Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Urbit is now in open developer beta

urbit.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 163 posts

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#61

Post by kazinator »

kovrik wrote: post #32
kovrik wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.

Also, I doubt they could handle it, their scope is huge: new OS, new programming language, networking, encryption, time, compilation, virtualization etc. I don't believe group of 5 unknown people can handle it. Like, Urbit time: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/ Where the hell are timezones, Leap seconds etc.? They just store constants!

Timezones are so last century. We have wobnits now. They are like nanoseconds, but that's just a metaphor which is dangerous if taken too literally.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#62

Post by trentmb »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #33
kovrik wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.

If you know about Yarvins other beliefs, the fact that t seems obfuscated makes quite a bit of sense in my view. I think it's a superiority thing for him. At its core? I think it's kind of interesting. Would have been more useful if he had made it simpler to understand/develop in. In its current form, it seems like a vanity project to me.

Ironically non-inclusive, elitist language is a mainstay for leftists too.

EDIT: Read Marxists.org, it's incredibly unapproachable to the layman that didn't complete high school let alone middle school.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#63

Post by Sanddancer »

kovrik wrote: post #32
kovrik wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Feels like it was written by someone with schizophasia. Like: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/ What are they talking about? Dry/wet arms? Batteries? Metal cores? Bridges? Gates? Superpowers? For me it looks like they've just replaced common concepts with random "cool" words, deliberately obfuscated the syntax and try to sell it as an innovation.

Also, I doubt they could handle it, their scope is huge: new OS, new programming language, networking, encryption, time, compilation, virtualization etc. I don't believe group of 5 unknown people can handle it. Like, Urbit time: https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/library/3c/ Where the hell are timezones, Leap seconds etc.? They just store constants!

Not only that, they are incorrect constants. The definition for :cet, for example, is only correct for non-leap centuries. 2000-2099 has an extra day compared to 1900-1999, or its partner :qad, which has the opposite problem and assumes any 4-year span has a leap year.

Of course, the language has other problems too, like 'moar' being used as a serious part of the language's grammar, or worse, more nebulous verbs like 'snag', which makes the language even more difficult to understand for non-native english speakers. It's just an utter mess.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#64

Post by kazinator »

emmelaich wrote: post #46
Camillo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is what amounts to a direct claim of purposeful obfuscation here: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... > We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.

Focus on the intuitively right. I think it makes sense for 0 to yes/true. Think of the Unix exit codes, and golang returns. No news is good (yes/true) news. edit: as to the "annoying" that's just Yarvin being cheeky. I really don't think it is too serious.

Zero is good for "absence of failure". It's a "yes" in the sense that "this worked". Whereas any one of the myriad non-zero codes is "no, it didn't work".

If we have a situation in which there are many numeric codes, exactly one of which means "success", it's probably best if that one is assigned zero.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#65

Post by [deleted] »

corv wrote: post #51
jcrites wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your criticism. I read through the Urbut whitepaper [1] a while ago, and there's some meat and novel ideas there. As far as a concise description, here's my attempt, followed by some content from the whitepaper. The key idea that distinguishes Urbit is its focus on deterministic computing. Urbit is a computing environment, like a virtual machine, with the distinction that the entire computationa…

I don't see how a clean-slate approach brings them closer to their goal of "make hosting this virtual machine easy enough to do that anyone could". Decentralized "cloud" computing is a necessity and I commend them for their efforts but this seems like a case of NIH syndrome if I ever saw one.

[deleted]

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#66

Post by kazinator »

emmelaich wrote: post #46
Camillo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is what amounts to a direct claim of purposeful obfuscation here: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... > We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.

Focus on the intuitively right. I think it makes sense for 0 to yes/true. Think of the Unix exit codes, and golang returns. No news is good (yes/true) news. edit: as to the "annoying" that's just Yarvin being cheeky. I really don't think it is too serious.

It's not confusing enough. I would call the 0 "pull down" and 1 "high z".

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#67

Post by patrickg_zill »

hodwik2 wrote: post #27
gaze wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if people read Curtis's writing under Mencius Moldbug, nobody would touch urbit with a ten foot pole. He believes that white people are genetically endowed with a higher IQ than black people. Why are people giving him money? This is why we can't have nice things.

I do not believe IQ is heritable -- racially, or otherwise . Full stop. Intelligence is, by my estimation, entirely a function of nurture, not nature. Those exceptions are in situations where it is lacking due to handicap. Which is to say, everyone's brain has the same chance at brilliance (barring fetal alcohol syndrome, neglect, etc.) if they are not intellectually handicapped, and are provided the same child-reari…

So all other physical characteristics, even things to do with domestication of dogs, that are more "soft" like temperament, are hereditable?

But not IQ?

What's the exception?

If your view is that genetics in terms of the science is flawed, then, don't beat around the bush, state your case.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#68

Post by shadeland »

jmspring wrote: post #25
aaron-lebo wrote: post #2

This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a pr…

Honestly, it seems to fit the current hype around being mysterious, disruptive, etc. That they can't describe what they are doing in plain english is downright silly.

> the ideas appeared to be deliberately obfuscated It reminds me of early days of http://21.co ,the Bitcoin computer, with the same ambiguous wordings. I assume the libertarian socialistic aspects of this genre of technology is prior to its technical and practical aspects.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#69

Post by lisper »

kazinator wrote: post #64
emmelaich wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focus on the intuitively right. I think it makes sense for 0 to yes/true. Think of the Unix exit codes, and golang returns. No news is good (yes/true) news. edit: as to the "annoying" that's just Yarvin being cheeky. I really don't think it is too serious.

Zero is good for "absence of failure". It's a "yes" in the sense that "this worked". Whereas any one of the myriad non-zero codes is "no, it didn't work". If we have a situation in which there are many numeric codes, exactly one of which means "success", it's probably best if that one is assigned zero.

Except that Curtis strongly (and snarkily) claims that Hoon is a typed language:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11819810 item #3 (and subsequent discussion)

So why are they punning integers and booleans in the first place?

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#70

Post by hirsin »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #4
aaron-lebo wrote: post #2

This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical. If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a pr…

I agree. What it really needs is an 'example' page, or a walkthrough of how/what you'd use it for. I just spent 10 minutes reading the docs and I'm not sure I get it. Is it like Owncloud? disapora*? ITTT? Is it an interface to mirror all my content from other social media sites, and interact with them? You say I can use it to authenticate with sites - is it an OpenID provider? Something something blockchain? All of t…

It's personal computing, explained in the context of a VC pitch to people who have never heard of an OS, think the browser is their computer, and don't seem to comprehend software that gets installed.

Look at the Evernote example - wouldn't it be great if you could replace the Evernote UI with a different one for $10? Well, you could do that today on any OS with an app and a REST API, but it either doesn't exist (because it's not that great) or it does already exist (so what's revolutionary?).

The same thing applies to almost every single thing lauded. Your data is saved locally! Great, my UrbitTwitter clone keeps my data locally in some undocumented format. But that's ok, I'm not beholden to the app developer in case they die (yes, that's in there), because I can get someone else to reverse engineer that format and build me a new twitter clone. How does Hoon make that special?

Gmail works locally! And Translation - someone (lots of someones) will build APIs and SDKs for our platform to interface with those services, and they'll be used just like in any other OS to make apps that run in your machine.

It lauds "you can install software, and it runs locally, forever!" as something new and great, when really that's existed since we got off mainframes in the 70s.

Everything it offers is stuff that was solved the first go around in personal computers, but this time with a cryptographic identity and an obtuse language. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I've been looking at urbit for 2.5 years, know (good) people that worked on it, and still can't find a compelling reason to think of it as something other than a hipster OS, reinventing decades old ideas because this time they'll do it right.

Post reply on HN