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

Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

urbit.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 172 posts

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#101

Post by nyolfen »

jacknoble wrote: post #66
han-sel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great question. The best way i've found to describe Urbit as a product is a decentralized, open source version of WeChat. No, nobody really cares about privacy, but I think the argument is that for the consumer there is the potential for a way better experience. If all of your data is in one place, as a consumer, you only ever need to enter it once. More interestingly, all of your apps can work together in…

>However, recently, I finally heard the first solution which felt like the completely right solution to me, and I believe they're pursuing it. What's that?

hazarding a guess: a secure social integration layer for cryptocurrency?

now that i'm thinking about it, this has to be the answer

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#102

Post by adiabatty »

ubernostrum wrote: post #90
adiabatty wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most available first-class address in the system is in a 32 bit address space. Why? Not for efficiency, but because the authors believe there aren't and never will be 4 billion human beings on the planet worthy of having a first-class address in their system. This, by the way, is their actual response to the objection of an overlay network with 32 bit addressing. One of the things they want is for identities to…

If it hasn't already, the total number of humans with mobile phone service will exceed 2^32 within the next year or two, and phone service typically isn't given away free out of the goodness of the phone companies' hearts. So the mobile industry is already past or very soon to be past the 32-bit space with paying customers .

Yeah, 2^32 was _clearly_ chosen based on what makes for nice, round numbers in binary, not based on reasonable population and cell-phone-use projections.

On the other hand, Urbit might never become popular enough for this sort of thing to really matter. We're at about 7 billion people now and the second derivative of the world population is negative, so it should level off at some point. If only 5% of 20 billion people care enough about this sort of thing to actually run a planet, then that'll be only 1 billion people, or a quarter of Urbit's 4-billion address space. 5% doesn't seem unreasonably low to me, either; app.net probably didn't even get 0.5% of Twitter's user count.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#103

Post by Chattered »

Munksgaard wrote: post #94
pcmonk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not all of the last 30 odd years of systems and programming research was pointless. Indeed, which is why it's a shame our primary server OSes (Unix-likes) can't incorporate them. Urbit can. As for what are the approaches different, there have been many words spilled over that, but here's a few examples to wit, most of which exist in one or two other systems, but aren't widely used: - All events are transactions, do…

I'm curious: What's the advantage of ditching Hindley-Milner?

I want to give urbit a try. I have a planet, but last time I fired it up the latency was so bad that I wasn't having fun. I'll try again sometime.

I can even get behind runes, and I set up abbreviations in Emacs to learn their names. And generally, I like the philosophy of language where short, one syllable, old/middle English words are used in place of the less familiar Latin/Greek derived words. I don't have a problem with revising our existing vocabulary in this way.

But the attitude to type theory strikes me as anti intellectual, precisely because we get nonsense claims about Hindley Milner requiring category theory. This sort of misinformation does no good for anyone.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#104

Post by ubernostrum »

adiabatty wrote: post #102
ubernostrum wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it hasn't already, the total number of humans with mobile phone service will exceed 2^32 within the next year or two, and phone service typically isn't given away free out of the goodness of the phone companies' hearts. So the mobile industry is already past or very soon to be past the 32-bit space with paying customers .

Yeah, 2^32 was _clearly_ chosen based on what makes for nice, round numbers in binary, not based on reasonable population and cell-phone-use projections. On the other hand, Urbit might never become popular enough for this sort of thing to really matter. We're at about 7 billion people now and the second derivative of the world population is negative, so it should level off at some point. If only 5% of 20 billion peop…

Urbit might never become popular enough for this sort of thing to really matter.

And decisions like this might be a part of why it never becomes popular. Elsewhere in the thread people are suggesting that, say, children don't need their own "planet" or whatever it's called, and that they could be one per family and still service the whole world. But that bakes in an awful lot of assumptions about culturally-specific ideas of family and stability of family units. Granted, I think those are culturally-specific ideas Moldbug would love to impose on the world if he could, but this is why people keep saying that even the technical decisions in Urbit are pushing specific political positions of his.

Also, at this point anyone who deliberately designs an address space to be too small to handle already-existing popular things is probably not making sound long-term technical decisions to begin with.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#105

Post by frou_dh »

archagon wrote: post #91

Huh, apparently the creator[1] of Urbit is one of the original folks behind the very gross dark enlightenment school of thought, and also associated with Peter Thiel through his startup. Well, that saps my interest in the project rather quickly. I'm sure there will be alternatives from people whose principles I'd actually be happy to support. I strongly believe in voting with my attention and/or money against ideals…

Is that your social grandstanding quota met for today, or are you in search of more opportunities?

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#106

Post by archagon »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #96
archagon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Which is why I can under no circumstance support Urbit, but would be happy to see a parallel project without the toxic founder. I hope most people feel their hearts constrict when they read up about what Curtis and his ilk believe[1] and don't immediately reach for the "PC culture" bugbear with comments like mine. To me, it's clear that zero dollars should be going towards the sustenance of such ideas. [1]:…

I've spent the last 15 minutes reading everything I can find about the subject, and honestly nothing seems very inflammatory. Have you read this? https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam... He seems like a reasonable, intelligent person, and people have gone out of their way to mischaracterize what he did say and to label him a racist. He was also writing under a pen name, and -- believe it or not…

Frankly, intelligence is not very high on my list of attributes I value in people. Plenty of terrible people are intelligent. And although I'm not deeply versed on the collective works of Yarvin/Moldbug, I know enough from osmosis, and also that, a) dark enlightenment type discussions that I've witnessed on Reddit et al. over the past few years — which have seemingly morphed into today's alt-right — are downright nauseating in their toxicity, and b) "roleplaying" and/or "it was just a joke" is one of the most disingenuous and overused excuses on the internet today. I equally loathe Thiel's ideas, and he appears to be closely tied to the project. There's really not much wiggle room here, even if the tech is great.

Tribalism. Is something like GNU equally tribalistic, then? Are we not permitted to shape the world by selectively choosing which personalities and projects will help us towards a better future? Tech by itself is worthless; it's the people who handle it and the social contexts in which it exists that make all the difference.

As for debate, there's the sea lion principle[1][2]. Unfortunately, with some genres of ideas, prim and proper debate is simply impossible. You're pitting reason against waves of the unreasonable. It is a war of attrition and you will lose.

It makes no difference to me whether any one particular person will "dig in to their beliefs and decide for [themselves]". I am personally not concerned with changing hearts and minds, but as a member of the community I do want to make my personal line in the sand clear and hope that others feel the same way. The coddling and back-patting that SV folks give these kinds of idealogues really upsets me.

[1]: http://wondermark.com/1k62/ [2]: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/trolls-will-always-win/

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#107

Post by [deleted] »

frou_dh wrote: post #105
archagon wrote: post #91

Huh, apparently the creator[1] of Urbit is one of the original folks behind the very gross dark enlightenment school of thought, and also associated with Peter Thiel through his startup. Well, that saps my interest in the project rather quickly. I'm sure there will be alternatives from people whose principles I'd actually be happy to support. I strongly believe in voting with my attention and/or money against ideals…

Is that your social grandstanding quota met for today, or are you in search of more opportunities?

[deleted]

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#108

Post by Nition »

ubernostrum wrote: post #104
adiabatty wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 2^32 was _clearly_ chosen based on what makes for nice, round numbers in binary, not based on reasonable population and cell-phone-use projections. On the other hand, Urbit might never become popular enough for this sort of thing to really matter. We're at about 7 billion people now and the second derivative of the world population is negative, so it should level off at some point. If only 5% of 20 billion peop…

Urbit might never become popular enough for this sort of thing to really matter. And decisions like this might be a part of why it never becomes popular. Elsewhere in the thread people are suggesting that, say, children don't need their own "planet" or whatever it's called, and that they could be one per family and still service the whole world. But that bakes in an awful lot of assumptions about culturally-specific…

Have they given a reason as to why it's not larger than 32-bit?

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#109

Post by archagon »

frou_dh wrote: post #105
archagon wrote: post #91

Huh, apparently the creator[1] of Urbit is one of the original folks behind the very gross dark enlightenment school of thought, and also associated with Peter Thiel through his startup. Well, that saps my interest in the project rather quickly. I'm sure there will be alternatives from people whose principles I'd actually be happy to support. I strongly believe in voting with my attention and/or money against ideals…

Is that your social grandstanding quota met for today, or are you in search of more opportunities?

Are you seriously suggesting that I posted the comment out of a desire to beat my chest, and not from sheer disgust at the ideas that Urbit's chief and backers espouse? Your words are cruel, petty, and unwarranted.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#110

Post by b1daly »

natural219 wrote: post #57

For those confused about Urbit's value proposition, I recommend Isaac Simpson's briefish explanation here. Funny enough, the original version was posted behind Medium's membership paywall, and the public link was just recently distributed: https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20s... My own perspective regarding these new decentralized platforms is that we're at the very tail end of low-hanging fru…

I'm not sure about Urbit as a solution, but they have identified a very real problem around the issues of identity and information that is connected to identity.

This essay sums it up nicely, so I won't repeat it. But I very much identify with, and am personally vexed by, the disorganized, Balkinized, online world we citizens of the "first world" are being forced to navigate.

One idea I don't grasp is how an Urbit server might integrate with a service like Facebook. Let's say you could set up your Urbit server to integrate your social news feeds from different services.

Would this violate the terms of service of a system like Facebook?

One could hypothetically create an application that at least would handle submission of personal content to any social network. And it could thereby keep a local copy of the content. But it would have to scrape the site, or use the provided API, to present any response to posts.

The linked article mentions that Facebook sued a company that tried to market an app that would present an integrated social news stream from FB and Twitter. I wonder how they would respond to an app that would let a user setup their own system to do the same thing?

I find the increasing power of the big tech companies disturbing, though I do appreciate the services they provide.

Post reply on HN