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Urbit: a personal cloud computer

doc.urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#51

Post by amelius »

urbit wrote: post #47
amelius wrote: post #21

So let me get this straight. This project is going to define 1. A new computing model, similar to how combinators work. 2. A programming language which produces expressions involving these combinators. 3. An operating system built on the above. 4. A cloud computing environment built on the above. Sorry, but while interesting, this sounds a little too ambitious, even by HN standards :)

Or as I sometimes say: "on the bottom it's a new kind of math, on the top it's a new kind of social network." This is kind of shameless hype but not as much as you might think. Sounds like a 10-year research project, right? Actually I started working on Urbit in 2002, as a sort of "unsupervised PhD thesis." I figured it'd be done by 2008 or so. We seeded a startup last fall and are busy turning a prototype into a pro…

But can you please explain why you couldn't use existing math (language and compiler) on the bottom layers (1 and 2) before replacing them by your own? That would help me understand the level of your ambition :)

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#52

Post by tel »

pavlov wrote: post #25
gfodor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had me going in the Nock spec until "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."

The same spirit seems to apply everywhere. The Hoon tutorial shows an incredibly elaborate way to build a decrement function, and it notes: "As you may remember, to decrement 'a' we need to count up to it."

That's completely standard for Peano arithmetic though.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#53

Post by abrichr »

happybeing wrote: post #29

That description sounds like http://MaidSafe.net , which is rapidly approaching launch.

This seems super interesting. One of the people behind it is David Irvine [1], who apparently "was Designer / Project Manager of one of the World’s largest private networks (Saudi Aramco, over $300M)." [2]

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/04/08/beyond-bi...

[2] https://github.com/maidsafe/MaidSafe/wiki/unpublished_papers...

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#54

Post by gojomo »

pyre wrote: post #36
gojomo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an idea: maybe anyone accusing someone else of being "too ambitious" should share one of their own projects that demonstrates exactly the right level of ambition.

So in your opinion nothing is ever too ambitious? Or is it just that no one should every be allowed to utter the words "too ambitious?"

No, some projects can be too ambitious, including even recklessly or dangerously ambitious. But I'd rather hear that judgement from someone with a reputation for appropriate, successful ambitiousness, and with some supporting reasoning.

The grandparent comment comes from a pseudonym linked to no evaluable projects. It offers a costless, totally-generic pooh-poohing of a real project as "too ambitious". But that project is actually shipping code that works, with 126 contributors, many with a known history of contributions in related spheres.

Against that, the comment even uses an appeal to "HN standards"! As if, we should all be discounting this sort of stuff, on its face.

I'd prefer "HN standards" encourage such ambition, backed with code – not casually mock it with a ascii-smiley.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#55

Post by vidarh »

gojomo wrote: post #28
gfodor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had me going in the Nock spec until "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."

Here's one possible intuition: There is one ground truth, origin, fixed point like the North Star: zero. There are an infinite number of possible falsehoods: all nonzero numbers. But Urbit chooses 1 as the canonical false.

And this is close to the reason why you often see zero used a "success" in languages like C: There are many possible error values.

So it's not very original at all.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#56

Post by implicit »

amelius wrote: post #32
GuiA wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/This project is going to define/This project is defining/ There's code that you can run and can play with. It may sound super far fetched (and it is), but the guy behind it is putting sweat into it.

And what is the reason why an existing language and compiler doesn't suffice for 1 and 2? For example, Haskell and GHC took decades to become what they are now (a powerful language and compiler). It seems quite wasteful to rebuild that work. If absolutely desired, Haskell can also be converted into combinator form, and vice versa, so why not use it? Seriously.

Judging by the documentation, Urbit looks to be less about leveraging pre-existing work and more about reinventing computer science and software engineering from the ground up.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#58

Post by rm445 »

youngthugger wrote: post #2

Can someone explain what is going on? Is this a new OS built from the ground up with it's own technologies ?

At present it's a bunch of programs that run on UNIX systems. I guess the Hoon interpreter is a C program that uses readline, talks to the network over sockets and the like. But everything on top is quite self-contained and in principle one might remove the layers underneath.

But I'm not sure that's necessarily the aim. As I understand the project's aims (and I'm not involved, I just read all the docs a few months back), it's more important that the Internet of the future is not a tangled mess of technologies that are insecure on different layers. Then it doesn't matter so what OS people's local machines are running.

I hope the essay at the URL below is still relevant, it seems to describe the aims rather well. "The result: Martian code, as we know it today. Not enormous and horrible - tiny and diamond-perfect."

http://moronlab.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/urbit-functional-prog...

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#60

Post by canjobear »

sz4kerto wrote: post #43

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320 I've been watching this since it's started. It has some magical atmosphere around it and you never now whether it's serious or not; whether it's a real technical project or some kind of artistic performance. I think I have a destroyer somewhere.

Lots of negativity in the previous discussion. Did the page used to be phrased in a combative way or something?
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