
Urbit user guide, hosted on Urbit - urbit
http://urbit.org/docs/user
======
e12e
From[1]: "Anyone can run the Urbit VM, of course. But the %ames network is
officially invitation-only. Not that we're antisocial -- just that we're under
construction."

So, is there support for running a separate p2p network? Or is the only option
to wait for urbit to stabilize?

[ed: Never mind, it's covered under "Launch Instructions": If you don't have
an invitation, pick a nickname for your comet, like mycomet. Urbit will
randomly generate a 128-bit plot]

[ed2: Hm, looks like the ability to spawn an alternate universe would make
playing with urbit more interesting, as I understand it - without an invite,
most of the best parts are inaccessible: "The fanciest way to control your
urbit is through Urbit itself: a moon, or satellite urbit. Sadly, only planets
can have moons."]

[1] [http://urbit.org/docs/user/intro](http://urbit.org/docs/user/intro)

~~~
chc4
It's entirely possible to spawn an alternate universe. In fact, it's
recommended to spin up an offline version of ~zod to develop on so you don't
end up crashing you actual planet. The `-F` flag makes it so your ships only
connect over localhost instead of looking up the top-level galaxies from
*.urbit.org

It's also possible to hard-fork the network. The galaxies' public key hash is
hard-coded in the source, so if you change it your ship will accept that the
new key is the actual galaxy. Of course, there is no guarentee that any OTHER
ship you talk to will agree with you...

~~~
e12e
Oh, thanks for the update. But this doesn't appear to be documented anywhere?
So far I've only been reading the documentation, not the source code --
perhaps it's more obvious from the source code that such functionality already
exists (eg: the -F flag)?

~~~
state
Our documentation is still very young, but it is mentioned in our contributing
guide:

[http://urbit.org/docs/dev/contributing](http://urbit.org/docs/dev/contributing)

There's much more to cover in terms of how the network works. It's coming! For
the time being some things are just folk knowledge. We're always happy to
answer questions though.

------
wyager
I am not convinced that urbit is not just some sort of ironic performance-art
criticism of computer science. Perhaps it would be elucidating if someone
would be so kind as to explain what the point is.

~~~
unimpressive
Urbit is a reinvention of the Old Internet with a lot of the principles from
ancient computer lore thrown in. (eg. Lisp Machines)

It reintroduces the social computing environment, emphasis on the word
_computing_. The Old Internet and timesharing systems like ITS and Unix were
based around this model:

[https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-
drinks-...](https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-
woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf)

So you have a standard identity layer, instead of a million little fiefdoms of
identity competing for sign ups. You have proper one-to-one connections
between individual users on the system, with modern cryptography inbetween.

You have a functional, very very small kernel out of which the rest of the
system is built. This kernel and core concept is a sort of distillation of the
ACID concept from database systems, so that your computer has transactions and
forgives mistakes.

It bakes the social layer and the community layer of the Internet into the
protocol. Urbit tries to be community-aware and politics-aware and handle this
gracefully. This sort of formal acknowledgement of necessary human factors in
technology is certainly in line with Curtis Yarvin's previously expressed
views on social organization. (And is mostly what people are talking about
when they say he 'baked neoreaction' into Urbit. This accusation strikes me as
intellectually dishonest on multiple levels, but I'd rather not digress on
it.)

If nothing else it's a very interesting piece of new research in computer
science, you should be excited about it.

EDIT: Curtis I know you're lurking, can I get an invite?

~~~
wyager
Why do you think it is a good idea to make things "social" at the OS level?
That seems like a very strange abstraction policy.

And how is this system "politics-aware"? I'm not even sure what that would
entail from what basically seems to amount to a collection of esolangs.

~~~
unimpressive
>Why do you think it is a good idea to make things "social" at the OS level?
That seems like a very strange abstraction policy.

Social means a bit more than just Facebook. It also means primitives for
things like collaborative editors and coworking spaces, video conferencing,
etc. IMO the ideal social system would look a lot like a mix between the old
timesharing systems, the early Internet and Douglas Engelbarts "Mother of All
Demos":
[https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCn...](https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect)

>And how is this system "politics-aware"? I'm not even sure what that would
entail from what basically seems to amount to a collection of esolangs.

Well it comes with the community. The way Urbit is structured your personal
cloud/ship/etc is intended to be linked up to a community of other users.
Politics are part of being social and part of communities. If you don't have a
structured way of handling it it'll happen regardless and can be made less
ugly with official support.

"The part that is stable we are going to predict, and the part that is
unstable we are going to control." \- John Von Neumann, 1948

------
networked
I was late last time, so this is my chance to ask again. Is the Urbit team
familiar with Ted Nelson's work? For some context, see my question from the
previous Urbit thread at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10286521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10286521).

~~~
yarvin9
How could anyone not be familiar with Ted Nelson's work? In the broad sense,
anyway.

I think the crucial layer that we need to implement... a lot of things... is a
global immutable (aka referentially transparent) namespace. Urbit is one
project building such a thing; another one is IPFS. (Urbit names are addressed
by identity; IPFS names are content-addressed; so they're complementary and
not competitive.)

One of the reasons the Web seems like such a poor imitation of Xanadu is that
it rests on this rickety foundation of a mutable binding from name to
resource. Once global immutable namespaces -- Urbit, IPFS, anything -- are
more widely deployed, I think Xanadu would be wise to use such a thing as a
layer.

But to paraphrase a famous saying: grant me the serenity to accept the code I
cannot rewrite, the courage to rewrite the code I can, and the wisdom to know
the difference :-)

~~~
e12e
> How could anyone not be familiar with Ted Nelson's work? In the broad sense,
> anyway.

Computer Science is not renowned for it's diligent study of history. And
that's just for those that actually study it in some form of institution, not
all the people who "practice" it without any formal training.

That said, the fact that Ted Nelson/the publisher have stubbornly refused to
just publish for example "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" free on the (inferior)
web, or at least as a DRMed ebook or merely a dead-tree re-print -- makes it
unnecessarily hard for people to read up on the concept(s).

~~~
teh_klev
"Computer Lib/Dream Machines" was in print once upon a time. I bought a copy
circa 1992, the copy I have is the revised edition which was published in
1987, these are photos of my copy (it's a wee bit aged looking now):

[http://imgur.com/a/ghtEb](http://imgur.com/a/ghtEb)

You can still find copies on Abe Books but they're not cheap.

[http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=091484549...](http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=0914845497&sts=t)

Glad I held on to this little bit of dead tree history even if it is the
revised version.

------
state
We also put up a new homepage that's hosted on Urbit:
[http://urbit.org/](http://urbit.org/).

------
to3m
Suggest adding a reminder that when saying "urbit" as "herb it", you need to
not say the "h". Unless you _are_ actually supposed to say the h, of course.
Perhaps it's the opposite of a silent letter.

~~~
yarvin9
Sorry, this is a ridiculous parochialism on our part. In America, which is
where English was invented and is also of course the biggest bestest country
in the world with giant atomic bombs and stuff, we don't say the "h."

But apparently there's some little islands or somewhere where they do. Will
fix.

~~~
Mithaldu
Honestly, i was a little sad to see you mention latin out of the corner of my
eye, which would mean you'd properly pronounce it oorbit, to then find out
you're being as english about it as the internet usually is.

------
Mithaldu
It would be nice if i could read the docs without needing JS.

It is nice to see sanely written documentation though. Cheers on improving
that. :)

Edit: Useful, thanks! vvvv

~~~
zerker2000
Or for that matter
[http://urbit.org/home/pub/docs/user](http://urbit.org/home/pub/docs/user),
which is a simple-html rendering of the OP link. Some of the pages require JS
to list children components, however.

~~~
TheDividualist
Thanks, because something is not working with the main site. You go to the
user introduction, click on the install manual or dojo or something, and
nothing happens. PaleMoon, latest.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
Isn't this one of those Mencius Moldbug things.

