Comment by moldbug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moldbug | Hacker News Reader

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Why would I prefer that bunch of idiot hippies? My preference is for Karl Marx and Henry George (with the former being better at seeing what capitalism really is, and the latter being the better economist).

Come on, you don't think you can shock people with Karl Marx, do you? In 2012? Try some Maistre, Carlyle, Froude. Maybe even George Fitzhugh or R.L. Dabney. Here, this'll get you started: http://books.google.com/books?id=an2LWYTh2ewC

No, I thought someone was going to fund me because my adviser is well-known and prestigious within the field.

Maybe you're not such a bad bureaucrat after all! But I meant not while you're in grad school, but after. Of course, if you stick with your mafia, and it's a good mafia, you can keep the party going. Perhaps. Definitely make sure you don't alienate your betters.

Even the successful industrial programmers I know, unless they became millionaires off a start-up, did not actually make enough money to "settle down" out of working and "found your own little university of one."

Yeah, that's what I mean. Dedicate yourself completely and unreservedly to the foul, foul art of money-grubbing, and/or money-saving. Or possibly money-stealing. Anything is better than either conning investors, or conning the government. Have you considered growing pot?

(I won't say this worked perfectly for me, but it did give me time to write my purely functional operating system. Unfortunately this took longer than expected and I'm now kinda broke. And I really can't turn my daughter's closet into a grow-room. So, we'll see if anyone thinks they need a purely functional operating system... Kickstarter, here I come.)

Come on, you don't think you can shock people with Karl Marx, do you?

The point isn't to shock. The actual point was that you're not supposed to talk politics in the workplace. I wasn't preaching Marx to coworkers, so why were they railing on about Hayek?

Yeah, that's what I mean. Dedicate yourself completely and unreservedly to the foul, foul art of money-grubbing, and/or money-saving. Or possibly money-stealing. Anything is better than either conning investors, or conning the government. Have you considered growing pot?

You've got to be kidding. You would rob people before "conning investors" (ie: making an actual go at a business) or "conning the government" (ie: making an actual go at research)?

Just link me to your "pure functional operating system" already, or I'm calling troll-post.

Conning investors is quite different from making an actual go at a business.

What is the difference? The difference is that when you invite investors to invest in your new location-based social network for morticians and coroners (or whatever the fsck), you are making an actual go at a business. Whereas when you invite investors to invest in your new programming language, you are conning investors.

Conning the government means making flagrantly bogus and absurd claims in your grant applications. Please bear in mind that all your competitors will be doing this. If you don't intend to play by the same rules, you need some other way of stabbing your competitors in the back before the finish line. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I am descended from a long line of Beltway bandits. I recognize the patterns and practices of the tribe at once. Indeed I recognized it in my first week at Berkeley, when they sat us down and gave us the basic lecture on what it means to have a career in "science" today.

I believe the numbers given were that half of us first-year grad students would finish, half of those would find teaching jobs, and those who found teaching jobs would be dividing their time three ways: 1/3 teaching, 1/3 research, 1/3 grantwriting. I found this broadly credible and still do.

So, that's only 1/3 of your day spent as a professional liar (and/or backstabber). You might as well try to spend only 1/3 of your day as a professional crackhead, whore, etc. But hey, it's worth a try.

As for trolling - absolutely! Laugh while you can, monkey-boy...

What is the difference? The difference is that when you invite investors to invest in your new location-based social network for morticians and coroners (or whatever the fsck), you are making an actual go at a business. Whereas when you invite investors to invest in your new programming language, you are conning investors.

I see little difference. Neither of those is ever going to make money.

Neither Hayek nor Marx is "politics." Politics is Olbermann and/or Glenn Beck.

Hayek and Marx are history and literature. If you're not supposed to talk history and literature at the workplace, you may be in the wrong workplace.

Hayek is a second-rate figure both as writer and thinker. The only Austrians worth reading are Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises. I would read all of Rothbard before I read any of Hoppe, and all of Mises before I read any of Rothbard. I would not read Hayek at all.

What's cool about Dabney and Fitzhugh is that you could be expelled from any university in the country if someone found them in your dorm room. I wouldn't want them on the shelf at work either. Even Carlyle is pushing it in both contexts.

You certainly can't say that for Mises and Rothbard, even - not to mention Henry George and Karl Marx. About the only thing more innocuous than Henry George and Karl Marx would be a pile of old National Geographics, if screened for tits.

> Just link me to your "pure functional operating system" already, or I'm calling troll-post.

Moldbug's system:

https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/

Its blog:

http://moronlab.blogspot.com/

That shit be old, man. Well, not the code... the blog.

Lesson 1: your research project is not an open-source project. Until it's done.

Lesson 2: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

That said, if you want to see some very odd-looking code:

https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/jupiter/sys/20...

Scroll down to the RSA implementation around line 2500. You won't learn anything. And why does a self-compiling compiler need an RSA implementation, anyway?

> Scroll down to the RSA implementation around line 2500.

I saw it when you checked it in. Be careful what you post for public consumption, someone might actually read it.

> And why does a self-compiling compiler need an RSA implementation, anyway?

You gave this one away already on MoronLab, for anyone who wishes to see.

Any why has the Urbit Dukes list been so quiet? Make some noise, Moldbug.

Neighbor, please. It's hard enough trying to reinvent the wheel by myself. With any help it'd be downright impossible.

There's a great anecdote about Jessica Mitford from the '50s. Mitford had spent years writing an autobiography and, during this process, had constantly been passing drafts around to all her commie-princess friends. Of whom as you'd imagine there was a great number. Finally she got an agent, whose name I forget but I'm sure was a big New York queen of some kind, who shut her down and forced her to finish the book instead. "It's like parading around all day," the agent told her, "in your underwear."

The system has only been self-hosting for 7 or 8 months. Until November the parser was still de facto impure. The packet decoder has never been tested and isn't even in the kernel. String syntax is nonexistent, the prettyprinter prints pure dog crap, Nock 6 was an aesthetic disaster so Nock 5 is actually Nock 7 but with the calling convention reversed, persistence is nonexistent, stack overflow recovery is nonexistent, profiling has succumbed again to bit rot, HTTP is completely untested, etc, etc. I could explain all these things to you, or I could finish putting my clothes on.

Obviously it's on a public repository and all the code is PD. Crap you can even build the thing if you like. You can even fork your own kernel and try to compete with me! Don't expect any documentation, however. If I don't answer my email I don't have to accept patches. If I don't read my email I don't have to answer it.

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