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Comment by chc4 | Hacker News Reader

- Programming Language dev: I think compilers and VM runtimes are neat, and like talking to people in the space on twitter or reading new papers that come out about it. The /r/ProgrammingLanguage discord server is a great place to hang out, with lots of interesting and competent people working on sideprojects simply because they like the topic.

- Urbit: I got into Urbit years ago, and still think it's really interesting as a Lisp-machine-alt-timeline-esque project. The goal is basically trying to think how the world would look if your entire OS was built on a runtime that uses cons cells and bignums everywhere for values, with a single transparently persistent state a la KeyKOS, and everything has typed RPC and P2P apps were the default.

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Do you actually use Urbit? I just tried it recently and found it insanely buggy and slow (the most basic things didn't work, attempting to join certain chatrooms hung forever, etc.) Wondering what I did wrong or if it's that way for everyone

I do use it. I'm in a few different chatrooms with friends that have decent traffic, including the general "hoon programming help" groups that have higher traffic.

It is pretty slow, both because it's a decentralized chat and thus things are hosted on normal peoples' home connections across the world, and also just because Urbit the actual binary isn't very well optimized. It's good enough for me, and I don't really expect it to be as good as Discord. I haven't actually hit any bugs in quite a while, actually.

Just to update my comment so that readers don't get the wrong idea: I went back and tested it again today. It's a lot faster than when I tried it. I still have things like "Fetching user count..." for groups that never seems to update, though.

That almost certainly has to do with the user who hosts the group not having their Urbit running when you tried to join.

Also, just to have it in this thread, most of the slowness when using Urbit has to do with poor frontend optimization. The network itself is actually quite snappy.

Hm I just started playing around with it recently and had no trouble joining groups and downloading apps. I'm only running a comet and not a planet.

Programming languages here as well. I am working on 2 at the same time currently (and I made many before); one of them I am trying to have done befor 1 dec to do AoC22 with. I believe I can make that.

Meh. Urbit. That's not a weird technical scene, that's a lightning-rod for arguments about code of conduct at conferences and whether you're a fan of Bergson / Popper-esque Open Societies [cf. "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" vs. J. S. Mill "On Liberty"]

No, really, it’s not political. But haters love to make it about politics because they can’t rebut it technically.

Technically it’s a very interesting and valuable project. And there are many normal well adjusted humans beings working on it. It’s a shame people want it smeared out of existence because a Berkeley grad who no longer has anything to do with the project has weird political fantasies that some people don’t like. People really seem to struggle to separate the two. Makes it feel deliberate.

> that's a lightning-rod for arguments about code of conduct at conferences and whether you're a fan of Bergson / Popper-esque Open Societies [cf. "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" vs. J. S. Mill "On Liberty"]

I'm out of the loop but intrigued.

Can you explain what the controversy is? In what way are Bergson / Popper and Mill said to disagreed and what does it have to do with (Urbit?) conference codes of conduct?

There's a nice search feature at the bottom of the main page. There are dozen of Urbit threads that go the same direction.

> that's a lightning-rod for argument

Then you must be the lightning itself, creating an account to ionise and electrically charge the thread I guess.

You're suggesting I created an account an hour before urbit was mentioned in this thread just knowing someone would mention it? And I made the comment with my IRL name to hide my tracks?

Sometimes the world doesn't revolve around you.

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