yarvin9

9 ms·

31.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Sorry, this is a ridiculous parochialism on our part. In America, which is where English was invented and is also of course the biggest bestest country in the world with giant atomic bombs and stuff, we don't say the "h." Bu
32.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Well, normally, if you want to decrement a, you write (dec a). But yes, if you want to write your own implementation of decrement, you could do it this way. It's just as bad an idea in Urbit as in any other language. Nock is a functio
33.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Not to be all Winnebago Man here, but all the code in Urbit (protocols and language alike) can be replaced and enhanced, except Nock. In fact, the normal way to drive this process is just by merging the new version of the code. It's
34.
by yarvin9 11y ago
To be slightly clearer, the values here are Urbit "nouns." A noun is an atom or a cell. An atom is an unsigned integer of any size. A cell is an ordered pair of nouns. I am fairly confident that many useful sets can be specified
35.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Yeah, that's exactly right. I usually say "normalization."
36.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Xena is right to note that this simple state-transformation function, f(event old-state) -> [actions new-state], is the obvious and eternal way to build a server. It's also worth noting that it's basically Haskell's State
37.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Urbit actually wound up with three different concepts which all want the word "type," and can't all have it. Worse, none of these quite matches the PL-theory meaning. So none of them wound up with the word. One easy way to s
38.
by yarvin9 11y ago
> I'd guess that would greatly depend on what Mochizuki's world allows one to do. Um, it's abstract math, it's not going to help you build a flying car. Isn't proving a major conjecture enough? Most of mathemati
39.
by yarvin9 11y ago
It somehow fits that this is halfway up the front page, and there are no comments on it. A good metric for the vitality of an academic field is the level of genuine interest researchers take in the substance of their peers' work. A go
40.
by yarvin9 11y ago
"They" is fine, though clunky at times. It is important to note that some persons may be triggered by nontraditional gender-neutral pronouns.
41.
by yarvin9 11y ago
I'm not normally a huge fan of gender-neutral pronouns, but you have heard of pseudonymity? ~hidduc-posmeg is an HN user with a very definite gender, but doxing is bad karma and avoiding pronouns is cumbersome. So, why not? In a syste
42.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Doh! Yeah, another thing Urbit is ok at is generating HTML. If you were designing a language, especially a language that's basically in some sense a Lisp, in 2015, you'd probably want custom syntax for XML-shaped data, to avoid
43.
by yarvin9 11y ago
These are some useful but quite unofficial tutorials written by ~hidduc-posmeg, who's probably asleep right now. It's always pathetic when your users shame you into documentation by reverse-engineering the system and writing thei
44.
by yarvin9 11y ago
A hint: consider the difference between calling web APIs from a cloud appliance controlled by a third party, versus calling web APIs from a personal server controlled by the user. A new network has no Metcalfe's law effect by definitio
45.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Hoon didn't really work properly until 2012 or so. Actually I've paid very little attention to it since 2013. Most of the time since mid 2012 (me for about a year, me and a few other for two for two more) has gone into writing Ar
46.
by yarvin9 11y ago
I understand. And it did improve the comment, so I forgive you. But it's just irritating when someone hangs a fat fastball over the plate, you whack it, then find out that the pitch magically turned into a curveball and all you'
47.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Moreover, the idea that Urbit thinks of the network as "a series of procedure calls somehow knitted together" is a very, very gross distortion. (I guess if you think of "'80s networking" as RPC-heavy, you might hav
48.
by yarvin9 11y ago
I actually like that we're having a substantive discussion in a snarky way. But 1980s? Not to make it personal, but I finished Brown in 1992 and dropped out of Berkeley in 1994 (where I arguably invented ASLR [0], though the basic ide
49.
by yarvin9 11y ago
And... this is why I keep coming back to HN. We should get lunch again sometime, Ron...
50.
by yarvin9 11y ago
I obviously find this a very interesting subject. However, I suspect there are better times and places to discuss it...
51.
by yarvin9 11y ago
No, you're right, it's a highbrow dismissal. Let me be a little more detailed. Once you've built a system that's both a protocol and an OS, you realize that putting an abstraction barrier between them is like building a
52.
by yarvin9 11y ago
That's exactly what we want you to think. :-) Don't worry, we'll put up some ropes...
53.
by yarvin9 11y ago
This is one thing we don't do in Hoon -- there are no user-defined macros, operator overloading, etc. If you're going to put a lot of energy into binding syntax to sound to semantics, you only want to do it once (per language, a
54.
by yarvin9 11y ago
I read more like a page at a time. Some might accuse me of being a page-at-a-time writer. Compare the way you perceive "~~" to the way you perceive "++". I hear these as "sig sig" and "lus lus". (O
55.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Doh! That serves me right for tweaking these right before shipping the whitepaper. Yes, "pel" is ).
56.
by yarvin9 11y ago
It definitely doesn't mean you have to wait for the audio to finish playing. It does mean that your brain thinks the audio. Which has a lot of consequences, including the energy it takes to think... Most people do read poetry silen
57.
by yarvin9 11y ago
Loosely, yes, they're both network operating systems. And of course, Plan 9 is brilliant. :-) All the details are different....
58.
by yarvin9 11y ago
There's a lot of folk workarounds for this problem. They're mostly fine for languages that use ASCII lightly. But it'd be a pretty confusing mess if we applied the "pick something in the jargon file" approach to s
59.
by yarvin9 11y ago
They do say noitatimi is the highest form of yrettalf...
60.
by yarvin9 11y ago
"Subvocalize" has a literal meaning (micro-activation of the vocal cords) which good silent readers avoid. But you're still activating the vocal areas of the brain [0]. If you read much poetry, you'll see that the conn

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