12 ms·

Urbit is now in open developer beta

184 points by jonasrosland 10y ago

inaseer 10y ago
I'm reserving my judgement on the system. Just sharing a few videos which might help in understanding Urbit better. Start with this LamdaConf talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs and pair with this demo video after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp9aCEfA6ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp9aCEfA6ao
- dingaling 10y ago
  Thank you, that second video was very instructive. If people want to see Urbit working, jump to around the two-minute mark and there's a demo of networked program execution as well as distributed version control.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a problem. If you can, why doesn't your homepage reflect that? Show me! I don't want to scroll through another website with 16 point font. We all love the Unix philosophy and puppies, too. Please take this as the constructive criticism it is.
- NeutronBoy 10y ago
  I agree. What it really needs is an 'example' page, or a walkthrough of how/what you'd use it for. I just spent 10 minutes reading the docs and I'm not sure I get it. Is it like Owncloud? disapora*? ITTT? Is it an interface to mirror all my content from other social media sites, and interact with them? You say I can use it to authenticate with sites - is it an OpenID provider? Something something blockchain? All of the above? This page explains a little bit [1], but a walkthrough or video or screenshots or something would help immensely [1] https://urbit.org/posts/vision/ https://urbit.org/posts/vision/
  - hirsin 10y ago
    It's personal computing, explained in the context of a VC pitch to people who have never heard of an OS, think the browser is their computer, and don't seem to comprehend software that gets installed. Look at the Evernote example - wouldn't it be great if you could replace the Evernote UI with a different one for $10? Well, you could do that today on any OS with an app and a REST API, but it either doesn't exist (because it's not that great) or it does already exist (so what's revolutionary?). The same thing applies to almost every single thing lauded. Your data is saved locally! Great, my UrbitTwitter clone keeps my data locally in some undocumented format. But that's ok, I'm not beholden to the app developer in case they die (yes, that's in there), because I can get someone else to reverse engineer that format and build me a new twitter clone. How does Hoon make that special? Gmail works locally! And <other Web service> Translation - someone (lots of someones) will build APIs and SDKs for our platform to interface with those services, and they'll be used just like in any other OS to make apps that run in your machine. It lauds "you can install software, and it runs locally, forever!" as something new and great, when really that's existed since we got off mainframes in the 70s. Everything it offers is stuff that was solved the first go around in personal computers, but this time with a cryptographic identity and an obtuse language. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I've been looking at urbit for 2.5 years, know (good) people that worked on it, and still can't find a compelling reason to think of it as something other than a hipster OS, reinventing decades old ideas because this time they'll do it right.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jcrites 10y ago
  I don't disagree with your criticism. I read through the Urbut whitepaper [1] a while ago, and there's some meat and novel ideas there. As far as a concise description, here's my attempt, followed by some content from the whitepaper. The key idea that distinguishes Urbit is its focus on deterministic computing. Urbit is a computing environment, like a virtual machine, with the distinction that the entire computational result is designed to be a deterministic function of the inputs. The inputs are represented as a sort of transactional log-structured file system, where computation is a pure function of the input events. They have provisions for multiple computers interacting over a network while handling inputs in that way. They implement a sort of combinator-based assembly language and virtual machine, a higher level language on top, and then an OS on top of that. Their virtual machine runs on a regular computer, but in theory you could run an Urbit VM on any machine and observe the same computational result. This is not a trivial problem to solve for an entire OS and network! They invented some interesting optimization techniques ("jets") and networking concepts to make it feasible. As an analogy (this is a stretch): it's like Plan9, except purely functional and deterministic. > Urbit is a new clean-slate system software stack. A nonpreemptive OS (Arvo), written in a strict, typed functional language (Hoon) which compiles itself to a combinator VM (Nock), drives an encrypted packet network (Ames) and defines a global version-control system (Clay). Including basic apps, the whole stack is about 30,000 lines of Hoon. Urbit is a “solid-state interpreter”: an interpreter with no transient state. The interpreter is an ACID database; an event is a transaction in a log-checkpoint system. Their goal is to make hosting this virtual machine easy enough to do that anyone could, while (if I recall correctly) decoupling it from the underlying physical machine it's running on, such that it could run anywhere you want it to. Then they speculate that, if many people hosted their own, then people would be less reliant on cloud services, or at least could fully trust computational results from the cloud. The ideas are unfortunately cumbersome to follow once the whitepaper and other technical content reach the point where they explain things with made-up, Urbit-specific terminology [2]. The authors explain their rationale for their choice to do this (IIRC, their reasoning was that they need to name so many new concepts that it's better just to assign random words like codenames - something like that). I feel ambivalent about this, but I will respectfully mention that the choice to do this might make more sense from the perspective of someone who lives and breathes Urbit every day. From the perspective of a beginner, it's a turn-off; I find it grating and it doesn't work for me. Haskell and Rust have terms to introduce, but their material doesn't leave me feeling bamboozled. If an alien species had invented computing, what might it look like? I think Urbit is a credible answer to that question. I'm joking, but only partially: from the perspective of "throw out everything and start over from scratch to see what modern computing would be like", Urbit seems like it may be a sincere attempt. At one point in the past, the ideas appeared to be deliberately obfuscated, like performance art or like Brainfuck. They've subsequently made efforts to explain the ideas and build things up from basic concepts, and I think the authors are sincere, but don't hold me to that. In conclusion, I think it's technically neat, but I think it'd be a lot neater if it were documented and presented within a grounding of typical CS and software terminology/concepts. Or if they can't give up the custom terminology, I'd want to see ~10X more material (per unit concept) introducing and clarifying the ideas slowly from the ground up. If they're inventing their own alien computer science, then they need to write the alien "C Programming Language" (K&R) and alien "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" [3]. [1] http://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf http://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf [2] https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ and prev discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435757 [3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
- kovrik 10y ago
  Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.
  - kovrik 10y ago
    Also, I doubt they could handle it, their scope is huge: new OS, new programming language, networking, encryption, time, compilation, virtualization etc. I don't believe group of 5 unknown people can handle it. Like, Urbit time: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/ Where the hell are timezones, Leap seconds etc.? They just store constants!
    - kazinator 10y ago
      Timezones are so last century. We have wobnits now. They are like nanoseconds, but that's just a metaphor which is dangerous if taken too literally.
    - Sanddancer 10y ago
      Not only that, they are incorrect constants. The definition for :cet, for example, is only correct for non-leap centuries. 2000-2099 has an extra day compared to 1900-1999, or its partner :qad, which has the opposite problem and assumes any 4-year span has a leap year. Of course, the language has other problems too, like 'moar' being used as a serious part of the language's grammar, or worse, more nebulous verbs like 'snag', which makes the language even more difficult to understand for non-native english speakers. It's just an utter mess.
      - taneq 10y ago
        Maybe their clean slate extends to calendars and other time measurement? :P
      - 10y ago
- jmspring 10y ago
  Honestly, it seems to fit the current hype around being mysterious, disruptive, etc. That they can't describe what they are doing in plain english is downright silly.
  - corv 10y ago
    That a project can't be explained in plain English is starting to become a guarantee for successful crowd-funding.
  - shadeland 10y ago
    > the ideas appeared to be deliberately obfuscated It reminds me of early days of http://21.co http://21.co ,the Bitcoin computer, with the same ambiguous wordings. I assume the libertarian socialistic aspects of this genre of technology is prior to its technical and practical aspects.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      Actually, I've been following Urbit for a while - it's decidedly not designed to be socialist, or libertarian, it is instead feudalistic. Specifically, the network protocol, once you get past the level of "two computers communicating", is based around a system where users are given land (a "planet") by a landlord (a "star"), and are then tied to that landlord in terms of infrastructure and trust. The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet.
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        > The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet. That's not weird if you look at it from the perspective of artificial scarcity. It took three decades but now IPV4 addresses are worth cold hard cash.
        vertex-four 10y ago
        Sure, but as a global personal computing infrastructure, the idea of absolutely ensuring that some people's identities will be worth more than others (not only in terms of monetary worth, but in terms of trust, etc) based on an artificial limit is a bit weird.
- thruflo 10y ago
  Below the intro paragraph on the homepage are two links: "Learn more" and "jump to the technical docs". Given your aversion to the technical docs, I'd imagine you might click "learn more". This scrolls the page down to another lead in para with links to "overview" and "beliefs and principles". So sure, it's two clicks not one but are you seriously telling me the https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ (posted on HN the other day) isn't a well written explanation of what Urbit is / does / why you'd be interested in it? [edit]: typo.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  >This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, Don't worry, it's not. It's a VM with bent towards distributed computing. That's all. I mean maybe one day it'll have an ecosystem of libraries and applications that makes that interesting but it's not today and it's not inherent in the technology.
- zekevermillion 10y ago
  Urbit people make too much effort to justify urbit extrinsically. Hey, we can use it to make P2P facebook, and to render websites that resemble a ruby-powered startup launch site. OK but urbit is also good for urbitting. Why stoop to using the idiom of today's crappy browser apps, and why bother justifying urbit to people who are apparently happy with the way things are on Earth now? Forget them, I say!
- TruthAndDare 10y ago
  I think it's a piece of software. That's all I know. I don't know if it's something you run on your own computer or distributed on a blockchain or something. I guess it's supposed to be obvious. It's not obvious to me.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  Reminds me of what happened to App.net.
deleted 10y ago
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panic 10y ago
Urbit is a republic. Its government has one task: promoting, preserving and protecting Urbit. It may take any legal action which advances this goal. That sounds a bit scary!
- jesstaa 10y ago
  Given the CTO's views it's a lot more scary.
  - sesteel 10y ago
    Interesting, I suspect this is what you are referring to. http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_29730782/controversy-surrounds-speaker-curtis-yarvin-at-boulder-programming http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_29730782/controve...
- gaze 10y ago
  I think if people read Curtis's writing under Mencius Moldbug, nobody would touch urbit with a ten foot pole. He believes that white people are genetically endowed with a higher IQ than black people. Why are people giving him money? This is why we can't have nice things.
  - hodwik2 10y ago
    I do not believe IQ is heritable -- racially, or otherwise. Full stop. Intelligence is, by my estimation, entirely a function of nurture, not nature. Those exceptions are in situations where it is lacking due to handicap. Which is to say, everyone's brain has the same chance at brilliance (barring fetal alcohol syndrome, neglect, etc.) if they are not intellectually handicapped, and are provided the same child-rearing and temperament. But, if you believed IQ to be heritable, as many of you do, it would seem a fair guess that it would be distributed unequally among races, as is height, hormone levels, muscularity, and so on. I don't believe this, as I don't believe IQ is heritable, but I don't see how one could possibly buy into the heritability of IQ while vehemently denying that it could be spread unevenly among races. You guys, to me, all seem to be grappling with two wildly incompatible ideas -- that race can't effect intelligence, and that intelligence is heritable. You'll need to choose which it is. I'm happy, even having read his (wrong) ideas on IQ, to entertain Urbit because he seems no more wrong than the rest of you. Cheers.
kondro 10y ago
I'm very confused.
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  It's a very interesting idea at its core implemented by a man seemingly high on his own sense of intelligence that has some very reactionary views. I'd love to see another project like this that doesn't talk down to its user base and doesn't use a strange language or unreadable source code.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
sesteel 10y ago
I want to like this, but I feel like they are trying to solve too many things at once. Which is just another kind of problem. New CLI, new language... https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/
tree_of_item 10y ago
Urbit is purposefully obfuscated. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the docs: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ There is no reason to gensym all of your concepts like this. It is different just for the purpose of being different: apparently you can't sell people on a "revolutionary technology" without appearing to be extremely different. Nock is also not a good virtual machine. Recognizing blessed sequences of bytecode and replacing them with opaque blobs of code is not a valid approach to optimization. No one can actually run a pure Nock VM, so what is the point of having Nock in the first place? Someone else on HN gave the best summary of Urbit I've seen yet: an elaborate cup and ball game, meant to give the impression of innovation and technical excellence.
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  Its ok to set yourself apart. But for some reason this feels very app.net in a way. Not to disrespect the projects or ceeators but the scope and ambitions were rather big.
  - JonathonW 10y ago
    App.net at least had a couple clear use cases in mind (twitter clone, notifications/pub/sub service), even if they weren't unique/compelling enough to sell people on the service. AFAICT, this platform has a broad scope without any kind of clear vision as to what they want to do with it. Maybe I haven't found the right part of their website yet?
    - asimuvPR 10y ago
      Its probably not public yet. The mystery does help with marketing. Keeping people guessing is an age old tactic. Either way I'm interested.
- mjfl 10y ago
  link for earlier thread, interesting because creators responded: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435757
asimuvPR 10y ago
The scope of the project is big. It mentions gmail, ifft and others. The api integrations for the third parties is measured in terms of years due to breaking changes and sheer amount of work. How is the urbit team managing that?
pbnjay 10y ago
From a purely academic standpoint, I find this project and it's goals intriguing... And I'd be interested in playing around with the environment, if only it weren't for the "Hoon" language. I'm fine dusting off lisp, or erlang, or any of the myriad imperative languages I know to play around, but I have no desire to learn an esoteric language that only works in one esoteric system! If someone ever makes a cross-compiler from a sane language let me know!
state 10y ago
People may also be interested in the LambdaConf talk from a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkZ3GkeU9kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkZ3GkeU9kg
galistoca 10y ago
Wow it's amazing how this post became #1 on front page, just based on criticism, no sarcasm. I guess it is true that all press is good press.
imron 10y ago
> An Urbit identity, or "ship," .... is actually just a 32-bit number, like an IP address 32-bits huh? That's brave.
- randallsquared 10y ago
  They are intentionally scarce.
  - zamalek 10y ago
    > By keeping addresses scarce, we make spam and abuse expensive The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up. Just over half could. What happens in 50 years when all of those 4.2 billion people are dead? Does the entire infrastructure die along with those who were "lucky" enough to win the lottery?
    - dingaling 10y ago
      > The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up They also have freely-available 128-bit identities, called 'submarines', that can be created on whim. The 32-bit identities are 'destroyers', both being subsets of 'ships'. Like everything else associated with Urbit, it's back-to-front. Real-world destroyers hugely out-number submarines.
      - knubie 10y ago
        They've changed the nomenclature since then. submarines -> comets, destroyers -> planet. along with 64 bit moons, 16 bit stars, and 8 bit galaxies.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      Addresses are transferred through agnatic selection.
- kevinschumacher 10y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. Pretty bold move for a startup with an aim to provide a digital identity for everyone in the world with their stack. But if you really dig (and I mean really dig) into their site: > In the general case, a ship is actually a 128-bit number. ... > A comet's [128-bit] address is the hash of its initial public key. Anyone can launch a comet. Nothing stops you from using a comet as your identity, except that the name is a mouthful and everyone will assume you're a bot. [0] So, I mean, there will be a market for names I guess. [0] https://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-moons-and-comets https://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-moons-and-comets
sumitgt 10y ago
Wow, before I read the HN comments, I felt really dumb for not understanding a word of what that page meant. I thought it was one of those strange things all the cool kids are into these days whose appeal I cannot understand or explain.
- fallenshell 10y ago
  Same. I didn't understand a single word in there, because there is nothing to look at there.
MaysonL 10y ago
It's a cult creation technology: anyone who expends enough effort to launch a ship will have convinced themself that this is really cool, and that they are very much smarter than the average bear.
- yebyen 10y ago
  Actually, it's very easy to just launch a ship, if you're not up for compiling stuff. `docker run -i -t --name ship-container yebyen/urbinit` This is not a part of the Urbit project, but something that I maintain. I think there's a reference to this method of installing somewhere in the official setup docs. http://github.com/yebyen/urbinit http://github.com/yebyen/urbinit If you don't like docker, there's also a set of instructions for building Deb packages that are somewhat less clear. (Sorry, I'm not doing this for my day job...) NB: at the time of this post, I took a bite of my own dogfood and saw that I could not reach ~zod, the network's leader. It is possible that it is swamped by HN visitors, or also possible that there is something wrong with my local network, or something wrong with my docker which is a few versions behind tip... Not sure... would be great if someone else can take a look, I'm on the clock.
adrusi 10y ago
I haven't read the whitepaper, but from what I've gathered, urbit is a virtual machine that runs on a network, maybe with support for untrusted nodes? If that's the case then that's amazing, and it's understandable how esoteric it all seems. But that's quite an extraordinary development and I'm skeptical. It would be nice if they would give a clear description of what is they've made. Does this enable running a server jointly with a partner you don't trust, with neither party having physical access, and without involving any third party?
bjorndmitri 10y ago
This has a strong "Shinichi Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture" vibe to me.
Animats 10y ago
I dunno. This thing is weird, but they put a lot of work into it, and you can download something that runs. What they want to build, from the user perspective, seems to be a federated social network. Like Diaspora, only with some of the problems solved. The two big user-level problems they claim to solve are 1) spam, and 2) being tied to a service provider. The solution to 1) is that you have to buy an identity from someone. You can't create identities for free. This is a profit center for someone, although I'm not clear whom. Not clear how much a personal identity costs, but there are only 2^32 of them. The solution to 2) is that you can pick up your ball and go home - take the entire state of your online presence and move it to another server. The routing gets fixed somehow. Sort of like cell phone number portability. Those are both good features. Right now, they apparently power only an online chat system and the ability to host web pages driven by programs in their language. Somebody could potentially build a Facebook-like system on top of that. The terminology and the cult-like aspects are seriously annoying. It reminds me of Xanadu and its team. (I knew that crowd. Mostly extreme libertarians. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.) I wonder if this could be used as a lightweight container system for server-side web applications. It has a container system, and those containers can serve web pages and talk to other containers. Unlike, say, Docker, you don't have to lug around a whole Linux environment in your container. Being able to move your container to a new hosting service very quickly would force hosting services to be competitive.
- wmf 10y ago
  I wonder if this could be used as a lightweight container system for server-side web applications. It has a container system, and those containers can serve web pages and talk to other containers. Unlike, say, Docker, you don't have to lug around a whole Linux environment in your container. Being able to move your container to a new hosting service very quickly would force hosting services to be competitive. Yeah, Sandstorm is pretty cool. :-)
- rmohanx 10y ago
  New terminology makes it easier to have new thoughts, even about old things, but especially about new things. I like the weird.
avip 10y ago
>We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right. This kind of sums up the approach taken here. I'm out. I'm too dumb for this project.
- sigusr1 10y ago
  He said in his recent talk about urbit if he were doing it over he probably wouldn't have done that.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    The current urbit.org documentation has been considerably bowdlerised from the originals, which were 200-proof Moldbug, so strong it crawls up the side of the glass.
  - kodablah 10y ago
    Is beta too late to change?
bordercases 10y ago
I'm not entirely sure I buy the arguments that "made-up words" are a bad thing. All words were made up at some point. And the English language on the surface seems extremely redundant in its vocabulary, but each element of a cluster of words can contain separate nuance, so we keep them around. Perhaps this doesn't have a place in computing, but perhaps it does. Consider, for example, the most jargon-y field of mathematics of all, category theory: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trinitarianism https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trinitarianism Proofs = Types = Categories; all related, all translatable in terms of one another, yet all different. New words in a technical vocabulary let you be both concise but also on occasion familiar. I find arguments about obfuscation maybe a bit more credible. It's hard to say. I'll venture that getting people to pay attention to your ideas by throwing you off of previous convention could potentially work, but time will tell.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  > Proofs = Types = Categories; all related, all translatable in terms of one another, yet all different. Proofs = Some Types and Type Theories = Some Categories, so I think even taken as an attempt to paint the situation in broad strokes what you wrote is at best misleading. Many (commonly studied) categories and classes thereof are not interpretable as type theories, and type theories contain plenty of terms that would not be typically interpreted as proofs. Also, even in category theory, papers and books take quite a bit of care to be clear when they introduce a new term. Urbit's documentation looks like it took every conceivable opportunity to invent new words for things where we already have words. The complaint is not about made-up words per se, but scores of unnecessary made-up words. It's like they expect to trademark the name of every little internal concept inside Urbit.
  - bordercases 10y ago
    Although that's a benefit I didn't think of, my charitable interpretation is that it allows for the use of terms that plug in to a social setting. Of course this all derives from Moldbug's political philosophy. It's technology that's engineered for a certain set of behaviors based on his framework. The terms put the technology in the context of the philosophy, giving hints as to how it solves the problems within it. I can see why that would turn some people off, but for its purpose I believe it's effective. It grounds previously ephermal concepts in metaphors that are tight, like land = server + addressing space or code = law. A lack of good metaphors (rather than an abundance of poor ones, as is the state of things) may be a part of the reason we've become so disoriented with how we handle privacy. When you think of privacy issues as, "my identifying documents are on someone else's land", suddenly it becomes more clear as to what the problem is. By contrast "The Cloud" is a shit metaphor: the cloud is just someone else's computer. It isn't public, universal, or neutral, like real clouds are. And where in the cloud is there a network? If one were to derive Unix in terms of, say, the operations of an anarchist society, as opposed to problems that are mostly mundane or technical, I would be saying the same thing. Arguably the last time this happened was during the Mother of All Demos with Doug Engelbart's models of the knowledge economy. Since then we've either been footnotes to Xerox PARC's visions, or have been otherwise haphazard. As for the Proof/Type/Category equivalences, you're right, they're only equivalent for some structures in all three theories. So they're only equivalent up to locally closed cartesian categories, or wherever. But moving between those three perspectives even under this constraint still leaves you with distinctions, like syntax vs semantics. So in that sense they maintain the notion that different views lead to different nuances even if they cluster around the same space.
arsalanb 10y ago
I met with the founders of Urbit over Dinner a few years back, part of a community meetup at the Thiel Fellowship Finalists Round in 2014 (yeah, bring out the pitchforks) and they seemed like pretty amazing guys. What I don't understand, however, is the need to romanticize software. There's too much magic in this. I get the feel that this is something very important, but I don't understand what it is. Anyhow, best of luck to the team!
PostOnce 10y ago
All I got from this is "we want to sell you a domain name that is unrecognized by all existing software and infrastructure, please give us money" If I wanna join a cyber-utopian hacker-hippie commune, I'm not going to pay a cult to do so. Especially not an inarticulate cult. I'll build it myself? It sure doesn't sound understandable to regular people if the HN crowd doesn't know what they're talking about.
VLM 10y ago
A good summary of some unhappy comments is that its an experimental reboot of a vast new system. Most of the people who are unhappy went into it expecting something very small like "uber for the jvm" or "the twitter of functional programming" or similar. Progress in IT / CS has dramatically slowed over my life. Urbit feels much like 80s home computing, where forklift upgrades of everything you know was "normal" in the extremely rapid transition from Altair CP/M to an Amiga to a SunOS box or whatever path. Nothing is new in the last 20 years, at least compared to the incredibly rapid pace of change in the first 10 years I was into computers. I'm just saying that however unthinkable a forklift upgrade is culturally in 2016, in 1986 it was considered to be "great fun" not a problem or a downside.
zekevermillion 10y ago
I will be interested to see how the address space crowdsale is set up. Any hints?
_m19m 10y ago
Just a reminder, you can learn more about the folks behind Urbit, their objections to democracy, women's suffrage, and general agenda at http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis
- toy_car 10y ago
  It should be noted that: - the other members of the urbit team are not Curtis. 'Folks' is incorrect. - this is an extremely biases article whose publisher's political views are directly the opposite of those being written about. This is not an objective primary source by any measure.
- TruthAndDare 10y ago
  > objections to democracy I'm afraid that doesn't say much. Are they striving for more centralized power (a dictator holding the power over everybody) or less centralized power (no one having the right to decide over other people)?
  - trbvm2 10y ago
    They did name the network leader Zod
- defen 10y ago
  So if you were around in the 50s, would you have argued against using transistors because Bill Shockley was a racist and eugenicist?
  - notthemessiah 10y ago
    Transistors aren't a technology for eugenics. Urbit is a technology for neocameralism.
drcreed 10y ago
I only get a white page. Why does this site require Javascript to run?
DoubleMalt 10y ago
If you prefer a more down to earth approach, check out https://cloudfleet.io https://cloudfleet.io

184 points by jonasrosland 10y ago

I'm reserving my judgement on the system. Just sharing a few videos which might help in understanding Urbit better. Start with this LamdaConf talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs and pair with this demo video after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp9aCEfA6ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp9aCEfA6ao

dingaling 10y ago
Thank you, that second video was very instructive. If people want to see Urbit working, jump to around the two-minute mark and there's a demo of networked program execution as well as distributed version control.

aaron-lebo 10y ago

This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a problem. If you can, why doesn't your homepage reflect that? Show me! I don't want to scroll through another website with 16 point font. We all love the Unix philosophy and puppies, too. Please take this as the constructive criticism it is.

NeutronBoy 10y ago
I agree. What it really needs is an 'example' page, or a walkthrough of how/what you'd use it for. I just spent 10 minutes reading the docs and I'm not sure I get it. Is it like Owncloud? disapora*? ITTT? Is it an interface to mirror all my content from other social media sites, and interact with them? You say I can use it to authenticate with sites - is it an OpenID provider? Something something blockchain? All of the above? This page explains a little bit [1], but a walkthrough or video or screenshots or something would help immensely [1] https://urbit.org/posts/vision/ https://urbit.org/posts/vision/
- hirsin 10y ago
  It's personal computing, explained in the context of a VC pitch to people who have never heard of an OS, think the browser is their computer, and don't seem to comprehend software that gets installed. Look at the Evernote example - wouldn't it be great if you could replace the Evernote UI with a different one for $10? Well, you could do that today on any OS with an app and a REST API, but it either doesn't exist (because it's not that great) or it does already exist (so what's revolutionary?). The same thing applies to almost every single thing lauded. Your data is saved locally! Great, my UrbitTwitter clone keeps my data locally in some undocumented format. But that's ok, I'm not beholden to the app developer in case they die (yes, that's in there), because I can get someone else to reverse engineer that format and build me a new twitter clone. How does Hoon make that special? Gmail works locally! And <other Web service> Translation - someone (lots of someones) will build APIs and SDKs for our platform to interface with those services, and they'll be used just like in any other OS to make apps that run in your machine. It lauds "you can install software, and it runs locally, forever!" as something new and great, when really that's existed since we got off mainframes in the 70s. Everything it offers is stuff that was solved the first go around in personal computers, but this time with a cryptographic identity and an obtuse language. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I've been looking at urbit for 2.5 years, know (good) people that worked on it, and still can't find a compelling reason to think of it as something other than a hipster OS, reinventing decades old ideas because this time they'll do it right.
deleted 10y ago
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jcrites 10y ago
I don't disagree with your criticism. I read through the Urbut whitepaper [1] a while ago, and there's some meat and novel ideas there. As far as a concise description, here's my attempt, followed by some content from the whitepaper. The key idea that distinguishes Urbit is its focus on deterministic computing. Urbit is a computing environment, like a virtual machine, with the distinction that the entire computational result is designed to be a deterministic function of the inputs. The inputs are represented as a sort of transactional log-structured file system, where computation is a pure function of the input events. They have provisions for multiple computers interacting over a network while handling inputs in that way. They implement a sort of combinator-based assembly language and virtual machine, a higher level language on top, and then an OS on top of that. Their virtual machine runs on a regular computer, but in theory you could run an Urbit VM on any machine and observe the same computational result. This is not a trivial problem to solve for an entire OS and network! They invented some interesting optimization techniques ("jets") and networking concepts to make it feasible. As an analogy (this is a stretch): it's like Plan9, except purely functional and deterministic. > Urbit is a new clean-slate system software stack. A nonpreemptive OS (Arvo), written in a strict, typed functional language (Hoon) which compiles itself to a combinator VM (Nock), drives an encrypted packet network (Ames) and defines a global version-control system (Clay). Including basic apps, the whole stack is about 30,000 lines of Hoon. Urbit is a “solid-state interpreter”: an interpreter with no transient state. The interpreter is an ACID database; an event is a transaction in a log-checkpoint system. Their goal is to make hosting this virtual machine easy enough to do that anyone could, while (if I recall correctly) decoupling it from the underlying physical machine it's running on, such that it could run anywhere you want it to. Then they speculate that, if many people hosted their own, then people would be less reliant on cloud services, or at least could fully trust computational results from the cloud. The ideas are unfortunately cumbersome to follow once the whitepaper and other technical content reach the point where they explain things with made-up, Urbit-specific terminology [2]. The authors explain their rationale for their choice to do this (IIRC, their reasoning was that they need to name so many new concepts that it's better just to assign random words like codenames - something like that). I feel ambivalent about this, but I will respectfully mention that the choice to do this might make more sense from the perspective of someone who lives and breathes Urbit every day. From the perspective of a beginner, it's a turn-off; I find it grating and it doesn't work for me. Haskell and Rust have terms to introduce, but their material doesn't leave me feeling bamboozled. If an alien species had invented computing, what might it look like? I think Urbit is a credible answer to that question. I'm joking, but only partially: from the perspective of "throw out everything and start over from scratch to see what modern computing would be like", Urbit seems like it may be a sincere attempt. At one point in the past, the ideas appeared to be deliberately obfuscated, like performance art or like Brainfuck. They've subsequently made efforts to explain the ideas and build things up from basic concepts, and I think the authors are sincere, but don't hold me to that. In conclusion, I think it's technically neat, but I think it'd be a lot neater if it were documented and presented within a grounding of typical CS and software terminology/concepts. Or if they can't give up the custom terminology, I'd want to see ~10X more material (per unit concept) introducing and clarifying the ideas slowly from the ground up. If they're inventing their own alien computer science, then they need to write the alien "C Programming Language" (K&R) and alien "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" [3]. [1] http://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf http://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf [2] https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ and prev discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435757 [3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
kovrik 10y ago
Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.
- kovrik 10y ago
  Also, I doubt they could handle it, their scope is huge: new OS, new programming language, networking, encryption, time, compilation, virtualization etc. I don't believe group of 5 unknown people can handle it. Like, Urbit time: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/ Where the hell are timezones, Leap seconds etc.? They just store constants!
  - kazinator 10y ago
    Timezones are so last century. We have wobnits now. They are like nanoseconds, but that's just a metaphor which is dangerous if taken too literally.
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    Not only that, they are incorrect constants. The definition for :cet, for example, is only correct for non-leap centuries. 2000-2099 has an extra day compared to 1900-1999, or its partner :qad, which has the opposite problem and assumes any 4-year span has a leap year. Of course, the language has other problems too, like 'moar' being used as a serious part of the language's grammar, or worse, more nebulous verbs like 'snag', which makes the language even more difficult to understand for non-native english speakers. It's just an utter mess.
    - taneq 10y ago
      Maybe their clean slate extends to calendars and other time measurement? :P
    - 10y ago
jmspring 10y ago
Honestly, it seems to fit the current hype around being mysterious, disruptive, etc. That they can't describe what they are doing in plain english is downright silly.
- corv 10y ago
  That a project can't be explained in plain English is starting to become a guarantee for successful crowd-funding.
- shadeland 10y ago
  > the ideas appeared to be deliberately obfuscated It reminds me of early days of http://21.co http://21.co ,the Bitcoin computer, with the same ambiguous wordings. I assume the libertarian socialistic aspects of this genre of technology is prior to its technical and practical aspects.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Actually, I've been following Urbit for a while - it's decidedly not designed to be socialist, or libertarian, it is instead feudalistic. Specifically, the network protocol, once you get past the level of "two computers communicating", is based around a system where users are given land (a "planet") by a landlord (a "star"), and are then tied to that landlord in terms of infrastructure and trust. The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      > The system is also, weirdly, specifically designed so that not every person in the world can have their own planet. That's not weird if you look at it from the perspective of artificial scarcity. It took three decades but now IPV4 addresses are worth cold hard cash.
      - vertex-four 10y ago
        Sure, but as a global personal computing infrastructure, the idea of absolutely ensuring that some people's identities will be worth more than others (not only in terms of monetary worth, but in terms of trust, etc) based on an artificial limit is a bit weird.
thruflo 10y ago
Below the intro paragraph on the homepage are two links: "Learn more" and "jump to the technical docs". Given your aversion to the technical docs, I'd imagine you might click "learn more". This scrolls the page down to another lead in para with links to "overview" and "beliefs and principles". So sure, it's two clicks not one but are you seriously telling me the https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ https://urbit.org/posts/overview/ (posted on HN the other day) isn't a well written explanation of what Urbit is / does / why you'd be interested in it? [edit]: typo.
Avshalom 10y ago
>This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, Don't worry, it's not. It's a VM with bent towards distributed computing. That's all. I mean maybe one day it'll have an ecosystem of libraries and applications that makes that interesting but it's not today and it's not inherent in the technology.
zekevermillion 10y ago
Urbit people make too much effort to justify urbit extrinsically. Hey, we can use it to make P2P facebook, and to render websites that resemble a ruby-powered startup launch site. OK but urbit is also good for urbitting. Why stoop to using the idiom of today's crappy browser apps, and why bother justifying urbit to people who are apparently happy with the way things are on Earth now? Forget them, I say!
TruthAndDare 10y ago
I think it's a piece of software. That's all I know. I don't know if it's something you run on your own computer or distributed on a blockchain or something. I guess it's supposed to be obvious. It's not obvious to me.
Yhippa 10y ago
Reminds me of what happened to App.net.

deleted 10y ago

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panic 10y ago

Urbit is a republic. Its government has one task: promoting, preserving and protecting Urbit. It may take any legal action which advances this goal. That sounds a bit scary!

jesstaa 10y ago
Given the CTO's views it's a lot more scary.
- sesteel 10y ago
  Interesting, I suspect this is what you are referring to. http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_29730782/controversy-surrounds-speaker-curtis-yarvin-at-boulder-programming http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_29730782/controve...
gaze 10y ago
I think if people read Curtis's writing under Mencius Moldbug, nobody would touch urbit with a ten foot pole. He believes that white people are genetically endowed with a higher IQ than black people. Why are people giving him money? This is why we can't have nice things.
- hodwik2 10y ago
  I do not believe IQ is heritable -- racially, or otherwise. Full stop. Intelligence is, by my estimation, entirely a function of nurture, not nature. Those exceptions are in situations where it is lacking due to handicap. Which is to say, everyone's brain has the same chance at brilliance (barring fetal alcohol syndrome, neglect, etc.) if they are not intellectually handicapped, and are provided the same child-rearing and temperament. But, if you believed IQ to be heritable, as many of you do, it would seem a fair guess that it would be distributed unequally among races, as is height, hormone levels, muscularity, and so on. I don't believe this, as I don't believe IQ is heritable, but I don't see how one could possibly buy into the heritability of IQ while vehemently denying that it could be spread unevenly among races. You guys, to me, all seem to be grappling with two wildly incompatible ideas -- that race can't effect intelligence, and that intelligence is heritable. You'll need to choose which it is. I'm happy, even having read his (wrong) ideas on IQ, to entertain Urbit because he seems no more wrong than the rest of you. Cheers.

kondro 10y ago

I'm very confused.

akhilcacharya 10y ago
It's a very interesting idea at its core implemented by a man seemingly high on his own sense of intelligence that has some very reactionary views. I'd love to see another project like this that doesn't talk down to its user base and doesn't use a strange language or unreadable source code.
- deleted 10y ago
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sesteel 10y ago

I want to like this, but I feel like they are trying to solve too many things at once. Which is just another kind of problem. New CLI, new language... https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/

tree_of_item 10y ago

Urbit is purposefully obfuscated. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the docs: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ There is no reason to gensym all of your concepts like this. It is different just for the purpose of being different: apparently you can't sell people on a "revolutionary technology" without appearing to be extremely different. Nock is also not a good virtual machine. Recognizing blessed sequences of bytecode and replacing them with opaque blobs of code is not a valid approach to optimization. No one can actually run a pure Nock VM, so what is the point of having Nock in the first place? Someone else on HN gave the best summary of Urbit I've seen yet: an elaborate cup and ball game, meant to give the impression of innovation and technical excellence.

asimuvPR 10y ago
Its ok to set yourself apart. But for some reason this feels very app.net in a way. Not to disrespect the projects or ceeators but the scope and ambitions were rather big.
- JonathonW 10y ago
  App.net at least had a couple clear use cases in mind (twitter clone, notifications/pub/sub service), even if they weren't unique/compelling enough to sell people on the service. AFAICT, this platform has a broad scope without any kind of clear vision as to what they want to do with it. Maybe I haven't found the right part of their website yet?
  - asimuvPR 10y ago
    Its probably not public yet. The mystery does help with marketing. Keeping people guessing is an age old tactic. Either way I'm interested.
mjfl 10y ago
link for earlier thread, interesting because creators responded: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435757

asimuvPR 10y ago

The scope of the project is big. It mentions gmail, ifft and others. The api integrations for the third parties is measured in terms of years due to breaking changes and sheer amount of work. How is the urbit team managing that?

pbnjay 10y ago

From a purely academic standpoint, I find this project and it's goals intriguing... And I'd be interested in playing around with the environment, if only it weren't for the "Hoon" language. I'm fine dusting off lisp, or erlang, or any of the myriad imperative languages I know to play around, but I have no desire to learn an esoteric language that only works in one esoteric system! If someone ever makes a cross-compiler from a sane language let me know!

state 10y ago

People may also be interested in the LambdaConf talk from a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkZ3GkeU9kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkZ3GkeU9kg

galistoca 10y ago

Wow it's amazing how this post became #1 on front page, just based on criticism, no sarcasm. I guess it is true that all press is good press.

imron 10y ago

> An Urbit identity, or "ship," .... is actually just a 32-bit number, like an IP address 32-bits huh? That's brave.

randallsquared 10y ago
They are intentionally scarce.
- zamalek 10y ago
  > By keeping addresses scarce, we make spam and abuse expensive The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up. Just over half could. What happens in 50 years when all of those 4.2 billion people are dead? Does the entire infrastructure die along with those who were "lucky" enough to win the lottery?
  - dingaling 10y ago
    > The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up They also have freely-available 128-bit identities, called 'submarines', that can be created on whim. The 32-bit identities are 'destroyers', both being subsets of 'ships'. Like everything else associated with Urbit, it's back-to-front. Real-world destroyers hugely out-number submarines.
    - knubie 10y ago
      They've changed the nomenclature since then. submarines -> comets, destroyers -> planet. along with 64 bit moons, 16 bit stars, and 8 bit galaxies.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    Addresses are transferred through agnatic selection.
kevinschumacher 10y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Pretty bold move for a startup with an aim to provide a digital identity for everyone in the world with their stack. But if you really dig (and I mean really dig) into their site: > In the general case, a ship is actually a 128-bit number. ... > A comet's [128-bit] address is the hash of its initial public key. Anyone can launch a comet. Nothing stops you from using a comet as your identity, except that the name is a mouthful and everyone will assume you're a bot. [0] So, I mean, there will be a market for names I guess. [0] https://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-moons-and-comets https://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-moons-and-comets

sumitgt 10y ago

Wow, before I read the HN comments, I felt really dumb for not understanding a word of what that page meant. I thought it was one of those strange things all the cool kids are into these days whose appeal I cannot understand or explain.

fallenshell 10y ago
Same. I didn't understand a single word in there, because there is nothing to look at there.

MaysonL 10y ago

It's a cult creation technology: anyone who expends enough effort to launch a ship will have convinced themself that this is really cool, and that they are very much smarter than the average bear.

yebyen 10y ago
Actually, it's very easy to just launch a ship, if you're not up for compiling stuff. `docker run -i -t --name ship-container yebyen/urbinit` This is not a part of the Urbit project, but something that I maintain. I think there's a reference to this method of installing somewhere in the official setup docs. http://github.com/yebyen/urbinit http://github.com/yebyen/urbinit If you don't like docker, there's also a set of instructions for building Deb packages that are somewhat less clear. (Sorry, I'm not doing this for my day job...) NB: at the time of this post, I took a bite of my own dogfood and saw that I could not reach ~zod, the network's leader. It is possible that it is swamped by HN visitors, or also possible that there is something wrong with my local network, or something wrong with my docker which is a few versions behind tip... Not sure... would be great if someone else can take a look, I'm on the clock.

adrusi 10y ago

I haven't read the whitepaper, but from what I've gathered, urbit is a virtual machine that runs on a network, maybe with support for untrusted nodes? If that's the case then that's amazing, and it's understandable how esoteric it all seems. But that's quite an extraordinary development and I'm skeptical. It would be nice if they would give a clear description of what is they've made. Does this enable running a server jointly with a partner you don't trust, with neither party having physical access, and without involving any third party?

bjorndmitri 10y ago

This has a strong "Shinichi Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture" vibe to me.

Animats 10y ago

I dunno. This thing is weird, but they put a lot of work into it, and you can download something that runs. What they want to build, from the user perspective, seems to be a federated social network. Like Diaspora, only with some of the problems solved. The two big user-level problems they claim to solve are 1) spam, and 2) being tied to a service provider. The solution to 1) is that you have to buy an identity from someone. You can't create identities for free. This is a profit center for someone, although I'm not clear whom. Not clear how much a personal identity costs, but there are only 2^32 of them. The solution to 2) is that you can pick up your ball and go home - take the entire state of your online presence and move it to another server. The routing gets fixed somehow. Sort of like cell phone number portability. Those are both good features. Right now, they apparently power only an online chat system and the ability to host web pages driven by programs in their language. Somebody could potentially build a Facebook-like system on top of that. The terminology and the cult-like aspects are seriously annoying. It reminds me of Xanadu and its team. (I knew that crowd. Mostly extreme libertarians. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.) I wonder if this could be used as a lightweight container system for server-side web applications. It has a container system, and those containers can serve web pages and talk to other containers. Unlike, say, Docker, you don't have to lug around a whole Linux environment in your container. Being able to move your container to a new hosting service very quickly would force hosting services to be competitive.

wmf 10y ago
I wonder if this could be used as a lightweight container system for server-side web applications. It has a container system, and those containers can serve web pages and talk to other containers. Unlike, say, Docker, you don't have to lug around a whole Linux environment in your container. Being able to move your container to a new hosting service very quickly would force hosting services to be competitive. Yeah, Sandstorm is pretty cool. :-)
rmohanx 10y ago
New terminology makes it easier to have new thoughts, even about old things, but especially about new things. I like the weird.

avip 10y ago

>We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right. This kind of sums up the approach taken here. I'm out. I'm too dumb for this project.

sigusr1 10y ago
He said in his recent talk about urbit if he were doing it over he probably wouldn't have done that.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  The current urbit.org documentation has been considerably bowdlerised from the originals, which were 200-proof Moldbug, so strong it crawls up the side of the glass.
- kodablah 10y ago
  Is beta too late to change?

bordercases 10y ago

I'm not entirely sure I buy the arguments that "made-up words" are a bad thing. All words were made up at some point. And the English language on the surface seems extremely redundant in its vocabulary, but each element of a cluster of words can contain separate nuance, so we keep them around. Perhaps this doesn't have a place in computing, but perhaps it does. Consider, for example, the most jargon-y field of mathematics of all, category theory: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trinitarianism https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trinitarianism Proofs = Types = Categories; all related, all translatable in terms of one another, yet all different. New words in a technical vocabulary let you be both concise but also on occasion familiar. I find arguments about obfuscation maybe a bit more credible. It's hard to say. I'll venture that getting people to pay attention to your ideas by throwing you off of previous convention could potentially work, but time will tell.

johncolanduoni 10y ago
> Proofs = Types = Categories; all related, all translatable in terms of one another, yet all different. Proofs = Some Types and Type Theories = Some Categories, so I think even taken as an attempt to paint the situation in broad strokes what you wrote is at best misleading. Many (commonly studied) categories and classes thereof are not interpretable as type theories, and type theories contain plenty of terms that would not be typically interpreted as proofs. Also, even in category theory, papers and books take quite a bit of care to be clear when they introduce a new term. Urbit's documentation looks like it took every conceivable opportunity to invent new words for things where we already have words. The complaint is not about made-up words per se, but scores of unnecessary made-up words. It's like they expect to trademark the name of every little internal concept inside Urbit.
- bordercases 10y ago
  Although that's a benefit I didn't think of, my charitable interpretation is that it allows for the use of terms that plug in to a social setting. Of course this all derives from Moldbug's political philosophy. It's technology that's engineered for a certain set of behaviors based on his framework. The terms put the technology in the context of the philosophy, giving hints as to how it solves the problems within it. I can see why that would turn some people off, but for its purpose I believe it's effective. It grounds previously ephermal concepts in metaphors that are tight, like land = server + addressing space or code = law. A lack of good metaphors (rather than an abundance of poor ones, as is the state of things) may be a part of the reason we've become so disoriented with how we handle privacy. When you think of privacy issues as, "my identifying documents are on someone else's land", suddenly it becomes more clear as to what the problem is. By contrast "The Cloud" is a shit metaphor: the cloud is just someone else's computer. It isn't public, universal, or neutral, like real clouds are. And where in the cloud is there a network? If one were to derive Unix in terms of, say, the operations of an anarchist society, as opposed to problems that are mostly mundane or technical, I would be saying the same thing. Arguably the last time this happened was during the Mother of All Demos with Doug Engelbart's models of the knowledge economy. Since then we've either been footnotes to Xerox PARC's visions, or have been otherwise haphazard. As for the Proof/Type/Category equivalences, you're right, they're only equivalent for some structures in all three theories. So they're only equivalent up to locally closed cartesian categories, or wherever. But moving between those three perspectives even under this constraint still leaves you with distinctions, like syntax vs semantics. So in that sense they maintain the notion that different views lead to different nuances even if they cluster around the same space.

arsalanb 10y ago

I met with the founders of Urbit over Dinner a few years back, part of a community meetup at the Thiel Fellowship Finalists Round in 2014 (yeah, bring out the pitchforks) and they seemed like pretty amazing guys. What I don't understand, however, is the need to romanticize software. There's too much magic in this. I get the feel that this is something very important, but I don't understand what it is. Anyhow, best of luck to the team!

PostOnce 10y ago

All I got from this is "we want to sell you a domain name that is unrecognized by all existing software and infrastructure, please give us money" If I wanna join a cyber-utopian hacker-hippie commune, I'm not going to pay a cult to do so. Especially not an inarticulate cult. I'll build it myself? It sure doesn't sound understandable to regular people if the HN crowd doesn't know what they're talking about.

VLM 10y ago

A good summary of some unhappy comments is that its an experimental reboot of a vast new system. Most of the people who are unhappy went into it expecting something very small like "uber for the jvm" or "the twitter of functional programming" or similar. Progress in IT / CS has dramatically slowed over my life. Urbit feels much like 80s home computing, where forklift upgrades of everything you know was "normal" in the extremely rapid transition from Altair CP/M to an Amiga to a SunOS box or whatever path. Nothing is new in the last 20 years, at least compared to the incredibly rapid pace of change in the first 10 years I was into computers. I'm just saying that however unthinkable a forklift upgrade is culturally in 2016, in 1986 it was considered to be "great fun" not a problem or a downside.

zekevermillion 10y ago

I will be interested to see how the address space crowdsale is set up. Any hints?

_m19m 10y ago

Just a reminder, you can learn more about the folks behind Urbit, their objections to democracy, women's suffrage, and general agenda at http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

toy_car 10y ago
It should be noted that: - the other members of the urbit team are not Curtis. 'Folks' is incorrect. - this is an extremely biases article whose publisher's political views are directly the opposite of those being written about. This is not an objective primary source by any measure.
TruthAndDare 10y ago
> objections to democracy I'm afraid that doesn't say much. Are they striving for more centralized power (a dictator holding the power over everybody) or less centralized power (no one having the right to decide over other people)?
- trbvm2 10y ago
  They did name the network leader Zod
defen 10y ago
So if you were around in the 50s, would you have argued against using transistors because Bill Shockley was a racist and eugenicist?
- notthemessiah 10y ago
  Transistors aren't a technology for eugenics. Urbit is a technology for neocameralism.

drcreed 10y ago

I only get a white page. Why does this site require Javascript to run?

DoubleMalt 10y ago

If you prefer a more down to earth approach, check out https://cloudfleet.io https://cloudfleet.io