yarvin9

23 ms·

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by yarvin9 11y ago
At a certain scale, it's often a lot easier to build one system that solves all the problems . Building a building: hard problem. Building 1/3 of a building: impossible problem. Building a cow: hard problem. Building 1/3
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by yarvin9 11y ago
This definitely counts as a highbrow dismissal! As I age, I find it harder and harder to remember how easy and natural it is for young people to learn new things: ideas, theories, languages, and yes -- names. Alas, we can't rejuvenate
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by yarvin9 11y ago
When both succeed, certainly. :-) We certainly don't try to solve the CDN problem that IPFS is solving.
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Also, the three-letter variable names aren't part of Hoon -- they're just a convention that works well if (and only if) you have short, simple functions. I've actually taken to using TLVs with a Hungarian suffix in C -- it wo
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by yarvin9 11y ago
We'll call it a terse highbrow dismissal, then. My terse highbrow dismissal: separating the programming environment from the protocol results in serious, pragmatic problems. For instance: protocols specified in English, in which messa
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by yarvin9 11y ago
I'll give you that one! It's an old mistake and not very costly in practice, but the intuitive rightness isn't worth the pain in the butt. But the pain in the butt also isn't painful enough to match the difficulty of f
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by yarvin9 11y ago
You're probably capable of something more interesting than a "middlebrow dismissal..."
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by yarvin9 11y ago
It'd be interesting to hear a more detailed description of what you'd classify as "different for the sake of being different." There's certainly plenty of code in this world that's the same for the sake of bein
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Apparent usability isn't the same as actual usability. Pretty much everyone who learns Hoon is surprised by how easy it was, which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending. There are about a hundred runes (digraphs) in Hoon, but y
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Yes -- Urbit is a "server" in the sense of "computer," which you control and which runs your own apps. IPFS stores and serves your data; so does Dropbox, Cloudflare, etc. In a sense the best way to see IPFS is as a dist
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by yarvin9 11y ago
TempleOS is definitely more of a religious experience. They're also way ahead of us in CGA graphics. I think pretty much anything but the most fly-by-night data centers use parity memory, but I'm always concerned by the failure
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by yarvin9 11y ago
I love IPFS, and it's definitely ahead in terms of applicability. IPFS is solving a different problem -- it's a storage network, not a personal server. IPFS is more comparable to Freenet or BitTorrent. Urbit is more comparable t
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by yarvin9 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Social_Democratic_Labo... "The RSDLP later split into Majority and Minority factions, with the Majority (in Russian: "Bolshevik") faction eventually becoming the Com
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Unums: John Gustafson's clean-slate redesign of floating-point [pdf](sites.ieee.org)
10 points by yarvin9 11y ago|0 comments
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by yarvin9 11y ago
OMG I love this guy and need to have his babies immediately. Some links: http://www.vrworld.com/2015/03/24/the-evils-of-floating-poin... http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/
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by yarvin9 11y ago
In a way we're arguing past each other: you're saying that approximate reproducibility is realistically the best scientists can do with today's toolchains. I'm saying that programmer's writing tomorrow's toolc
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Let me say the same thing perhaps more clearly: there isn't any nondeterminism here, just failure to capture the inputs and outputs of a deterministic code transformation. Suppose CPU count is the configuration input. Then you have a
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by yarvin9 11y ago
You can do a lot with single-threaded actors. You're right - it's not that hard, for certain values of "hard." Working on it... :-)
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Yes, source code for every dependency is needed too! This is a classic source-to-source transformation problem. You have an abstract matrix multiplication algebra which needs to be converted into a deterministic algorithm with a known orde
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Not to be too harsh, but this seems like the kind of thinking that leads to solutions like the leap second. For the sake of an optimization in an important but specialized corner case, you abandon a general principle of universal applicabi
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by yarvin9 11y ago
You make my point exactly. It is possible to get deterministic floating point out of existing toolchains. It requires work. Sure, people who can't do that work suck, for certain values of the word "suck." I'm just say
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by yarvin9 11y ago
It seems clear that if we hadn't inherited a bunch of irreproducible languages and/or instruction sets from the 20th century, no one would bother creating a new one. There are certainly some ways to get optimization advantages fr
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Also not related: Urbit. "Ur-" is the Germanic prefix for "original or primitive," which obviously appeals to functional programmers. And of course, Abraham was originally from there: https://en.wiktionary.or
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Privacy advocates may still envision a world where most people keep their personal servers in data centers as a sort of snooper's Disneyland, because a global adversary could just trawl the whole machine room and get everyone's da
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by yarvin9 11y ago
It seems worth taking this criticism up with the authors of, for example, Risch et al 2005 [0]. From the abstract: "Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspo
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by yarvin9 11y ago
It's easy to find South Africans "holding forth" etc. For example: [0]. "The number of black people who believe life was better under South Africa's apartheid regime is growing, according to a survey published yeste
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by yarvin9 11y ago
Sorry, but no. urbit, from the Latin urbs == city, is actually a good bit older than UR. The initials are somehow very compelling - another couple of great literary UR blogs are the Unz Review (unz.com) and Uncouth Reflections (uncouthre
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by yarvin9 11y ago
I shouldn't post as urbit. Quite a few other people, few of whom agree with me on anything, have worked on the project. The word "racist" and its conjugations does not appear in the English language until the 1920s - see Pet
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by yarvin9 11y ago
I think if you read (b) again, you'll see that it's exactly the same hypothesis as your (c).