skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading a few articles I felt like I finally figured out what Urbit was and wrote down my sense in a Tweet thread: https://twitter.com/ianbicking/status/1249862161758916609

In summary: Urbit is a functional/deterministic VM. That's mostly it. It runs a bytecode called Nock. The only language that really compiles to Nock is a weird language called Hoon. Because the VM is functional and deterministic, it is (in theory) also portable – you pick up the (ever-evolving) VM image and move it somewhere else, and it should act the same. Since the VM may move around there's also an identity/networking layer so you can talk to the VM wherever it is.

Right now Urbit is a program called u3 (runs on Linux or whatever) that runs Nock programs. OS 1 is such a program that does a couple things. It's unclear to me if they've really built an OS or just a library of routines that can be used to build a single multipurpose application.

The most direct article I found was "Review of Urbit": https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14...

Urbit's own "Common Objections to Urbit" was helpful, in a methinks-he-doth-protest-too-much sort of way: https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/

And that article pointed me to "Houyhnhnms vs Martians" which was helpful though also as weird as Urbit: http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/06/11/chapter-10-houyhnhnm...

While some people say Urbit is feudalistic, I tend to agree more with those that call it simply obscurantist. More occult than fascist.
Good job making it sound like a cult.
Yep being a lowly engineer who loves math I always wanted to learn a more rigorous approach, but then again I am lazy, so for example I started with Rudin, but gave up as soon as I couldnt grasp something, same with other analysis books and lecture notes. Then comes Terry with his 2 jewels of books on Analysis, but I thought to myself, no way I am going to understand anything from arguably the best mathematician in the last decades. But not only the prose is clear and unpretentious the motivation of why analysis is "needed" is presented perfectly, the books are self-contained and the progression is very smooth,no pun intended. Highly, highly recommended.
How to Use the Web, Properly
>I’m not sure the farmer would agree with you.

Emphasis on factory farm.
So it's embrace and extend, thank you.
I have Comcast at home, and they flat out require me to rent a modem from them in order to receive static IPs. I have their modem set up in bridge mode and a BSD router behind it, but would really love the option of sourcing my own modem.

At least the tech who came out to do the install was kind enough to give me a rackmount modem! I hadn't seen many before, but asked for one just in case they could provide it.
Consider having an attorney in your state review the application with you when you fill it out. Not having been convicted of a felony is a big positive. Just be very cautious about answering the question asked truthfully.

But there are carve-outs to state law -- for example if you are working on a product that stores data where a customer is working on behalf of, or using data derived from the Federal government, you may be subject to their standards and have additional background checks.

Also, in some states "ban the box" laws protect you during hiring, but not once you are hired. If you need a separate check for Project X or Customer Y, that could be an issue.
Credit card transactions generally take 2.9% + $0.30, which completely removes the possibility of making money on micropayments. Theoretically crypto should enable lower-fee transactions which could enable micropayments.

I say that, but a transaction on the Bitcoin ledger has been more expensive than $0.15 since mid-2016 and fluctuates wildly. Other cryptocurrencies might be able to handle this better. I'm optimistic about Stellar being a useful transaction network, but I don't think the value of 1 XLM is going to move much relative to 1 USD.
(Replying to my comment because it's edit window has expired)

Fun fact: On sunny days, California alone generates more electricity (10GW/hr) from solar than Australia generates from coal across the entire country. There’s a lot of sunlight hitting the Earth each day.
Yeah, it's definitely confusing for anyone who hasn't been following all the twists and turns (i.e., the vast majority of developers)
For case-insensitive string comparisons, avoid char-by-char functions
Google Meet is "free" for 60 minutes, which conveniently enough won't be enforced until September.

That's just a shady deal, especially if they end up trying to retire Hangouts chat and so normal users can no longer use free video / voice call services that they've come to rely on having for like 10+ years now.

Don't get me wrong - I love Meet on my business accounts and along with all the other Apps in G Suite, it is well worth paying for. But I also value the fact that normal ass standard Google users have been able to have access to a semi-decent video and voice conferencing platform for over a decade now. I hope that doesn't change come September.
Overcoming Your Fear of Writing and How You Can Find Motivation
I guess Javon never learned about second order effects in college.

> the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway

You start in the same situation, but with the room for advancement in a skilled field, you have the opportunity to either pursue growth in your role, or leverage those skills into a related but more lucrative career. Avoiding dead ends is much more important than your velocity, assuming you have enough time to let things play out.
Think of all of the bureaucrats in the colleges that will lose their jobs.

Also think of all of those low and middle class students who we'll turn down since we're not willing to do wealth redistribution with our endowment (<scoff>, that's the government's job).
I agree, but what's the alternative - cynically give up on them as a lost cause?

Probably you won't change their mind, but at least by disagreeing in a rational manner you may shake their faith a little and let them know not everyone thinks like they do.

Censorship is not the answer.
mostly as an intermediary for pubsub architectures. ZMQ is what I've used.
They'd be better off hiring people with engineering degrees (non-software). That's applied critical thinking and creative problem solving all in one.

I really don't know why there's this insistence that humanities has a monopoly on teaching critical thinking.
This is still inferior to AMD's high-end offerings in terms of price/performance and performance/watt, but it does have one edge: single-threaded performance. There are certain applications where that matters a lot. Other than those, I'd pass.
I prefer the terms, “productive debt” and “consumptive debt”. Productive debt allows you to produce more things. A business loan, for example. Or even a small loan for an inexpensive car so you can go to work would also be productive debt. Consumptive debt is a large loan for a car that is way more than the minimum, or for most recreational spend.
I think the many of the ideas behind Urbit are exciting, but I don’t think it’s putting itself in a good position. It’s just too weird. If it used WebAssembly instead of some small, functional bytecode, you’d lose some beauty perhaps, but it’d be much more palatable.
Pop and country are alright, but heavy metal... ewww! It needs much more work!
"The only choice we seem able to make anymore is the choice not to make anything."

"American manufacturing output is larger than ever"

Which is it?
> brilliantly avoided mixing up C++/COM

I remember VB6 was also exceptionally good at this.
"The person involved with this has ideas that I find distasteful and so therefore it's total garbage."

At least try to argue against the "feudalistic" basis of the project and why that's bad rather than saying it's for Nazis and moving on.
There's too much to quote, but scroll down to Xiamoi's responses. Man, that is the quintessential example of gaslighting. "No we didn't, that's not true at all. Well, we kinda did, but it's 'anonymized', so it's okay."

"But we have video of your device sending data to..."

"...but, but, anonymized!"

"I thought you said you weren't sending data at all, now it's just anonymized browser data, but we see your devices sending device usage outside the brows..."

"ANONYMIZED!!!!11"
why don't you enlighten us as to where the logic breaks down instead of refuting the idea that you might have chosen the wrong voice to believe?

And scroll down to the section on hero worship to see where the author anticipated and addressed your objection.
> I work at a large company... it would take a world ending event to move.

What's your current Theory of Change[0] for how to affect decisions at a large company? Are you simply "paying your dues" and moving up in the ranks until you've accumulated enough political capital to make unilateral changes in the working lives of your underlings? How much does your individual organizational agility[1] figure into it? Are you, rather, content to let all decisions be made by higher-ups for the rest of your career? How do you suppose your peers model change? Is there any semblance of democracy?

I am curious because project tracking tools seem representative of a whole class of stable, albeit local-optima that don't seem to change as often as they should, and as a company ages what changes are made seem to come increasingly from decision-makers far removed from the tools' impact on the Individual Contributor.

As it's been said, "ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system."[2]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_change

1. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/organizational-agility/

2. https://how.complexsystems.fail/
Touché. I guess I'm describing my wishes more than reality.
I don't know everyone else's experience, but I found unit testing encouraged me to write better quality code. Testable code is better code. Methods are smaller and have more focused purpose, leading to more reusability. Writing unit tests with >98% coverage forces me to think more deeply about and have a greater understanding of the code I'm writing and how it all interacts. I am more likely to consider edge cases where things might go awry and deal with them. So even if someone believes that tests don't buy them anything directly, I can only speak for myself but the second and third order effects have been great for my career.
The main reasons in my mind (source: I am Albertan):

1) The oil industry has been a source of high-paying jobs here since at least the 60s; and

2) Royalties from oil are a significant portion of provincial govt revenues.

It's also interesting to note that Canada at large makes up about 8% of all oil exports in the world, and almost all of that would come from Alberta:

https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/science-data/data-analysis/energy-da...
1) Hitting enter needs to submit the form.

2) The answer needs to clear the screen.

3) I'd stay away from running ads on this page. You could quickly run afoul of child advertising laws (which I am completely unfamiliar with, beyond that they exist)
> Added their own packages version of every package.

> Added their own package repository (MRAN), replacing CRAN.

How is any of this different than the many incompatible Linux packaging solutions?

How would you address insecurity and trust relations if you weren't a first-class contributor of CRAN?
(consider the recent Python package exploit; although amateur, it's still an indication of such issues; I'm sure I remember this was an issue with the Perl packages as well; wasn't there an exploit pushed to the Linux kernel tree at some point years ago?)

The narrative changes from "MS is EEE'ing CRAN" to "MS allowed a package with exploits to be deployed from CRAN".

I am not familiar with any of the issues within the R ecospace, but I am very familiar with corporate culture, security, and liability awareness.
thanks for the clarification!
Let's make that point clearer:

Since the bank is absolved from making that bet, it is now the young adult making the same bet that no sane bank would take.

A lot of people are now living with having lost that bet.
How do we do this in the face of systemic, subsidized discrimination against American industry?

The ePacket program forces the USPS to subsidize shipping from the PRC to the US. End this immediately and let's start analyzing the forces behind this abusive practice.
NASA-Developed Ventilator Authorized by FDA for Emergency Use
Yeah right. Next.
If you are getting a degree that doesn't have good job prospects then you should pay for it out of pocket, only the rich should try for it (rich can mean middle class with a good job taking a second degree for fun). If you take a loan that means you expect the value of the degree is worth more than the loan amount over time. If you can't find such a job paying enough to make it worth it, then you should declare bankruptcy.

If the only value of the degree is it makes you well rounded, then universities should ensure that only enough people start down the path using loans as their are tenured positions expected to be open in 10 years. If there is industry demand elsewhere then meet it.

I don't know how to solve the problems of someone declaring bankruptcy as soon as they finish their degree though.
Supposing that that is the case, what does that have to do with Nazis?
Sorry, don't feel like giving nazis that much of my mental energy, nor those who defend nazis :)

If you can't see why feudalism is bad I'd suggest you pick up a history book at some point in your life.
that's true, but that ignores opportunities/opportunity costs, which would cover housing/food in an alternate scenario.
And then you can't get a decent loan for anything until you're 30. It's not a great solution.
those loans shouldn't be allowed in the first place. There should be some kind of cap on the loans in the first place. Perhaps, create a ceiling of something manageable say 5k. At that point, colleges will have no choice but to start cutting costs and make college more affordable.
The source is open, as already mentioned. But as for spending developer resources, I think having Microsoft work on things like this helps Rust and Windows alike. It helps Rust by lending a sense of official platform support to the language. And it helps Windows by encouraging Rust users to develop for the platform.
Well, if performance is the objective, then I can't suggest Python, because that isn't the goal. You can still have a performant application implemented in Python, I for example had it encode video stream on the fly, but this of course is done through extensibility via C extensions and the core work wasn't really done in Python itself.

Sometimes with the right approach (mapping PostgreSQL calls 1:1) and right tooling (uvloop, Cython) you can write code in Python and still squeeze better performance than in Go[1], but you need to know what you're doing.

If you want to explore types, these resources[2][3] were useful for me.

[1] https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg

[2] https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

[3] https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.htm
These are very big models, like 100x to 300x the # parameters of resnet-50.

2.7bn parameters (for the smaller model) means you have to do 2.7bn calculations for a single step of the model. You could fit the model in main memory, but how long is it going to take you to run all those calculations on a CPU? And the full model will need to run multiple times to output a single sentence.
The homepage (urbit.org) offers a succinct description:

> Urbit OS is a clean slate reimagining of the operating system as an 'overlay OS.' It runs on any Unix machine with an internet connection.

> It's a compact system for an individual to run their own permanent personal server.

> Urbit ID is a decentralized digital identity system. Your Urbit ID is a username, network address, and crypto wallet.

> Both are designed to work together as a single system, completely open source.

For those who want to dig deeper:

AMA with lead dev https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...

First appearance on HN 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052795

First HN post with traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320

Urbit's HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit
Amazon reports $75.5B in Q1 2020 revenue
Sorry if my comment sounded insulting, I didn't mean it to. I use open-minded as a term to refer to the type of user the original comment was alluding to, for the sake of consistent terminology. I didn't call anyone ignorant, and apologize if you interpreted my comment that way. I use many of these services myself, and too think this attitude of them vs. us, right vs. wrong, is the wrong one to take.
> The ability to quickly refactor code is very important and Go fails at it horribly for a number of reasons. 1) sheer verbosity. 2) multiple return makes altering function signatures tedious. 3) no generics mean code is written in hard to refactor styles out of the box 4) poor reflection support 5) poor tooling compared to professional grade languages (Java/C#/etc)

1) there are worse languages in that category. some are even more widely used.

2) that doesn't make sense. return arguments are part of the argument list signature. either changing any argument makes this tedious, or none does. you indicated that only return ones do for some reason.

3) can't argue there. in the rare occasion that type asserting interfaces is required because of lack of generics, things really do suck.

4) can you elaborate on that?

5) only thing i found lacking was absence of advanced refactoring tools. for everything else, the available tooling seems to be on part with what i've used with java (anecdotal)
You shouldn't use Facebook's Messenger Rooms
I think if you're low income, you qualify for a lot more loans.
The fact that Yarvin is one?
The Financial Oligarchs Exposed
The most recent generation had turbo numbers that were about 100MHz higher than they should be, and it was difficult or impossible to reach the stated number on most chips, especially on launch or near-launch BIOS versions.
Woa, that sounds pretty heavy duty stuff. Thanks for the writeup!
A ton of photograpers, artists, small-time writers, and hobbyists of any kind have sites. Many of them started before Facebook, though.
I'm no expert, this stuff is definitely over my head, but here's my attempt to understand it: Let say you want a computer in the cloud. Today you probably do that by paying someone like Linode for something like a VPS. But under that model, Linode still has a ton of control over your computer in the cloud. With Urbit, it's distributed, so you aren't renting access to your cloud computer from some entity that has more control over it than you do.
>For the average college graduate, college is still a pretty good investment

Evidence doesn't seem to bear this out.

"The college income premium—the extra income earned by a family headed by a college graduate over an otherwise similar family without a bachelor’s degree—remains positive but has declined for recent graduates. The college wealth premium (extra wealth) has declined more noticeably among all cohorts born after 1940. Among non-Hispanic white family heads born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium is at a historic low; among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero [emphasis added]. Using variables available for the first time in the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that controlling for the education of one’s parents reduces our estimates of college and postgraduate income and wealth premiums by 8 to 18 percent. Controlling also for measures of a respondent’s financial acumen—which may be partly innate—, our estimates of the value added by college and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment. We explore a variety of explanations and conclude that falling college wealth premiums may be due to the luck of when you were born, financial liberalization and the rising cost of higher education."

particularly noteworthy: "[...]among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero[...]"

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/is...
I tried to understand how Hoon and Nock work once and got completely lost. They happily claim that their definition of Nock is super simple and Turing Complete, and I'm used to dealing with some really abstract things, but I simply can't deduce it. Their definition of Nock contains a couple of different combinators. They start out really simple: one to increment, one to tell if something is a list or an atom, one for equality. Then comes this one:

/[1 a] a
/[2 a b] a
/[3 a b] b
/[(a + a) b] /[2 /[a b]]
/[(a + a + 1) b] /[3 /[a b]]

And then I'm completely lost. What on earth does this combinator do? Every time I try tracing it with an example list it quickly goes into infinite recursion.
Yes. Carl Sagan did it. He wrote a book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
Bizarre Spinosaurus makes history as first known swimming dinosaur
or the small schools find a way to make education more cost effective. i'm sure there are tons of businesses that would be happy to give you an online education for cheap if it were legally allowable.
Somewhat surprised at the lack of PCIe 4.0. Is there really no demand for more PCI bandwidth on high-end desktops?
How'd you like it/would you recommend it? I've heard really good things about that program specifically, other than it can be hard to graduate from it.
This is pretty good advice. I have a friend who works in a call center who found another job due to COVID-19 (started looking when they said they were going to lay everyone off, it's an affected industry). She took 3 weeks vacation from that job, then started the new one. The new one was a disaster; training was disorganized, IT can't get them the right access, and the actual job wasn't what was expected. She quit the new job, and will just silently return to the old one after her vacation is up.

I've never thought of doing this, but it's genius.

(Note to programmer types, though; you might have signed something that says you won't do this. Recommend legal advice or at least a backup plan for if you get caught ;)
Except this chat seems has a unique(feudalistic maybe?) update system:

https://urbit.org/using/operations/stars-and-galaxies/

Updates are passed down from galaxy to star to planet. Star owners can modify those updates to push custom software to planet VMs.
At the very least, having more than zero users. Maybe yours was pay-only, in which case you basically just spent three weeks coding for fun, but that doesn't stop you from continuing on in a solely bizdev capacity. I'm sure your app has at least some set of basic tools that all of your putative competitors have, so just sell that for a while and see what happens.
It's easy to make broad vague philosophical promises.

They are meaningless without a plan, legislation, and a budget.

How many empty promises have we heard from various politicians with zero follow-through? When will we learn to tune-out this political BS?
That’s cool, I guess. I just don’t want all those things bundled up.
For typical desktop workloads memory bandwidth is not that important. They likely will release Xeon-W counterparts later with similar frequencies but higher memory channels and PCI-E lanes for those who need it.