22 ms·

Urbit OS 1

263 points by pcr910303 7y ago

0xy 7y ago
Urbit is such a niche product that totally ignores the average consumer it's essentially dead on arrival. They struggle to explain it to technical people. Imagine trying to explain this thing to your mother. It's the fever dream of deeply technical types who have created a product so academic in nature that it's totally useless in practicality.
- arcadeparade 7y ago
  its an os, its social media without the middleman, its an identity, its many things. Sadly HN always seems to hate it whenever it get posted here.
  - 0xy 7y ago
    Could you explain Urbit to your mother within a minute?
    - gowld 7y ago
      Is there any person you could explain it to in a minute?
    - jraines 7y ago
      “An operating system in a box that connects with others to provide (mostly in the future) the kind of networked services and apps you enjoy now, but with your data stored locally instead of on corporate servers” Easier than explaining bitcoin, honestly. No warrants made to mom or others on usability or service availability
      - ashtonkem 7y ago
        My mother fell asleep because I read that, it was that boring to non techies.
      - duskwuff 7y ago
        Hypothetical response: "An operating system? Is it better than Windows? What games does it have?" I'm not convinced that's an appropriate term to use here, even as part of a simplified explanation.
    - defen 7y ago
      "Have you ever had a software update break your computer or an app you used, or have you ever had a website you love disappear from the internet? Imagine if that could never happen again."
  - qppo 7y ago
    Maybe a better question is, "what does Urbit do? Like, specifically - and using either standard technical jargon, comparison to other products on the market. Because at this point it just sounds like a techno-cult.
    - 0xy 7y ago
      My best answer to this question is that it's an overly complex IRC with additional features and misleading marketing designed to swindle investors. In fact, it's so obscure and bloated that the average IRC user wouldn't be able to understand it. The average user has no hope. I mean, just look at them trying to explain Urbit on Twitter. Meaningless abstract buzzwords and it still doesn't explain anything. https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1184984759123922945 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1184984759123922945 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1255284955850125312 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1255284955850125312 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1253709910694432768 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1253709910694432768 It reads like a cult.
    - arcadeparade 7y ago
      Right now you can download urbit and message other people with an urbit planet if you know their id, and its peer to peer. you own the planet forever and you cannot be censored or have your data be sold to advertisers on social media platforms.
      - qppo 7y ago
        What is the difference compared to signal or other E2E encrypted SMS approaches?
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    That might have more to do with Urbit's founder rather than the technical merits of the project.
  - mdszy 7y ago
    Good job making it sound like a cult.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    That’s cool, I guess. I just don’t want all those things bundled up.
- Uhhrrr 7y ago
  It seems clear to me that they have no interest in targeting average consumers at this point.
  - core-questions 7y ago
    It's abundantly clear, and I'm not sure why people have a problem with that. Plenty of computing projects have required a long time before they become accessible to the common person as a packaged, supportable product.
- jshevek 7y ago
  There are many valid arguments against Urbit, but this one... >They struggle to explain it to technical people. Imagine trying to explain this thing to your mother. ...doesn't hold up for me. My grandparents understand computers only in terms of what they can do for them, and the buttons they need to click to make that happen. If Urbit ever matures, there will be applications of similar functionality and similar complexity to what non-technical people currently use.
- sincerely 7y ago
  Me not being able to explain Kubernetes to my mother hasn't stopped it from being a resoundingly successful project, and it's not clear to me why Urbit should be different.
type02 7y ago
I've been told what Urbit is about 10 times now and I still don't fully get it.
- lisper 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674322
  - Avshalom 7y ago
    It's also just a programming language VM with focus on distributed apps and some opinions on network architecture. That's the "what" it's just that the "how" (fucking hoon/nock) and "why" (moldbugs weird shit) is such a fucking rabbit hole that it obfuscates the very straight forward and uninteresting "what".
- robenkleene 7y ago
  I'm no expert, this stuff is definitely over my head, but here's my attempt to understand it: Let say you want a computer in the cloud. Today you probably do that by paying someone like Linode for something like a VPS. But under that model, Linode still has a ton of control over your computer in the cloud. With Urbit, it's distributed, so you aren't renting access to your cloud computer from some entity that has more control over it than you do.
  - wmf 7y ago
    Urbit isn't that distributed since your planet is running on one VPS. (As an aside, the whole "$PROVIDER is going to hack into my VM" thing is pretty overblown. The cloud has existed for over 10 years and the worst that happens is the provider deletes all your data and you restore from backup onto a different provider. You do have a backup that isn't on the same provider, right?)
    - robenkleene 7y ago
      Cool thanks, in what sense is it distributed then?
rkobeissi 7y ago
I searched "Urbit" in the HN archives. The old discussion is still relevant for a project as long-term as this, and the more recent you get the more Urbit is misunderstood or attacked simply for being different. Years on from the first announcements this hugely ambitious project is finally showing real-world practical application that is already superior to the alternatives in some dimensions, and with great potential for growth. If you're sleeping on this it's like sleeping on the Bitcoin whitepaper. The dimensions for the future of computing are being hashed out in front of you. A congratulations to everyone involved.
- phnofive 7y ago
  Could you explain what Urbit’s main goals or purposes are? I feel like, for Bitcoin, the intent and outcome might not be perfectly aligned, but I get what it was for and how it is used.
  - miles 7y ago
    The homepage (urbit.org) offers a succinct description: > Urbit OS is a clean slate reimagining of the operating system as an 'overlay OS.' It runs on any Unix machine with an internet connection. > It's a compact system for an individual to run their own permanent personal server. > Urbit ID is a decentralized digital identity system. Your Urbit ID is a username, network address, and crypto wallet. > Both are designed to work together as a single system, completely open source. For those who want to dig deeper: AMA with lead dev 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... First appearance on HN 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052795 First HN post with traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320 Urbit's HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit
  - faizshah 7y ago
    This HNer did a deep dive into Urbit's source, it's the best explanation of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676792 Another good, more charitable, explanation posted below: https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f149 https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14...
crankylinuxuser 7y ago
This is that neo-fascist serfdom computing network, right? It's the one that you are effectively a sharecropper on other peoples' galaxies, stars, planets, and stuff? I'll pass. The Fediverse is much more interesting, being that it's more for open source and egalitarianism.
calvinmorrison 7y ago
So it's a slack like chat that runs in a VM in my browser? Sorry I read thier homepage and dont get it
- jdhopeunique 7y ago
  Except this chat seems has a unique(feudalistic maybe?) update system: https://urbit.org/using/operations/stars-and-galaxies/ https://urbit.org/using/operations/stars-and-galaxies/ Updates are passed down from galaxy to star to planet. Star owners can modify those updates to push custom software to planet VMs.
deleted 7y ago
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mdszy 7y ago
Ah yes, Urbit, the project that is inherently feudalistic in all of its architecture because the guy who created it is an alt-right crank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin). Weird crypto-crap for Nazis. Nothing more.
- tyrust 7y ago
  I'm not a fan of Yarvin or anything, but I don't think a project is inherently bad because of a bad founder (who is no longer involved [0]). What makes you say that Urbit is for Nazis? From my research of the project, it seems independent of any ideology. [0] - https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/ https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/
  - mdszy 7y ago
    It was created with the goal of a few folks having control over larger parts of the ecosystem ("galaxies") which then give out control over "stars" and "planets" - a structure that is mentioned in the very article you linked - with the author constantly saying "it's NOT feudalistic, I really mean it!!" even though it very obviously is. Given this, it's clear that the political ideology of the author is involved in the core structure of the project, whether one likes it or not.
    - tyrust 7y ago
      Supposing that that is the case, what does that have to do with Nazis?
      - mdszy 7y ago
        The fact that Yarvin is one?
        tyrust 7y ago
        Sorry, my question wasn't clear, what does the alleged feudalistic structure of the project have to do with Nazis?
lidHanteyk 7y ago
As soon as the protocol is stable enough, if it is useful, it will be reverse-engineered and reimplemented in more-legible source code. From this, I can deduce that Urbit is not yet useful.
- tylershuster 7y ago
  Just because it’s illegible does not mean it is suboptimal. It purposely breaks with existing conventions because it does things in a way not current code does.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    Here [0] is but one example of Urbit's suboptimality: Their encoding into C is insecure, and they have no interest in changing it. Writing a new operating system is hard. Taking lots of questionable paths, like writing "jet" templates [1] that call directly into existing C libraries, or defining a brand-new Boolean type that doesn't behave like standard Booleans, is not the right way to build confidence in any kind of quality, let alone optimality. Also, as a word-choice note, "optimal" means "best". Urbit is clearly not the best operating system, because there is clearly no metric by which to measure it against other OSs. It doesn't support the same sorts of hardware or APIs or processes or other common components of our craft. "optimal" is a terrible word to use around greenfield projects and nebulous designs; reserve it for when you can prove that your approach truly is the best one. [0] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/752 https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/752 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_metaprogramming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_metaprogramming
    - strbean 7y ago
      That issue is pretty hilarious, and reveals a lot about Urbit. This topic on HN is my first exposure to the project, and I was on the fence about the (seemingly much debated) 'is this satire?' question. This ticket pushed me over to the 'yes' side. Of course there is the 'loobean' schtick, but the best part is them sneaking in three-valued logic as a trojan horse, where the third state is "NO". They evens steer the reader towards the obvious footgun: > You should ignore the numeric values and use comparisons against c3y and c3n for everything. So I should say if (bluebeanValue == TRUE) { ... } and if (bluebeanValue == FALSE) { ... } Making any value outside the expected range mean "NO to any boolean test".
GuiA 7y ago
It’s a scam. They have 2^32 “planets” (a UUID that you can use to interact with the Urbit network), that they are each trying to sell for ~$10-$20 on a cute “exchange”: https://urbit.live/ https://urbit.live/ (Of course you don’t really own anything when buying a planet because someone else owns the “star” and the “galaxy” and you can’t buy those unless you’re friends with them) They even have a nice pyramid diagram for their not-pyramid-scheme: https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address-space-pt2a.svg https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address-s...
- kemenaran 7y ago
  It looks like so, yes. Though, after digging in the doc, turns out there may be a way to create temporary free ids to try out Urbit: https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a-comet/ https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a-comet/
  - GuiA 7y ago
    The first hit is always free :)
- arcadeparade 7y ago
  Your planet is not tied to a specific star, you can move it to other stars. The reason there is a cost is to reduce spam, among other things.
- core-questions 7y ago
  Are IP addresses a scam?
  - wmf 7y ago
    If someone proposed 32-bit IP addresses in the 21st century I would call that a scam. I don't object to Urbit's addressing only because I think it has no chance of taking off.
- jck 7y ago
  It's not a pyramid scheme - it's a reverse funnel system.
lachlan-sneff 7y ago
I think the many of the ideas behind Urbit are exciting, but I don’t think it’s putting itself in a good position. It’s just too weird. If it used WebAssembly instead of some small, functional bytecode, you’d lose some beauty perhaps, but it’d be much more palatable.
- dpc_pw 7y ago
  Hoon does have some very nice security / usability things, that a plain WASM doesn't: every function call is pretty much a sandbox, everything is serializable and sandboxable (so you can eg. exchange code around safely), great reflexivity/inspectability, etc. It looks weird, and names are weird (which IMO is unnecessary), but the underlying mechanisms are actually not that difficult to grasp.
  - lachlan-sneff 7y ago
    Yeah, I wish wasm had more support for pure programming. Of course, state can be constrained, but it's pretty heavyweight.
openasocket 7y ago
I tried to understand how Hoon and Nock work once and got completely lost. They happily claim that their definition of Nock is super simple and Turing Complete, and I'm used to dealing with some really abstract things, but I simply can't deduce it. Their definition of Nock contains a couple of different combinators. They start out really simple: one to increment, one to tell if something is a list or an atom, one for equality. Then comes this one: /[1 a] a /[2 a b] a /[3 a b] b /[(a + a) b] /[2 /[a b]] /[(a + a + 1) b] /[3 /[a b]] And then I'm completely lost. What on earth does this combinator do? Every time I try tracing it with an example list it quickly goes into infinite recursion.
- minitech 7y ago
  Did you come from the Nock 4K thing seen in https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/definition/ but without the rest of the stuff on that page? It’s explained in words there: > / (slot) is a tree addressing operator. The root of the tree is 1; the left child of any node n is 2n; the right child is 2n+1. /[x y] is the subtree of y at address x. > For instance, /[1 [531 25 99]] is [531 25 99]; /[2 [531 25 99]] is 531; /[3 [531 25 99]] is [25 99]; /[6 [531 25 99]] is 25; /[12 [531 25 99]] crashes. (edit: there’s also more at https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/explanation/. https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/explanation/.)
- samatman 7y ago
  Well, I'm partial to my explanation of that operator. But then, I would be. https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/comment.md#branch https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/comment.md#branch
oldgun 7y ago
If I understand correctly, Urbit is a new OS kernel and application layer, with a new weird FP language on a weird VM. Its first app is a crypto ID system. Am I wrong or am I wrong?
- lachlan-sneff 7y ago
  It's not an actual "kernel". It's an application that hides all hardware specifics from applications that run inside it. Or something like that, I have no idea.
  - samatman 7y ago
    It's an actual kernel the same way a virtual machine is an actual machine. To unpack that: a virtual machine could be a real machine, it just happens to instead by a software-hosted emulation thereof. There's a hardware JVM in your SIM card, for an example. arvo (the kernel) is the same deal: there's nothing stopping someone from implementing the syscalls it uses (used to be seven of them IIRC), writing some drivers, and running it on bare metal. But that's a lot of work, and the Unix-hosted virtual kernel works well enough. The whole thing may be fairly compared with inferno, which is a hosted plan9 which runs on a VM.
- centimeter 7y ago
  Yes, it's a new bytecode format and some application-layer stuff to go along with it (like some networking tools). This is almost impossible to determine because they intentionally made this as obscure as possible. A relatively clear explanation of what Urbit is and why they made it so intentionally confusing is available on the UR blog. I don't remember the title; something about computers in 2020.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  it's a minimal turing-complete function, built out into a higher-level language and functional, deterministic operating system (arvo) that is virtualized on a host OS. arvo runs an encrypted overlay network that is decentralized and federated. individual instances have combination identities/routing addresses that are finite and cryptographically owned (built on ethereum at the moment, though perhaps not forever). you could say its first app is a decentralized chat & social software suite. everything built on the OS gets the decentralized network 'for free'; apps become protocols.
motohagiography 7y ago
We should have an "Explain Urbit" competition. I haven't looked at it in years, but when I read about it, my initial version was something like: "Think of abstracting an OS into a namespace, which uses a crypto layer to instantiate verifiable versions of itself - and then you write programs for it in a functional DSL, which do the stuff you do in a browser today, but with the benefit of a kernel of security proofs, strong anonymity, and federation." Then 5 Whys: - a.0 To re-establish the any-to-any principles of the internet as trustworthy federations. - a.1 Because the current OS ecosystem is still an artifact of the very problems the internet was designed to solve. - a.2 Because politics and messy human stuff. - a.3 Because (the author believes) governments have become parasites that are killing their host. - a.4 Because the people with the outlier intelligence necessary to form a just society are captured and cannot find one another or do not have sufficient tools to organize themselves. If you read the websites, it's more like if a Rick and Morty fan BBS met Skynet at a cypherpunks key ceremony, and that would probably suffice for most use cases.
- pgt 7y ago
  Hmm, point "a.3 Because governments have become parasites that are killing their host," resonates with truth, but not all of the truth. We must be in a local maxima (minima?) at the moment - I don't believe we've found the best political system. I will think on this government-as-parasite idea, some more.
  - vageli 7y ago
    If that idea interests you, you may also find it worthwhile to consider the more general case of ideologies. Ideologies are parasite-like and replicate, seek hosts, defend themselves against other ideologies, etc. Ideologies often have less-palatable ideas lumped together with generally-agreeable ideas to aid in defensibility, express identity (through group membership) and so much more. I take governments to be expressions of particular (or collections of) ideologies.
    - agravier 7y ago
      Cool stuff. Ideologies mutate a bit, in particular when then change host. After a while, their current form may differ greatly from their original phenotype.
newx 7y ago
Suggestion to the leads of this project: make the product objective/statement clearer. Maybe I'm not the target demographic for this but I was met with a wall of text and couldn't make much of it all. It seems exciting and also complex, at least for me, but selecting the right words can go a long way. I know that I can search the archives and this current thread to get more context but this might not be the case of whoever gets directly to the introduction page. Feel free to contact me should you want to review those texts. I'd gladly try to give you my humble help.
- centimeter 7y ago
  > make the product objective/statement clearer. They intentionally make Urbit obscure, for reasons explained in the UR post introducing the idea 2011. It basically has to do with keeping out people who are a net drain on a new software project (software entryists, "developer evangelists", etc.).
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    If their goal is to never gain enough momentum to make this more than a toy project, then that makes sense. Personally it annoys the fuck out of me.
- pvg 7y ago
  Obscurantism is very much the point, otherwise nobody even attempt to take it seriously. The target demographic is 'people whom you might be able to bamboozle into also becoming crypotnazis' which I realize sounds bananas but that's barely scratching the surface of the banananess of it all.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Bravo using the word "crypto" with two different meaning that both fit the sentence.
    - pvg 7y ago
      I had it misspelled as 'crypt' for a bit, unintentionally further insulting both Yarvin and Morrissey fans.
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rakoo 7y ago
We might not fully understand what Urbit is, but we can't say they don't have some attractive design, from the layout of the article to the screenshots themselves
- core-questions 7y ago
  Building a new aesthetic resonates deeply with the kind of people interested in this project
  - rakoo 7y ago
    That's very odd for a project that goes down all the way to defining a "bytecode" and re-implements everything on top of it. Kudos to you for doing it though. Do you have resources on design guidelines defining your project ?
lykahb 7y ago
How different is it from Dat or Solid? They promise decentralized environment and control over data too and are less obscure.
- wmf 7y ago
  Dat and Solid only cover data storage while Urbit also provides a VM to execute apps.
dpc_pw 7y ago
Congratulations. One of my main critiques of Urbit was that I've been waiting years for something more widely usable and it seems that finally things are turning around. There's a lot of very shallow and superficial negative opinions about Urbit, while it's one of the most interesting projects being developed online, IMO. I do have my own set of criticism (see: https://dpc.pw/pragrammatic-critique-of-urbit https://dpc.pw/pragrammatic-critique-of-urbit), but overlay I hope it will be successful.
- Err_Eek 7y ago
  I don't know man, I tried to use it two weeks ago and I couldn't even get the chat to work. Neither could I try out their functional programming language.
xkapastel 7y ago
Nock and Hoon are intentionally obscure. There is no good reason for either of them to be the way they are. Until they come to grips with this, Urbit is somewhere in between an art project and a pyramid scheme. Here is a legible alternative to Nock's vision of a "minimalist combinator VM": http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html [A] a = A [A] b = [[A]] [A] [B] c = [A B] [A] d = [A] [A] [A] e = [A] [B] f = [B] [A] There you go, "Maxwell's equations of software", without the obscurantist nonsense.
- westoncb 7y ago
  Just out of curiosity, have you verified in some way that your alternative is legitimate? (Like maybe there are some contexts you haven't considered where other aspects of Nock are necessary.) If so, are you sure the Urbit folks just didn't happen to discover this simpler/clearer way of doing it? Or do they have some motivation for making it obscure?
  - xkapastel 7y ago
    > Just out of curiosity, have you verified in some way that your alternative is legitimate? (Like maybe there are some contexts you haven't considered where other aspects of Nock are necessary.) If you want a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values, there it is. Nock is not a serious language, I would love to hear what aspects you think it has that could be relevant in whatever context. I'm pretty sure Yarvin's motivation for making the project obscure was just trolling.
    - westoncb 7y ago
      > I would love to hear what aspects you think it has that could be relevant in whatever context. I wasn't taking issue with what you said, just trying to understand how well-grounded it was. I personally have little familiarity with Urbit, just a bit of curiosity (enough to read a few HN comments on the subject). > If you want a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values, there it is. I guess the piece that's missing for me is why you believe that set of properties forms a complete set of requirements for the language. Like maybe they described Nock as "a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values," so then finding something else fitting that description is supposed to be equivalent—but I wouldn't consider it to necessarily be so, since people often speak informally when giving some abstract summary like that (it's not necessarily meant to be exhaustive).
philsnow 7y ago
> Urbit address space has value, which means the distribution of address space has tax implications. You should speak with your tax advisor about these implications. oh to be a fly on that wall..
jv22222 7y ago
https://urbit.org/faq/ https://urbit.org/faq/ > Urbit started back in 2002 as Curtis Yarvin’s personal project. Curtis developed the original prototype for Urbit and, separately, wrote a blog on history and politics under the pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’. > In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all of his voting interest (both as address space and voting shares in the company) back to Tlon. He retains a non-voting, minority interest in both the address space and the company — but is not involved in the day-to-day development or operations. > Curtis laid the foundation for Urbit by delivering its first prototype but, since 2013, it has been refined and almost entirely rewritten by a community of developers. No one working on Urbit today had anything to do with Curtis’s writing. For the most part, we couldn’t be less interested in it. Thought this was interesting.
rrdharan 7y ago
What I don't understand is, if they want to make the dissociation with Yarvin more clear, why not just change the name of the project? I have the same question about ReiserFS. I feel like it boils down to the fact that they know a bunch of their user or developer base would be angered by such a move, and that same portion are the folks the rest of the world would consider toxic, and so they just kind of ignore the question.
- core-questions 7y ago
  > What I don't understand is, if they want to make the dissociation with Yarvin more clear, why not just change the name of the project? It's not called "Moldbug OS". Urbit is a nice, succint, short name that can be pronounced and remembered, which is a commodity in short supply.
  - neetdeth 7y ago
    Another salient difference: Reiser killed a person. Yarvin wrote a blog.
    - balladeer 7y ago
      > Yarvin wrote a blog. An openly racist, far right blog. By an author who has stated that he believed some races were more suitable for slavery (he also seemed to have no problem with slavery of course) and that some races have genetic superiority to have better IQs. (Just added it since I thought you forgot mentioning it)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - neetdeth 7y ago
        So, what?
        aiscapehumanity 7y ago
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urbitthrow235 7y ago
Question for the Urbit devs (when they get done celebrating and come in here to answer the questions, and sigh in dismay at the inevitable Nth round of hn-yarvin's-bashing): In theory, it should be really easy to write a social media app in Urbit. I mean, that's kind of what it's designed for, right, to make it easy and secure to do the sorts of server-side use cases that we currently off-load to Facebook and Twitter and such? So, where is it? I don't mean a legit FB/IG/TW/etc challenger, I just mean a toy proof of concept in which I can 'add' an urbit identity, 'share' a piece of text, and they would see it in their feed. I know the easy answer is, "Why don't you write one?" Well, I'm a mediocre programmer and I already have a side project. This isn't me demanding that open source software be written for me; this is me asking, if the PoC social media site for urbit doesn't exist yet, does that mean that it's harder to make than a superficial understanding of the project would suggest?
- lukebuehler 7y ago
  > In theory, it should be really easy to write a social media app in Urbit. Did you read the post? Have you looked at OS1? This is literally what OS1 is; it allows you to create groups which share notes, links, and chats. You get notifications in the dashboard if anything happens in any of the groups you are part of.
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Aloha 7y ago
See, I'd love to play around with urbit, but having to buy cryptocurrency to buy something of dubious value for too much money seems, absurd. I'm still interested in trying it, but I see no easy entry, which makes me question its value as a federated network.
- lukebuehler 7y ago
  Install urbit. Boot a comet (free). Join the chat groups. Ask for a planet (free). While not certain, in my experience, if Tlon people see interest, they’ll send you a planet. Or maybe just write to their support, they are super responsive.
indymike 7y ago
I'm intrigued... but have no idea how to get an ID without dropping $30USD...
- yasp 7y ago
  opensea.io has them for under $5
unknownkadath 7y ago
So suppose Urbit is genuinely useful. What is to stop someone from forking it, stripping out the obscurantism, writing friendly documentation, then redistributing galaxies/etc in a different way? I don't see the moat.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I think that would probably make urbit a lot more genuinely useful.
- canjobear 7y ago
  It would take a complete rewrite. Urbit is written entirely in an idiosyncratic programming language stack that compiles to an idiosyncratic combinator language.
- jshevek 7y ago
  I believe that a forked urbit could only create entirely new, independent galaxies/stars/planets if those were in a completely separate namespace (ie parallel universe). This could be great, maybe, for siloed intranets or maybe as a means of enjoying some of the benefits of urbit technology without paying for the 'land'. I might be wrong.
crocodiletears 7y ago
Lots of people, including myself are quite confused by exactly what Urbit is. It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to such a degree, that they can only describe it in the most broad and unspecific of strokes. I'll take a stab at it, as someone who just spent five minutes skimming its description of its address space, and trying to parse people's varying descriptions of the project. I'd love it if someone more familiar with the project could tell me how off-base I am. - Urbit is a virtual computing platform in-which all devices (ships) are members of federated network. - The federated network is hierarchically organized in such a manner that anyone can join, and receive a unique 128-bit address, but you're incentivized to join as a child of a node on the next level up the hierarchy (in-which case the first 64 bits will be your address, and the next 64 bits are your parent's address). - your address is cryptographically signed by the parent, which serves as a reputational voucher. Your parent node also serves as a package manager for your vm(?). - This system allows network nodes to ostracize branches of the network of ill-repute, in order to incentivize parents to 'disown' bad actors, as well as good clients to transfer to parents that don't vouch for bad actors. - your vm is just that. A sandboxed computing environment in-which to exectute arbitrary code/applications either pulled from your parent node, or exchanged between you and your peers, as well as a mechanism to store and cryptographically sign data data you've generated/data that others have generated which you've cached.
- mgn01 7y ago
  It wants to be secure personal server that anyone and their mother can setup and use. I have hard time understanding how people have hard time understanding this. It's not that "complex" guys.
  - bigyikes 7y ago
    Maybe I’m just a dummy but... that sounds a lot more complex than systems I am familiar with
  - crocodiletears 7y ago
    It's mostly a component of how deliberately obtuse the terminology behind it was early on (with no clear explanation), and how smarmy the early adopters are/were about describing it early on. I knew a guy who was big into it back in 2013. He refused to describe it as anything other than 'everything you could ever want computing to be'. Ask for specifics, and he'd just use the project's own terminology and act like you were stupid if you wanted clarification. Personal server doesn't really do the project justice, because it does nothing to differentiate it in someone's mind from spinning up a vm on digitalocean with no specific intent. It will make more sense once the platform actually has software you can point to, but it'll still need more explanation to justify its existence.
justinmk 7y ago
urbit "why": > Each user runs their own node completely independently. Everyone using Urbit OS owns their own identity and data. ... over an encrypted and authenticated network. Interesting note about OS 1 in particular: > One really critical thing about OS 1 is the pattern of ‘groups sharing modules’. This pattern makes it perfectly clear how a virtual computer can outcompete a bunch of different services. ... quickly outruns the messy, disconnected world we’re currently stuck in.
ipnon 7y ago
I'm actually quite excited by the curiosity/comprehension ratio regarding Urbit. Those who don't understand it dismiss it entirely.
pmlnr 7y ago
Personal definition for Urbit: Confucianism in a made up software terminology.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  As a Confucian and legalist (among other philosophical positions), there is one obvious gaping flaw in this classification: Urbit is obscurantist, while Confucius would have preferred that Urbit clearly define its terminology and goals [0], and that if it were truly an open project, that it would not try to divide people into groups based on allocation of private property, but instead unite them through common social visions and spaces [1]. Although, to be quite frank, I think that Urbit and its followers are usurping the name of philosophers like Mencius [2] when they try to play themselves off as Confucians or legalists. They are clearly neoreactionaries [3] and range from feudalism and monarchism to neo-fascism in their expressions of belief. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencius [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    Thank you for this comment. I need to broaden my readings.
amelius 7y ago
Technical overview: https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/concepts/technical-overview/ https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/concepts/technical-overview...
stagas 7y ago
It's an art project.
jeremyt 7y ago
Galaxy holder here. AMA. It's very disappointing to see all of the knee-jerk reactions about urbit here. I bought my galaxy from Tlon a couple of years ago before Curtis left the project. I don't know Curtis, only met him once for a brief lunch. I used to browse his blog, and honestly found it thought-provoking but ultimately wrong. To say that I don't share his political and philosophical views would be an understatement. And yet, I find that the structure of the Urbit network means that it doesn't matter. I have my galaxy and I can do what I want with it, which will definitely at times not be what Tlon wants me to do with it, and if you are a planet or a star under my galaxy and you don't like it you can move to another. There are 255 other galaxies and 64,999 other stars. I don't understand the criticism of this being digital feudalism. I mean, if you want to call a planet a "peasant", and you want to say that stars and galaxies are some sort of feudal lord, then okay, but specifically what do you mean? As opposed to Facebook, or Google, as a galaxy owner I don't have your data, can't look at your traffic, and can't monetize your personal information. I can't spam you. The only thing I can do is block you, and in five minutes you can switch over to another galaxy. As long as there is one independent galaxy out of 256, then every person on the network can switch over to that galaxy. There's no monopoly power here unless you own all 256 galaxies, which would basically amount to a failure of the whole system and frankly I don't see how that could happen. I'm not selling mine. There is also a lot of criticism about selling address space. Well, of course there are 4 billion addresses, and at $10 a piece, that's a lot of money some day if the network succeeds. But if the network succeeds, we are talking about a new Internet, and I think $40 billion is modest. It's also important to be clear that for everyone who bought address space already, we certainly didn't pay $10 per address, so Tlon isn't laughing all the way to the bank. And as a galaxy holder, I'm figuring that planet prices go down and maybe go as low as five dollars each or free as a loss leader. The money will be made in providing hosting and value added services on top of the network, and what exactly is wrong with that? Right now, OS1 has a built-in blog application, a chat application, a slack clone, and a reddit clone. Short on features, sure, but if all of that isn't worth a one time fee of $5, then I would argue you're just being a stubborn polemicist. I'm also a critic of the tendency to be obscure. Curtis' trollishness, without a doubt comes out in the programming language. Again, I don't really care. I don't know Hoon. Maybe i'll learn it at some point. Hoon school classes are constantly full. People will learn it. For those who don't want to, there will be APIs, so that I can write in my native language. That's totally possible, and the whole thing is open source. Finally, the whole "I can't figure out how to use it argument" is not unique to Urbit. Yes, the documentation needs to be improved. Yes the sign-up process needs to be improved. That is priority #1 from the team. But really, how easy is linux to use? In my opinion, not. I've been a mediocre developer for 10 years, and I still can't maintain my own box. I set up a server 10 years ago, and I went to set up that same server, with the same software today, and running the same commands doesn't give me the same thing. All new versions, with all new dependencies, some of them conflict. I break out in cold sweats every time I have to do a security update or upgrade, afraid that everything is going to break. The only thing to do is learn the new magic phrases to make the box do exactly what I want it to do. For me Linux is totally opaque, obscure, and I've given up on understanding it. I am assured by the team, and I believe them, that we will have easy, non technical installation and hosting by the end of the year. And that's why i'm excited about Urbit. It's an IOS and app store that I own and control 100%. It's a VPS that (soon) will just work, that maintains itself, that keeps my data under my control. It's a merciful exit from this horrible, dare I say it, feudalistic system in which the lords of FB, Google, and the like own and use (abuse) my data as they please. So, I get it if you have impressions of the project based on how it was two or five years ago, but you are mistaken. The core developers on Urbit are some of the hardest working, competent, and idealistic people i've ever met. It's a joy to be involved, which is not what I can say about a lot of projects. The thing I love most about Urbit is it's not blowing $1 billion on marketing, or trying to be the cool thing on the block. Ever since I've been involved, they have quietly kept their head down and shipped. Even against all of the hate, and I have a lot of respect for that. Go watch the launch event for OS1 and watch one of the core developers talking about how badly he wants to build the best e-reader ever, and tell me that the passion isn't contagious.
trianglem 7y ago
I’ve been following Moldbug for a while and his extreme bigotry means this is something that should never succeed. Thankfully, urbit isn’t doing that all by themselves
andrewrothman 7y ago
I have mixed feelings on urbit. I think it's a really interesting idea, but it's implementation is too obscure and complex. I do, however, sympathize with their goal and appreciate the UI design of this new web app. I struggle to see the practical benefit of urbit versus something like sandstorm.io, although I don't think that project is perfect either. With WebAssembly getting its footing, it's hard for me to justify a future platform that requires code to be written in a specific language. What if we had a federated computing platform that ran code via WebAssembly, stored data wherever the user would like including an option for IPFS, and managed identity via OAuth / SSL certificate authorities / private/public keys? It could be interacted with via a web portal, and apps could be provided APIs to interact with other apps and the rest of the system. I can see something like that being built to fulfill similar goals (as I understand them... I could be wrong) but using existing tech: HTTP3, TLS, IPFS, WebAssembly

263 points by pcr910303 7y ago

0xy 7y ago

Urbit is such a niche product that totally ignores the average consumer it's essentially dead on arrival. They struggle to explain it to technical people. Imagine trying to explain this thing to your mother. It's the fever dream of deeply technical types who have created a product so academic in nature that it's totally useless in practicality.

arcadeparade 7y ago
its an os, its social media without the middleman, its an identity, its many things. Sadly HN always seems to hate it whenever it get posted here.
- 0xy 7y ago
  Could you explain Urbit to your mother within a minute?
  - gowld 7y ago
    Is there any person you could explain it to in a minute?
  - jraines 7y ago
    “An operating system in a box that connects with others to provide (mostly in the future) the kind of networked services and apps you enjoy now, but with your data stored locally instead of on corporate servers” Easier than explaining bitcoin, honestly. No warrants made to mom or others on usability or service availability
    - ashtonkem 7y ago
      My mother fell asleep because I read that, it was that boring to non techies.
    - duskwuff 7y ago
      Hypothetical response: "An operating system? Is it better than Windows? What games does it have?" I'm not convinced that's an appropriate term to use here, even as part of a simplified explanation.
  - defen 7y ago
    "Have you ever had a software update break your computer or an app you used, or have you ever had a website you love disappear from the internet? Imagine if that could never happen again."
- qppo 7y ago
  Maybe a better question is, "what does Urbit do? Like, specifically - and using either standard technical jargon, comparison to other products on the market. Because at this point it just sounds like a techno-cult.
  - 0xy 7y ago
    My best answer to this question is that it's an overly complex IRC with additional features and misleading marketing designed to swindle investors. In fact, it's so obscure and bloated that the average IRC user wouldn't be able to understand it. The average user has no hope. I mean, just look at them trying to explain Urbit on Twitter. Meaningless abstract buzzwords and it still doesn't explain anything. https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1184984759123922945 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1184984759123922945 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1255284955850125312 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1255284955850125312 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1253709910694432768 https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1253709910694432768 It reads like a cult.
  - arcadeparade 7y ago
    Right now you can download urbit and message other people with an urbit planet if you know their id, and its peer to peer. you own the planet forever and you cannot be censored or have your data be sold to advertisers on social media platforms.
    - qppo 7y ago
      What is the difference compared to signal or other E2E encrypted SMS approaches?
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  That might have more to do with Urbit's founder rather than the technical merits of the project.
- mdszy 7y ago
  Good job making it sound like a cult.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  That’s cool, I guess. I just don’t want all those things bundled up.
Uhhrrr 7y ago
It seems clear to me that they have no interest in targeting average consumers at this point.
- core-questions 7y ago
  It's abundantly clear, and I'm not sure why people have a problem with that. Plenty of computing projects have required a long time before they become accessible to the common person as a packaged, supportable product.
jshevek 7y ago
There are many valid arguments against Urbit, but this one... >They struggle to explain it to technical people. Imagine trying to explain this thing to your mother. ...doesn't hold up for me. My grandparents understand computers only in terms of what they can do for them, and the buttons they need to click to make that happen. If Urbit ever matures, there will be applications of similar functionality and similar complexity to what non-technical people currently use.
sincerely 7y ago
Me not being able to explain Kubernetes to my mother hasn't stopped it from being a resoundingly successful project, and it's not clear to me why Urbit should be different.

type02 7y ago

I've been told what Urbit is about 10 times now and I still don't fully get it.

lisper 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674322
- Avshalom 7y ago
  It's also just a programming language VM with focus on distributed apps and some opinions on network architecture. That's the "what" it's just that the "how" (fucking hoon/nock) and "why" (moldbugs weird shit) is such a fucking rabbit hole that it obfuscates the very straight forward and uninteresting "what".
robenkleene 7y ago
I'm no expert, this stuff is definitely over my head, but here's my attempt to understand it: Let say you want a computer in the cloud. Today you probably do that by paying someone like Linode for something like a VPS. But under that model, Linode still has a ton of control over your computer in the cloud. With Urbit, it's distributed, so you aren't renting access to your cloud computer from some entity that has more control over it than you do.
- wmf 7y ago
  Urbit isn't that distributed since your planet is running on one VPS. (As an aside, the whole "$PROVIDER is going to hack into my VM" thing is pretty overblown. The cloud has existed for over 10 years and the worst that happens is the provider deletes all your data and you restore from backup onto a different provider. You do have a backup that isn't on the same provider, right?)
  - robenkleene 7y ago
    Cool thanks, in what sense is it distributed then?

rkobeissi 7y ago

I searched "Urbit" in the HN archives. The old discussion is still relevant for a project as long-term as this, and the more recent you get the more Urbit is misunderstood or attacked simply for being different. Years on from the first announcements this hugely ambitious project is finally showing real-world practical application that is already superior to the alternatives in some dimensions, and with great potential for growth. If you're sleeping on this it's like sleeping on the Bitcoin whitepaper. The dimensions for the future of computing are being hashed out in front of you. A congratulations to everyone involved.

phnofive 7y ago
Could you explain what Urbit’s main goals or purposes are? I feel like, for Bitcoin, the intent and outcome might not be perfectly aligned, but I get what it was for and how it is used.
- miles 7y ago
  The homepage (urbit.org) offers a succinct description: > Urbit OS is a clean slate reimagining of the operating system as an 'overlay OS.' It runs on any Unix machine with an internet connection. > It's a compact system for an individual to run their own permanent personal server. > Urbit ID is a decentralized digital identity system. Your Urbit ID is a username, network address, and crypto wallet. > Both are designed to work together as a single system, completely open source. For those who want to dig deeper: AMA with lead dev 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... First appearance on HN 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052795 First HN post with traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320 Urbit's HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit
- faizshah 7y ago
  This HNer did a deep dive into Urbit's source, it's the best explanation of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676792 Another good, more charitable, explanation posted below: https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f149 https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14...

crankylinuxuser 7y ago

This is that neo-fascist serfdom computing network, right? It's the one that you are effectively a sharecropper on other peoples' galaxies, stars, planets, and stuff? I'll pass. The Fediverse is much more interesting, being that it's more for open source and egalitarianism.

calvinmorrison 7y ago

So it's a slack like chat that runs in a VM in my browser? Sorry I read thier homepage and dont get it

jdhopeunique 7y ago
Except this chat seems has a unique(feudalistic maybe?) update system: https://urbit.org/using/operations/stars-and-galaxies/ https://urbit.org/using/operations/stars-and-galaxies/ Updates are passed down from galaxy to star to planet. Star owners can modify those updates to push custom software to planet VMs.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mdszy 7y ago

Ah yes, Urbit, the project that is inherently feudalistic in all of its architecture because the guy who created it is an alt-right crank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin). Weird crypto-crap for Nazis. Nothing more.

tyrust 7y ago
I'm not a fan of Yarvin or anything, but I don't think a project is inherently bad because of a bad founder (who is no longer involved [0]). What makes you say that Urbit is for Nazis? From my research of the project, it seems independent of any ideology. [0] - https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/ https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/
- mdszy 7y ago
  It was created with the goal of a few folks having control over larger parts of the ecosystem ("galaxies") which then give out control over "stars" and "planets" - a structure that is mentioned in the very article you linked - with the author constantly saying "it's NOT feudalistic, I really mean it!!" even though it very obviously is. Given this, it's clear that the political ideology of the author is involved in the core structure of the project, whether one likes it or not.
  - tyrust 7y ago
    Supposing that that is the case, what does that have to do with Nazis?
    - mdszy 7y ago
      The fact that Yarvin is one?
      - tyrust 7y ago
        Sorry, my question wasn't clear, what does the alleged feudalistic structure of the project have to do with Nazis?

lidHanteyk 7y ago

As soon as the protocol is stable enough, if it is useful, it will be reverse-engineered and reimplemented in more-legible source code. From this, I can deduce that Urbit is not yet useful.

tylershuster 7y ago
Just because it’s illegible does not mean it is suboptimal. It purposely breaks with existing conventions because it does things in a way not current code does.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  Here [0] is but one example of Urbit's suboptimality: Their encoding into C is insecure, and they have no interest in changing it. Writing a new operating system is hard. Taking lots of questionable paths, like writing "jet" templates [1] that call directly into existing C libraries, or defining a brand-new Boolean type that doesn't behave like standard Booleans, is not the right way to build confidence in any kind of quality, let alone optimality. Also, as a word-choice note, "optimal" means "best". Urbit is clearly not the best operating system, because there is clearly no metric by which to measure it against other OSs. It doesn't support the same sorts of hardware or APIs or processes or other common components of our craft. "optimal" is a terrible word to use around greenfield projects and nebulous designs; reserve it for when you can prove that your approach truly is the best one. [0] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/752 https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/752 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_metaprogramming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_metaprogramming
  - strbean 7y ago
    That issue is pretty hilarious, and reveals a lot about Urbit. This topic on HN is my first exposure to the project, and I was on the fence about the (seemingly much debated) 'is this satire?' question. This ticket pushed me over to the 'yes' side. Of course there is the 'loobean' schtick, but the best part is them sneaking in three-valued logic as a trojan horse, where the third state is "NO". They evens steer the reader towards the obvious footgun: > You should ignore the numeric values and use comparisons against c3y and c3n for everything. So I should say if (bluebeanValue == TRUE) { ... } and if (bluebeanValue == FALSE) { ... } Making any value outside the expected range mean "NO to any boolean test".

GuiA 7y ago

It’s a scam. They have 2^32 “planets” (a UUID that you can use to interact with the Urbit network), that they are each trying to sell for ~$10-$20 on a cute “exchange”: https://urbit.live/ https://urbit.live/ (Of course you don’t really own anything when buying a planet because someone else owns the “star” and the “galaxy” and you can’t buy those unless you’re friends with them) They even have a nice pyramid diagram for their not-pyramid-scheme: https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address-space-pt2a.svg https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address-s...

kemenaran 7y ago
It looks like so, yes. Though, after digging in the doc, turns out there may be a way to create temporary free ids to try out Urbit: https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a-comet/ https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a-comet/
- GuiA 7y ago
  The first hit is always free :)
arcadeparade 7y ago
Your planet is not tied to a specific star, you can move it to other stars. The reason there is a cost is to reduce spam, among other things.
core-questions 7y ago
Are IP addresses a scam?
- wmf 7y ago
  If someone proposed 32-bit IP addresses in the 21st century I would call that a scam. I don't object to Urbit's addressing only because I think it has no chance of taking off.
jck 7y ago
It's not a pyramid scheme - it's a reverse funnel system.

lachlan-sneff 7y ago

I think the many of the ideas behind Urbit are exciting, but I don’t think it’s putting itself in a good position. It’s just too weird. If it used WebAssembly instead of some small, functional bytecode, you’d lose some beauty perhaps, but it’d be much more palatable.

dpc_pw 7y ago
Hoon does have some very nice security / usability things, that a plain WASM doesn't: every function call is pretty much a sandbox, everything is serializable and sandboxable (so you can eg. exchange code around safely), great reflexivity/inspectability, etc. It looks weird, and names are weird (which IMO is unnecessary), but the underlying mechanisms are actually not that difficult to grasp.
- lachlan-sneff 7y ago
  Yeah, I wish wasm had more support for pure programming. Of course, state can be constrained, but it's pretty heavyweight.

openasocket 7y ago

I tried to understand how Hoon and Nock work once and got completely lost. They happily claim that their definition of Nock is super simple and Turing Complete, and I'm used to dealing with some really abstract things, but I simply can't deduce it. Their definition of Nock contains a couple of different combinators. They start out really simple: one to increment, one to tell if something is a list or an atom, one for equality. Then comes this one: /[1 a] a /[2 a b] a /[3 a b] b /[(a + a) b] /[2 /[a b]] /[(a + a + 1) b] /[3 /[a b]] And then I'm completely lost. What on earth does this combinator do? Every time I try tracing it with an example list it quickly goes into infinite recursion.

minitech 7y ago
Did you come from the Nock 4K thing seen in https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/definition/ https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/definition/ but without the rest of the stuff on that page? It’s explained in words there: > / (slot) is a tree addressing operator. The root of the tree is 1; the left child of any node n is 2n; the right child is 2n+1. /[x y] is the subtree of y at address x. > For instance, /[1 [531 25 99]] is [531 25 99]; /[2 [531 25 99]] is 531; /[3 [531 25 99]] is [25 99]; /[6 [531 25 99]] is 25; /[12 [531 25 99]] crashes. (edit: there’s also more at https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/explanation/. https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/explanation/.)
samatman 7y ago
Well, I'm partial to my explanation of that operator. But then, I would be. https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/comment.md#branch https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/comment.md#branch

oldgun 7y ago

If I understand correctly, Urbit is a new OS kernel and application layer, with a new weird FP language on a weird VM. Its first app is a crypto ID system. Am I wrong or am I wrong?

lachlan-sneff 7y ago
It's not an actual "kernel". It's an application that hides all hardware specifics from applications that run inside it. Or something like that, I have no idea.
- samatman 7y ago
  It's an actual kernel the same way a virtual machine is an actual machine. To unpack that: a virtual machine could be a real machine, it just happens to instead by a software-hosted emulation thereof. There's a hardware JVM in your SIM card, for an example. arvo (the kernel) is the same deal: there's nothing stopping someone from implementing the syscalls it uses (used to be seven of them IIRC), writing some drivers, and running it on bare metal. But that's a lot of work, and the Unix-hosted virtual kernel works well enough. The whole thing may be fairly compared with inferno, which is a hosted plan9 which runs on a VM.
centimeter 7y ago
Yes, it's a new bytecode format and some application-layer stuff to go along with it (like some networking tools). This is almost impossible to determine because they intentionally made this as obscure as possible. A relatively clear explanation of what Urbit is and why they made it so intentionally confusing is available on the UR blog. I don't remember the title; something about computers in 2020.
nyolfen 7y ago
it's a minimal turing-complete function, built out into a higher-level language and functional, deterministic operating system (arvo) that is virtualized on a host OS. arvo runs an encrypted overlay network that is decentralized and federated. individual instances have combination identities/routing addresses that are finite and cryptographically owned (built on ethereum at the moment, though perhaps not forever). you could say its first app is a decentralized chat & social software suite. everything built on the OS gets the decentralized network 'for free'; apps become protocols.

motohagiography 7y ago

We should have an "Explain Urbit" competition. I haven't looked at it in years, but when I read about it, my initial version was something like: "Think of abstracting an OS into a namespace, which uses a crypto layer to instantiate verifiable versions of itself - and then you write programs for it in a functional DSL, which do the stuff you do in a browser today, but with the benefit of a kernel of security proofs, strong anonymity, and federation." Then 5 Whys: - a.0 To re-establish the any-to-any principles of the internet as trustworthy federations. - a.1 Because the current OS ecosystem is still an artifact of the very problems the internet was designed to solve. - a.2 Because politics and messy human stuff. - a.3 Because (the author believes) governments have become parasites that are killing their host. - a.4 Because the people with the outlier intelligence necessary to form a just society are captured and cannot find one another or do not have sufficient tools to organize themselves. If you read the websites, it's more like if a Rick and Morty fan BBS met Skynet at a cypherpunks key ceremony, and that would probably suffice for most use cases.

pgt 7y ago
Hmm, point "a.3 Because governments have become parasites that are killing their host," resonates with truth, but not all of the truth. We must be in a local maxima (minima?) at the moment - I don't believe we've found the best political system. I will think on this government-as-parasite idea, some more.
- vageli 7y ago
  If that idea interests you, you may also find it worthwhile to consider the more general case of ideologies. Ideologies are parasite-like and replicate, seek hosts, defend themselves against other ideologies, etc. Ideologies often have less-palatable ideas lumped together with generally-agreeable ideas to aid in defensibility, express identity (through group membership) and so much more. I take governments to be expressions of particular (or collections of) ideologies.
  - agravier 7y ago
    Cool stuff. Ideologies mutate a bit, in particular when then change host. After a while, their current form may differ greatly from their original phenotype.

newx 7y ago

Suggestion to the leads of this project: make the product objective/statement clearer. Maybe I'm not the target demographic for this but I was met with a wall of text and couldn't make much of it all. It seems exciting and also complex, at least for me, but selecting the right words can go a long way. I know that I can search the archives and this current thread to get more context but this might not be the case of whoever gets directly to the introduction page. Feel free to contact me should you want to review those texts. I'd gladly try to give you my humble help.

centimeter 7y ago
> make the product objective/statement clearer. They intentionally make Urbit obscure, for reasons explained in the UR post introducing the idea 2011. It basically has to do with keeping out people who are a net drain on a new software project (software entryists, "developer evangelists", etc.).
- Aeolun 7y ago
  If their goal is to never gain enough momentum to make this more than a toy project, then that makes sense. Personally it annoys the fuck out of me.
pvg 7y ago
Obscurantism is very much the point, otherwise nobody even attempt to take it seriously. The target demographic is 'people whom you might be able to bamboozle into also becoming crypotnazis' which I realize sounds bananas but that's barely scratching the surface of the banananess of it all.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Bravo using the word "crypto" with two different meaning that both fit the sentence.
  - pvg 7y ago
    I had it misspelled as 'crypt' for a bit, unintentionally further insulting both Yarvin and Morrissey fans.

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rakoo 7y ago

We might not fully understand what Urbit is, but we can't say they don't have some attractive design, from the layout of the article to the screenshots themselves

core-questions 7y ago
Building a new aesthetic resonates deeply with the kind of people interested in this project
- rakoo 7y ago
  That's very odd for a project that goes down all the way to defining a "bytecode" and re-implements everything on top of it. Kudos to you for doing it though. Do you have resources on design guidelines defining your project ?

lykahb 7y ago

How different is it from Dat or Solid? They promise decentralized environment and control over data too and are less obscure.

wmf 7y ago
Dat and Solid only cover data storage while Urbit also provides a VM to execute apps.

dpc_pw 7y ago

Congratulations. One of my main critiques of Urbit was that I've been waiting years for something more widely usable and it seems that finally things are turning around. There's a lot of very shallow and superficial negative opinions about Urbit, while it's one of the most interesting projects being developed online, IMO. I do have my own set of criticism (see: https://dpc.pw/pragrammatic-critique-of-urbit https://dpc.pw/pragrammatic-critique-of-urbit), but overlay I hope it will be successful.

Err_Eek 7y ago
I don't know man, I tried to use it two weeks ago and I couldn't even get the chat to work. Neither could I try out their functional programming language.

xkapastel 7y ago

Nock and Hoon are intentionally obscure. There is no good reason for either of them to be the way they are. Until they come to grips with this, Urbit is somewhere in between an art project and a pyramid scheme. Here is a legible alternative to Nock's vision of a "minimalist combinator VM": http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html [A] a = A [A] b = [[A]] [A] [B] c = [A B] [A] d = [A] [A] [A] e = [A] [B] f = [B] [A] There you go, "Maxwell's equations of software", without the obscurantist nonsense.

westoncb 7y ago
Just out of curiosity, have you verified in some way that your alternative is legitimate? (Like maybe there are some contexts you haven't considered where other aspects of Nock are necessary.) If so, are you sure the Urbit folks just didn't happen to discover this simpler/clearer way of doing it? Or do they have some motivation for making it obscure?
- xkapastel 7y ago
  > Just out of curiosity, have you verified in some way that your alternative is legitimate? (Like maybe there are some contexts you haven't considered where other aspects of Nock are necessary.) If you want a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values, there it is. Nock is not a serious language, I would love to hear what aspects you think it has that could be relevant in whatever context. I'm pretty sure Yarvin's motivation for making the project obscure was just trolling.
  - westoncb 7y ago
    > I would love to hear what aspects you think it has that could be relevant in whatever context. I wasn't taking issue with what you said, just trying to understand how well-grounded it was. I personally have little familiarity with Urbit, just a bit of curiosity (enough to read a few HN comments on the subject). > If you want a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values, there it is. I guess the piece that's missing for me is why you believe that set of properties forms a complete set of requirements for the language. Like maybe they described Nock as "a Turing complete combinator VM with transparent serialization of all values," so then finding something else fitting that description is supposed to be equivalent—but I wouldn't consider it to necessarily be so, since people often speak informally when giving some abstract summary like that (it's not necessarily meant to be exhaustive).

philsnow 7y ago

> Urbit address space has value, which means the distribution of address space has tax implications. You should speak with your tax advisor about these implications. oh to be a fly on that wall..

jv22222 7y ago

https://urbit.org/faq/ https://urbit.org/faq/ > Urbit started back in 2002 as Curtis Yarvin’s personal project. Curtis developed the original prototype for Urbit and, separately, wrote a blog on history and politics under the pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’. > In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all of his voting interest (both as address space and voting shares in the company) back to Tlon. He retains a non-voting, minority interest in both the address space and the company — but is not involved in the day-to-day development or operations. > Curtis laid the foundation for Urbit by delivering its first prototype but, since 2013, it has been refined and almost entirely rewritten by a community of developers. No one working on Urbit today had anything to do with Curtis’s writing. For the most part, we couldn’t be less interested in it. Thought this was interesting.

rrdharan 7y ago

What I don't understand is, if they want to make the dissociation with Yarvin more clear, why not just change the name of the project? I have the same question about ReiserFS. I feel like it boils down to the fact that they know a bunch of their user or developer base would be angered by such a move, and that same portion are the folks the rest of the world would consider toxic, and so they just kind of ignore the question.

core-questions 7y ago
> What I don't understand is, if they want to make the dissociation with Yarvin more clear, why not just change the name of the project? It's not called "Moldbug OS". Urbit is a nice, succint, short name that can be pronounced and remembered, which is a commodity in short supply.
- neetdeth 7y ago
  Another salient difference: Reiser killed a person. Yarvin wrote a blog.
  - balladeer 7y ago
    > Yarvin wrote a blog. An openly racist, far right blog. By an author who has stated that he believed some races were more suitable for slavery (he also seemed to have no problem with slavery of course) and that some races have genetic superiority to have better IQs. (Just added it since I thought you forgot mentioning it)
    - deleted 7y ago
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    - neetdeth 7y ago
      So, what?
      - aiscapehumanity 7y ago

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urbitthrow235 7y ago

Question for the Urbit devs (when they get done celebrating and come in here to answer the questions, and sigh in dismay at the inevitable Nth round of hn-yarvin's-bashing): In theory, it should be really easy to write a social media app in Urbit. I mean, that's kind of what it's designed for, right, to make it easy and secure to do the sorts of server-side use cases that we currently off-load to Facebook and Twitter and such? So, where is it? I don't mean a legit FB/IG/TW/etc challenger, I just mean a toy proof of concept in which I can 'add' an urbit identity, 'share' a piece of text, and they would see it in their feed. I know the easy answer is, "Why don't you write one?" Well, I'm a mediocre programmer and I already have a side project. This isn't me demanding that open source software be written for me; this is me asking, if the PoC social media site for urbit doesn't exist yet, does that mean that it's harder to make than a superficial understanding of the project would suggest?

lukebuehler 7y ago
> In theory, it should be really easy to write a social media app in Urbit. Did you read the post? Have you looked at OS1? This is literally what OS1 is; it allows you to create groups which share notes, links, and chats. You get notifications in the dashboard if anything happens in any of the groups you are part of.

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Aloha 7y ago

See, I'd love to play around with urbit, but having to buy cryptocurrency to buy something of dubious value for too much money seems, absurd. I'm still interested in trying it, but I see no easy entry, which makes me question its value as a federated network.

lukebuehler 7y ago
Install urbit. Boot a comet (free). Join the chat groups. Ask for a planet (free). While not certain, in my experience, if Tlon people see interest, they’ll send you a planet. Or maybe just write to their support, they are super responsive.

indymike 7y ago

I'm intrigued... but have no idea how to get an ID without dropping $30USD...

yasp 7y ago
opensea.io has them for under $5

unknownkadath 7y ago

So suppose Urbit is genuinely useful. What is to stop someone from forking it, stripping out the obscurantism, writing friendly documentation, then redistributing galaxies/etc in a different way? I don't see the moat.

Aeolun 7y ago
I think that would probably make urbit a lot more genuinely useful.
canjobear 7y ago
It would take a complete rewrite. Urbit is written entirely in an idiosyncratic programming language stack that compiles to an idiosyncratic combinator language.
jshevek 7y ago
I believe that a forked urbit could only create entirely new, independent galaxies/stars/planets if those were in a completely separate namespace (ie parallel universe). This could be great, maybe, for siloed intranets or maybe as a means of enjoying some of the benefits of urbit technology without paying for the 'land'. I might be wrong.

crocodiletears 7y ago

Lots of people, including myself are quite confused by exactly what Urbit is. It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to such a degree, that they can only describe it in the most broad and unspecific of strokes. I'll take a stab at it, as someone who just spent five minutes skimming its description of its address space, and trying to parse people's varying descriptions of the project. I'd love it if someone more familiar with the project could tell me how off-base I am. - Urbit is a virtual computing platform in-which all devices (ships) are members of federated network. - The federated network is hierarchically organized in such a manner that anyone can join, and receive a unique 128-bit address, but you're incentivized to join as a child of a node on the next level up the hierarchy (in-which case the first 64 bits will be your address, and the next 64 bits are your parent's address). - your address is cryptographically signed by the parent, which serves as a reputational voucher. Your parent node also serves as a package manager for your vm(?). - This system allows network nodes to ostracize branches of the network of ill-repute, in order to incentivize parents to 'disown' bad actors, as well as good clients to transfer to parents that don't vouch for bad actors. - your vm is just that. A sandboxed computing environment in-which to exectute arbitrary code/applications either pulled from your parent node, or exchanged between you and your peers, as well as a mechanism to store and cryptographically sign data data you've generated/data that others have generated which you've cached.

mgn01 7y ago
It wants to be secure personal server that anyone and their mother can setup and use. I have hard time understanding how people have hard time understanding this. It's not that "complex" guys.
- bigyikes 7y ago
  Maybe I’m just a dummy but... that sounds a lot more complex than systems I am familiar with
- crocodiletears 7y ago
  It's mostly a component of how deliberately obtuse the terminology behind it was early on (with no clear explanation), and how smarmy the early adopters are/were about describing it early on. I knew a guy who was big into it back in 2013. He refused to describe it as anything other than 'everything you could ever want computing to be'. Ask for specifics, and he'd just use the project's own terminology and act like you were stupid if you wanted clarification. Personal server doesn't really do the project justice, because it does nothing to differentiate it in someone's mind from spinning up a vm on digitalocean with no specific intent. It will make more sense once the platform actually has software you can point to, but it'll still need more explanation to justify its existence.

justinmk 7y ago

urbit "why": > Each user runs their own node completely independently. Everyone using Urbit OS owns their own identity and data. ... over an encrypted and authenticated network. Interesting note about OS 1 in particular: > One really critical thing about OS 1 is the pattern of ‘groups sharing modules’. This pattern makes it perfectly clear how a virtual computer can outcompete a bunch of different services. ... quickly outruns the messy, disconnected world we’re currently stuck in.

ipnon 7y ago

I'm actually quite excited by the curiosity/comprehension ratio regarding Urbit. Those who don't understand it dismiss it entirely.

pmlnr 7y ago

Personal definition for Urbit: Confucianism in a made up software terminology.

lidHanteyk 7y ago
As a Confucian and legalist (among other philosophical positions), there is one obvious gaping flaw in this classification: Urbit is obscurantist, while Confucius would have preferred that Urbit clearly define its terminology and goals [0], and that if it were truly an open project, that it would not try to divide people into groups based on allocation of private property, but instead unite them through common social visions and spaces [1]. Although, to be quite frank, I think that Urbit and its followers are usurping the name of philosophers like Mencius [2] when they try to play themselves off as Confucians or legalists. They are clearly neoreactionaries [3] and range from feudalism and monarchism to neo-fascism in their expressions of belief. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencius [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
- pmlnr 7y ago
  Thank you for this comment. I need to broaden my readings.

amelius 7y ago

Technical overview: https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/concepts/technical-overview/ https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/concepts/technical-overview...

stagas 7y ago

It's an art project.

jeremyt 7y ago

Galaxy holder here. AMA. It's very disappointing to see all of the knee-jerk reactions about urbit here. I bought my galaxy from Tlon a couple of years ago before Curtis left the project. I don't know Curtis, only met him once for a brief lunch. I used to browse his blog, and honestly found it thought-provoking but ultimately wrong. To say that I don't share his political and philosophical views would be an understatement. And yet, I find that the structure of the Urbit network means that it doesn't matter. I have my galaxy and I can do what I want with it, which will definitely at times not be what Tlon wants me to do with it, and if you are a planet or a star under my galaxy and you don't like it you can move to another. There are 255 other galaxies and 64,999 other stars. I don't understand the criticism of this being digital feudalism. I mean, if you want to call a planet a "peasant", and you want to say that stars and galaxies are some sort of feudal lord, then okay, but specifically what do you mean? As opposed to Facebook, or Google, as a galaxy owner I don't have your data, can't look at your traffic, and can't monetize your personal information. I can't spam you. The only thing I can do is block you, and in five minutes you can switch over to another galaxy. As long as there is one independent galaxy out of 256, then every person on the network can switch over to that galaxy. There's no monopoly power here unless you own all 256 galaxies, which would basically amount to a failure of the whole system and frankly I don't see how that could happen. I'm not selling mine. There is also a lot of criticism about selling address space. Well, of course there are 4 billion addresses, and at $10 a piece, that's a lot of money some day if the network succeeds. But if the network succeeds, we are talking about a new Internet, and I think $40 billion is modest. It's also important to be clear that for everyone who bought address space already, we certainly didn't pay $10 per address, so Tlon isn't laughing all the way to the bank. And as a galaxy holder, I'm figuring that planet prices go down and maybe go as low as five dollars each or free as a loss leader. The money will be made in providing hosting and value added services on top of the network, and what exactly is wrong with that? Right now, OS1 has a built-in blog application, a chat application, a slack clone, and a reddit clone. Short on features, sure, but if all of that isn't worth a one time fee of $5, then I would argue you're just being a stubborn polemicist. I'm also a critic of the tendency to be obscure. Curtis' trollishness, without a doubt comes out in the programming language. Again, I don't really care. I don't know Hoon. Maybe i'll learn it at some point. Hoon school classes are constantly full. People will learn it. For those who don't want to, there will be APIs, so that I can write in my native language. That's totally possible, and the whole thing is open source. Finally, the whole "I can't figure out how to use it argument" is not unique to Urbit. Yes, the documentation needs to be improved. Yes the sign-up process needs to be improved. That is priority #1 from the team. But really, how easy is linux to use? In my opinion, not. I've been a mediocre developer for 10 years, and I still can't maintain my own box. I set up a server 10 years ago, and I went to set up that same server, with the same software today, and running the same commands doesn't give me the same thing. All new versions, with all new dependencies, some of them conflict. I break out in cold sweats every time I have to do a security update or upgrade, afraid that everything is going to break. The only thing to do is learn the new magic phrases to make the box do exactly what I want it to do. For me Linux is totally opaque, obscure, and I've given up on understanding it. I am assured by the team, and I believe them, that we will have easy, non technical installation and hosting by the end of the year. And that's why i'm excited about Urbit. It's an IOS and app store that I own and control 100%. It's a VPS that (soon) will just work, that maintains itself, that keeps my data under my control. It's a merciful exit from this horrible, dare I say it, feudalistic system in which the lords of FB, Google, and the like own and use (abuse) my data as they please. So, I get it if you have impressions of the project based on how it was two or five years ago, but you are mistaken. The core developers on Urbit are some of the hardest working, competent, and idealistic people i've ever met. It's a joy to be involved, which is not what I can say about a lot of projects. The thing I love most about Urbit is it's not blowing $1 billion on marketing, or trying to be the cool thing on the block. Ever since I've been involved, they have quietly kept their head down and shipped. Even against all of the hate, and I have a lot of respect for that. Go watch the launch event for OS1 and watch one of the core developers talking about how badly he wants to build the best e-reader ever, and tell me that the passion isn't contagious.

trianglem 7y ago

I’ve been following Moldbug for a while and his extreme bigotry means this is something that should never succeed. Thankfully, urbit isn’t doing that all by themselves

andrewrothman 7y ago

I have mixed feelings on urbit. I think it's a really interesting idea, but it's implementation is too obscure and complex. I do, however, sympathize with their goal and appreciate the UI design of this new web app. I struggle to see the practical benefit of urbit versus something like sandstorm.io, although I don't think that project is perfect either. With WebAssembly getting its footing, it's hard for me to justify a future platform that requires code to be written in a specific language. What if we had a federated computing platform that ran code via WebAssembly, stored data wherever the user would like including an option for IPFS, and managed identity via OAuth / SSL certificate authorities / private/public keys? It could be interacted with via a web portal, and apps could be provided APIs to interact with other apps and the rest of the system. I can see something like that being built to fulfill similar goals (as I understand them... I could be wrong) but using existing tech: HTTP3, TLS, IPFS, WebAssembly