mbrock

83 ms·

811.
by mbrock 9y ago
ghcjs is a pretty heavyweight environment. It's actually translating the compiled core IR from GHC into JavaScript, and including a port of GHC's runtime system. It can run basically any Haskell library. That includes the ability
812.
by mbrock 9y ago
I just use ordinary cheap earplugs from the drug store or whatever, but actually I don't use them that much, and there's probably some more comfy variant.
813.
by mbrock 9y ago
Earplugs. I don't like thinking and listening at the same time, usually silence is what I need. I've also found that earplugs make my breathing more apparent, which tends to make me breathe more deeply and regularly, which feels g
814.
by mbrock 9y ago
I truly yearn for the day when I can pay rent with my GitHub street cred. Makes me think, there was that old Y Combinator experiment of letting HN posters vote for funding in a small funding round. Combine that notion with a karma-weighted
815.
by mbrock 9y ago
"Fundamental mode" handles all those things great, and anything you can think of. Escape the shackles of syntax highlighting and special modes and you'll be free, hackers, you'll be free...
816.
by mbrock 9y ago
Oops, forgot to mention that this is a total hack that I would never put in production. I'm actually very curious about the atomicity of ASDF loads, and I don't know how it works. I wouldn't expect it to be for example atomic
817.
by mbrock 9y ago
Good to know. I've noticed that NixOS hosts their binary package caches on CloudFront, which I assumed was because it's cost effective. Those URLs are completely content addressed so they're optimal for CDN caching. Is there
818.
by mbrock 9y ago
I've sometimes used a snippet like this: (defun rebuild (&optional (sha1 (sha1-of-current-commit))) (asdf:operate 'asdf:compile-op :my-package) (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :my-package) (push sha1 *
819.
by mbrock 9y ago
You could try learning a model checker for concurrent algorithms, like TLA+.
820.
by mbrock 9y ago
What about CloudFront?
821.
by mbrock 9y ago
I don't have a fully formed view yet, but I think Solidity is a pretty good prototyping language, disregarding all marketing hype that it's an "easy" language. While developing, you'd also be working on a specificat
822.
by mbrock 9y ago
The contract coders I work with try as much as possible to avoid loops altogether, because even if they're correct, they'll still have a linear cost, and that's usually not what you want. Almost all contract operations should
823.
by mbrock 9y ago
Madness indeed. For better or for worse, silly experiments in this industry often turn out to win. According to the "Worse is Better" theory, that's partly because they ship much faster than the projects that want to get ever
824.
by mbrock 9y ago
The gas limit is one reason I think it's weird that people insist on calling the EVM "Turing complete", since one of the most prominent features of the system is that every program is guaranteed to terminate in a finite and
825.
by mbrock 9y ago
Some pointers you might appreciate: Jack Petterson and Robert Edström did a master's thesis about retargeting the Idris compiler to emit EVM code, with a custom effect type to express smart contract effects. They ended up modestly skep
826.
by mbrock 9y ago
I'm interested in such schemes, but I suspect that the best way to implement it would resemble a delegated proof of stake blockchain.
827.
by mbrock 9y ago
If you're competent with proofs in Idris, you can write your EVM programs as an Idris DSL. But, I mean, there's no proof that the Idris compiler does what it's supposed to do, so you'd still have a huge trusted base.
828.
by mbrock 9y ago
The real answer is probably that total languages are obscure and the Ethereum inventors didn't know about them so they chose a simple and ordinary stack machine. But those total systems are, of course, subsets of Ethereum, which means
829.
by mbrock 9y ago
The belief that Turing machines aren't amenable to formal verification is a hobgoblin that shows up in every thread like this, but it's not real. Of course there are limited formalisms that make certain types of verification easie
830.
by mbrock 9y ago
Promoters gonna promote. Governments gonna govern.
831.
by mbrock 9y ago
There's no good solution for that problem yet. It's still in some sense better than centralized trust, because you can in principle understand the contract code. But we need to develop much better tools for auditing. Fortunately t
832.
by mbrock 9y ago
Of course there are a lot of technical questions. To answer this one, the logic is distributed and executed on every full node. It's like one big distributed database where a transaction can also create a stored procedure.
833.
by mbrock 9y ago
Basically yes, and this is reasonable from a security perspective, otherwise every smart contract would basically have a trusted administrator. But in many cases you do want some ability to upgrade the code, and then you simply program in t
834.
by mbrock 9y ago
You know Bitcoin is useful. One of the useful things in Bitcoin is that you can make a transaction conditional on a multiparty approval ("multisig"). This is used by many organizations to control funds in a safe way. Ethereum lets
835.
by mbrock 9y ago
It's a distributed money database with stored procedures.
836.
by mbrock 9y ago
Brick for Haskell is really nice.
837.
by mbrock 9y ago
The Ethereum blockchain is reactive, it only performs any effects when someone makes a transaction. So you can't directly do something like a timer. So, for example, with crowdfund contracts that have an expiration time, you would typi
838.
by mbrock 9y ago
Lisp programmers know the value of everything and the gas cost of nothing...
839.
by mbrock 9y ago
Here's basically all I'm saying. 1. Payments and value management on the internet currently suck horribly compared to what you could imagine. (Insert your own imaginations here, since you don't like mine.) 2. Some attempts ar
840.
by mbrock 9y ago
"So you've got nothing?" Since you immediately reject my examples so completely, I think I won't persuade you. Good for you -- I won't fool you into wasting your time on this obviously pointless blockchain thing.

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