8 ms·

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.

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.

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.