Viewing profile — urbit

Tlon (Urbit) | San Francisco | Full-time | https://tlon.io/ Tlon builds Urbit, a secure peer-to-peer network of personal servers, built on a clean-slate system software stack. You …

Tlon (Urbit) | San Francisco | Full-time | https://tlon.io/ Tlon builds Urbit, a secure peer-to-peer network of personal servers, built on a clean-slate system software stack. You …

Unfortunately I wouldn't expect a lot of substantive technical discussion for a post like this on HN -- this post will expire before anyone has time to read it properly and produce…

Definitely not dead -- it got stalled for a while because Urbit tends to use deep stacks and both Graal and the JVM seem to favor shallow ones. The author (not me) came up with a "…

Here's a more optimistic take which is unavoidably a plug. Urbit is maybe a sort of "extreme langsec." "Immune" is a dangerous word. Urbit is "premitigated" against Spectre for the…

Um, I think you just did. :-) Of course, like every abstraction, this abstraction breaks down as you get into the details...

If I can distill my objection to the pure capability model: there are two different statements of the capability manifesto, one strong and one weak. The weak capability position is…

Protip: if no one's ahead of you, you're leading :-) This is a great answer. I think the impedance-mismatch question is a big part of the problem. Personally I prefer to boil the o…

This is a great question. One possible answer: maybe the right system would use "ambient authority" (ACLs, etc) for the common case, but scale up to true capabilities for interesti…

Wadler's criticisms of jets are pretty common and not super hard to respond to. Nothing at all stops any jet-based interpreter from using normal standards practices to specify a st…

On first glance, Cell feels like a very serious effort and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has an impact. The embedding model is a nice and thoughtful touch. I think a lot of imperat…

Urbit | San Francisco, CA | FULL TIME | ONSITE Urbit is hiring: Urbit is a clean-slate system software stack defined as a single frozen function. We're looking for: - Systems gener…

The first question (economics) is one we've thought a bit about. Not affiliated with Filecoin/IPFS/Protocol Labs, so these answers may be wrong: Filecoin creates a market for stora…

I agree - I see this Benjamin Franklin ("if we don't all stand together, we shall all hang separately") attitude everywhere. But I don't think this new attitude is an accident. It'…

As a competitor (or "competitor," I don't think decentralized services actually compete with each other in the traditional sense), I just want to say: Matrix is an amazing project …

Also, I would say that the worst thing about the inability to do EOM on the Internet stack is that it puts the responsibility for idempotence on the application programmer, then te…

If you define EOM as magic, or as a solution to the Two Generals problem, EOM is certainly impossible. If EOM means "the programmer doesn't have to think about idempotency," EOM is…

Exactly-once messaging is not a hard problem so long as you change the problem a little. (Plug warning: this is the way Urbit does EOM, or EOM * if you prefer.) TLDR, you don't nee…

The more I see from this project, the more I like it. The Pijul team seems just completely serious about building system software right. Also while I could wish for more doc, what'…

Linux on Xen would also fail this test. Urbit is an OS in that it defines the complete lifecycle of a general-purpose computer. It's not an OS in that it's the lowest layer above b…

Linux on Xen would also fail this test. Urbit is an OS in that it defines the complete lifecycle of a general-purpose computer. It's not an OS in that it's the lowest layer above b…

Blatant plug: Urbit (urbit.org) is a general-purpose OS built on the event-sourced model. Urbit's state is a small, frozen function of its event log. I don't know of any other gene…

This is ancient -- see the modern site at https://www.urbit.org .

Yes, Urbit is (or at least is designed to become) a personal server which solves this problem among others. One: a chain of specialized Posix programs would work for that. You woul…