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Urbit: a personal cloud computer

doc.urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#121

Post by lexcorvus »

Estragon wrote: post #65

Is nock designed to run untrusted, potentially hostile code with guaranteed identical results on all platforms? I'm looking for a virtual machine (or NaCl-like sandbox) which does this. Edit: To anyone who downvoted me, could you please let me know why?

I'm just speculating, but the HN upvote/downvote arrows are tiny, and it's easy to click on the wrong one accidentally. (This is especially true on tablet devices.) Your comment clearly doesn't deserve a downvote, though, so I've thrown you an upvote to help make up for it. :-)

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#122

Post by emmanueloga_ »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #117

Interesting distribution of contributors [1]. Usually what I see on most projects is one or two guys contributing the most of the code since the start of the repository, with minor contributors coming and going. These contributors chart seem to show different guys taking the helm at different points on time though. 1: https://github.com/urbit/urbit/graphs/contributors

BTW, since I know how much does the hackernews crowd appreciate baseless speculation (sorry!), I'd add this: I wonder if Ryan Dahl is involved with this project. Working on something like this would be compatible with some of the things he wrote about before disappearing [1].

1: http://xahlee.info/comp/Ryan_Dahl_on_software_complexity.htm...

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#123

Post by jabits »

BorisMelnik wrote: post #115

Don't really get what this is technically, but conceptually I do understand it and would love to back a company like this. Technologies like this could kill Microsoft (Windows) and many others.

Why would this be any better? Then this is the big company that screws things up.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#124

Post by state »

Scaevolus wrote: post #119
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #117

Interesting distribution of contributors [1]. Usually what I see on most projects is one or two guys contributing the most of the code since the start of the repository, with minor contributors coming and going. These contributors chart seem to show different guys taking the helm at different points on time though. 1: https://github.com/urbit/urbit/graphs/contributors

Not quite. It looks like urbit has imported the histories of multiple other projects. LibUV: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors Re2: https://code.google.com/p/re2/source/list

Hm. Not sure how that happened. We have had a number of different contributors.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#126

Post by jdpage »

Zillion wrote: post #82

The choice of 0 for true and 1 for false is _wrong:_ On the Curry-Howard correspondence (and above) a type corresponds to a false sentence when it is not inhabited, like 0, and to a true sentence when it is. The Curry-Howard correspondence is fundamental, and so that is the. correct way to go, absent evidence in the other direction. I don't know whether Nock is a better foundation for a programming language than the…

Aside from the zero/one thing, if I'm understanding this right, Nock is based on the SKI combinator calculus, where the combinators are

S: λxyz.xz(yz)

K: λxy.x

I: λx.x

From there, you can express anything from the lambda calculus, and vice-versa. So I think it's reasonable to say that Nock is just a machine-friendly way of expressing the lambda calculus.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#128

Post by shkkmo »

grayclhn wrote: post #106
Adlai wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is set intersection intuitively multiplication? My expectation is that a set multiplication would give me a new set consisting of all pairs consisting of a single element from each set.

x ∈ (A ∩ B) = (x ∈ A) * (x ∈ B) if "x ∈ A" equals 1 when x is in the set A, 0 when x is not in the set A. Using "indicator functions" like this also gives you a nice formulation for probability and integration, etc. that falls apart if you use 1 to represent x ∉ A. edit: I should add that I'm not claiming "you can't build measure theoretic probability from this formulation of booleans" is a strike against the project…

I don't see how you lose boolean algebra, you just need to flip * and + in your equations. x ∈ (A ∩ B) = (x ∈ A) + (x ∈ B) (and) x ∈ (A ∪ B) = (x ∈ A) * (x ∈ B) (or)

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#129

Post by JDulin »

Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?...

First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's destined to be the future, but I sure as hell hope it is.

I had the privilege of interning at Tlon, the company working on Urbit's development, this summer. It owns most of the namespace (Personal cloud computer IP addresses, essentially.) and is where the architect of the system works full-time. They are funded, well enough, by VCs you know of. Urbit is not really launched yet though - We spent the summer doing a lot of work getting the network, file system, protocols, and application layer in "Industrial grade" shape, and I believe more of that is happening this fall.

Because the system is still unlaunched and the docs are being retooled, I imagine these pages are discombobulating. That's... expected. Urbit has a lot of odd ideas that take time to appreciate. However, if you do take the time to understand the motivation behind the design of everything from Hoon's appearance to the network protocol replacement for TCP to the vision for future social networks, you'll find some of the best and most complete computer science research done in decades in networks, systems, and functional programming. The essential idea is not an outlandish one - We need a new basis of computing and networking to build digital identities with, and 1970s system software is not up to the task.

It's unfortunate that ambition and a sense of humor can be misinterpreted as a joke today. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it [1] that these guys are deadly serious and have the technical chops to back up their ambition. Future documentation and applications built on the OS should soon make that more immediately evident.

[1] Or start reading the tutorials!

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#130

Post by lumpypua »

JDulin wrote: post #129

Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?... First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's destined to be the future, but I sure as hell hope it is. I had the privilege of interning at Tlon, the company working on Urbit's development, this summer. It owns most of the namespace (Personal cloud computer IP addresses, essentially.) and is where the architect of…

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames...

There are hundreds of lines of noise. This makes perl and forth look absurdly readable. What on earth do the directory and file names mean?

I dunno how familiar people on HN are but the original author of urbit is Mencius Moldbug, a neoreactionary blogger. His style of writing is absurdly obfuscated and purposely impenetrable if containing some interesting ideas. The exact same thing is true of urbit. Interesting ideas but obfuscated the point of utter inaccessibility.

Here's sort of the wider group of blogs he philosophically aligns with:

http://rationalwiki.org/w/images/d/d5/Scharlachs-visualizing...

His views are likely unpopular around here but I am a fan of a bunch of those other blogs, and I've tried to dive into Moldbug's blog Unqualified Reservations a few times. It's kind of insane—the guy is clearly very intelligent—yet writes in his own discursive style that is absolutely opaque.

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