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Urbit: a personal cloud computer

doc.urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#131

Post by jcburke »

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…

Wait, so they wrote their own bytecode, functional language (complete with compiler and libraries), functional operating system, TCP replacement, and distributed storage protocol? And will presumably write all their own apps, or some kind of interface layer that will allow non-Hoon code to run on their system efficiently? That has to be one of the most ridiculously ambitious projects I've ever seen. Good luck to them I guess, but I've always been a believer in not reinventing too many wheels at once

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#132

Post by comboy »

rm445 wrote: post #58
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 ba…

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

My brain did not enjoy any wall of text that much since I read the bitcoin whitepaper. Now I want to learn more and be up to date.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#133

Post by kazagistar »

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 :)

They already basically have all of the above, as a working tech demo. They actually had it like a year ago or more, but bits are missing or in progress still.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#134

Post by walterbell »

GuiA wrote: post #20

Urbit is a weird thing that feels like it comes from a parallel universe of computing. It's a bit hard to wrap your head around it at first, but it has some neat ideas. I like this article which introduces it: Urbit is perhaps how you'd do computing in a post-singularity world, where computational speed and bandwidth are infinite, and what's valuable is security, trust, creativity, and collaboration. It's essentially…

"Despite messages between ships being encrypted, the founders state that they've purposely designed the network to make it as easy as possible for governments to regulate and control. It's not entirely clear why this is supposed to be a good thing."

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#135

Post by nnq »

It's probably the second time that I come across Urbit and found it attention worthy, but... how hard would it be to explain at least some of the concepts in plain English and with some nice intuitive drawings/schemas on the side, really?

I mean, this http://doc.urbit.org/doc/hoon/tut/1/ is supposed to be a "tutorial" but it's definitely not what anyone else would call a "tutorial". It's more like a "philosophical introduction" to a PhD paper, which would be ok if labeled as such. A tutorial should be about "how do I do X using Y, without bothering to really understand Y" because this is what a tutorial is about, a "mostly wrong" "mental shortcut" that you take in order to gain some kind of "feel for how something works" before actually delving deeper and reading up on the theory.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#136

Post by valvar »

lumpypua wrote: post #130
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 interesti…

I haven't read all of Unqualified Reservations, but what I have read so far (Dawkins, Open Letter, Gentle Introduction) has not been difficult to read at all. Perhaps long and winding, but not opaque. In fact, I find Moldbug to be much more accessible than his sources of inspiration (which are standard fare if you even want to even begin with political theory).

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#137

Post by jacquesm »

rm445 wrote: post #58
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 ba…

> I guess the Hoon interpreter is a C program that uses readline

"or even readline - this is not readline, it's internal to Arvo"

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#138

Post by jacquesm »

This is fun stuff. Reading around a bit I found this:

"While nowhere near the simplest such automaton known, and certainly not of any theoretical interest, Nock is so stupid that if you gzip the spec, it's only 374 bytes. Nock's only arithmetic operation is increment. So decrement is an O(n), operation; add is O(m * n)... "

Don't they mean 'subtraction' rather than 'add'?

edit: This is so fascinating, it has me totally enthralled. Think smalltalk meets lisp meets some wild eyed programmer who knows just how to appeal to the general frustration most programmers should have (do they?) about the state of our art.

Best post on HN in a long time, very curious how this one will turn out in the long term. May all your ships come in ;)

edit2:

Digging around a bit more: Peter Thiel and a bunch of others have apparently invested in this through a vehicle called 'Tion', https://angel.co/tlon (the Thiel reference is that Thiel backed John Burnham, who is co-founder in Tion).

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#139

Post by agumonkey »

GuiA wrote: post #20

Urbit is a weird thing that feels like it comes from a parallel universe of computing. It's a bit hard to wrap your head around it at first, but it has some neat ideas. I like this article which introduces it: Urbit is perhaps how you'd do computing in a post-singularity world, where computational speed and bandwidth are infinite, and what's valuable is security, trust, creativity, and collaboration. It's essentially…

My thoughts exactly. Have you seen their previous video ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6439329

if no, you're gonna experience even weirder things

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#140

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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