y ago
Haskell with Aeson and Lens starts to approach convenience when dealing with deep JSON structures, but it's still kind of messy and arcane compared to JavaScript—in my opinion as a Haskell coder since 2004 who went to Chalmers, studied
562.
by mbrock 9y ago
"Why functional programming matters" by John Hughes was recommended reading in my first year undergraduate program in Gothenburg. https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.p...
563.
by mbrock 9y ago
That whole phenomenon strikes me as a fundamental dimension of reality and perception (sorry for the bombast). We basically see the world as a texture of possibilities, and there are different poles in the way that works. Some people are ri
564.
by mbrock 9y ago
That's also kind of why people go to meditation centers and retreats and stuff—to voluntarily get a "mandatory" meditation schedule, so they'll actually do it. I also really appreciate these brief periods of forced medit
565.
by mbrock 9y ago
For balance, I shall quote my favorite curmudgeon, Phillip Lopate, in his personal essay about dinner parties: I don't expect the reader to agree with me. That's not the point. Unlike the behavior called for at a dinner party,
566.
by mbrock 9y ago
I saw a conversation where a diarist asked what a historian wished to find in someone's diary—like, do they wish for nuanced analyses about current events? But the historian said the most interesting stuff is that which you don't
567.
by mbrock 9y ago
Surely there are lower and higher levels of abstraction and impact in accounting too—and a lot of repetitive drudgery in carpentry and other crafts.
568.
by mbrock 9y ago
I'm actually kind of romantically impressed by accountants and actuaries!
569.
by mbrock 9y ago
I think the craft aspect is somewhat romanticized and that much of programming work is more like a kind of accounting or some other clerical bureaucratic trade.
570.
by mbrock 9y ago
When you buy a pizza with USD, do you think "hmm, maybe I should invest this into BTC instead?"

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