This project is reinventing a bunch of stuff that's completely orthogonal to the goal of a decentralized app platform. They've written an OS, a filesystem, a networking layer -- all in a completely new language that looks incomprehensible (https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/clay.hoon).
I doubt very much this project will get much traction due to the enormous conceptual overhead of working within its ecosystem. There's a huge learning curve approaching something like this from the Unix/C ecosystem, and I don't think it's merited.
“[I]n many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”
― Mencius Moldbug (a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin author of Urbit)
The language designer must be a fan of writing assembly language, combined with some LISPy syntax, or something... that's the closest analogy I can think of from looking at it. Maybe it requires some IDE type of editor to make it comprehensible.
From the authors:
Its syntax is entirely novel and initially quite frightening.
[...]
If I can summarize Hoon's goal, it's to be the C of functional
programming.
[...]
On the other hand, the apparent complexity of Hoon is very high.
When you open a Hoon file, you are confronted with an enormous
avalanche of barely structured line noise. Again this reminds us
of C, which makes no attempt at the kind of abstract prettiness
we expect from a Pascal or a Haskell. Learning Hoon involves
learning nearly 100 ASCII digraph "runes."
Is this a harsh learning curve? Of course it is. On the other hand,
it is not a mathematical task, but a mechanical one. It is trivial
compared to the task of learning the Chinese alphabet, memorizing
the Qu'ran, etc, all rote mental tasks routinely performed by normal
human 11-year-olds.
My current pet theory is that they obfuscated Urbit so much because otherwise, the artificial scarcity of address space would be unenforceable. As it is, you have to make a huge investment in learning their tech to understand everything, and if you wanted to launch a competing network, no one would help you establish your network effect. Everyone else who has gone through the same elaborate hazing ritual has developed enough camaraderie to keep the defection rate low. The profitable strategy is to cooperate, buy a star, and build software people will want.
I have some skepticism, but if Urbit and its peer-to-peer network are actually useful things, the incentive system for building useful apps for it exists. It might be strong enough.
What did they sell? Apparently, some (all?) of their potential user ID space.
Urbit, under all their jargon, is a base for a federated social network. Sort of like Diaspora. (Right now, they say they have chat, so it's sort of like IRC.) They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam. If you can freely create user IDs, it's hard to stop spammers. But if user IDs cost money, then spam blocking costs spammers money (their purchased online identities lose value) and spamming is no longer cost-effective.
So their solution is to create a market in user ID space. It's not clear if this will work out, but it's something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you're not at the mercy of some service provider, and can freely move from one service provider to another without their permission. (I think this is right. Not entirely sure.)
It's not clear if this will work in the social space. They have the underlying machinery, but nobody has built the Facebook or WhatsApp or Dropbox killer on top of it yet, so it's useless to end users at this stage. The concepts are interesting; it's good to see people trying original ideas.
If someone builds an easy to use social application on this and gets some services to host it (like Wordpress hosting), this could get actual users. Right now, it's a developer toolkit.
urbit dev here: we completely agree that we need to have useful apps on top of it. We have an alpha for super simple wordpress-like hosting (in fact, the urbit.org site uses it!). All you have to do is drop a few md files into a tree and you're ready to go. See http://urbit.org/docs/using/web/
Joey Krug, founder of Augur, had a great post on how he could see Urbit as being a great compliment to the blockchain[0]:
"If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else.
To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead].
If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems.
Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!"
> So their solution is to create a market in user ID space.
How is this supposed to work when some advertisers are willing to spend more on a single ad impression for certain keywords (e.x. "mesothelioma") than the average monthly wage for people in some parts of the world?
Can someone give a synopsis of Urbit? Every time Urbit comes up, I skim their website but get pretty lost in marketing-speak. I see a lot of "control your data", "digital freedom", and "general purpose computing" without any short, to the point explanation of what the heck it's all about.
It has the cult-like approach of Xanadu - use new terminology, tie it to an economic model, and re-invent everything. Also, there seems to be a cult leader.
Jargon: noun (data), nock (interpreter), mint (compiler), span (type), twig (expression), gate (function), mold (constructor), core (object), mark (protocol). It's Newspeak for programmers.
The overall concept seems to be a federated social system, like Diaspora. Everybody has a online presence which they own. But you can take your ball and go home, moving your online presence somewhere else, and it still gets found by others. Somehow. (That's a hard problem at scale.)
There's a claim that nobody can create vast numbers of identities for spam purposes because there are only 2^32 possible human identities. (That number should have been at least as big as the population of the planet. 2^36, maybe.) Apparently you have to buy address space, which is a profit center for somebody.
There's a download, which gets you their "OS" (which runs on top of another OS), an interpreter for their Hoon language and access to their chat environment.
Not sure what to think of this, but someone put in a lot of work.
I find the original blog posts [1] a really interesting read. Nowadays Urbit is indeed full of buzzwords, “your personal cloud computer” and the like. But initially, Urbit was this [2]:
> Urbit is a new programming and execution environment designed from scratch. Any resemblance to existing languages or operating systems is coincidental, cosmetic, or inevitable.
It was based on this idea: suppose that a different civilization (Martians specifically) had invented computing long before humans. Then by now they would have perfected it. What would their system look like? Urbit is an attempt to rethink computing without the bias of human research and our current intuition. At the heart of Urbit is Nock, a “functional assembly language”. Zero is intentionally used to denote “true” to defy programmer intuition.
The gist is it's some sort of distributed datastore network vaguely similar to IPFS [1], Freenet [2], but instead operates at a different level of abstraction from files. It ships with several other components, like an OS and a programming language, to flesh out that ecosystem.
My understanding is that the founder has some elitist ideas about separating and isolating the supposedly smarter people from everyone else. The opaqueness and complexity is a feature designed to keep out the riff raff.
It's a functional (as in functional programming — immutable data, no side effects and so on) server/OS and (peer-to-peer, I think?) networking protocol, written in a dialect of APL[1] I call EOPL[0]. So far I believe there isn't any software on it besides a chat app, but the rather ambitious goal appears to be to eventually replace Unix and the TCP/IP stack.
> fwiw, the clearest explanation of the point of urbit is this 5-minute talk by yarvin from 2013. (how he will actually get from point a to point asdfghjkl666 is another matter of course.) https://youtu.be/6S8JFoT6BEM
Though I don't have a whole lot of confidence in this project...I do appreciate the Borges reference in the company's name. Truly a wonderful story, and highly relevant to the project they are attempting to undertake.
I'll never forget the first time I read the opening few sentences. I don't think i've ever had a literary experience like it before or since:
> I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an
encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country
house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously
called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a
literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902.
The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner
with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast
polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose
narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various
contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to
perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the
corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is
inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something
monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the
heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are
abominable, because they increase the number of men.
Their take on namespace management is interesting. The trouble with most kinds of online namespace (IP addresses, domain names) is that somebody has control over it, and they can jack prices up. You don't really own it; you're just renting.
[What follows is how I think Urbit works. This may be incorrect.]
Urbit seems to actually sell user IDs. Once you own one, some blockchain like system registers this, and you own them forever (unless and until you lose your private key, as with Bitcoin wallets). So Urbit doesn't have the problem of domain registrars raising renewal prices.
Your user ID leads to an online presence on some hosting service, but the system enforces number portability - you can move to another service without the consent of the leaving service. So having an online presence will be price competitive.
Somehow, the hosting services which host user IDs have a distributed directory system so that they can find any given user ID. Unclear how this works, and if it both scales and is secure against attacks.
If Urbit can actually do all that, it's useful as a distributed directory management system. This is useful. Once you have that, you can do chat (this is apparently supported now) and that can be extended to voice and video calls. All without central control.
So, is this a Skype killer? You have to buy a user ID, and then you have to buy hosting. That's going to cost a few dollars a month. It's nice that it's federated and presumably ad-free, but it competes with everybody else's ad-supported chat program. It's hard to compete with free.
"The project is composed of several parts: a virtual machine (dubbed "Nock"), an operating system ("Arvo"), a programming language ("Hoon") and a peer-to-peer network ("Ames")."
You can introduce any one of those and possibly survive. Doing all four at once? You're doomed. Sorry.
I thought this was going to be real estate and bitcoin merged together. Would be interesting to see how those two concepts might merge. Maybe the ability to buy land using bitcoin, and instead of holding a deed/title issued by the state, it remains with a holding company and you prove ownership with a digital private key. Useful for people who want to be anonymous but still sort-of-directly own real estate.
I'm curious to know how the Urbit team went about choosing the stars to distribute, it seems the 1020 stars amount to almost the address space of 4 galaxies. Have 4 galaxies been picked or are said stars distributed across various galaxies. If the galaxies have been hand picked, could we know their names?
Since we have buyers in the order they came in, I think it'd be fun to distribute stars sequentially across sequential galaxies. But we really aren't sure yet.
I might be misunderstanding Urbit (quite easy it seems), but this idea of selling off what is essentially "land" seems to go against some of the ideas that it pushes - i.e. the democratisation of the web. Also, they appear(?) to have sold off rather large chunks/the address space seems small, is it going to need a "v6" to bring it out of beta like the internet did?
... I don't know the Urbit team all that well, but Yarvin is in particular publicly anti-democratisation of anything. So I'm assuming this is in fact according to plan.
Democratization is I think a poor metaphor; a better one would be emancipation.
Right now, if you use Facebook, Facebook owns you. If you don't use Facebook but all your friends do, Facebook still owns you, but you're worthless to it, and it punishes you for failing to generate value by making you as close to socially invisible as it can - which is pretty damn close. (Ask me how I know!) None of this is deliberate, in the sense of an evil conspiracy cooked up by cackling villains. But all of it is true.
The purpose of Urbit is to make it possible for people to own themselves. Doing so is not free of charge. (Should it be? Are you worth nothing?) But it is, or will be once (if) it's possible at all, as cheap as can be made practical - which is very cheap indeed, or free, if you don't mind opting out of guaranteed and durable identity. The tradeoff is that people who don't opt out may not be as quick to trust people who do. But that's a choice you get to make, instead of, as now, a choice that Facebook makes for you. I can't speak for anyone else (especially Tlön), but I've had enough of Facebook making choices
for me. Have you?
No, and they're kind of discouraging it. "We're resistant to any technical measure that would effectively "securitize" or "monetize" Urbit ships — either rendering them fungible and/or trivially transferable, or defining them as fractional claims against some shared asset."
On a more practical level, since most of the address space is unallocated it seems simpler/cheaper to buy fresh space from Tlon than secondhand space. Like how nobody was buying IP addresses when ARIN was giving them out for free.
I get their goal of users having control over their data but limiting the identities artificially sounds pointless to me. Spam accounts are part of the internet and it's time we acknowledge and consider them as part of the overall user base. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding their reason for limiting the identities.
Urbit being already able to host website, I presume it's possible for me to get a web domain name that will somehow direct to urbit.org and resolve through the planet name to my Urbit?
[+] [-] jobeirne|9 years ago|reply
I doubt very much this project will get much traction due to the enormous conceptual overhead of working within its ecosystem. There's a huge learning curve approaching something like this from the Unix/C ecosystem, and I don't think it's merited.
[+] [-] ModernMech|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|9 years ago|reply
From the authors:
From the languages even more confusing documentation: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/0-int...[+] [-] natrius|9 years ago|reply
I have some skepticism, but if Urbit and its peer-to-peer network are actually useful things, the incentive system for building useful apps for it exists. It might be strong enough.
[+] [-] seibelj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eridius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imaginenore|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
Urbit, under all their jargon, is a base for a federated social network. Sort of like Diaspora. (Right now, they say they have chat, so it's sort of like IRC.) They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam. If you can freely create user IDs, it's hard to stop spammers. But if user IDs cost money, then spam blocking costs spammers money (their purchased online identities lose value) and spamming is no longer cost-effective.
So their solution is to create a market in user ID space. It's not clear if this will work out, but it's something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you're not at the mercy of some service provider, and can freely move from one service provider to another without their permission. (I think this is right. Not entirely sure.)
It's not clear if this will work in the social space. They have the underlying machinery, but nobody has built the Facebook or WhatsApp or Dropbox killer on top of it yet, so it's useless to end users at this stage. The concepts are interesting; it's good to see people trying original ideas.
If someone builds an easy to use social application on this and gets some services to host it (like Wordpress hosting), this could get actual users. Right now, it's a developer toolkit.
[+] [-] davidgerard|9 years ago|reply
(Urbit is explicitly intended to instantiate Yarvin's political views, per the 2013 version of the security chapter: http://archive.is/UK8So )
[+] [-] lisper|9 years ago|reply
1.6% of their address space. For $200k. And they sold it all. That puts an implicit current valuation on the entire Urbit address space of $17M.
[+] [-] hault|9 years ago|reply
Joey Krug, founder of Augur, had a great post on how he could see Urbit as being a great compliment to the blockchain[0]:
"If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else.
To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead].
If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems. Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!"
And finally, another idea: https://urbit.org/posts/objections/#killer
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721
[+] [-] TylerE|9 years ago|reply
So, until the chinese mining cartels or coredevs decide you don't?
[+] [-] tlrobinson|9 years ago|reply
How is this supposed to work when some advertisers are willing to spend more on a single ad impression for certain keywords (e.x. "mesothelioma") than the average monthly wage for people in some parts of the world?
[+] [-] nikolay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wille92|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kefka|9 years ago|reply
It has the cult-like approach of Xanadu - use new terminology, tie it to an economic model, and re-invent everything. Also, there seems to be a cult leader.
Jargon: noun (data), nock (interpreter), mint (compiler), span (type), twig (expression), gate (function), mold (constructor), core (object), mark (protocol). It's Newspeak for programmers.
The overall concept seems to be a federated social system, like Diaspora. Everybody has a online presence which they own. But you can take your ball and go home, moving your online presence somewhere else, and it still gets found by others. Somehow. (That's a hard problem at scale.)
There's a claim that nobody can create vast numbers of identities for spam purposes because there are only 2^32 possible human identities. (That number should have been at least as big as the population of the planet. 2^36, maybe.) Apparently you have to buy address space, which is a profit center for somebody.
There's a download, which gets you their "OS" (which runs on top of another OS), an interpreter for their Hoon language and access to their chat environment.
Not sure what to think of this, but someone put in a lot of work.
[+] [-] Ruud-v-A|9 years ago|reply
> Urbit is a new programming and execution environment designed from scratch. Any resemblance to existing languages or operating systems is coincidental, cosmetic, or inevitable.
It was based on this idea: suppose that a different civilization (Martians specifically) had invented computing long before humans. Then by now they would have perfected it. What would their system look like? Urbit is an attempt to rethink computing without the bias of human research and our current intuition. At the heart of Urbit is Nock, a “functional assembly language”. Zero is intentionally used to denote “true” to defy programmer intuition.
[1]: https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr... [2]: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/0-int...
[+] [-] Avshalom|9 years ago|reply
This is all apparently very novel.
[+] [-] niftich|9 years ago|reply
But joking aside, about a month ago this well-articulated writeup was posted on their site: https://urbit.org/posts/overview/
There was an HN thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721
The gist is it's some sort of distributed datastore network vaguely similar to IPFS [1], Freenet [2], but instead operates at a different level of abstraction from files. It ships with several other components, like an OS and a programming language, to flesh out that ecosystem.
[1] https://ipfs.io/#why [2] https://freenetproject.org/
[+] [-] guelo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smitherfield|9 years ago|reply
[1] /s
[0] Extra-Obfuscated Perl-Lisp
[+] [-] sremani|9 years ago|reply
https://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans...
[+] [-] cronjobber|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ForHackernews|9 years ago|reply
http://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/141832812938/argumate-all...
[+] [-] 1918398112|9 years ago|reply
The real reason is probably to generate some buzz for Bitcoin, because some of the valley nouveau riche like to gamble and have long positions.
[+] [-] primodemus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darawk|9 years ago|reply
http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf
I'll never forget the first time I read the opening few sentences. I don't think i've ever had a literary experience like it before or since:
> I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
[What follows is how I think Urbit works. This may be incorrect.]
Urbit seems to actually sell user IDs. Once you own one, some blockchain like system registers this, and you own them forever (unless and until you lose your private key, as with Bitcoin wallets). So Urbit doesn't have the problem of domain registrars raising renewal prices.
Your user ID leads to an online presence on some hosting service, but the system enforces number portability - you can move to another service without the consent of the leaving service. So having an online presence will be price competitive.
Somehow, the hosting services which host user IDs have a distributed directory system so that they can find any given user ID. Unclear how this works, and if it both scales and is secure against attacks.
If Urbit can actually do all that, it's useful as a distributed directory management system. This is useful. Once you have that, you can do chat (this is apparently supported now) and that can be extended to voice and video calls. All without central control.
So, is this a Skype killer? You have to buy a user ID, and then you have to buy hosting. That's going to cost a few dollars a month. It's nice that it's federated and presumably ad-free, but it competes with everybody else's ad-supported chat program. It's hard to compete with free.
[+] [-] astrodust|9 years ago|reply
You can introduce any one of those and possibly survive. Doing all four at once? You're doomed. Sorry.
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holychiz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgrenier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] state|9 years ago|reply
Since we have buyers in the order they came in, I think it'd be fun to distribute stars sequentially across sequential galaxies. But we really aren't sure yet.
[+] [-] danpalmer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Avshalom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haldean|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwanem|9 years ago|reply
Right now, if you use Facebook, Facebook owns you. If you don't use Facebook but all your friends do, Facebook still owns you, but you're worthless to it, and it punishes you for failing to generate value by making you as close to socially invisible as it can - which is pretty damn close. (Ask me how I know!) None of this is deliberate, in the sense of an evil conspiracy cooked up by cackling villains. But all of it is true.
The purpose of Urbit is to make it possible for people to own themselves. Doing so is not free of charge. (Should it be? Are you worth nothing?) But it is, or will be once (if) it's possible at all, as cheap as can be made practical - which is very cheap indeed, or free, if you don't mind opting out of guaranteed and durable identity. The tradeoff is that people who don't opt out may not be as quick to trust people who do. But that's a choice you get to make, instead of, as now, a choice that Facebook makes for you. I can't speak for anyone else (especially Tlön), but I've had enough of Facebook making choices for me. Have you?
[+] [-] 4ad|9 years ago|reply
Urbit is not democratic, it's feudal.
The namespace is scarce by design.
[+] [-] smellf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristjansson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwanem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] theseatoms|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|9 years ago|reply
On a more practical level, since most of the address space is unallocated it seems simpler/cheaper to buy fresh space from Tlon than secondhand space. Like how nobody was buying IP addresses when ARIN was giving them out for free.
[+] [-] blntechie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JeremyBanks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgrenier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgerard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwb|9 years ago|reply