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Oh god no. Urbit is not less complex or easier. It's piling on all kinds of extra superfluous nonsense in service of an ideological project, not for technical r

Oh god no. Urbit is not less complex or easier. It's piling on all kinds of extra superfluous nonsense in service of an ideological project, not for technical reasons.

ISaIF73 6y ago
Urbit stack is ~30k lines of code, that's low enough to be grasped by a single person. What's hard is learning form scratch completely new platform, but that's deliberate and is not such a problem if it manages to deliver what it promises. Somehow I feel that accusations of being ideological come from people, who themselves are ideologically oposed to Yarvins work and fail to consider Urbits network protocol purely for its properties. Idea of giving network addresses value, cryptographic ownership and creating a hierarchy of addresses resembling functionality on the network (users, ISPs, etc.) seems perfectly resonable.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  From the last time this came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156 > the core of the whole system (the Nock language) has "loobeans" instead of booleans in which 1 represents false and 0 represents true at which point I nope'd out pretty hard. >> Being contrarian is not the same as being clever, and this is very much not clever.
  - ISaIF73 6y ago
    Do you think this convention would be that hard to get used to, so that the whole system should be disuqallified?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Yeah, no disagreement from me there. That bit is dumb and he admitted it was a mistake to do that. It doesn’t mean that everything is bad. I was skeptical initially too, but was curious enough to check it out. I was surprised when I did. It's a small community and product is still in pre-widespread adoption stage (though far enough along to be useful for people to play with): https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/ https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/ My quick overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397725
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Also (not excusing the bad design) 0 is often the success error code in Unix for the shell and 1 or something else is often error. So it’s not entirely without precedent, but it’s still an unnecessary and confusing inversion for true and false.
fossuser 6y ago
As long as a complex system has the complexity abstracted away it can still be simple for users. The modern (non-Urbit) tech stack is extremely complex, but a lot of that (though not enough) is hidden from the end user. In a lot of important ways the Urbit stack is a lot less complex than the existing modern tech stack, but it’s still early on and the abstraction for regular users is still in progress. Being less complex than the modern tech stack (by designing from the feet up by first principles) is one of the main reasons the project exists. It’s just rarely done anymore in modern computing. It happened more in the 60s-70s when people would experiment. I understand the skepticism - I think it’s a cool project, but there’s still work to do before it’ll win over average users. Luckily the project is invested in long-term planning and design (with solid short term execution and feature shipping/iteration) so it’s improving quickly.

Oh god no. Urbit is not less complex or easier. It's piling on all kinds of extra superfluous nonsense in service of an ideological project, not for technical reasons.

ISaIF73 6y ago

Urbit stack is ~30k lines of code, that's low enough to be grasped by a single person. What's hard is learning form scratch completely new platform, but that's deliberate and is not such a problem if it manages to deliver what it promises. Somehow I feel that accusations of being ideological come from people, who themselves are ideologically oposed to Yarvins work and fail to consider Urbits network protocol purely for its properties. Idea of giving network addresses value, cryptographic ownership and creating a hierarchy of addresses resembling functionality on the network (users, ISPs, etc.) seems perfectly resonable.

ForHackernews 6y ago
From the last time this came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156 > the core of the whole system (the Nock language) has "loobeans" instead of booleans in which 1 represents false and 0 represents true at which point I nope'd out pretty hard. >> Being contrarian is not the same as being clever, and this is very much not clever.
- ISaIF73 6y ago
  Do you think this convention would be that hard to get used to, so that the whole system should be disuqallified?
- fossuser 6y ago
  Yeah, no disagreement from me there. That bit is dumb and he admitted it was a mistake to do that. It doesn’t mean that everything is bad. I was skeptical initially too, but was curious enough to check it out. I was surprised when I did. It's a small community and product is still in pre-widespread adoption stage (though far enough along to be useful for people to play with): https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/ https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/ My quick overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397725
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Also (not excusing the bad design) 0 is often the success error code in Unix for the shell and 1 or something else is often error. So it’s not entirely without precedent, but it’s still an unnecessary and confusing inversion for true and false.

fossuser 6y ago

As long as a complex system has the complexity abstracted away it can still be simple for users. The modern (non-Urbit) tech stack is extremely complex, but a lot of that (though not enough) is hidden from the end user. In a lot of important ways the Urbit stack is a lot less complex than the existing modern tech stack, but it’s still early on and the abstraction for regular users is still in progress. Being less complex than the modern tech stack (by designing from the feet up by first principles) is one of the main reasons the project exists. It’s just rarely done anymore in modern computing. It happened more in the 60s-70s when people would experiment. I understand the skepticism - I think it’s a cool project, but there’s still work to do before it’ll win over average users. Luckily the project is invested in long-term planning and design (with solid short term execution and feature shipping/iteration) so it’s improving quickly.