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Urbit: a personal cloud computer

doc.urbit.org

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Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#241

Post by likeclockwork »

urbit wrote: post #232
likeclockwork wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Hoon code is very pretty but the English content of the names is extremely low. I mean.. reading a programming language I don't know, okay.. I don't expect to be able to understand much. But syntax and semantics aside the names are a language of their own with no attempt at referencing anything that might even be a little bit similar. It's as though every time you needed to name a concept you came up with a uniq…

Frankly, it always surprises me that people are willing to randomly run other peoples' C code! It's really quite plausible that I'm just out to steal your Bitcoin wallet. The above are all data structures - not even functions. So we say "a pimp" or "a marl" or whatever. For precision, we might say "slam a gate on a pimp," but everyone will understand you when you say "call a function on a pimp." Then, we refer to the…

What did you feel when you wrote "slam a gate on a pimp" just now?

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#242

Post by VexXtreme »

Padding wrote: post #195
VexXtreme wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean look, I understand what the philosophy is about, and I think it would never work in the real world. We've learned time and again that entrusting a lot of executive power to one person is a horrible idea - extremely exploitable and subject to corruption. Looks almost like a product of a deranged autistic mind. I have no interest in such asinine "philosophies".

> I have no interest in such asinine "philosophies". I bet no one does .. the real issue is how to decide on what is "asinine". After all, why are your views and beliefs any more valid than any one else's?

Normally I'd just tell you that I don't subscribe to moral and philosophical relativism, but for the sake of this discussion, I will oblige in explaining further.

First off, what is the definition of valid and correct? What is the metric that makes a certain belief more "valid" than some other belief? Well, over the millennia, we humans have arrived to certain definitions of what's good and what's bad in the context of preserving life, civilization, society and liberty. In that sense, things that harm those concepts can be defined as bad and those that further those goals are good. History has shown, time and again, that empowering one person with a lot of executive power inevitably leads to tyranny, oppression, genocide, slavery and other completely horrible things that we seem to have been able to get rid of (more or less).

So when someone rejects thousands of years of historical evidence as to what happens with such regimes and where they eventually lead, and proposes instating one again, I can only call it either asinine (if the author is well-intentioned) or evil (if they simply want power over others).

In more practical terms, liberty, self-determination and self-ownership are sacrosanct to a lot of people. In order to take those things away, you will need a lot of people, guns and body bags.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#243

Post by gojomo »

urbit wrote: post #216
gojomo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proje…

Again, the contributor list in github is WAY misleading, because it accidentally somehow pulled in all the contributors of the libraries we bundled (eg, libuv). We need to fix this, I think.

Thanks for the clarification; I hadn't noticed that caveat earlier.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#244

Post by gfodor »

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.

this is that point where i get frustrated i can't post animated head-explode.gif's in HN.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#245

Post by melloclello »

urbit wrote: post #200
Locke1689 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the given text your attempt at eliminating reserved keywords by using nonsense as keywords? Other languages have simply decided to use contextual keywords, which preserves familiarity and flexibility.

Good lord, no! Hoon has no reserved words at all. The nonsense words are all names. This is entirely a style choice. The actual name syntax is roughly Lisp's - for instance, (my-long-function arg1 arg2) does the same thing (roughly) in Hoon as in Lisp. In the "lapidary" Hoon in which most of the kernel is written, facets (variable names, roughly) are meaningless TLV strings, usually CVC (consonant-variable-consonant)…

Do you have any examples of what "non-lapidary" Hoon might look like?

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#246

Post by zerker2000 »

melloclello wrote: post #245
urbit wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord, no! Hoon has no reserved words at all. The nonsense words are all names. This is entirely a style choice. The actual name syntax is roughly Lisp's - for instance, (my-long-function arg1 arg2) does the same thing (roughly) in Hoon as in Lisp. In the "lapidary" Hoon in which most of the kernel is written, facets (variable names, roughly) are meaningless TLV strings, usually CVC (consonant-variable-consonant)…

Do you have any examples of what "non-lapidary" Hoon might look like?

I'm not sure much strictly non-lapidary hoon exists, but for samples marginally less lapidary than the kernel, I would like to point you to a simple algorithm translation at https://gist.github.com/MichaelBlume/17a227cc839f52f68c97, and the twitter library /main/lib/twitter/core.hook in the standard distribution.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#247

Post by jrochkind1 »

urbit wrote: post #174
lumpypua wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Stepping away from the Algol keyword tradition is obviously a risk. At the same time, after using a keyword-free syntax for a while, reserved words feel really weird. Someone just emailed and pointed out that he couldn't check out Urbit on Windows, because it has a file con.c. Oh, right, reserved filenames. How are reserved words different? The difference is - you're used to them. Also, perceived usability (while it…

> it also comes with a vocalization model that makes it easy to say out loud. > For instance, "=+", which more or less declares a variable, is "tislus." A lot of things like "=+" also start with "=", ie, "tis." You wind up learning about a hundred of these digraphs or "runes," which is a lot less than, say, Chinese.

Uh... you realize this isn't helping to convince anyone?

The project may well be brilliant rather than ridiculous, but if so I suspect you're gonna have to come up with a better pitch to get people interested enough to invest the time to see it.

Your made up language where every punctuation mark is a phoneme or something... it's not helping.

And I should hope any programming language would indeed be easier to learn than Chinese (or just about any natural language).

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#248

Post by bufo »

yebyen wrote: post #210
roboben wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you very much for your long explanation. I really do care because I really like the idea of this. (Even I don't understand everything for now) The question is: Why is my pier not trying to reach any of the available carriers then but only ~zod?

Your submarine "needs" ~zod to be found by anyone because: try=> ->- (sein ->- ... ~zod is your parent ship. Without him, you simply have no forwarding address. If your batz wizardry is sufficient and ~zod is not there (both of these are things that we are not counting on being true when you run Urbit for the first time) you will still get the same result in your terminal, you can reach out and contact other carriers…

What about something inspired by SFS (see section 2.4 and 3.7 in this IPFS paper)? http://static.benet.ai/t/ipfs.pdf

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#249

Post by yebyen »

urbit wrote: post #219
jacquesm wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it will succeed but that it won't be the only thing that will succeed and that some will take inspiration from it to build something even better. Challenging the status quo as such is a useful property and showing that you can in fact reboot is useful as well. That said, the more I read about it (a couple of hours so far) the more I'm thinking it will not succeed because of some of the weirder philosophical de…

I prefer to think of it as: you can be "free as in beer" or "free as in speech," but not both. Sith Lord Zuck has set you free as in beer, but not in speech. Urbit will set you free as in speech, but not as in beer. The difference is simply that while there are a limited number of Urbit identities (or at least memorable identities, ie, 32-bit "destroyers") in the world, and therefore they can't possibly be made free…

The random guy from Rochester here (~del)

I will hock destroyers, although I don't know if I can sell them, for reasons I can't go into. Also offering Yachts, to anyone who thinks that a destroyer is just too militaristic.

I can also confirm, don't know Curtis from Adam.

Re: Urbit: a personal cloud computer

#250

Post by Estragon »

urbit wrote: post #167
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?

Yes - although actually achieving this result in practice (and efficiently) takes a lot of doing right.

Thanks. How close are you to achieving that?
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