Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

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Is Urbit some kind of performance art project? Every time I read about it, it feels like I'm reading Edward Lear.

Edit: Example from Reddit: "sensible reason there are so many four-letter words is that they are symbols in the kernel, and four-letter symbols fit into 31 bits, which lets us use machine ints as an interpreter optimization rather than calling out to GMP."

Sensible?! Hahahaha! This has to be comedy. They are bigint-encoding identifiers? There is no sane reason to do this.

OK, I'm just going to go through the website here:

"If Bitcoin is money and Ethereum is law, Urbit is land."

Wow, how expositional.

"A 32-bit ship (like ~firbyr-napbes) is called a "planet." A 16-bit ship (like ~pollev) is a "star." An 8-bit ship (like ~mun) is a "galaxy.""

Edward Lear on subnets?

"Much as all real-estate titles in England trace back to William the Conqueror, all certificates in Urbit trace back to ~zod."

All hail!

"As an Urbit user, these basics are all you need to know."

Really? Because I still have no idea what the hell is supposed to be going on here.

"A principle called "Zooko’s triangle" says that a practical identity system can achieve any two of these goals."

Disproved by Namecoin, FWIW.

"For more on Urbit's governance design, see our beliefs and principles and our interim constitution."

Oh great, so this "personal server" project (as described on the front page) has a constitution and a statement of principles?

Seriously, the only way I can interpret this is as some sort of abstract absurdist comedy project.

> They are bigint-encoding identifiers? There is no sane reason to do this.

There needn't be any "encoding" really. Modern CPUs have a 32-bit compare instruction. The CPU doesn't understand types as a compiler does; it will accept any aligned series of 4 bytes as a comparand. Some implementations of strcmp use that. Forcing the identifiers to 4 bytes eliminates some if-else edge casing before the compare, which might speed things up.

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about urbit. I agree such an optimization is surprising. The more normal pattern is to convert human-readable symbols to integers early, thus avoiding string comparison in performance-critical sections.

> Sensible?! Hahahaha! This has to be comedy. They are bigint-encoding identifiers? There is no sane reason to do this.

This fixed machine-width type of character encoding isn't unheard of. For example, Windows uses tags of this size to identify chunks of memory associated with drivers: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff...

Yes, but it's terrible design to use this in a dynamic interpreter. You can either use a proper text type or use identifier substitution.

And yet, we're completely serious.

I've seen you guys comment to this effect several times, but the most plausible explanation I can come up with is that this is a Nathan Fielder-style performance comedy. You insistently play the role of someone who is totally invested in their clearly nonsensical idea, and you take advantage of the fact that social pressure will cause people to go along with it.

When you look at it that way, it's pretty funny! But, the truth is, I'm actually sitting in an office working on Urbit. I'd invite you to come by for coffee or something, but the internet tells me you're in Austin. Would Skype count as proof?

I'm in CA right now. I'll send you an email. I'd be happy to be proven wrong and that Urbit is totally reasonable.

Let the HN record show: wyager and I are going to meet up at some point. I may or may not be able to convince him that Urbit is real — but civility prevails nonetheless!

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