8 ms·

Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?... First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's desti

by JDulin 12y ago

Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?... First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's destined to be the future, but I sure as hell hope it is. I had the privilege of interning at Tlon, the company working on Urbit's development, this summer. It owns most of the namespace (Personal cloud computer IP addresses, essentially.) and is where the architect of the system works full-time. They are funded, well enough, by VCs you know of. Urbit is not really launched yet though - We spent the summer doing a lot of work getting the network, file system, protocols, and application layer in "Industrial grade" shape, and I believe more of that is happening this fall. Because the system is still unlaunched and the docs are being retooled, I imagine these pages are discombobulating. That's... expected. Urbit has a lot of odd ideas that take time to appreciate. However, if you do take the time to understand the motivation behind the design of everything from Hoon's appearance to the network protocol replacement for TCP to the vision for future social networks, you'll find some of the best and most complete computer science research done in decades in networks, systems, and functional programming. The essential idea is not an outlandish one - We need a new basis of computing and networking to build digital identities with, and 1970s system software is not up to the task. It's unfortunate that ambition and a sense of humor can be misinterpreted as a joke today. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it [1] that these guys are deadly serious and have the technical chops to back up their ambition. Future documentation and applications built on the OS should soon make that more immediately evident. [1] Or start reading the tutorials!

lumpypua 12y ago
https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames.hoon#L470 https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames... There are hundreds of lines of noise. This makes perl and forth look absurdly readable. What on earth do the directory and file names mean? I dunno how familiar people on HN are but the original author of urbit is Mencius Moldbug, a neoreactionary blogger. His style of writing is absurdly obfuscated and purposely impenetrable if containing some interesting ideas. The exact same thing is true of urbit. Interesting ideas but obfuscated the point of utter inaccessibility. Here's sort of the wider group of blogs he philosophically aligns with: http://rationalwiki.org/w/images/d/d5/Scharlachs-visualizing-neoreaction.png http://rationalwiki.org/w/images/d/d5/Scharlachs-visualizing... His views are likely unpopular around here but I am a fan of a bunch of those other blogs, and I've tried to dive into Moldbug's blog Unqualified Reservations a few times. It's kind of insane—the guy is clearly very intelligent—yet writes in his own discursive style that is absolutely opaque.
- valvar 12y ago
  I haven't read all of Unqualified Reservations, but what I have read so far (Dawkins, Open Letter, Gentle Introduction) has not been difficult to read at all. Perhaps long and winding, but not opaque. In fact, I find Moldbug to be much more accessible than his sources of inspiration (which are standard fare if you even want to even begin with political theory).
  - lexcorvus 12y ago
    Yeah, people who think Moldbug is opaque should try reading a little Carlyle. A few years back I spent a week powering through Carlyle's main political works (Chartism, Latter-Day Pamphlets, Shooting Niagara, and the Occasional Discourse), and it took a couple of days just to get acclimated to his writing style. By comparison, Moldbug is a breeze.
- MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
  He does have really odd political views. I know HN shouldn't be about politics, but this was a really interesting read: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ It looks like he thinks that the benevolent-dictator-for-life model is how countries should be run. And Peter Thiel seems to agree with him.
  - jarcane 12y ago
    That is quite actually one of the creepiest things I've read in a while. I've always been fundamentally uncomfortable with a certain wing of Valley thought, but man, even I didn't think it went that far and in such lofty halls.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I thought it was pretty common to think that a benevolent dictatorship was a great way to run a country. The problem is in making sure your dictator is benevolent. Nobody knows how to do that, so we try non-dictatorial systems instead.
jcburke 12y ago
Wait, so they wrote their own bytecode, functional language (complete with compiler and libraries), functional operating system, TCP replacement, and distributed storage protocol? And will presumably write all their own apps, or some kind of interface layer that will allow non-Hoon code to run on their system efficiently? That has to be one of the most ridiculously ambitious projects I've ever seen. Good luck to them I guess, but I've always been a believer in not reinventing too many wheels at once
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- urbit 12y ago
  Perhaps it makes a bit more sense if it's explained that the original goal was to keep the whole codebase (outside of the C support layer, which adds no semantics) at 10Kloc. Unfortunately this is now rapidly slipping toward 20. Of course, Kloc is a deceptive measure of algorithmic simplicity in a functional language, if compared to procedural. Also there is about another 15Kloc of C in the interpreter and another 10K that wraps an event layer on libuv. Bear in mind that Urbit can also be seen as an ACID database on the log-and-snapshot principle - events are transactions. You can of course export application state to some other storage system, but you don't have to. (If you change the source code, your app reloads - you do have to write a function that maps your old state to your new state, though.) So there is a lot of strange futzing around with mmap at the bottom.
guscost 12y ago
I never would have guessed that Urbit has funding. That sounds like a very interesting job.
- djur 12y ago
  Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of both neoreactionarism and various types of out-there futurism; I wouldn't be surprised if he's involved, and I'm sure he's not the only jillionaire with similar interests.
  - clarkm 12y ago
    > Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of... neoreactionarism Do you have examples?
    - djur 12y ago
      Sure. He funds Eliezer Yudkowsky through MIRI; "friendly AI" futurism is at this point a branch of the "Dark Enlightenment". Thiel himself has famously said "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible".
      - urbit 12y ago
        I'm quite confident that Eliezer would object strenuously to this characterization!
      - alexandros 12y ago
        The first sentence above is completely false. Eliezer Yudkowsky has explicitly stated that he has nothing to do with the reactionaries, and the latest stats on the friendly AI community (as gathered at lesswrong.com) show about 2% of members are neoreactionaries. Further, with FHI at Oxford, FLI at MIT, CSER at Cambridge, the Superintelligence book being endorsed by everyone from Elon Musk, to Stephen Haking, to Morgan Freeman, calling MIRI/Friendly AI a branch of the reactionaries can't be anything else but a deliberate attempt to smear people's reputation. I'm on the record as having several severe criticisms of EY/MIRI, but being neoreactionaries is not one of them.

by JDulin 12y ago

lumpypua 12y ago

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames.hoon#L470 https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames... There are hundreds of lines of noise. This makes perl and forth look absurdly readable. What on earth do the directory and file names mean? I dunno how familiar people on HN are but the original author of urbit is Mencius Moldbug, a neoreactionary blogger. His style of writing is absurdly obfuscated and purposely impenetrable if containing some interesting ideas. The exact same thing is true of urbit. Interesting ideas but obfuscated the point of utter inaccessibility. Here's sort of the wider group of blogs he philosophically aligns with: http://rationalwiki.org/w/images/d/d5/Scharlachs-visualizing-neoreaction.png http://rationalwiki.org/w/images/d/d5/Scharlachs-visualizing... His views are likely unpopular around here but I am a fan of a bunch of those other blogs, and I've tried to dive into Moldbug's blog Unqualified Reservations a few times. It's kind of insane—the guy is clearly very intelligent—yet writes in his own discursive style that is absolutely opaque.

valvar 12y ago
I haven't read all of Unqualified Reservations, but what I have read so far (Dawkins, Open Letter, Gentle Introduction) has not been difficult to read at all. Perhaps long and winding, but not opaque. In fact, I find Moldbug to be much more accessible than his sources of inspiration (which are standard fare if you even want to even begin with political theory).
- lexcorvus 12y ago
  Yeah, people who think Moldbug is opaque should try reading a little Carlyle. A few years back I spent a week powering through Carlyle's main political works (Chartism, Latter-Day Pamphlets, Shooting Niagara, and the Occasional Discourse), and it took a couple of days just to get acclimated to his writing style. By comparison, Moldbug is a breeze.
MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
He does have really odd political views. I know HN shouldn't be about politics, but this was a really interesting read: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ It looks like he thinks that the benevolent-dictator-for-life model is how countries should be run. And Peter Thiel seems to agree with him.
- jarcane 12y ago
  That is quite actually one of the creepiest things I've read in a while. I've always been fundamentally uncomfortable with a certain wing of Valley thought, but man, even I didn't think it went that far and in such lofty halls.
- mikeash 12y ago
  I thought it was pretty common to think that a benevolent dictatorship was a great way to run a country. The problem is in making sure your dictator is benevolent. Nobody knows how to do that, so we try non-dictatorial systems instead.

jcburke 12y ago

Wait, so they wrote their own bytecode, functional language (complete with compiler and libraries), functional operating system, TCP replacement, and distributed storage protocol? And will presumably write all their own apps, or some kind of interface layer that will allow non-Hoon code to run on their system efficiently? That has to be one of the most ridiculously ambitious projects I've ever seen. Good luck to them I guess, but I've always been a believer in not reinventing too many wheels at once

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
urbit 12y ago
Perhaps it makes a bit more sense if it's explained that the original goal was to keep the whole codebase (outside of the C support layer, which adds no semantics) at 10Kloc. Unfortunately this is now rapidly slipping toward 20. Of course, Kloc is a deceptive measure of algorithmic simplicity in a functional language, if compared to procedural. Also there is about another 15Kloc of C in the interpreter and another 10K that wraps an event layer on libuv. Bear in mind that Urbit can also be seen as an ACID database on the log-and-snapshot principle - events are transactions. You can of course export application state to some other storage system, but you don't have to. (If you change the source code, your app reloads - you do have to write a function that maps your old state to your new state, though.) So there is a lot of strange futzing around with mmap at the bottom.

guscost 12y ago

I never would have guessed that Urbit has funding. That sounds like a very interesting job.

djur 12y ago
Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of both neoreactionarism and various types of out-there futurism; I wouldn't be surprised if he's involved, and I'm sure he's not the only jillionaire with similar interests.
- clarkm 12y ago
  > Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of... neoreactionarism Do you have examples?
  - djur 12y ago
    Sure. He funds Eliezer Yudkowsky through MIRI; "friendly AI" futurism is at this point a branch of the "Dark Enlightenment". Thiel himself has famously said "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible".
    - urbit 12y ago
      I'm quite confident that Eliezer would object strenuously to this characterization!
    - alexandros 12y ago
      The first sentence above is completely false. Eliezer Yudkowsky has explicitly stated that he has nothing to do with the reactionaries, and the latest stats on the friendly AI community (as gathered at lesswrong.com) show about 2% of members are neoreactionaries. Further, with FHI at Oxford, FLI at MIT, CSER at Cambridge, the Superintelligence book being endorsed by everyone from Elon Musk, to Stephen Haking, to Morgan Freeman, calling MIRI/Friendly AI a branch of the reactionaries can't be anything else but a deliberate attempt to smear people's reputation. I'm on the record as having several severe criticisms of EY/MIRI, but being neoreactionaries is not one of them.