mbrock

24 ms·

241.
by mbrock 7y ago
It violates that principle but on the other hand it embraces the RY (Repeat Yourself) principle which has its own set of pros and cons, the major pros being simplicity of implementation and reduced risk of retroactive breakage. I’ve found t
242.
by mbrock 7y ago
That’s why I personally don’t use money at all and do all my daily shopping by negotiating bond trades with the cashiers
243.
by mbrock 7y ago
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/exact-real-0.12.2 I’ve used this package to get exact real computations in Haskell which get evaluated at n bits when needed for printing or equality checking etc.
244.
by mbrock 7y ago
You could mirror your blog posts to a decentralized network like Secure Scuttlebutt, assuming you have a few friends who would be willing and able to follow your feed and thus mirror your content. Or it might be simpler to just email out a
245.
by mbrock 7y ago
Six years ago the founder said setting up a nonprofit foundation for the thing was a good idea but it doesn't seem to have happened. Their pledge doesn't mention anything about what happens when the current two people get bored of
246.
by mbrock 7y ago
I’ve always liked to work at night or early morning or northern European winter afternoons and since 2002 it’s been obvious to me that a dark but not black background with a medium contrast text is optimal for day and night, especially the
247.
by mbrock 7y ago
Woodworking. When I code I use an awful mixture of bash, Nix, Haskell, and JavaScript, all mashed together. Sometimes it turns into something truly horrible like a Nix derivation with a bash script that calls a Haskell program to generate J
248.
by mbrock 7y ago
On the other hand freedom is a really nice word that everyone loves whereas "libre" is some fake French or something that you have to try to pronounce with some kind of rolled r like is that really going to succeed in the American
249.
by mbrock 7y ago
Total nitpick but Nix is indeed Turing complete since it contains the untyped lambda calculus; you can write arbitrary recursive functions.
250.
by mbrock 7y ago
Well obviously a distributed database needs a consensus protocol.
251.
by mbrock 7y ago
Yeah, you would need to overlay Git with a client that selects a repository’s master branch based on a PoW scheme included in the commits.
252.
by mbrock 7y ago
Indeed, the blockchain concept is more exciting and understandable for a lot of people, so in that sense branding their consortium-controlled cryptographically verifiable ledger as a blockchain seems like a good PR decision.
253.
by mbrock 7y ago
It totally depends on the source and destination of the transfer. My girlfriend's small art house cinema recently transferred money to pay a filmmaker for festival participation and the correspondent bank fee was something like 60 euro
254.
by mbrock 7y ago
The purpose of using a blockchain scheme to issue a centralized liability is probably to increase trust in the system due to the public verifiability of issuance and transfers.
255.
by mbrock 7y ago
Nix's use of determinism actually has an important purpose, it's not just some arbitrary annoying restriction, it's what makes the whole system work properly. This script is a kind of funny meme that should probably be delete
256.
by mbrock 7y ago
So Git could be a somewhat reasonable backend for a cryptocurrency... if only its hash function weren't broken.
257.
by mbrock 7y ago
Stakeholder vote elects a smart contract that takes the median of dozens of price feeds controlled by various independent parties, so it's decentralized to some extent, and decentralization is not a clear-cut binary attribute.
258.
by mbrock 7y ago
Indeed you could even think of them as embodying the "proof of work" principle in that you naturally look for the branch with the most work done to find the true Schelling point fork for your own contributions. (By the way, I ofte
259.
by mbrock 7y ago
Both the US and the eurozone are kind of single market currency unions where you would expect money transfers to be relatively convenient. As soon as you make a transfer outside of the EU you'll get hit by arbitrary and outrageous corr
260.
by mbrock 7y ago
Facebook's blockchain will most likely be a consortium of corporate validators. In this case you could say that the blockchain is "just" a normal distributed append-only hash-linked ledger with public verifiable records, but
261.
by mbrock 7y ago
Someone made a Nix thing that's supposed to check whether a new version of Chrome is available, and if so, generate an updated package. While doing so, they found themselves needing some kind of "tryFetch" function that would
262.
by mbrock 7y ago
I’m a bit skeptical of the difficulty ascribed to doing something like resumable conditions in a Java system. You could have a per-thread singleton stack of handler objects. To raise a resumable condition you call a method on the stack that
263.
by mbrock 7y ago
The Haskell philosophy is easily misunderstood. It's not really that shared mutable state is evil but that it's difficult and so should be treated seriously and explicitly. The language still supports it—quite well. GHC's gre
264.
by mbrock 7y ago
“Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug — in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it les
265.
by mbrock 7y ago
I actually don’t like the way they manage data only through algebraic types passed around as parameters. That is one nice way to do things but I often find myself poorly reinventing relational stores or wishing for Datalog.
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by mbrock 7y ago
Also in true socialism there will be no exchange of consumption goods between people. How will this be enforced? Hmm, let’s not think about that.
267.
by mbrock 7y ago
It sort of seems like philosophers tend to fetishize either reason or emotion or both, and maybe underestimate some more basic aspects related to attention and caring. I think Heidegger had some critiques like this. When I go about my norma
268.
by mbrock 7y ago
I think I see what you're saying. I wonder what you think about the descriptions of the deepening levels of dhyana which do involve "detaching from reality" in some sense. Even the one-pointed concentration needed to approa
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by mbrock 7y ago
Delirium seems like quite a strange and unusual description of the refined mental states achieved through meditation and the subsequent extinguishing of suffering. Like this dictionary definition of delirium: > an acutely disturbed state
270.
by mbrock 7y ago
One way to put it that I've heard from meditation teachers is that it's very nice and useful to have your mind be a bit more "spacious." So you practice a kind of distancing where you let everything like thoughts and per

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