5 ms·

App School Live

29 points by NealEDavis 4y ago

dang 4y ago
This looks like an announcement for an event that hasn't happened yet and those are generally off topic on HN, since they aren't interesting in their own right.
jiscariot 4y ago
Urbit docs and app dev has come an amazing long way in the last 10 years. You don't see many projects with the staying power of urbit, despite being constantly called a cult poo-poo'd every time it comes up on HN. Feature not a bug. They day HN gives any positive feedback on it, I'll have to re-assess.
gaze 4y ago
Urbit is a weird libertarian/neofeudalist cult.
- UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
  Perfect for this site then
  - gaze 4y ago
    yeah and the fact that it's warmed-over old technology implemented poorly makes it even more perfect
- dang 4y ago
  Maybe so, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? It looks like you've been doing it repeatedly and that's definitely not what this site is for. Fortunately you've also posted substantive comments, so this should be easy to fix. If you'd stick to the latter and drop the former, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lisper 4y ago
Just in case you're wondering whether Urbit is worth looking into, let me save you the trouble: no. Just, no. Urbit is a cult. All of its artifacts are deliberately obfuscated in order to instill a sense of community into those who climb the learning curve. It has no actual technical merit whatsoever. Here is a clue: > We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars. No, you are not going to terraform Mars by writing apps. No one is going to terraform Mars. Terraforming Mars is a pipe dream. We humans can't even get our act together enough to stop ourselves from de-terraforming earth. [UPDATE: turns out they are not actually talking about teraforming Mars. But the invention of a private language to identify the in-group is one the hallmarks of a cult.] Sorry if this is rant-y but I've been watching Urbit since its inception and I am absolutely dismayed at how many otherwise smart people are wasting their time on it.
- NealEDavis 4y ago
  It's a pun on a longstanding joke of Urbit as Martian technology; it has nothing to do with the planet Mars.
  - lisper 4y ago
    OK, but that doesn't actually refute my central point, that Urbit is a cult. One of the hallmarks of cults is that they invent a private language that helps identify the in-group. Obviously I am not part of the in-group. Scientology is famous for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_terminology
    - arthyn 4y ago
      there's a difference between cults and culture, both tend to generate their own language
      - lisper 4y ago
        That's true, but I stand by my characterization of Urbit as a cult rather than a culture because Urbit's terminology is intentionally misleading. Urbit is deliberately obfuscated down to its very core. And the reason for this is that it is designed to produce an in-group that is separated from the out-group. The founder of Urbit, Curtus Yarvin, is an extreme hard-core right-wing liberatarian. Go read up about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment I'm not even sure that Curtis would object to my characterization of Urbit as a cult. He and I are not exactly on speaking terms any more, as you might imagine, but he is just enough of an iconoclast that he might actually agree with me on this.
danpalmer 4y ago
> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars Why is the Urbit project completely unable to produce anything approachable, set any practical goals, or explain anything in terms of existing approaches? It seems like an extreme level of hubris to think that Urbit is so far beyond the current level of technology that everything must be started from scratch. I've bounced off Urbit because of the tech and documentation a number of times now, and I would like to think I'm capable of understanding and appreciating the need for this sort of thing.
- lukestiles 4y ago
  Have you dug into the docs or watched any of the Hoon videos, or launched a comet?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    I think you need NASA clearance to launch any comets. Possibly the FAA too if you launch from ground.
gonehome 4y ago
For those that haven’t checked it out the ideas behind urbit are really interesting, it’s the first attempt I’ve seen to get us out of the local maximum of centralized web services we’re trapped in where success is among the potential outcomes (most attempts are destined to fail because they don’t tackle the underlying issues from first principles). I think it could really work and I’m convinced urbit or something like it eventually will - the ideas are correct. Jack Dorsey’s “web5”, Dan Romero’s Farcaster all touch on a lot of these concepts - people are starting to come around to the same conclusions (which is good!) - urbit had just taken a boil the ocean approach on a bet that we need to rethink the stack from first principles so we can control certain assumptions to reduce complexity and make some of the problems in modern computing easier to handle. Finding it really felt like the first time I started playing with Linux for me. It revived a lot of the dreams of the 90s web and what it could be, people being able to run their own nodes in a way that could actually work. To do that you have to solve the identity problem, you have to reduce the complexity of running the system, and you have to have the internet front and center when building the OS. The dream of a truly decentralized web from the 90s failed and it failed for reasons that make sense given the constraints of the technology we use. I think urbit is a way out. An old blog post (from 2010!) that really digs into the details: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html?m=1 https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...
- gaze 4y ago
  It's in no way interesting. It's a bunch of old, bad ideas duct taped together and renamed with nonsense words to both obfuscate what they're doing and establish an in-group language just as cults do.
  - 0x732202 4y ago
    Binary trees as a fundamental data structure is not a bad idea, and it's also entirely clarifying for programming purposes. Don't you agree OOP has huge drawbacks?
- cowtools 4y ago
  I've looked into it and it sounds like a ton of pretentious crap. How is this any better than IPFS, I2P, tor onion services, or Gnunet? It's nice that it helped introduce you to linux though. You make a few good points about usability, but I don't think the internet was designed to be a distributed network from the get-go. https://secushare.org/broken-internet https://secushare.org/broken-internet

29 points by NealEDavis 4y ago

dang 4y ago

This looks like an announcement for an event that hasn't happened yet and those are generally off topic on HN, since they aren't interesting in their own right.

jiscariot 4y ago

Urbit docs and app dev has come an amazing long way in the last 10 years. You don't see many projects with the staying power of urbit, despite being constantly called a cult poo-poo'd every time it comes up on HN. Feature not a bug. They day HN gives any positive feedback on it, I'll have to re-assess.

gaze 4y ago

Urbit is a weird libertarian/neofeudalist cult.

UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
Perfect for this site then
- gaze 4y ago
  yeah and the fact that it's warmed-over old technology implemented poorly makes it even more perfect
dang 4y ago
Maybe so, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? It looks like you've been doing it repeatedly and that's definitely not what this site is for. Fortunately you've also posted substantive comments, so this should be easy to fix. If you'd stick to the latter and drop the former, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lisper 4y ago

Just in case you're wondering whether Urbit is worth looking into, let me save you the trouble: no. Just, no. Urbit is a cult. All of its artifacts are deliberately obfuscated in order to instill a sense of community into those who climb the learning curve. It has no actual technical merit whatsoever. Here is a clue: > We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars. No, you are not going to terraform Mars by writing apps. No one is going to terraform Mars. Terraforming Mars is a pipe dream. We humans can't even get our act together enough to stop ourselves from de-terraforming earth. [UPDATE: turns out they are not actually talking about teraforming Mars. But the invention of a private language to identify the in-group is one the hallmarks of a cult.] Sorry if this is rant-y but I've been watching Urbit since its inception and I am absolutely dismayed at how many otherwise smart people are wasting their time on it.

NealEDavis 4y ago
It's a pun on a longstanding joke of Urbit as Martian technology; it has nothing to do with the planet Mars.
- lisper 4y ago
  OK, but that doesn't actually refute my central point, that Urbit is a cult. One of the hallmarks of cults is that they invent a private language that helps identify the in-group. Obviously I am not part of the in-group. Scientology is famous for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_terminology
  - arthyn 4y ago
    there's a difference between cults and culture, both tend to generate their own language
    - lisper 4y ago
      That's true, but I stand by my characterization of Urbit as a cult rather than a culture because Urbit's terminology is intentionally misleading. Urbit is deliberately obfuscated down to its very core. And the reason for this is that it is designed to produce an in-group that is separated from the out-group. The founder of Urbit, Curtus Yarvin, is an extreme hard-core right-wing liberatarian. Go read up about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment I'm not even sure that Curtis would object to my characterization of Urbit as a cult. He and I are not exactly on speaking terms any more, as you might imagine, but he is just enough of an iconoclast that he might actually agree with me on this.

danpalmer 4y ago

> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars Why is the Urbit project completely unable to produce anything approachable, set any practical goals, or explain anything in terms of existing approaches? It seems like an extreme level of hubris to think that Urbit is so far beyond the current level of technology that everything must be started from scratch. I've bounced off Urbit because of the tech and documentation a number of times now, and I would like to think I'm capable of understanding and appreciating the need for this sort of thing.

lukestiles 4y ago
Have you dug into the docs or watched any of the Hoon videos, or launched a comet?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  I think you need NASA clearance to launch any comets. Possibly the FAA too if you launch from ground.

gonehome 4y ago

For those that haven’t checked it out the ideas behind urbit are really interesting, it’s the first attempt I’ve seen to get us out of the local maximum of centralized web services we’re trapped in where success is among the potential outcomes (most attempts are destined to fail because they don’t tackle the underlying issues from first principles). I think it could really work and I’m convinced urbit or something like it eventually will - the ideas are correct. Jack Dorsey’s “web5”, Dan Romero’s Farcaster all touch on a lot of these concepts - people are starting to come around to the same conclusions (which is good!) - urbit had just taken a boil the ocean approach on a bet that we need to rethink the stack from first principles so we can control certain assumptions to reduce complexity and make some of the problems in modern computing easier to handle. Finding it really felt like the first time I started playing with Linux for me. It revived a lot of the dreams of the 90s web and what it could be, people being able to run their own nodes in a way that could actually work. To do that you have to solve the identity problem, you have to reduce the complexity of running the system, and you have to have the internet front and center when building the OS. The dream of a truly decentralized web from the 90s failed and it failed for reasons that make sense given the constraints of the technology we use. I think urbit is a way out. An old blog post (from 2010!) that really digs into the details: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html?m=1 https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...

gaze 4y ago
It's in no way interesting. It's a bunch of old, bad ideas duct taped together and renamed with nonsense words to both obfuscate what they're doing and establish an in-group language just as cults do.
- 0x732202 4y ago
  Binary trees as a fundamental data structure is not a bad idea, and it's also entirely clarifying for programming purposes. Don't you agree OOP has huge drawbacks?
cowtools 4y ago
I've looked into it and it sounds like a ton of pretentious crap. How is this any better than IPFS, I2P, tor onion services, or Gnunet? It's nice that it helped introduce you to linux though. You make a few good points about usability, but I don't think the internet was designed to be a distributed network from the get-go. https://secushare.org/broken-internet https://secushare.org/broken-internet