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Comment by state | Hacker News Reader

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Hello! I'm one of the Urbit devs.

1. Has this ever actually happened? I'd be quite disturbed by that. We're more than happy to have people learning about Urbit, although we're not particularly active on social media.

2. Curtis is certainly controversial. None of us share his views, but we do enjoy working together. I'd like to think we live in a world where people who don't agree can still collaborate professionally.

3. Learning Hoon is much easier than it looks. In my experience it's absolutely designed for usability — although it doesn't appear that way at first. We're actively working to better explain how Hoon works and teach people the language. It would be totally against our interests to do otherwise. I do think our new docs do a much better job: http://urbit.org/docs

4. There is a company behind Urbit, but it's not technically possible for us to control the project in the long term. Urbit is definitely not behind any kind of 'firewall' — it's designed to be owned by the community.

I'd encourage you to check out the posts on our beliefs and principles [0], address space [1] and company [2].

0 - http://urbit.org/posts/principles/ 1 - http://urbit.org/posts/address-space/ 2 - http://urbit.org/posts/company/

"Controversial" is the pinnacle of weasel words. How do you feel about his belief that some ethnic groups are genetically better slaves, and do you think that his views would make people from those ethnic groups feel welcome in your community?

It would demonstrate a lot about the HN community if we could get through an entire Urbit post without it devolving in to yet another debate on Curtis Yarvin's (incredibly lengthy, vague and contradictory, and entirely irrelevant) views on race.

It wouldn't demonstrate anything that would make it a community I want to be a part of, though.

> his belief that some ethnic groups are genetically better slaves

I'm curious, do you take that to speak well or ill about the ethnic groups in question?

It's a shame you were downvoted here, you're asking a pretty interesting question.

Yeah, I mean, being strong as an ox would mean both that your abilities are superior to those of others and that you would make for a useful slave.

The comments that I have seen from him on that topic (and it should be noted that I have only read a small part of his comments so this may not be representative of his thoughts on these matters) implied that those groups were better slaves because they were more resilient or stronger, so were able to better survive slavery than less resilient or weaker groups.

I don't see why that would make people from those groups feel unwelcome. If anything I would expect people from the groups that he says were genetically not as good as slaves to be the ones who would feel unwelcome. The implication is that they are weaker or less resilient.

Wait, so your argument is that only Native Americans would feel unwelcome in this community?

Is this supposed to be in his favor?

EDIT: For clarity

> So your argument is that Native Americans should feel unwelcome in this community?

You're putting words in 5F36B5F62640's mouth.

And to be absolutely honest, anybody reading this can see that you're the one attempting to make people feel unwelcome in this community.

Edit: The commenter has now upgraded his comment but the original with added emphasis is quoted above.

That was the example Moldbug used, claiming that Africans made genetically better slaves than Native Americans. 5F36B5F62640 contended that the groups that were not better slaves should feel unwelcome. This is just the basic logical implication of taking those two claims together.

Rather than attacking me personally, is there something I missed or was incorrect about?

You created a 'should' from a 'would', and therefore implied that 5F36B5F62640 had ill-feelings towards Indians.

I'm not attacking you personally, nor am I speaking to you personally. I am just pointing out to anybody reading this, that you just tried to smear somebody.

Of course, whether you did so on purpose is another matter.

You're grasping a bit on this. Logic does not dictate that there were implied ill-feelings on 5F36B5F62640's behalf. In fact, I can categorically state that from the one post I've read from them I do not believe they have any such ill-feelings!

To restate, then: "Wait, so your argument is that only Native Americans would feel unwelcome in this community?

Is this supposed to be in his favor?"

I appreciate your dedication to accuracy, and I must assume this satisfies your complaint.

It wasn't a grasp. The rhetorical effect of your comment was to imply some sentiment from 5F36B5F62640 on 'what ought to be'.

Yes, that is no longer accusatory; and it is correct: there are other sets of people that would no doubt feel unwelcome in such a community.

I think in a practical sense their fear is overblown as 'Code is law'. However people generally make decisions based on consensus reality.

Do you seriously not see how someone discussing how good a slave you would make is (at the very least) 'unwelcoming'?

Was that on Urbit's homepage? The docs? The IRC? The subreddit? Over e-mail?

Was it something like "yeah it is a functional system... hey have I mentioned how much potential you have for whenever you feel like dedicating your life to slavery?"

...or was it just the guy rambling on a blog of his under a pen name?

It's pretty obvious to anyone that the guy's views are obscenely offensive, but if the guy is strictly professional when it comes to Urbit, treats everyone with the same respect and works just fine along with many people that despise his views, how are the project's goals tainted?

Because people don't just see Urbit, if they end up participating long-term. They see Yarvin, and he definitely is not one to hide his worldview.

As much as some people like to pretend it's only about tech, tech is made by people and it requires them to interact with each other, and that can never be completely confined to code.

>They see Yarvin, and he definitely is not one to hide his worldview.

While talking to Urbit contributors about Urbit?

By definition no, of course. But I have never done a non-trivial amount of open source-style work (coding or otherwise) with someone who shares their political views online, without learning about them somehow.

And in fact, every Urbit contributor in this thread who's mentioned this has also heard about Yarvin's political views, and not from this thread. It appears to me there's already a kind of self-selection process in Urbit contributors, towards those who are comfortable tolerating his garbage. And that's exactly the problem.

Well, if you define "comfortable tolerating his garbage" as "contributes to Urbit despite it being Yarvin's project", then tautological assertion is tautological.

There is certainly some self-selection for people who don't throw tech babies out with political bathwater. I count myself as one such person. I mean, I continued using Javascript and Firefox even after hearing about Brendan Eich's political contribution! Feel free to draw incorrect inferences regarding my opinion of gay marriage.

I have also toyed around with Urbit, and have (in a sense) made minor contributions. Feel free to draw incorrect inferences regarding my opinion of Yarvin's political writing.

It's not about your beliefs or what people infer about them. In fact it's not about you at all- it's about the other potential contributors and users that Yarvin is alienating, despite all the claims in this thread that his views don't impact the project.

Ah. So basically this[1]?

[1]: https://gist.github.com/djspiewak/3a6ff436865d9e5794e4

I mean, I guess you're technically correct: If nothing else, the impact of his views on the project is that it results in the exclusion of people who choose to exclude themselves from projects created by "the wrong people".

But of course that's trivially true of all projects, so why do you think it's such a problem in this particular case? If you answer "because his views are really bad" while acknowledging that they otherwise have no direct bearing on the technology, you're basically saying "because he's really unpopular".

I have no love of Yarvin's politics, but that sort of cure is worse than the disease.

Where we seem to differ is in the importance of those people who avoid Yarvin (or Torvalds, or other more or less abrasive open source contributors), as well as the reasons they avoid him. It's more than merely ideological for many people, it's personal.

I don't acknowledge that his views have no direct bearing on the technology, either, and that's tied up in my first point. We design things for ourselves, for the most part, so by excluding (perhaps inadvertently) people with different perspectives on life, we lose out on valuable input.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm certainly not claiming that people who avoid the project are somehow "less important" as a result of their decision. And I wouldn't doubt that it's personal for them - "mere ideology" also seems like a pretty personal thing!

I think we agree that Urbit would benefit from a larger, more diverse user/contributor base. What wouldn't? We're just ascribing agency in different places. I view the claim that Yarvin is excluding people as a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand. What he's actually done is 1) publish some really unpopular opinions, and 2) build Urbit. It is entirely possible to evaluate 2 on its own merits[1]. So I'm disappointed to see so many people write it off for other IMO less relevant reasons.

It reminds me a bit of a "Christian-friendly" Linux distro I once saw that omitted software written by known homosexuals. Would you also claim that the gay programmers were (perhaps inadvertently) excluding a subset of Christians? I suspect most people would agree in this case that agents of exclusion are the ones actually performing the exclusive act, rather than ones who happened to be "the wrong people" from another group's point of view.

[1]: This is true even in the presence of a strong political influence on the technology. I honestly don't see much of a connection between Urbit and Moldbug's politics, but then the latter never made much sense to me, so maybe I'm missing something. If there are politically objectionable aspects to the software, then by all means object! But plain old guilt by association is a weak argument in any context, doubly so in a technical one.

Yes, in a hypothetical platonic code-only way you can separate Yarvin from his work to some degree. But you're underestimating the impact of the word "personal" here- some people avoid communities like this not as a boycott, but for their personal safety or emotional well-being. That's the point where they go from the excluder to the one being excluded.

> "It's pretty obvious to anyone that the guy's views are obscenely offensive"

Is it? From what I've seen so far all the controversy has come from taking statements out of context.

However, I take your main point that it doesn't need to impact on Urbit.

> Hello! I'm one of the Urbit devs.

Can you please explain to me what a "non-lambda interpreter" is and why it matters?

We had this argument in person! Or, at least we had a good chunk of it. It was cut short, and I think it's my fault for not re-initiating it.

As you may remember, I'm really not the person to answer that question sufficiently. But I would like to see you and Curtis have this out at greater length.

> We had this argument in person!

Sorry, I didn't recognize your handle. (And just for the record, I wasn't trying to start an argument, just asking a question.)

> it's my fault

OK ;-)

> I'm really not the person to answer that question sufficiently.

OK.

> But I would like to see you and Curtis have this out at greater length.

Well, we're already having something out in another branch of this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11819810). But it's rather hard to get a straight answer out of him. He has this weird theory that the only way to avoid being sucked into the Lisp Failure Vortex is to not learn Lisp. But at the same time he professes his intentional ignorance of Lisp he also takes these weird pot-shots at it. That is, alas, not a good foundation for a constructive discussion, which is why I was hoping (and continue to hope) that you (or someone) might be able to explain it to me.

> Sorry, I didn't recognize your handle.

No problem. Just, you know, hi! I'm actually happy to pick this thread up. I remember really enjoying the last discussion.

As (I think) we discussed last time I basically have two views:

- Urbit actually works. Like, I actually build stuff on top of it. That's really the layer I'm most interested in. If it were built in Lisp, well, I probably wouldn't know the difference. I'm not sure I'm able to understand the implicit criticism at the user level.

- Shaking off the cruft of existing systems is actually pretty hard. I don't have as much experience with this as a programmer as Curtis does, but it's a problem near and dear to me. It's very difficult to think clearly inside of someone else's intellectual framework. So, maybe Hoon looks like a bad Lisp variant today. What does it look like in 50 years? Maybe it's dead, maybe it's everywhere. I'm not sure we can actually make this judgement for certain. That is: whether Nock / Hoon is definitively better or worse in terms of its long-term adoption and performance.

What Nock does seem to unlock is incredible amount of enthusiasm. The feeling of disillusionment can easily be converted into excitement. I've seen this done by Urbit — and that's pretty difficult to do. My intuition is that Lisp suffers from the opposite: the feeling that breaking from its history is impossible.

Either way I'm serious about getting you two to have this out in some kind of organized way. Ideally, on Urbit somehow.

> I remember really enjoying the last discussion.

Very happy to hear that.

> I'm not sure I'm able to understand the implicit criticism at the user level.

Let me make the criticism explicit then: inventing a new language is not hard. People do it all the time. It's an elementary exercise. However, inventing a good new language, i.e. one that actually advances the state of the art and provides a substantial advantage over existing languages -- that is very hard. That happens very rarely, probably less than a dozen times in the history of computing.

Although I have never heard Curtis say so explicitly, the rhetoric surrounding Urbit strongly implies that Nock and Hoon are languages of the second sort, that is, that they provide some benefit that existing languages lack, and without which developing Urbit would be substantially more difficult or even impossible. My question for the last four years has been: what is that benefit? Do Nock and Hoon really advance the state of the art in programming language design, or is their sole purpose to be the Shiny New Thing that gets people excited? Because if it's the latter, that does not bode well for Urbit's long-term prospects. Nothing gets to be the Shiny New Thing forever.

> It's very difficult to think clearly inside of someone else's intellectual framework.

That may be true, but do you not see the irony here? You didn't invent Nock/Hoon, Curtis did. So if you are thinking clearly, then you are doing it in someone else's intellectual framework, precisely the thing you say is very difficult.

> What Nock does seem to unlock is incredible amount of enthusiasm.

That I don't doubt. Curtis is a master marketeer. But Donald Trump is unlocking an incredible amount of enthusiasm too. Just because a lot of people get enthusiastic about something doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea.

Forgive my ignorance, but a typed functional system all the way down to machine is a huge departure from today's languages built on top of imperative dynamic machines, and a huge advantage in building typed functional systems, isn't it? I would go so far as to say that without a new machine and new languages designed for it, the abstraction will always leak. Which is why our software sucks today.

That's true, but Urbit isn't like that. It runs on stock hardware, which is to say, untyped imperative hardware. And even from a purely theoretical point of view, Urbit's lowest level (Nock) is untyped.

The last time anyone built a computer that was typed all the way down to the hardware was (ironically) Lisp machines.

It's an axiomatic interpreter not based on the lambda calculus.

It matters because gensyms suck. More generally, if you are building a two-layered system in which a compiler targets the interpreter, symbols, functions, and scopes are concepts that belong in the high-level language, not the low-level interpreter. (I think Shen is one example of a typed Lisp that targets an untyped Lisp, but obviously I know nothing about Lisp.)

So the lambda calculus is a classic layer violation.

Where I went to school in operating systems, which was Brown and Berkeley, we were taught to avoid layer violations and always separate mechanism from policy. Not sure what Lisp people are or were taught -- honestly, there were not a lot of them left, even in the '90s -- but it never seemed to include this.

I always look at a stateful Lisp machine, or Emacs, or whatever, and see a giant structureless blob of symbols. That said, this is probably a totally unjustified prejudice on my part, and at this point I really have no excuse except lack of time for refusing to learn more.

> not based on the lambda calculus

> It matters because gensyms suck.

That makes no sense. The lambda calculus has nothing to do with symbols. Lisp introduced the concept of symbols, but Lisp and the Lambda Calculus are not the same thing.

> obviously I know nothing about Lisp

That is indeed becoming rather obvious.

The Lambda Calculus does have to do with symbols and is defined in terms of them. Consider how application is defined. "λx.t" is an anonymous function that takes an input and substitutes it for the symbol "x" in the expression "t".

For example, given "λx.x+1" then "(λx.x+1)(z) => z+1". This reduction process is formally defined by the beta reduction rule, which says that "(λx.t)s" evaluates to "t[x:=s]".

"t[x:=s]" means "substitute the value s for the symbol x in expression t". E.g., x+1[x:=5] => 5+1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Beta_reducti...

If by symbol you mean something different than variable, then I might agree, but the heart of lambda calculus is the rule set for lambda abstraction, application, beta reduction. Due to alpha equivalence you could say that lambda calculus is agnostic to symbols however. I suppose it depends on what you mean. (Lambda calculus is defined in terms of capture avoiding substitutions.)

> If by symbol you mean something different than variable, then I might agree,

Well, the real question is what Curtis means by symbol, as the answer he gave is rather cryptic. But since he specifically raised the issue of "gensyms", that seems to be a reference to a standard Lisp function that generates symbols, a first-class Lisp data structure, at run-time or, more usually, at macro-expansion time. Since Curtis has complained about macros in the past, I assumed this was what he was referring to. "Symbols" that exist only in the textual representation of the language and not as first-class data types are usually called "identifiers" rather than symbols precisely to avoid this sort of confusion.

In any case, it is an elementary exercise to define a formal computational system equivalent to the lambda calculus that uses integers rather than identifiers. Instead of λx.x you write λn where n is an integer. 0 refers to the value bound by the innermost scope, 1 to the value bound by the next outer scope, and so on. So, for example, λx.λy.x becomes λλ1. But of course, no one does this because it's completely pointless.

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