Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also doesn't work on Windows 95 :(
Wait, people still use Windows 95?
I'm still hanging on to my Windows 3.1 here, you know, the last known good version
What Urbit is
21–30 of 251 posts
Re: What Urbit is
#22This seems very exciting, in a way that I'm hard-pressed to define. Maybe because it seems to offer a greenfield opportunity to build...something. Or to be something. Unique.
Re: What Urbit is
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry about that. Since this page is built with urbit it's easy to just request the raw Markdown. Here's plain text for anyone interested: http://urbit.org/posts/overview.md Edit: it should be easy for us to stick that link inside a noscript tag be default. Issue here: https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/149
To be honest, the site could use some work. Low-hanging fruit mainly, I'm not even asking for anything browsers didn't do in the 90s. You're doing a lot of work yourself: loading pages (why not let the browser do that, catch errors, display progress, etc.? Now it shows a spinner and if I hadn't backgrounded the tab already I'd have given up on loading because "clearly the spinner isn't doing anything"); opening links…
Yeah, I agree (and I worked a lot on the frontend). The site is hosted with the default frontend for Urbit — so it's built to do a lot more than what it's doing in this specific case.
The links not opening on ctrl+click is ridiculous (issue here: https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/10) as are the cross-origin resources. Loading in the title is a good idea (issue here: https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/11).
Being lazy is good. I'm with you there!
Re: What Urbit is
#24I love that they even introduced convenient ways of pronouncing the ASCII symbols Hoon uses. Last time I saw it, I created this gist: https://gist.github.com/killercup/be14570af13cbddb5dbc
(Haven't checked if anything changed since then.)
Re: What Urbit is
#25If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else. To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentraliz…
There is no such thing as a trustless app, unless you are doing basic mathematical algorithms contained within the same system. Ethereum adds no value to Bitcoin because any useful apps you want to make NEED a centralize source to provide data to it. For example, if I want to make an app that sends coins to someone when bitcoin is at a certain price, I would inherently be relying on the trusted source, that provides the bitcoin price data. Similarly for sport payouts or property contracts, they all rely on the external centralized source for information. The only thing Ethereum can do, is basic operations contingent on values within the same system, otherwise you break the "trustless apps" veil.
Re: What Urbit is
#26I think Jay Maynard said it best: Urbit is "INTERCAL as OS". Alternatively, it's a New Kind of Computing (by analogy with Wolfram's New Kind of Science).
This paper didn't really tell me anything about Urbit that I didn't already know. But it's good to see them have a nice clean readable rationale.
Re: What Urbit is
#27Re: What Urbit is
#28I was looking into this, as I have connections to the devs via our hackerspace.
After research, I steered away, and hard.
1. Newbies trying to grok the platform are mocked mercilessly. Publicly over reddit and twitter.
2. The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general. Now, ad hominems aren't "good"... but if I work on it, I get lumped into the similar group. Just no.
3. It uses "Hoon" to program, which is in reality a Lisp variant. They wanted something completely foreign so "only dedicated people would learn it". Seriously. Use Lisp.
4. It's another company interests driving the project. Projects like these have the potential of changing everything on the internet. Locking it behind a company "firewall" means if they die, the project does as well.
Re: What Urbit is
#29If you're having trouble viewing the page (like I was) the text is here:
https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org/blob/master/main/posts/ov...
At least I think this is the text, I can't check.
Re: What Urbit is
#30I was looking into this, as I have connections to the devs via our hackerspace. After research, I steered away, and hard. 1. Newbies trying to grok the platform are mocked mercilessly. Publicly over reddit and twitter. 2. The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general. Now, ad hominems aren't "good"... but if I work on it, I get lumped into the similar group. Just no. 3. It uses "Hoon" to program, which…
Got any sources to back this up? I'd rather not believe, but if it's so...