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

91–100 of 163 posts

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#91

Post by pythia__ »

gaze wrote: post #11
panic wrote: post #6

Urbit is a republic. Its government has one task: promoting, preserving and protecting Urbit. It may take any legal action which advances this goal. That sounds a bit scary!

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.

Devil's advocate here. What nice things would we have if nobody gave money to people who believe that? Or, if that is what you meant, if the belief itself was extinct?

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#92

Post by Natanael_L »

jcrites wrote: post #19
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 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…

Sounds like an interesting approach.

I hope they integrate a proper capabilities framework too, ideally one with cryptographic credentials that allows for reasonable assurances in distributed systems. Stuff like being able to provide a cryptographic guarantee of who have access to what data.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#93

Post by PostOnce »

All I got from this is "we want to sell you a domain name that is unrecognized by all existing software and infrastructure, please give us money"

If I wanna join a cyber-utopian hacker-hippie commune, I'm not going to pay a cult to do so. Especially not an inarticulate cult. I'll build it myself? It sure doesn't sound understandable to regular people if the HN crowd doesn't know what they're talking about.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#94

Post by allengeorge »

trentmb wrote: post #62
akhilcacharya wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Elitist language can be used by any group to partition themselves from others. I'm sure many groups (formal and informal) do it.

That said, I believe there has to be a floor to the language level you choose, and it's reasonable to use "high school English" as that floor. Besides, I checked out that link (history section) and didn't see anything that screamed "overly clever"...

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#95

Post by davidgerard »

sigusr1 wrote: post #47
avip wrote: post #42

>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. This kind of sums up the approach taken here. I'm out. I'm too dumb for this project.

He said in his recent talk about urbit if he were doing it over he probably wouldn't have done that.

The current urbit.org documentation has been considerably bowdlerised from the originals, which were 200-proof Moldbug, so strong it crawls up the side of the glass.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#96

Post by wolfgke »

cronjobber wrote: post #84
Sanddancer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> difficult to understand for non-native english speakers Au contraire! They managed to almost eliminate any advantage that programmers who speak english usually enjoy.

> Au contraire! They managed to almost eliminate any advantage that programmers who speak english usually enjoy.

What are those advantages?

When I was young and my English was really bad, I simply learned the keywords just as mathematical terms (i.e. if, else, for, while, break, next, goto, gosub, signed, class etc.) - I mean, they aren't that many (say 40 and you've covered most mainstream programming languages that aren't really verbose (OK, COBOL is an exception, but who uses COBOL ;-) ). This really isn't much harder than learning mathematical terms as sin, log, cos, exp, cot, asec etc. even if you know no word of English.

What really makes programming hard when you are not sufficiently fluent in English is that lots of documentation is only available in English (this was the main problem I had). And I don't see how Urbit is going to change that.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#97

Post by morsch »

trentmb wrote: post #62
akhilcacharya wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The comparison to marxist texts is more pointed if they were unapproachable not just to the layman, but to people proficient in (non-marxist) political economics -- which is arguably the case.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#98

Post by Avshalom »

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…

>This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world,

Don't worry, it's not. It's a VM with bent towards distributed computing. That's all.

I mean maybe one day it'll have an ecosystem of libraries and applications that makes that interesting but it's not today and it's not inherent in the technology.

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#99

Post by krautsourced »

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.

I'm sorry but this... madness. Referring to return codes, which are completely arbitrary in nature, as being intuitive and thus, 0 as true being intuitive, feels like a complete logic breakdown.

Yes, if this language were to exist in a complete vacuum, where no other languages are existing, and nobody learnt anything else before, then sure, 0 as true and 1 as false would be fine I guess. Still not more or less intuitive, but one could agree on using it. But in a world where every other programming language uses 0 as false (or some equivalent) and where the chance that someone would use "nock" as his one and only programming language is very much 0%, this feels like utter bullshit.

Also, the versioning scheme based on Kelvin temperature? Seriously?

And then look at the Hoon syntax. No keywords, just ASCII symbols. Just look at it.

This better be some very elaborate hoax...

Re: Urbit is now in open developer beta

#100

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN