22 ms·

What Urbit is

234 points by rgbrgb 10y ago

rgbrgb 10y ago
They just released a really clean new homepage too. Big stuff! https://www.urbit.org/ https://www.urbit.org/
- chc4 10y ago
  They just presented at LambdaConf, and posted a (bootleg) video of the talk, too. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs Slides: http://media.urbit.org/lambda-conf_2016.pdf http://media.urbit.org/lambda-conf_2016.pdf
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  If by "clean" you mean its fallback behavior without JS is to show a white page with nothing, then it is squeaky clean. :D
  - state 10y ago
    Sorry about that. Since this page is built with urbit it's easy to just request the raw Markdown. Here's plain text for anyone interested: http://urbit.org/posts/overview.md http://urbit.org/posts/overview.md Edit: it should be easy for us to stick that link inside a noscript tag be default. Issue here: https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/149 https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/149
    - Mithaldu 10y ago
      Maybe the noscript tags for those pages could just show a link to the underlying .md? Then you don't need to worry about including it in the page, and it's still available. :)
      - state 10y ago
        Agreed. Thanks for saying something!
        strictnein 10y ago
        Typo: > "Each urbit is a node on _an_ global, encrypted P2P network."
        pcmonk 10y ago
        Fixed, thanks!
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      To be honest, the site could use some work. Low-hanging fruit mainly, I'm not even asking for anything browsers didn't do in the 90s. You're doing a lot of work yourself: loading pages (why not let the browser do that, catch errors, display progress, etc.? Now it shows a spinner and if I hadn't backgrounded the tab already I'd have given up on loading because "clearly the spinner isn't doing anything"); opening links (I can't ctrl+click because, hey, you're handling the opening of links yourself; why not let the browser do that?); changing the title happens only after the new page loaded, which takes 20 seconds, during which time a white page is displayed with the old browser and the new URL already (the browser would change it to "loading new page" for you); and there are some cross-origin resources (alright, the browser doesn't do this, but it's almost difficult to mess that up with the widespread TLS support these days). I probably caught most of my personal things, but the general idea is to be more lazy ;)
      - state 10y ago
        Yeah, I agree (and I worked a lot on the frontend). The site is hosted with the default frontend for Urbit — so it's built to do a lot more than what it's doing in this specific case. The links not opening on ctrl+click is ridiculous (issue here: https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/10 https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/10) as are the cross-origin resources. Loading in the title is a good idea (issue here: https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/11 https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/11). Being lazy is good. I'm with you there!
  - Touche 10y ago
    It also doesn't work on Windows 95 :(
    - bovermyer 10y ago
      Wait, people still use Windows 95?
      - martin-adams 10y ago
        I'm still hanging on to my Windows 3.1 here, you know, the last known good version
      - JulianMorrison 10y ago
        There was a time when I could have said, no, with Windows 95, Russia uses you. But that time has probably passed.
bshimmin 10y ago
This page was so clearly written, and its content so compelling, I was actually left wondering whether it was the same bafflingly pretentious Urbit that I'd stared at in mesmerised bewilderment in years past. This makes sense, looks great, and I might well give it a try!
- zekevermillion 10y ago
  I for one enjoyed reading about the bafflingly pretentious Urbit even though I wasn't sure what to make of it.
dpc_pw 10y ago
I was checking out Urbit before, and it's an amazing idea. I can highly recommend anyone investigating it a little, just to get a notion how things could be. I need to check the current progress. I hope the previous "invitation/ticket" I had is still working. :)
- state 10y ago
  Yep — your ticket still works.
joeykrug 10y ago
If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else. To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead]. If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems. Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!
- um_ya 10y ago
  There is no such thing as a trustless app, unless you are doing basic mathematical algorithms contained within the same system. Ethereum adds no value to Bitcoin because any useful apps you want to make NEED a centralize source to provide data to it. For example, if I want to make an app that sends coins to someone when bitcoin is at a certain price, I would inherently be relying on the trusted source, that provides the bitcoin price data. Similarly for sport payouts or property contracts, they all rely on the external centralized source for information. The only thing Ethereum can do, is basic operations contingent on values within the same system, otherwise you break the "trustless apps" veil.
Bino 10y ago
Pro tip: I'm mildly clever. However I wan't able to understand the value or reasoning of this. Make it more clear and resell it to me
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Consider what you would do with a personal server. Now imagine it's easy enough for anyone to use and maintain. Now imagine everyone's personal server could connect and communicate with each other seamlessly and securely, transferring data of any type. That's the promise of urbit.
  - rspeer 10y ago
    If you ended with "That's the promise of the Information Superhighway", it would be an MCI commercial from the '90s.
    - yarvin9 10y ago
      I remember that commercial! Exactly right. Just think of Urbit as the Information Super-Duperhighway, and you can't go wrong.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Interesting! I wasn't familiar with that MCI commercial (I don't live in the US), but I can see what I wrote has that type of tone.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  The key for me was: > Each urbit is a node on an global, encrypted P2P network. Your Urbit name, a generated pseudonym like ~talsur-todres, is also your network address. Like Bitcoin, Urbit address space is a cryptographic asset with a limited supply. Additionally from the whitepaper: > Functionally, Urbit is a full execution stack. VM, compiler, OS, network, web server, and core apps are 30kloc […] It's a distributed, encrypted peer-to-peer virtual machine. Fascinating. Interesting to see what Urbit _actually_ is after all the pretentious bullshit they've spouted in the past.
applecore 10y ago
Technology aside, this is a masterpiece of clear and concise technical writing for a general audience.
bovermyer 10y ago
This seems very exciting, in a way that I'm hard-pressed to define. Maybe because it seems to offer a greenfield opportunity to build...something. Or to be something. Unique.
killercup 10y ago
I love that they even introduced convenient ways of pronouncing the ASCII symbols Hoon uses. Last time I saw it, I created this gist: https://gist.github.com/killercup/be14570af13cbddb5dbc https://gist.github.com/killercup/be14570af13cbddb5dbc (Haven't checked if anything changed since then.)
bitwize 10y ago
I think Jay Maynard said it best: Urbit is "INTERCAL as OS". Alternatively, it's a New Kind of Computing (by analogy with Wolfram's New Kind of Science). This paper didn't really tell me anything about Urbit that I didn't already know. But it's good to see them have a nice clean readable rationale.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  INTERCAL is a whole other level of crazy hard opaqueness though. I admit I never tried to write anything in one of these two funny urbit languages, but from what I've seen in the docs, they don't intend to go out of their way to be impenetrable. I read INTERCAL documentation twice. First time for fun & crazy and I had some good laughs. Then a while later I came across a challenge to write X in INTERCAL (I forgot what X was), so I got the documentation again, this time reading it with intention to write code, ... I gave up halfway, in horror. INTERCAL was designed to be "most unlike any other programming language" and didn't stop for any feature if it could be twisted into being more unlike any other language. And it shows, it's hilariously hard to program in, and gets in your way on purpose. Ubrit also seems so far to be very much unlike many or most systems, ever. But it's more about trying something new, with an idea, it uses its weirdness to support the idea, but it doesn't stop at nothing to keep pushing the weirdness over the top. There's another goal in mind. But the goal is not very funny so that's an extra barrier it has over INTERCAL.
kefka 10y ago
I was looking into this, as I have connections to the devs via our hackerspace. After research, I steered away, and hard. 1. Newbies trying to grok the platform are mocked mercilessly. Publicly over reddit and twitter. 2. The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general. Now, ad hominems aren't "good"... but if I work on it, I get lumped into the similar group. Just no. 3. It uses "Hoon" to program, which is in reality a Lisp variant. They wanted something completely foreign so "only dedicated people would learn it". Seriously. Use Lisp. 4. It's another company interests driving the project. Projects like these have the potential of changing everything on the internet. Locking it behind a company "firewall" means if they die, the project does as well.
- Church- 10y ago
  Got any sources to back this up? I'd rather not believe, but if it's so...
  - kefka 10y ago
    Sure do. Yarvin's AMA. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarvin_developer_of_urbit_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv... http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/sjws-urge-programming-conference-to-ban-speaker-over-political-views/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/sjws-urge-programmi... Its the sum of these views, writings, and his own AMA that steered me clear of his stuff. Mainly, if he treats fellow members of the community like this, I'm sure not going to have a good fit in ... wherever he works on.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - zimbu668 10y ago
      "As for "race," you can learn way more about someone from a minute of conversation than from a full genome sequence -- even if we knew how to decode the information in the sequence, which we don't. As for politics, there is essentially no one sane who thinks of themselves as evil or wanting to do evil. I have lots of progressive friends, and you'd be surprised how many ways we can find to see the world in the same way." What a monster!
faizshah 10y ago
If you're having trouble viewing the page (like I was) the text is here: https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org/blob/master/main/posts/overview.md https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org/blob/master/main/posts/ov... At least I think this is the text, I can't check.
- pcmonk 10y ago
  This is correct.
placeybordeaux 10y ago
All of these comments seem to be saying that this is so well written. I still have no idea what it is actually trying to accomplish. Is it a decentralized storage/compute platform? Why are they calling it an OS? Why does it only reference existing technology to say it isn't that? None of the links are working for me either.
- urbit 10y ago
  Sorry, the server was struggling for a moment. We fixed it. It's an OS admittedly in the metaphorical sense -- the same sense that your browser is an OS. That is, a platform that runs higher-level programs. Urbit doesn't run on bare metal, though it could, in the same sense that your browser could. In fact, one way of describing Urbit is "the browser for the server side." In the same way that your browser replaces a bunch of individual client apps with one native client that's a platform for higher-level programing, Urbit s/client/server/. Does that help?
  - profeta 10y ago
    so it is a place that will centralize all my credentials so it can fetch and parse my mail, IMs, stock trades, files, etc to then inter-process that to my liking and possible talk to a client on my phone or such? why a chain of specialized posix programs would fail for that?
    - urbit 10y ago
      Yes, Urbit is (or at least is designed to become) a personal server which solves this problem among others. One: a chain of specialized Posix programs would work for that. You would have to be someone who can manage a chain of specialized Posix programs, though. Two: serving as a general-purpose stateful HTTP client is a subset of what Urbit does, though an important subset. It's also a server on a public network. The second problem can also be solved with Posix programs, but it pretty much seals the requirement for a trained professional. It is possible to imagine a high-usability personal Linux (Sandstorm, for instance), but not really a high-usability general-purpose Internet server (at least if it implements social apps via decentralized protocols). (In fact, it's not even clear that trained professionals are comfortable with decentralized protocols -- see under, Google doesn't even want your XMPP traffic, etc.) Urbit may or may not be the perfect solution, but I think it's clear that if ordinary humans are going to have their own personal servers, they're going to need some kind of new system software.
frou_dh 10y ago
Well it certainly has more grounds for a get-in-on-the-ground-floor impulse than App.net did a few years ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xemdetia 10y ago
This is the first time I've heard of this, there just seems to be a bunch of holes in it. OK, so you have a basic embedded-style ROM vm with a light layer of application code above it. Hard, solvable problem that they seem to have covered. If it is supposed to be for the people how am I supposed to find a route between hosts behind a NAT? Is this galaxy.urbit.org the DNS and the TURN relay? Is the expectation of the 'server cluster that is yours alone' still dependent on someone else running the relay? How can my servers have friends that aren't part of my trust network? How do I run my own trust network between people I want to trust? The weirdest thing is that there doesn't seem to be a designed way for an operator of an Urbit to talk to their/other Urbits. Where's the classic plain text protocol to at least say HELO? How do I fix it? This just ends up looking like a specific-use estoeric lang + runtime to me, which I do enjoy as an exercise. I just can't see how the UX problem is going to pan out based on what is presented.
- urbit 10y ago
  A planet, like ~tasfyn-partyv, has a parent chain going back to the galaxy: ~tasfyn-partyv (32-bit), ~doznec (16-bit), ~zod (8-bit). zod.urbit.org is directly DNS mapped. Not using TURN and STUN specifically as the RFCs, but in effect it's the same. Routing will STUN (establish a direct peer-to-peer connection) so long as either side has full cone NAT. As a planet, you need some star to route for you. Right now, the network is small and friendly enough that trust problems aren't an issue. As we grow, we'll put in an escape protocol so that you can switch stars if you have an issue -- there are 2^16, after all. Urbit is not PGP. It's designed to feel more like the early Internet, ie, a wide-area world of nontrivial default trust. At present, it would be foolish to go full cypherpunk, because we're a long way from being worth attacking. Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" -- that term is reserved for languages which genuinely don't care about usability.
  - xemdetia 10y ago
    > Urbit is not PGP. It's designed to feel more like the early Internet, ie, a wide-area world of nontrivial default trust. At present, it would be foolish to go full cypherpunk, because we're a long way from being worth attacking. It's not as much that. If I am going to be owning a service that I want to use among my peers generally someone has to run the thing and generally I am that person. If I am relying on urbit.org then the goal described in this overview of "Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service. And since it's yours, open source and patent-free, it never shows you ads. Or loses your data. Or updates without your consent." is not met. If urbit.org is so entrenched and the galaxy lookup so well defined how do I use this when you are gone? The galaxy lookup is clearly one of the most critical pieces of the design yet seems the most weak. In the world of online games the lookup service is what has a community live or die, and I did not see a better answer after writing the comment. It seems that the only way is to recompile and distribute an alternate version of the software. > Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" -- that term is reserved for languages which genuinely don't care about usability. I would class it as such because there doesn't seem to be a description (going by the whitepaper) of modularity/code layout/best practice sort of thing. There is also the complexity of symbol management from bash/perl/php land that seems to be in Hoon too. I work with grammars all day and I guess I was just looking for a more formal description of the language.
shaunxcode 10y ago
Finally getting down to brass tacks: "Is this a lisp? Is this basically emacs? At a certain level this is basically emacs."
captainmuon 10y ago
So ignoring the abstruseness and pretentiousness for a moment [x], what I don't like is this model of immutable networking Urbit has. Maybe I am in a minority position, but I fear the future where everything is cryptographically signed, verifiable and irrefutable. I want to be able to go on a website and post bullshit that I'll regret 15 years later. And if after 15 years someone unearths that post, I want to be able to say "that proves nothing, anybody with a text editor could have forged that". You might say a prospective employer wouldn't buy that argument even now, but I want to live in a world where people do buy that argument. Where you can post party pictures on the internet, because it's trivially easy to fake pictures, and everybody has accepted that pictures have no proving power, so everybody feels free to post them, even my boss. Let technology drive society to be more laissez faire. A similar thing with bitcoin. My utopia doesn't involve cryptographically secure, ideal money - it rather involves no money at all. I'd rather put my energy into developing a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money) than using algorithms to cement this society. I believe cryptography is great for being CRYPTic, i.e. providing anonymity. But using it to prove identity etc. should be used very sparingly and not without thinking about the consequences. [x] And I don't want to denigrate this project. It seems to be a great technical and theoretical achievement - it's just that their ideals are not necessarily mine.
- urbit 10y ago
  I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. If you bound an identity cryptographically to your real name, that's permanent -- no getting around it. We all make mistakes. However, one of the benefits of Urbit is that you can build a reputation around a pseudonym that isn't linked to your real-life identity. There's a place for the 4chans of the world, with totally disposable one-time identities. You can do this with Urbit as well -- use a 128-bit self-signing identity (comet). But most people tend to want a little more stability and permanence.
  - tzs 10y ago
    > I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. A problem with disposable identities as usually implemented is that they are too cheap and easy to make. This makes it easy to make a new identity every place you want to be an asshole. The end result is that places get tired of this, and ban such identities from their spaces. I think what we might need are semi-disposable identities. You can make a new one whenever you want, but it costs something to make a new one, and that cost goes up with each new semi-disposable identity you make.
dreamdu5t 10y ago
This is the most interesting and important project since the WWW.
- wmf 10y ago
  Or maybe even the most interesting and important project since Xanadu.
  - Animats 10y ago
    It has the cult-like approach of Xanadu - use new terminology, tie it to an economic model, and re-invent everything. Also, there seems to be a cult leader. Jargon: noun (data), nock (interpreter), mint (compiler), span (type), twig (expression), gate (function), mold (constructor), core (object), mark (protocol). It's Newspeak for programmers. The overall concept seems to be a federated social system, like Diaspora. Everybody has a online presence which they own. But you can take your ball and go home, moving your online presence somewhere else, and it still gets found by others. Somehow. (That's a hard problem at scale.) There's a claim that nobody can create vast numbers of identities for spam purposes because there are only 2^32 possible human identities. (That number should have been at least as big as the population of the planet. 2^36, maybe.) Apparently you have to buy address space, which is a profit center for somebody. There's a download, which gets you their "OS" (which runs on top of another OS), an interpreter for their Hoon language and access to their chat environment. Not sure what to think of this, but someone put in a lot of work.
    - kefka 10y ago
      Yep, this precisely. Hit the hammer on the head on this comment. My gut feeling was this was a bucket of NiH syndrome. There was too much duplication of work, and way too much made-up jargon to throw us off the mark of what it really was. But yeah, a cult.
    - philippeback 10y ago
      Worth learning. Not so easy to do I am afraid. Nock is very nice. Hoon bends the mind, which is actually a nice thing. This whole thing bends my mind anyway. A good option for avoiding Alzheimer by training those neurons... interesting internal feeling trying to grok it for sure.
lisper 10y ago
Hmmm... "Addionally, we're creating an open political and economic process, with a small, fixed-price public presale of Urbit address space." Why does an "open political and economic process" require (or even allow) a "pre-sale of address space" by a central authority?
- natrius 10y ago
  Sybil resistance. I'm skeptical, but it could make sense.
- state 10y ago
  natrius got it. The explanation you may be looking for is (mostly) here: http://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-initial-allocation-and-rationale http://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-initial-allocation-an...
- tjbiddle 10y ago
  Maybe it's for vanity names?
  - yarvin9 10y ago
    Urbit ships are synthetic names that sound like human names in a foreign language. Eg, ~sondel-forsut. This is just a 32-bit number in a phonemic base-256. Our experience is that people rapidly bond with their ship names. Apparently no one is too old to want a secret codename. And human beings of a more grownup character can interact pseudonymously through dignified, impersonal synthetic names -- instead of retarded juvenile handles as on Wikipedia etc, or real names as on Facebook.
cronjobber 10y ago
> For example, your urbit runs a single shopping app, which downloads catalogs and uploads orders. This app is one store which sells everything in the world, with a salesman who's 100% on your side and always has the best price. That's written under the heading "The Urbit future". I presume that it is meant to describe how things would pan out if Urbit is a success. But how is this vision enforced... or even made likely? Why would powerful monopolies like Amazon submit to this, instead of supplying an app specifically and exclusively for shopping at Amazon?

What Urbit is

234 points by rgbrgb 10y ago

rgbrgb 10y ago

They just released a really clean new homepage too. Big stuff! https://www.urbit.org/ https://www.urbit.org/

chc4 10y ago
They just presented at LambdaConf, and posted a (bootleg) video of the talk, too. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs Slides: http://media.urbit.org/lambda-conf_2016.pdf http://media.urbit.org/lambda-conf_2016.pdf
Mithaldu 10y ago
If by "clean" you mean its fallback behavior without JS is to show a white page with nothing, then it is squeaky clean. :D
- state 10y ago
  Sorry about that. Since this page is built with urbit it's easy to just request the raw Markdown. Here's plain text for anyone interested: http://urbit.org/posts/overview.md http://urbit.org/posts/overview.md Edit: it should be easy for us to stick that link inside a noscript tag be default. Issue here: https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/149 https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/149
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    Maybe the noscript tags for those pages could just show a link to the underlying .md? Then you don't need to worry about including it in the page, and it's still available. :)
    - state 10y ago
      Agreed. Thanks for saying something!
      - strictnein 10y ago
        Typo: > "Each urbit is a node on _an_ global, encrypted P2P network."
        pcmonk 10y ago
        Fixed, thanks!
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    To be honest, the site could use some work. Low-hanging fruit mainly, I'm not even asking for anything browsers didn't do in the 90s. You're doing a lot of work yourself: loading pages (why not let the browser do that, catch errors, display progress, etc.? Now it shows a spinner and if I hadn't backgrounded the tab already I'd have given up on loading because "clearly the spinner isn't doing anything"); opening links (I can't ctrl+click because, hey, you're handling the opening of links yourself; why not let the browser do that?); changing the title happens only after the new page loaded, which takes 20 seconds, during which time a white page is displayed with the old browser and the new URL already (the browser would change it to "loading new page" for you); and there are some cross-origin resources (alright, the browser doesn't do this, but it's almost difficult to mess that up with the widespread TLS support these days). I probably caught most of my personal things, but the general idea is to be more lazy ;)
    - state 10y ago
      Yeah, I agree (and I worked a lot on the frontend). The site is hosted with the default frontend for Urbit — so it's built to do a lot more than what it's doing in this specific case. The links not opening on ctrl+click is ridiculous (issue here: https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/10 https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/10) as are the cross-origin resources. Loading in the title is a good idea (issue here: https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/11 https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/11). Being lazy is good. I'm with you there!
- Touche 10y ago
  It also doesn't work on Windows 95 :(
  - bovermyer 10y ago
    Wait, people still use Windows 95?
    - martin-adams 10y ago
      I'm still hanging on to my Windows 3.1 here, you know, the last known good version
    - JulianMorrison 10y ago
      There was a time when I could have said, no, with Windows 95, Russia uses you. But that time has probably passed.

bshimmin 10y ago

This page was so clearly written, and its content so compelling, I was actually left wondering whether it was the same bafflingly pretentious Urbit that I'd stared at in mesmerised bewilderment in years past. This makes sense, looks great, and I might well give it a try!

zekevermillion 10y ago
I for one enjoyed reading about the bafflingly pretentious Urbit even though I wasn't sure what to make of it.

dpc_pw 10y ago

I was checking out Urbit before, and it's an amazing idea. I can highly recommend anyone investigating it a little, just to get a notion how things could be. I need to check the current progress. I hope the previous "invitation/ticket" I had is still working. :)

state 10y ago
Yep — your ticket still works.

joeykrug 10y ago

If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else. To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead]. If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems. Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!

um_ya 10y ago
There is no such thing as a trustless app, unless you are doing basic mathematical algorithms contained within the same system. Ethereum adds no value to Bitcoin because any useful apps you want to make NEED a centralize source to provide data to it. For example, if I want to make an app that sends coins to someone when bitcoin is at a certain price, I would inherently be relying on the trusted source, that provides the bitcoin price data. Similarly for sport payouts or property contracts, they all rely on the external centralized source for information. The only thing Ethereum can do, is basic operations contingent on values within the same system, otherwise you break the "trustless apps" veil.

Bino 10y ago

Pro tip: I'm mildly clever. However I wan't able to understand the value or reasoning of this. Make it more clear and resell it to me

ZenoArrow 10y ago
Consider what you would do with a personal server. Now imagine it's easy enough for anyone to use and maintain. Now imagine everyone's personal server could connect and communicate with each other seamlessly and securely, transferring data of any type. That's the promise of urbit.
- rspeer 10y ago
  If you ended with "That's the promise of the Information Superhighway", it would be an MCI commercial from the '90s.
  - yarvin9 10y ago
    I remember that commercial! Exactly right. Just think of Urbit as the Information Super-Duperhighway, and you can't go wrong.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Interesting! I wasn't familiar with that MCI commercial (I don't live in the US), but I can see what I wrote has that type of tone.
PeCaN 10y ago
The key for me was: > Each urbit is a node on an global, encrypted P2P network. Your Urbit name, a generated pseudonym like ~talsur-todres, is also your network address. Like Bitcoin, Urbit address space is a cryptographic asset with a limited supply. Additionally from the whitepaper: > Functionally, Urbit is a full execution stack. VM, compiler, OS, network, web server, and core apps are 30kloc […] It's a distributed, encrypted peer-to-peer virtual machine. Fascinating. Interesting to see what Urbit _actually_ is after all the pretentious bullshit they've spouted in the past.

applecore 10y ago

Technology aside, this is a masterpiece of clear and concise technical writing for a general audience.

bovermyer 10y ago

This seems very exciting, in a way that I'm hard-pressed to define. Maybe because it seems to offer a greenfield opportunity to build...something. Or to be something. Unique.

killercup 10y ago

I love that they even introduced convenient ways of pronouncing the ASCII symbols Hoon uses. Last time I saw it, I created this gist: https://gist.github.com/killercup/be14570af13cbddb5dbc https://gist.github.com/killercup/be14570af13cbddb5dbc (Haven't checked if anything changed since then.)

bitwize 10y ago

I think Jay Maynard said it best: Urbit is "INTERCAL as OS". Alternatively, it's a New Kind of Computing (by analogy with Wolfram's New Kind of Science). This paper didn't really tell me anything about Urbit that I didn't already know. But it's good to see them have a nice clean readable rationale.

tripzilch 10y ago
INTERCAL is a whole other level of crazy hard opaqueness though. I admit I never tried to write anything in one of these two funny urbit languages, but from what I've seen in the docs, they don't intend to go out of their way to be impenetrable. I read INTERCAL documentation twice. First time for fun & crazy and I had some good laughs. Then a while later I came across a challenge to write X in INTERCAL (I forgot what X was), so I got the documentation again, this time reading it with intention to write code, ... I gave up halfway, in horror. INTERCAL was designed to be "most unlike any other programming language" and didn't stop for any feature if it could be twisted into being more unlike any other language. And it shows, it's hilariously hard to program in, and gets in your way on purpose. Ubrit also seems so far to be very much unlike many or most systems, ever. But it's more about trying something new, with an idea, it uses its weirdness to support the idea, but it doesn't stop at nothing to keep pushing the weirdness over the top. There's another goal in mind. But the goal is not very funny so that's an extra barrier it has over INTERCAL.

kefka 10y ago

I was looking into this, as I have connections to the devs via our hackerspace. After research, I steered away, and hard. 1. Newbies trying to grok the platform are mocked mercilessly. Publicly over reddit and twitter. 2. The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general. Now, ad hominems aren't "good"... but if I work on it, I get lumped into the similar group. Just no. 3. It uses "Hoon" to program, which is in reality a Lisp variant. They wanted something completely foreign so "only dedicated people would learn it". Seriously. Use Lisp. 4. It's another company interests driving the project. Projects like these have the potential of changing everything on the internet. Locking it behind a company "firewall" means if they die, the project does as well.

Church- 10y ago
Got any sources to back this up? I'd rather not believe, but if it's so...
- kefka 10y ago
  Sure do. Yarvin's AMA. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarvin_developer_of_urbit_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv... http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/sjws-urge-programming-conference-to-ban-speaker-over-political-views/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/sjws-urge-programmi... Its the sum of these views, writings, and his own AMA that steered me clear of his stuff. Mainly, if he treats fellow members of the community like this, I'm sure not going to have a good fit in ... wherever he works on.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - zimbu668 10y ago
    "As for "race," you can learn way more about someone from a minute of conversation than from a full genome sequence -- even if we knew how to decode the information in the sequence, which we don't. As for politics, there is essentially no one sane who thinks of themselves as evil or wanting to do evil. I have lots of progressive friends, and you'd be surprised how many ways we can find to see the world in the same way." What a monster!

faizshah 10y ago

If you're having trouble viewing the page (like I was) the text is here: https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org/blob/master/main/posts/overview.md https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org/blob/master/main/posts/ov... At least I think this is the text, I can't check.

pcmonk 10y ago
This is correct.

placeybordeaux 10y ago

All of these comments seem to be saying that this is so well written. I still have no idea what it is actually trying to accomplish. Is it a decentralized storage/compute platform? Why are they calling it an OS? Why does it only reference existing technology to say it isn't that? None of the links are working for me either.

urbit 10y ago
Sorry, the server was struggling for a moment. We fixed it. It's an OS admittedly in the metaphorical sense -- the same sense that your browser is an OS. That is, a platform that runs higher-level programs. Urbit doesn't run on bare metal, though it could, in the same sense that your browser could. In fact, one way of describing Urbit is "the browser for the server side." In the same way that your browser replaces a bunch of individual client apps with one native client that's a platform for higher-level programing, Urbit s/client/server/. Does that help?
- profeta 10y ago
  so it is a place that will centralize all my credentials so it can fetch and parse my mail, IMs, stock trades, files, etc to then inter-process that to my liking and possible talk to a client on my phone or such? why a chain of specialized posix programs would fail for that?
  - urbit 10y ago
    Yes, Urbit is (or at least is designed to become) a personal server which solves this problem among others. One: a chain of specialized Posix programs would work for that. You would have to be someone who can manage a chain of specialized Posix programs, though. Two: serving as a general-purpose stateful HTTP client is a subset of what Urbit does, though an important subset. It's also a server on a public network. The second problem can also be solved with Posix programs, but it pretty much seals the requirement for a trained professional. It is possible to imagine a high-usability personal Linux (Sandstorm, for instance), but not really a high-usability general-purpose Internet server (at least if it implements social apps via decentralized protocols). (In fact, it's not even clear that trained professionals are comfortable with decentralized protocols -- see under, Google doesn't even want your XMPP traffic, etc.) Urbit may or may not be the perfect solution, but I think it's clear that if ordinary humans are going to have their own personal servers, they're going to need some kind of new system software.

frou_dh 10y ago

Well it certainly has more grounds for a get-in-on-the-ground-floor impulse than App.net did a few years ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

xemdetia 10y ago

This is the first time I've heard of this, there just seems to be a bunch of holes in it. OK, so you have a basic embedded-style ROM vm with a light layer of application code above it. Hard, solvable problem that they seem to have covered. If it is supposed to be for the people how am I supposed to find a route between hosts behind a NAT? Is this galaxy.urbit.org the DNS and the TURN relay? Is the expectation of the 'server cluster that is yours alone' still dependent on someone else running the relay? How can my servers have friends that aren't part of my trust network? How do I run my own trust network between people I want to trust? The weirdest thing is that there doesn't seem to be a designed way for an operator of an Urbit to talk to their/other Urbits. Where's the classic plain text protocol to at least say HELO? How do I fix it? This just ends up looking like a specific-use estoeric lang + runtime to me, which I do enjoy as an exercise. I just can't see how the UX problem is going to pan out based on what is presented.

urbit 10y ago
A planet, like ~tasfyn-partyv, has a parent chain going back to the galaxy: ~tasfyn-partyv (32-bit), ~doznec (16-bit), ~zod (8-bit). zod.urbit.org is directly DNS mapped. Not using TURN and STUN specifically as the RFCs, but in effect it's the same. Routing will STUN (establish a direct peer-to-peer connection) so long as either side has full cone NAT. As a planet, you need some star to route for you. Right now, the network is small and friendly enough that trust problems aren't an issue. As we grow, we'll put in an escape protocol so that you can switch stars if you have an issue -- there are 2^16, after all. Urbit is not PGP. It's designed to feel more like the early Internet, ie, a wide-area world of nontrivial default trust. At present, it would be foolish to go full cypherpunk, because we're a long way from being worth attacking. Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" -- that term is reserved for languages which genuinely don't care about usability.
- xemdetia 10y ago
  > Urbit is not PGP. It's designed to feel more like the early Internet, ie, a wide-area world of nontrivial default trust. At present, it would be foolish to go full cypherpunk, because we're a long way from being worth attacking. It's not as much that. If I am going to be owning a service that I want to use among my peers generally someone has to run the thing and generally I am that person. If I am relying on urbit.org then the goal described in this overview of "Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service. And since it's yours, open source and patent-free, it never shows you ads. Or loses your data. Or updates without your consent." is not met. If urbit.org is so entrenched and the galaxy lookup so well defined how do I use this when you are gone? The galaxy lookup is clearly one of the most critical pieces of the design yet seems the most weak. In the world of online games the lookup service is what has a community live or die, and I did not see a better answer after writing the comment. It seems that the only way is to recompile and distribute an alternate version of the software. > Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" -- that term is reserved for languages which genuinely don't care about usability. I would class it as such because there doesn't seem to be a description (going by the whitepaper) of modularity/code layout/best practice sort of thing. There is also the complexity of symbol management from bash/perl/php land that seems to be in Hoon too. I work with grammars all day and I guess I was just looking for a more formal description of the language.

shaunxcode 10y ago

Finally getting down to brass tacks: "Is this a lisp? Is this basically emacs? At a certain level this is basically emacs."

captainmuon 10y ago

So ignoring the abstruseness and pretentiousness for a moment [x], what I don't like is this model of immutable networking Urbit has. Maybe I am in a minority position, but I fear the future where everything is cryptographically signed, verifiable and irrefutable. I want to be able to go on a website and post bullshit that I'll regret 15 years later. And if after 15 years someone unearths that post, I want to be able to say "that proves nothing, anybody with a text editor could have forged that". You might say a prospective employer wouldn't buy that argument even now, but I want to live in a world where people do buy that argument. Where you can post party pictures on the internet, because it's trivially easy to fake pictures, and everybody has accepted that pictures have no proving power, so everybody feels free to post them, even my boss. Let technology drive society to be more laissez faire. A similar thing with bitcoin. My utopia doesn't involve cryptographically secure, ideal money - it rather involves no money at all. I'd rather put my energy into developing a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money) than using algorithms to cement this society. I believe cryptography is great for being CRYPTic, i.e. providing anonymity. But using it to prove identity etc. should be used very sparingly and not without thinking about the consequences. [x] And I don't want to denigrate this project. It seems to be a great technical and theoretical achievement - it's just that their ideals are not necessarily mine.

urbit 10y ago
I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. If you bound an identity cryptographically to your real name, that's permanent -- no getting around it. We all make mistakes. However, one of the benefits of Urbit is that you can build a reputation around a pseudonym that isn't linked to your real-life identity. There's a place for the 4chans of the world, with totally disposable one-time identities. You can do this with Urbit as well -- use a 128-bit self-signing identity (comet). But most people tend to want a little more stability and permanence.
- tzs 10y ago
  > I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. A problem with disposable identities as usually implemented is that they are too cheap and easy to make. This makes it easy to make a new identity every place you want to be an asshole. The end result is that places get tired of this, and ban such identities from their spaces. I think what we might need are semi-disposable identities. You can make a new one whenever you want, but it costs something to make a new one, and that cost goes up with each new semi-disposable identity you make.

dreamdu5t 10y ago

This is the most interesting and important project since the WWW.

wmf 10y ago
Or maybe even the most interesting and important project since Xanadu.
- Animats 10y ago
  It has the cult-like approach of Xanadu - use new terminology, tie it to an economic model, and re-invent everything. Also, there seems to be a cult leader. Jargon: noun (data), nock (interpreter), mint (compiler), span (type), twig (expression), gate (function), mold (constructor), core (object), mark (protocol). It's Newspeak for programmers. The overall concept seems to be a federated social system, like Diaspora. Everybody has a online presence which they own. But you can take your ball and go home, moving your online presence somewhere else, and it still gets found by others. Somehow. (That's a hard problem at scale.) There's a claim that nobody can create vast numbers of identities for spam purposes because there are only 2^32 possible human identities. (That number should have been at least as big as the population of the planet. 2^36, maybe.) Apparently you have to buy address space, which is a profit center for somebody. There's a download, which gets you their "OS" (which runs on top of another OS), an interpreter for their Hoon language and access to their chat environment. Not sure what to think of this, but someone put in a lot of work.
  - kefka 10y ago
    Yep, this precisely. Hit the hammer on the head on this comment. My gut feeling was this was a bucket of NiH syndrome. There was too much duplication of work, and way too much made-up jargon to throw us off the mark of what it really was. But yeah, a cult.
  - philippeback 10y ago
    Worth learning. Not so easy to do I am afraid. Nock is very nice. Hoon bends the mind, which is actually a nice thing. This whole thing bends my mind anyway. A good option for avoiding Alzheimer by training those neurons... interesting internal feeling trying to grok it for sure.

lisper 10y ago

Hmmm... "Addionally, we're creating an open political and economic process, with a small, fixed-price public presale of Urbit address space." Why does an "open political and economic process" require (or even allow) a "pre-sale of address space" by a central authority?

natrius 10y ago
Sybil resistance. I'm skeptical, but it could make sense.
state 10y ago
natrius got it. The explanation you may be looking for is (mostly) here: http://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-initial-allocation-and-rationale http://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-initial-allocation-an...
tjbiddle 10y ago
Maybe it's for vanity names?
- yarvin9 10y ago
  Urbit ships are synthetic names that sound like human names in a foreign language. Eg, ~sondel-forsut. This is just a 32-bit number in a phonemic base-256. Our experience is that people rapidly bond with their ship names. Apparently no one is too old to want a secret codename. And human beings of a more grownup character can interact pseudonymously through dignified, impersonal synthetic names -- instead of retarded juvenile handles as on Wikipedia etc, or real names as on Facebook.

cronjobber 10y ago

> For example, your urbit runs a single shopping app, which downloads catalogs and uploads orders. This app is one store which sells everything in the world, with a salesman who's 100% on your side and always has the best price. That's written under the heading "The Urbit future". I presume that it is meant to describe how things would pan out if Urbit is a success. But how is this vision enforced... or even made likely? Why would powerful monopolies like Amazon submit to this, instead of supplying an app specifically and exclusively for shopping at Amazon?