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Interesting stuff, but in my usual 15 minutes of attention-span for things like this, utterly impenetrable. Can anyone who has had the privilege of being invit

Interesting stuff, but in my usual 15 minutes of attention-span for things like this, utterly impenetrable. Can anyone who has had the privilege of being invited to the Urbit network enlighten us as to just how useful it is shaping up to be in light of, say, the situation with IPFS by comparison? (http://ipfs.io http://ipfs.io) Because to me, it seems that IPFS may well be ahead in terms of actual applicability right now. Am I mistaken?

yarvin9 11y ago
I love IPFS, and it's definitely ahead in terms of applicability. IPFS is solving a different problem -- it's a storage network, not a personal server. IPFS is more comparable to Freenet or BitTorrent. Urbit is more comparable to Sandstorm, although of course they're technically very different.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  Like I said, I'm yet to finish boning up on what, exactly, Urbit is .. Sorry - not trying to be pedantic - but how is IPFS not a personal server? I can serve content with it right now, in fact - its what I mostly use it for at the moment. I guess Urbit is more of an 'operating environment' that allows applications to be built, then?
  - yarvin9 11y ago
    Yes -- Urbit is a "server" in the sense of "computer," which you control and which runs your own apps. IPFS stores and serves your data; so does Dropbox, Cloudflare, etc. In a sense the best way to see IPFS is as a distributed CDN, of course with an immutable namespace that actually works.
    - msutherl 11y ago
      Do you foresee Urbit making use of IPFS?
      - yarvin9 11y ago
        When both succeed, certainly. :-) We certainly don't try to solve the CDN problem that IPFS is solving.
- pkinsky 11y ago
  Is Urbit comparable to Ethereum?
  - jpt4 11y ago
    Ethereum is distributed: the network acts as a single organism, and computation only co-occurs with (perhaps can only be considered a side-effect of) consensus among nodes. Urbit is [de|para|un]-centralized, with each node capable of independent (possibly antagonistic) action.
akhilcacharya 11y ago
>Interesting stuff, but in my usual 15 minutes of attention-span for things like this, utterly impenetrable. It's pretty much designed to be as hard to understand as possible. Look at the source/demo videos - it seems like it's designed to be obfuscated. https://github.com/urbit/urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit http://urbit.org/preview/~2015.9.25/materials/part-i http://urbit.org/preview/~2015.9.25/materials/part-i Personally, I can't get over the really made up words.
- yebyen 11y ago
  > Personally, I can't get over the really made up words. The idea of having new names for everything is that when you use a name you've already seen before in another context, you carry forward any ideas you have about things with that name based on their implementations in those other languages. There's a specific meaning for the words that are used for the introductory language concepts: arm, gate, battery, sample, core, rune, glyph, ... twig, jet, and so on. Many of these are either new concepts, or new arrangements of old concepts. A gate is not a lambda or a function, neither is a core, and if either were called those things anyone who hadn't seen them explained before would probably go ahead and take the big word to their nearest search engine, only to become even more confused by idiosyncratic and sometimes conflicting explanations of those ideas that appear slightly differently in hundreds of other languages. I think that Hoon hopes to be the first programming language for a lot of people one day, so they won't usually be coming expecting familiar things to have familiar names.
  - msutherl 11y ago
    Interestingly, this same objection comes up when people try to read so-called (normally French) postructuralist theory from the 60s and 70s. Derrida himself, or Rorty writing on Derrida, supposedly advanced a similar argument, that using new terms allowed one to avoid falling back onto old concepts. I couldn't find a good source quickly, but it's mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Criticism_from_analytic_philosophers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Criticism_from...
    - 11y ago

yarvin9 11y ago

I love IPFS, and it's definitely ahead in terms of applicability. IPFS is solving a different problem -- it's a storage network, not a personal server. IPFS is more comparable to Freenet or BitTorrent. Urbit is more comparable to Sandstorm, although of course they're technically very different.

fit2rule 11y ago
Like I said, I'm yet to finish boning up on what, exactly, Urbit is .. Sorry - not trying to be pedantic - but how is IPFS not a personal server? I can serve content with it right now, in fact - its what I mostly use it for at the moment. I guess Urbit is more of an 'operating environment' that allows applications to be built, then?
- yarvin9 11y ago
  Yes -- Urbit is a "server" in the sense of "computer," which you control and which runs your own apps. IPFS stores and serves your data; so does Dropbox, Cloudflare, etc. In a sense the best way to see IPFS is as a distributed CDN, of course with an immutable namespace that actually works.
  - msutherl 11y ago
    Do you foresee Urbit making use of IPFS?
    - yarvin9 11y ago
      When both succeed, certainly. :-) We certainly don't try to solve the CDN problem that IPFS is solving.
pkinsky 11y ago
Is Urbit comparable to Ethereum?
- jpt4 11y ago
  Ethereum is distributed: the network acts as a single organism, and computation only co-occurs with (perhaps can only be considered a side-effect of) consensus among nodes. Urbit is [de|para|un]-centralized, with each node capable of independent (possibly antagonistic) action.

akhilcacharya 11y ago

>Interesting stuff, but in my usual 15 minutes of attention-span for things like this, utterly impenetrable. It's pretty much designed to be as hard to understand as possible. Look at the source/demo videos - it seems like it's designed to be obfuscated. https://github.com/urbit/urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit http://urbit.org/preview/~2015.9.25/materials/part-i http://urbit.org/preview/~2015.9.25/materials/part-i Personally, I can't get over the really made up words.

yebyen 11y ago
> Personally, I can't get over the really made up words. The idea of having new names for everything is that when you use a name you've already seen before in another context, you carry forward any ideas you have about things with that name based on their implementations in those other languages. There's a specific meaning for the words that are used for the introductory language concepts: arm, gate, battery, sample, core, rune, glyph, ... twig, jet, and so on. Many of these are either new concepts, or new arrangements of old concepts. A gate is not a lambda or a function, neither is a core, and if either were called those things anyone who hadn't seen them explained before would probably go ahead and take the big word to their nearest search engine, only to become even more confused by idiosyncratic and sometimes conflicting explanations of those ideas that appear slightly differently in hundreds of other languages. I think that Hoon hopes to be the first programming language for a lot of people one day, so they won't usually be coming expecting familiar things to have familiar names.
- msutherl 11y ago
  Interestingly, this same objection comes up when people try to read so-called (normally French) postructuralist theory from the 60s and 70s. Derrida himself, or Rorty writing on Derrida, supposedly advanced a similar argument, that using new terms allowed one to avoid falling back onto old concepts. I couldn't find a good source quickly, but it's mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Criticism_from_analytic_philosophers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Criticism_from...
  - 11y ago