[HN Gopher] Urbit OS 1
___________________________________________________________________
Urbit OS 1
Author : pcr910303
Score : 131 points
Date : 2020-04-30 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (urbit.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (urbit.org)
| mdszy wrote:
| 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).
|
| Weird crypto-crap for Nazis. Nothing more.
| tyrust wrote:
| 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/
| mdszy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Supposing that that is the case, what does that have to do
| with Nazis?
| mdszy wrote:
| The fact that Yarvin is one?
| tyrust wrote:
| Sorry, my question wasn't clear, what does the alleged
| feudalistic structure of the project have to do with
| Nazis?
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| > alleged feudalistic structure of the project
|
| Alleged? Go look the galaxy/solar system/planet structure
| and everything around it. It is feudalism. It lines up
| with the philosophy Moldbug outlined.
|
| > have to do with Nazis?
|
| You should probably go actually read Moldbug so you can
| understand why some people describe him as being a Nazi.
| I'm not trying to put the burden of proof on you or
| anything, it's just that if you begin trying to boil down
| neoreaction into an HN post, is not gonna go well and
| will probably upset the mods.
|
| But uh yeah, Moldbug is an authoritarian top-down
| feudalist that has problems with people that aren't
| white. This isn't like, an ad-hom or something, he kind
| of just out and says it.
| sparkie wrote:
| The galaxy system does indeed seem like the weakest link
| of Urbit. I personally fail to see how 256 actors, even
| if we generously assume are all distinct, is much better
| than the small handful of actors who control the IP
| address spaces or the DNS TLDs. His assumption is that it
| will get more distributed over time, but I really don't
| buy it. He's designed centralizing vector into the
| system, which will attract bad actors and will only get
| concentrated into fewer hands with time and will weaken
| the intended goal of creating a censorship resistant
| network.
|
| I'm not convinced this address space problem is even one
| that needs solving. For example, the Lightning Network
| built on Bitcoin appears to offer a better solution where
| every identity is simply a public key. Anyone can create
| any amount of them, no sponsorship needed, and no public
| keys are any more privileged than others. The system is
| resistant to spam because in order to convince other
| nodes in the network to relay information, you need to
| establish a payment channel by committing to some funds
| on the bitcoin network, which incurs a transaction fee.
| The number of potential public keys for secp256k1 is
| sufficient that for our purposes we can pretend that
| they're infinite, unlike Urbit IDs. Additionally, the LN
| has an incentive model for routing built into it, where
| any intermediate node offering to route a payment can
| take a small fee in exchange - this removes the necessity
| for the network to operate on altruism, and also highly
| encourages competition between node operators, who can be
| absolutely anyone, to route information. The network can
| become adequately distributed that no number of entities
| could collude to block messages as anybody can offer to
| route in their place - and earn from it. Additionally,
| nodes offering routing are really just blind actors who
| take a fee to pass on a message whose contents they don't
| know and don't know who sent, or who is receiving.
| Refusing to relay a message is self-harm, as it prevents
| you from earning the fee on it (and will most likely get
| you blacklisted, further preventing your ability to earn
| more fees.)
| sfkdjf9j3j wrote:
| You say you're not a fan of throwing around the term
| "Nazi" lazily, but immediately in the previous sentence
| you suggest that you understand Nazism as a combination
| of "nationalism" and "socialism". Since this is a pretty
| common cudgel among far-right media commentators, used to
| disingenuously associate Nazi atrocities with left-wing
| politics, it's very difficult to read that in anything
| but bad faith. In fact this misrepresentation is so
| common that r/askhistorians has an entire section of
| their FAQ dedicated to explaining it: https://www.reddit.
| com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe#wiki_...
| matthewbauer wrote:
| He thinks the enlightenment was a bad idea and wants the
| world to return to feudalism, taking away the rights of
| Serfs, Jews, etc. This isn't quite Nazism but is pretty
| close to the beliefs of far-right groups like the neo-
| Nazis.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Quoting Terry Pratchett from memory: "They thought a king
| would make them free."
|
| The thing is, feudalism works out really well for the
| king. Works out all right for the dukes, earls, and
| barons. Works out OK for the knights, and less well for
| the peasants. Those who advocate such stuff almost
| certainly think that they're not going to be the
| peasants. (They are also almost certainly wrong. If this
| dream/nightmare ever comes to pass, people like Moldbug
| will probably be used as useful idiots and then
| slaughtered like livestock as soon as they don't serve
| the purposes of the rulers. The rulers will be people who
| really understand power, not people who can write online
| screeds well.)
| creddit wrote:
| "The person involved with this has ideas that I find
| distasteful and so therefore it's total garbage."
|
| At least try to argue against the "feudalistic" basis of the
| project and why that's bad rather than saying it's for Nazis
| and moving on.
| mdszy wrote:
| Sorry, don't feel like giving nazis that much of my mental
| energy, nor those who defend nazis :)
|
| If you can't see why feudalism is bad I'd suggest you pick up
| a history book at some point in your life.
| creddit wrote:
| It's that difficult for you to tell us why the product
| Urbit is bad? You've already spent some time letting people
| know about how it's associated with a bad man and is
| therefore bad, but it's a huge effort to say why the
| product is bad beyond that association?
|
| It's also interesting that saying that an argument that
| goes as "bad person is associated with thing therefore
| thing is bad" is invalid, is in your view equivalent to
| defending the bad person. This type of thinking is exactly
| the tool of totalitarians that you seem to be so adverse
| to.
| mdszy wrote:
| >bad person is associated with thing therefore thing is
| bad
|
| No, bad thing was created with fundamental bad ideas from
| bad person and, while bad person is not with the project
| anymore, the project still fundamentally relies on these
| bad ideas. Bad person being as bad as they are simply
| serves to amplify how bad all this is.
|
| Is that simple enough for you to understand?
| creddit wrote:
| The fundamental bad idea being that someone can create a
| space in which they have control over it and the people
| who willingly choose to participate in? Is Reddit a "bad
| thing" too?
|
| It's not simple enough for anyone to understand because
| you aren't saying what the "fundamental bad ideas" are!
| mdszy wrote:
| Creating a space in which a set person has control isn't
| the problem, the problem is the _limitation in who can
| control those spaces_
|
| Reddit doesn't make sense as a comparison because there
| are no limits to how many subreddits can be created, and
| communities split off from larger subreddits reasonably
| often when they don't like the rules.
|
| In Urbit's system, you can't do that. If you don't like
| what the person at the top decides for your plebian self,
| then you're SOL.
| yarrel wrote:
| You've badly misunderstood Urbit.
|
| Once you have an Urbit identity, you control who you talk
| to and can create as many "subreddits" as you like.
|
| Split away to your heart's content.
| Lammy wrote:
| Reddit's admins place unwritten limits on what subreddits
| they will allow, and any splinter subreddits of banned
| communities are also banned on sight.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I feel like we shouldn't have to explain why feudalism is
| bad. We've had a few centuries to sort that one out.
| creddit wrote:
| Feudalism the political system was bad for a whole host of
| reasons but this is a digital product, not a political
| system.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Sure, less harm, no doubt.
|
| Personally a system that gives you more control over
| other users purely due to when you joined seems
| unpleasant. As long as I'm not obligated to join I don't
| really care, people are free to join if that's their
| thing, but it sounds like not a lot of fun.
| creddit wrote:
| So you're probably very against Reddit then? Reddit is
| inherently feudal in the same way: someone creates a
| subreddit over which they have near total power and loyal
| subjects are allowed to subscribe and post at the grace
| of the moderator lords.
| [deleted]
| mdszy wrote:
| Except there's nothing stopping you from creating your
| own subreddit. There's no limit to them.
|
| In Urbit and Feudal systems, there's an idea of there
| being
|
| 1. A limited amount of land/resources
|
| 2. Some barrier to entry to getting them.
|
| In Urbit, there are a set, fixed number of "galaxies"
| (similar to subreddits in your example) that have all
| already been given out. Planets themselves cost money and
| there's an exchange for them (https://urbit.live/)
|
| Reddit isn't a comparison at all. There are very many
| examples of communities whose users got sick of the
| moderators of their subreddits so they split off and
| created a new community.
| creddit wrote:
| There are fixed number of subreddits as the names are
| limited in length.
|
| So their revenue model is selling their product instead
| of selling ads and that's the bad part?
|
| Also, they're open source right so you can just run your
| own: https://github.com/urbit/urbit
|
| Super evil stuff here.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| As long as it's voluntary, I wouldn't call it evil. I
| also have no idea why you'd want to participate in such a
| system, but you do you.
|
| The idea that limited string length makes reddit a feudal
| system is not a believable argument. I'd let that one go.
| creddit wrote:
| > As long as it's voluntary, I wouldn't call it evil. I
| also have no idea why you'd want to participate in such a
| system, but you do you.
|
| Agreed 100%. The product, as best as I grok it, is
| totally garbage. But, that wasn't what was being said.
| What was being said was "Urbit is Nazi trash" and "Ubrit
| is feudal in nature and therefore bad". This kind of
| totalitarian thought policing is what is bad.
|
| The nature of Reddit is very much so Feudal in all the
| same senses as Urbit except that Urbit is much more
| explicitly limited in the number of polities that can be
| created. Subreddits are inherently feudal in the exact
| same way in that some set of lords (moderators) have
| control over what happens in their domain (subreddit).
| Who can become a lord (redditors with X amount of Karma)
| is limited and so are subreddits, thought the limit is so
| large it's not really a practical limit. The principals
| are the same, still, so arguing against Urbit for being
| bad because of this nature is mostly if not entirely
| wrong. The reality is these arguments are more about
| moralizing than the actuality of what is presented.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| You're mixing your metaphors. Are lords people with
| karma, or are they moderators? Those are not the same
| groups, at all, with moderators typically having lower
| karma than top posters.
|
| Secondly Reddit has no real hierarchy that's built in.
| It's true that there are a limited amount of resources,
| but being early gives you no particular right the
| creation of any new resources, nor does it obligate any
| new joiner to participate in any particular subreddit.
| New subreddits created by new redditors regularly surpass
| old subreddits, undermining the concept of there being a
| heirarchy.
|
| Compare that to Urbit, where there is an _explicit_
| heirarchy. You're either a galaxy, a star, or a planet.
| Each level is responsible for distributing the addresses
| below it, and has some level of control over them too,
| and if I'm reading this correctly has the right to
| collect taxes as well. This is explicitly Feudal, and in
| fact the original code names for these were "lords",
| "dukes", and "earls".
|
| Finally, Yarvin considers himself an absolute monarchist,
| and thinks that American democracy should be scratched
| and replaced with a totalitarian government. It's not
| surprising that he'd build a system filled with
| references to his preferred political structure.
| creddit wrote:
| I'm not mixing metaphors. There is a limit to who can
| create a subreddit which is based on the amount of karma
| (it was claimed there was no limit on who can become a
| lord). The "lords" are the moderators of subreddits. This
| hierarchy is clearly built in. Above the moderators, of
| course, are the Reddit admins who have totalitarian power
| over all.
|
| I'm not arguing that Urbit isn't feudal. I'm saying that
| a feudal structure to an online service that someone
| voluntarily chooses to be a part of is not inherently bad
| in any way. Additionally, there are tons of existing
| feudal services we use regularly that no one is upset
| about. The only reason anyone is upset about Urbit's
| structure is that it came from a racist.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Honestly, I care more about arguing about your metaphor
| than Urbit. I think Urbit is a weird little side project
| that'll probably come to nothing, so I don't really care.
| Now being pedantic on the internet is something I
| _really_ care about.
|
| If creating a subreddit makes reddit feudal, than
| everything is feudalism and the word literally means
| nothing. The hallmark of feudalism is _not_ the presence
| of total control over limited resources, that's common in
| a huge number of systems. What makes a system feudal is
| the binding of people into an immutable tree of
| hierarchical relationships, with peasants bound to lesser
| lords, lesser lords bound to greater lords, and so on up
| to the king.
|
| Reddit is more akin to modern American property law;
| property owners have (more or less) total control over
| their property and who to rent it out to. But with huge
| amounts of unused land available, anyone not happy with
| their current home is free to go buy cheap land and do
| the hard work to build their own house if they want to.
| [deleted]
| wmf wrote:
| Originally Urbit _was_ explicitly pitched as a political
| system. More recently they don 't talk about politics and
| I don't think anyone has worked out what the emergent
| politics of the Urbitverse would be.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Yarvin being pushed out probably has something to do with
| that.
| drngdds wrote:
| If you're trying not to sound like a fascist, downplaying
| Yarvin's neo-fascism as "ideas you find distasteful" is a bad
| way of doing it.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| qznc wrote:
| An Urbit is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors,
| isn't it?
| agumonkey wrote:
| usually OSes are modeled or encoded as co-things .. but I'm
| not a haskeller so wait and see.
| lonelappde wrote:
| I think it's a fixed point in the lattice of operational
| systems.
| lykahb wrote:
| How different is it from Dat or Solid? They promise decentralized
| environment and control over data too and are less obscure.
| wmf wrote:
| Dat and Solid only cover data storage while Urbit also provides
| a VM to execute apps.
| xkapastel wrote:
| 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
| [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.
| newx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.).
| pvg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Bravo using the word "crypto" with two different meaning that
| both fit the sentence.
| 0xy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mdszy wrote:
| Good job making it sound like a cult.
| 0xy wrote:
| Could you explain Urbit to your mother within a minute?
| jraines wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| My mother fell asleep because I read that, it was that
| boring to non techies.
| gowld wrote:
| Is there any person you could explain it to in a minute?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| That's cool, I guess. I just don't want all those things
| bundled up.
| qppo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/1255284955850125312
|
| https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1253709910694432768
|
| It reads like a cult.
| arcadeparade wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What is the difference compared to signal or other E2E
| encrypted SMS approaches?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| That might have more to do with Urbit's founder rather than
| the technical merits of the project.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| It seems clear to me that they have no interest in targeting
| average consumers at this point.
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rkobeissi wrote:
| 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.
| Rerarom wrote:
| Is there any way to get rich easily if you jump in early and
| this gets big? (like with bitcoin)
| tylershuster wrote:
| Maybe. You would have to have a star, which is already about
| $2.000
| st-isidore wrote:
| In my opinion, it's too late for that. However, there are
| some healthy profits to be made with honest effort, most
| easily identified in the form of bounties. You can become a
| star owner by claiming and implementing a bounty listed on
| https://grants.urbit.org/. Some already claimed examples
| include: a Tor Nodes Relay Search Tile, an (HTML) Content
| Saver, and an Ethereum ABI Parser. In general, though, Tlon
| are very happy and willing to merge good pull requests, and
| often reward contributors with Urbit address space (which,
| _if_ this gets big, will be worth quite a lot more than
| current market rates at, for example, https://urbit.live).
| Hope that helps.
| qznc wrote:
| I don't understand Urbit now and then. Is it artwork like
| TempleOS? Is it over-ambitious vaporware like Xanadu? Is it a
| revolution attempt like Bitcoin?
|
| The technical details (Hoon and Nock) sound weird like
| TempleOS. Some claims (see parent) sound like Bitcoin.
| phnofive wrote:
| 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.
| rkobeissi wrote:
| "Urbit is made to blossom into an endless garden of human
| cultures, each of which must regulate itself, none of which
| can bother the others."
|
| What the internet has become is no "garden". Urbit is trying
| to change the default internet user permissions from slave to
| master. Its ambition should be applauded, here of all places,
| especially with its hacker ethos.
| boredgamer2 wrote:
| > "Urbit is made to blossom into an endless garden of human
| cultures, each of which must regulate itself, none of which
| can bother the others."
|
| I'm really not sure what this flowery, abstract language
| means in concrete terms. It reminds me of the idealistic,
| flowery language of "We" in the WeWork IPO / S1
| centimeter wrote:
| The primary explicit goal, as stated by Yarvin in the post
| where he introduced the idea for Urbit (it might not have
| been named at that point), is to free user data from "silos"
| like Facebook and Google by shifting away from a client-
| server architecture to a more peer-to-peer architecture.
| Yarvin (and by extension Urbit) has a specific vision for
| doing this involving scarce identities, federated/feudalist
| network organization, etc.
| GuiA wrote:
| The main goal of the people working on Urbit, as with most
| ventures, is to make money.
|
| They make money by selling you an identifier that gives you
| access to their network for ~$10-$20. They have 2^32
| identifiers so they expect to make a lot of money.
|
| Keep in mind that this identifier doesn't mean you "own" or
| "control" much, as it is folded under a parent identifier of
| which there are only 2^8, all controlled by the original
| Urbit creators/their associates.
|
| The rest is a semi-interesting mix of distributed systems +
| crypto ideas as other commenters have tried to summarize;
| there are other, less indecipherable, projects with similar
| ideas.
| omnimus wrote:
| Could you name some similar projects? Do you mean something
| like blockstack or dfinity?
| miles wrote:
| 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/4bxf
| 6f/im_curtis_yarv...
|
| First appearance on HN 10 years ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052795
|
| First HN post with traction
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320
|
| Urbit's HN comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit
| faizshah wrote:
| This HNer did a deep dive into Urbit's source, it's the best
| explanation of it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676792
|
| Another good, more charitable, explanation posted below:
| https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-
| urbit-e7cc4c35f14...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| How is the first link a "deep dive" or a good explanation
| of Urbit? He just puts Urbit down for being intentionally
| obscure and then confuses it with "Urbit Data", some random
| unrelated shitcoin that was going on at the time.
|
| Nothing they say indicates they even read a single line of
| source, it's just the same insults you can find in any HN
| Urbit thread.
| GuiA wrote:
| 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/
|
| (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-s...
| arcadeparade wrote:
| 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.
| kemenaran wrote:
| 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/
| GuiA wrote:
| The first hit is always free :)
| crankylinuxuser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Except this chat seems has a unique(feudalistic maybe?) update
| system:
|
| 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]
| lachlan-sneff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, I wish wasm had more support for pure programming. Of
| course, state can be constrained, but it's pretty
| heavyweight.
| dpc_pw wrote:
| 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), but overlay I
| hope it will be successful.
| openasocket wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Did you come from the Nock 4K thing seen in
| 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/.)
| [deleted]
| philsnow wrote:
| > 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..
| oldgun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| centimeter wrote:
| 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.
| type02 wrote:
| I've been told what Urbit is about 10 times now and I still don't
| fully get it.
| artemonster wrote:
| Just read the source code /s (I still don't get it how they
| code in this mess)
| lisper wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674322
| Avshalom wrote:
| 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".
| Koshkin wrote:
| This may be more to the point: https://urbit.org/understanding-
| urbit/urbit-os/
| krebs_liebhaber wrote:
| Nobody really "gets" Urbit - you're just supposed to nod
| amicably whenever someone brings it up.
|
| In all seriousness, it's nice to see that the Urbit peoplo are
| actually making substantial progress on... whatever it is
| they're doing. I love huge, totally outlandish projects like
| this.
| hvs wrote:
| I _believe_ it 's an attempt at a truly distributed OS, but it
| is buried in about 10 miles of unnecessary obfuscation and
| wordplay. Apparently now it is a Slack-clone as well.
| ianbicking wrote:
| After reading a few articles I felt like I finally figured out
| what Urbit was and wrote down my sense in a Tweet thread:
| https://twitter.com/ianbicking/status/1249862161758916609
|
| In summary: Urbit is a functional/deterministic VM. That's
| mostly it. It runs a bytecode called Nock. The only language
| that really compiles to Nock is a weird language called Hoon.
| Because the VM is functional and deterministic, it is (in
| theory) also portable - you pick up the (ever-evolving) VM
| image and move it somewhere else, and it should act the same.
| Since the VM may move around there's also an
| identity/networking layer so you can talk to the VM wherever it
| is.
|
| Right now Urbit is a program called u3 (runs on Linux or
| whatever) that runs Nock programs. OS 1 is such a program that
| does a couple things. It's unclear to me if they've really
| built an OS or just a library of routines that can be used to
| build a single multipurpose application.
|
| The most direct article I found was "Review of Urbit":
| https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14...
|
| Urbit's own "Common Objections to Urbit" was helpful, in a
| methinks-he-doth-protest-too-much sort of way:
| https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/
|
| And that article pointed me to "Houyhnhnms vs Martians" which
| was helpful though also as weird as Urbit:
| http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/06/11/chapter-10-houyhnhnm...
|
| While some people say Urbit is feudalistic, I tend to agree
| more with those that call it simply obscurantist. More occult
| than fascist.
| faizshah wrote:
| That "Review of Urbit" is the best post I've read on it,
| thanks for sharing.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It seems similar to Tim Berners-Lee Solid. I guess the idea is
| to have a sort of pod of local data and a peer to peer system
| that enables people to connect those pods and build services on
| top of it.
|
| That's about what I got from reading through the webpage.
| robenkleene wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cool thanks, in what sense is it distributed then?
| wmf wrote:
| Everybody having their own VPS is far more distributed
| than Facebook/Twitter/Slack but it's less distributed
| than some of the social blockchain systems. They have
| some good commentary on this point:
| https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/#gov
| robenkleene wrote:
| Got it, so the social features are distributed (like
| Mastadon/Email are), but the OS install itself is not
| distributed?
| pdonis wrote:
| What VPS? Do you have to provide it yourself? Or is it
| assigned to you and managed by someone else? (I see a note
| in the article about "in the future, free hosting", but I'm
| not sure what that means.)
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, you provide it yourself.
| 477360820 wrote:
| It's a:
|
| hierarchical
|
| p2p network
|
| of virtual machines
|
| running an unusual, but lisp-like, OS
|
| where the OS state is a pure function of a stream of input
| events
| st-isidore wrote:
| That wasn't too hard, was it? ;)
| rakoo wrote:
| 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
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