I admire the general spirit of your comment, but this specific example seems off to me. Search and browsers, for example, don't make sense as independent businesses. Rather, they are products based off of Ads.

Maybe the idea would be for Ads to pay Search to include their ads, and for Search to pay Browsers to be the default search engine?

* Donald Trump is revealed to be the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto

* President Nelson (prophet of the LDS church) dies and is replaced by Dallin Oaks

* Dugin writes a sequel to The Fourth Political Theory, titled The n+1'th Political Theory

* New microscope finds the words "God was here" etched into every molecule in the universe

* People become at least 5% cuter as estrogen/testosterone ratio continues to tip in that direction

I'm reminded of this excerpt from 1984:

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

---

Of course, I'm sure none of that would ever apply to our numbers, only to those of our opponents.

A virile map has monsters, and beckons a boy to grab his stick (gleaming steel) and hop aboard the patio (great ship with full sails) and set the neighborhood alight in delight fighting pirates.

He devises elaborate dilemmas and improvises wilely against his barbarous captors, even as the governors of his native country conspire against him, or wonders what strange countries lie just beyond the edge of the words "the known world".

Or maybe the sea is made of stars, and he envisions gayly springtime planets, or dark winter stars that become dragons across the nebulae.

Idk, even then, maybe there's a frontier beyond the final one - where consciousness melts between the fabrics of little realities, each with their own cutely crafted logic, and he drifts to a new dream where 1 + 1 is 3 and it only makes sense that way.

Idk. ChatGPT raised me and I'm afraid I'm becoming my father, who then will I raise to look like me? If only I had a map of the ages to not fear myself.

In fact, I think I really enjoy specialized notations. I care about how ideas are expressed, sometimes even more than the ideas themselves. Sheet music, SQL, creating DSLs in Lisp, Hoon code (controversial here).

There are counter examples. For example, I adore coding in SQL, but ORMs always feel super gross. And isn't Paul Graham's adoration of Lisp kind of a programming version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis?

Whatever, and in Sapir (and Whorf)'s defense, how "debunked" is linguistic relativity anyway?

Whatever, I'll keep accruing beautiful new symbols and vocabularies and aesthetics for saying things that were previously unsayable and discovering new ideas to put together elegantly.

>They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of “Israel”.

source is in the thread I linked to

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41805390

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Remember though, how often in the history of states, the temporary cannily usurps permanence. It's hard to tell what's a brief deviation from the mean, rather than an early glimpse into the new normal.

I have no idea what I'm talking about, either in terms of understanding society nor the UK specifically, but your phrasing tickled my paranoia about that phrase a sort of famous last words for civilizations, lol.

On the other hand, it was also used to justify why the federal government can prevent states from legalizing marijuana, even if it won't leave the state. It's certainly a ruling with a complicated moral legacy, in that it has some clearly good use cases, a few bad ones, while also brazenly defying the clear meaning of the constitution because doing so was convenient to the state.

Not sure how I feel about it, but I guess it was inevitable anyway.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294504

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Setting a static max-width, increasing margins, and playing with the font made the page much more readable for me.

I don't endorse Dissenter, however, I do think it's death coincided with a vibe shift. Before that, there was kind of a left-libertarian vibe on the internet. Even banning obviously horrendous content would be met with hordes of "muh freeze peach" outrage from greasy web bois. It feels like the state and media managed to collaborate against big tech to reign them in as a competing power.

I say "feels like" because I have no idea what I'm talking about. Take everything I've said as seriously as you'd take "What if we are just really advanced NPCs and the whole universe is a video game for aliens" lol.

My point is, I miss comments sections (and I guess, that I project my nostalgia onto weakly evidenced conspiracy theories about the machinations of the state)

Thanks so much for this enlightening comment :3

Although I'm curious why Hoon doesn't just detect and cache identical computations by default. I guess it's a tradeoff, since using ~+ is more memory intensive, and you don't always want that either. Especially is Urbit itself is already fairly memory intensive.

This is precisely what I did in my Hoon solution :) However, I wasn't aware that this approach is the standard way, and I'm glad to have learned that! Thanks

Let's use the fibonacci sequence as an example. Let's write it the classic, elegant way: f(n) = f(n-1) + f(n-2). Gorgeous. It's the sum of the two previous. With the caveat that f(n=0|1) = n. In Python:

  # fib for basic b's
  def fib(n):
    ## Base case
    if n == 0 or n == 1:
      return n
    
    return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)

  # optimize-pilled memoize-chad version
  def fib(n, saved={}):
    if n in saved:
      return saved[n]
    
    if n == 0 or n == 1:
      saved[n] = n
    else:
      saved[n] = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
    
    return saved[n]

This is the normal pattern in most languages, memoizing otherwise "pure" functions is easy because you can reference a shared object using references, right? Even with multithreading, we're fine, since we have shared memory.

Okay, but in Hoon, there are no pointers! Well, there kinda are. The operating system lets you update the "subject" of your Urbit (the context in which your programs run), and you can do this via the filesystem (Clay) or daemons (Gall agents, which have their own state kind of).

But to do this within a simple function, not relying on fancy OS features? It's totally possible, but a huge pain the Aslan.

First, here's our bog-standard fib in Hoon:

  |=  n=@ud
  ?:  (lte n 1)
    n
  %+  add
    $(n (dec n))
  $(n (sub n 2))

  :-  %say
  |=  [* [n=@ud ~] [cache=(map @ud @ud) ~]]
  :-  %noun
  ^-  [sum=@ud cache=(map @ud @ud)]
  =/  has-n  (~(get by cache) n)
  ?~  has-n
    ?:  (lte n 1)
      [n (~(put by cache) n n)]
    =/  minus-1  $(n (dec n))
    =/  minus-2 
      =/  search  (~(get by cache.minus-1) (sub n 2))
      ?~  search  0
      (need search)
    :-  (add sum.minus-1 minus-2)
    (~(put by cache.minus-1) n (add sum.minus-1 minus-2))
  [(need has-n) cache]

  > =fib-8 +fib 8
  > sum.fib-8
  21

I even wonder how much faster I actually made things. Let's see:

  > =old now
  > =res +fib 18
  > sum.res
  2.584
  > (sub now old)
  1.688.849.860.263.936
  :: now with the non-memoized code...
  > =before now
  > +fib 18
  2.584
  > (sub now before)
  1.125.899.906.842.624

Wait. Nevermind. My memoized version is faster. I tested it with the Unix time command. It's just that Urbit Dojo has a wierd way of handling time that doesn't match my intuition. Oh well, I guess I can learn how that works. But my point is, thinking is hard, and in Python or JS or C I only have to think in terms of values and pointers. And yes, that comes with subtle bugs where you think you have a value but you really have a pointer! But most of the time it's pretty easy.

Btw sorry for rambling on with this trivial nonsense - I'm a devops guy so this is probably super boring and basic for all you master hn swe's. But it's just a tiny example of the constant frustrations I've had trying to do things that would be super simple if I could just grab a reference and modify something in memory, which for better or worse, is how every imperative language implicitly does things.

>We support technology projects that counter online censorship and combat repressive surveillance to enable all citizens to exercise their fundamental human rights online.

Huh! Based on my experience as an open source contributor, I've developed certain intuitions, and this language just screams "state-sponsored ngo". Nothing wrong with that - but it made me curious. Thankfully, OTF is super open about their funding: https://www.opentech.fund/about/about-our-funding/

>OTF receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. government via the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Funding is appropriated for OTF through the annual Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs appropriations and provided to OTF via a grant agreement from USAGM.

Ha! I knew it. It's wierd how you can just tell, with these things. I didn't even know USAGM existed. Over the last decade, people have become so politicized, yet I feel like understanding of the Actually Existing State is pretty limited. Or maybe I should just speak for myself. When I study the state, I tend to do so in terms of political values and traditions that maybe don't make that much sense. Ie, in terms of democracy, freedom, liberal values, or whatever, when I don't know if these terms really mean anything at all in the context of modern polities, you know?

But if nothing else, it's cool to see my tax dollars going towards something that makes the world pretty much safer :)

I feel like there are two kinds of singers - people who are good at singing, and people who have something to sing about. You and I, I think, prefer the latter.