
Urbit - tomrod
https://urbit.org/
======
ALittleLight
I have seen Urbit a couple times but never really understood it. From the
"Understanding Urbit" page -

>Imagine that you can login from anywhere with one name and password.

>And when you do, your entire OS appears.

>Inside is your whole digital life. All of your communities, conversations,
and connections. All of your biometric data and devices. Your entire personal
archive in one place that’s secure, private, and designed to last forever.

What does this mean? My whole digital life? It sounds like I'm signing in to a
VPS from which I access all of my digital life. Is that it? Do I get a VPS?

That seems kind of like what I'm getting. The first line on urbit.org is
"Urbit is your last computer" \- but I don't see how I'm buying a computer,
for a one time fee, for life, without paying a ton of money.

I see this website [1] has an Urbit "Planet" available for .04 ETH, or about 6
USD. Could I get a life long VPS for 6 dollars? If so, I'd definitely be up
for it. If not, what, exactly am I getting for 6 dollars?

The page "Understanding Urbit" also says that Urbit OS "can never show you
ads". What does that even mean? It can't run Chrome? The OS can't show ads?
Any image or text can be an ad. I don't get it.

What I would like to see is a simple explanation of what Urbit is. Maybe a
video, where someone logs in to Urbit, and interacts with it in someway, doing
something that can't easily be done in some other way. I'd like to know the
difference between planets, stars, and galaxies.

There has to be a better way to explain this.

1 -
[https://opensea.io/assets/0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871...](https://opensea.io/assets/0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d/4738720)

~~~
nootropicat
The part you buy is dns that runs on ethereum (iirc), but with artificial
scarcity because they want to make money. This part is completely pointless,
because the actual system could work as well on ens directly, or even dns.

The actual urbit is like docker with standard API for communication between
all apps on different containers, but it runs on a lisp-machine like
architecture, except instead of lisp there's a new esoteric language called
Hoon.

If not for the scammy wealth extraction attempt with the name system, I would
consider it to be in the same general category as TempleOS - a form of art.

~~~
matildepark
That's a bit cynical, I think. The address space has had a few "official"
rationales because it serves a handful of duties at the same time; again,
explaining a system is different than explaining a product, but pitching a
system as a product is difficult. You often end up framing the system-as-
product a specific way each time.

> Urbit is a friendly network: a network on which you can assume that a
> stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct consequence of
> scarce, individually owned identities. We're not changing human nature, just
> creating the right economic incentives.

> Most forms of network abuse are "Sybil attacks": they rely on an infinite
> supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work. Spam is a
> business; if the cost of a new planet exceeds the amount of money you can
> make by spamming from that planet until its reputation is trashed, there
> will be no spam. [1]

While it's true an intent was selling the parts of the address space Tlon has
to fund its development, its business model for consumers going forward isn't
really to sell you planets; it's more about bootstrapping the project and
offering hosting and support.

For investors, purchasing address space (i.e. a galaxy or star within Tlon's
ownership) is a way of investing in an asset that could be a source of income
while also having some influence over how the network changes in the future,
in the way a stockholder would a company.

Essentially the address space is an attempt to create and maintain ideal
incentives for the ICANN-esque players (galaxies), down to the ISP-esque
players (stars) and the everyday user (planets), and their devices or
additional users (moons) in a way that sustains the entire network.

[1] [https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-
space/](https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/)

~~~
lidHanteyk
These sorts of optimistic beliefs that all people have some inherent good
inside them, and that good-faith attempts will rule the day, never seem to
survive any _actual_ economic incentives.

Some lessons from neoliberalism are worth considering here. Sometimes people
_want_ to be fed trashy content. In those situations, planets offering trash
will be popular enough to pay for the cost of (renting) the planet. (And make
no mistake, rent and landlords are an inherent part of any real-estate
offering!) So there will be spam, but it will look and taste like the
offerings of Disney and Vicom, of Hasbro and Mattel, of Unilever and GSK.

Some lessons from other distributed systems are also worth considering.
Technically, messages are always delivered by peers, despite the fact that the
messages may have been composed by faraway unknown senders. This leads to
_local_ topological reasoning, and webs of trust based on peer-to-peer
acquaintance. This can offer better performance and resiliency against attacks
than Urbit's top-down neofeudal hierarchy of reputations.

I don't really _want_ to support Tlon. If this is truly federated, then there
ought not need be any corporate control over the system. History has shown
that a few extremely ethical and competent hackers are more valuable in terms
of software quality and usability than any sort of corporate planning.

I _do_ appreciate that, by explicitly embracing blockchains, Urbit has
demystified one part of its design: What makes Urbit property valuable? Only
the hidden cryptographic keys at the base of Urbit's own signing system give
any scarcity, and thus any value, to otherwise-uninteresting bitstrings. In
other words, it's as valuable as ZCash or Bitcoin or any other digital gold;
it's a Satoshi scheme.

u'i n'ae lojbo .i ku'i ka'eku
[https://zod.that.world/giveaway/](https://zod.that.world/giveaway/)

------
crazygringo
For all the other commenters who couldn't understand what the heck this is
(like myself)... Wikipedia at least gives a fairly straightforward explanation
[1]:

> _Urbit is a decentralized personal server platform. The platform seeks to
> deconstruct the client-server model in favour of a federated network of
> personal servers in a peer-to-peer network with a consistent digital
> identity._

> _The Urbit software stack consists of a set of programming languages (
> "Hoon," a high-level functional programming language, and "Nock," its low-
> level compiled language); a single-function operating system built on those
> languages ("Arvo"); a personal address space, built on the Ethereum
> blockchain, for each instance of the operating system to participate in a
> decentralized network ("Azimuth"); and the decentralized network itself, an
> encrypted, peer-to-peer protocol running on top of the User Datagram
> Protocol._

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit)

~~~
um_ya
Worst naming convention I've ever seen. Did they just draw from a hat of cooky
names? What ever happened to the concept of choosing names relevant to the
thing you're describing? I start to understand what's going on, then they
throw words like "Hoon" and "Arvo" at me, and now I'm confused again. I still
don't understand what it does, but now I don't care.

~~~
huevo5050
From [https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-
farewell/](https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/) :

"Urbit's internal opacity persists for two reasons, one good and one bad. The
bad reason is just laziness. The good reason is justified fear of premature
explanation, which like premature optimization ruins the annealing process.

When you don't know exactly what you're doing, preserve as much ambiguity as
possible. For example, a name that means something is a commitment to one
specific explanation; a name that means nothing is no commitment at all. A
cryptic name is productive procrastination; it lets the hard problem of naming
get solved later, and hence better."

~~~
unlinked_dll
Anyone else ever work on a project without a firm definition?

Anyone ever finish those projects?

------
iudqnolq
So if I buy my "last computer" from Urbit a "senate" made up of people who
paid them money early on can do whatever they want to my data --- ahem
"upgrade the logic" \--- without my having any say? I'm not sure if I want
some ChromeOS-analogue with automatic updates from the Reddit/4Chan --- ahem
early cryptocurrency adopter --- hive mind.

> We want everyone to own their own identity and wallet. One way to do this
> would be to build a MEGACORP or a Centralized Naming Authority of Urbit. But
> we prefer decentralized, collectively owned systems. So that’s what we
> built. Let’s look briefly at the basic mechanics of Urbit ID.

> Urbit IDs are distributed by a sponsorship tree. At the top of the tree are
> 2^8 (256) galaxies. Each galaxy issues 2^8 stars, making a total of 2^16
> (65K). Stars then each can issue 2^16 planets, making for 2^32 (~4B). As you
> might expect, each planet issues 2^32 moons.

> Second, Urbit IDs are distributed by a sponsorship tree. Each sponsor issues
> a fixed number of addresses. Since there are lots of sponsors, there are
> lots of ways to get an Urbit ID — not just one central authority.

> Urbit IDs need a sponsor even after they’re issued, but you can always
> change sponsors and sponsors can always reject children. This means bad
> actors can be banned and abusive sponsors can be ignored. We think this
> strikes a nice balance between accountability and freedom.

> Finally, galaxies (the top of the sponsorship tree) form a senate that can
> upgrade the logic of the Urbit ID system by majority vote. We think Urbit ID
> should last for quite a long time, but if it ever needs to be changed, the
> galaxies can facilitate upgrades. Code may be law, but ultimately we
> acknowledge that human judgment can’t be factored out.

~~~
miss_haru
I'm not sure how you got your first assumption from the rest of your
quotations.

"[the Urbit] "senate" can do whatever they want to my data"

No. The urbit senate can do nothing with your data.

Your server holds your data. It is not distributed on the block chain. It is
not mirrored by your peers. No one has any access to your data, except where
you give them permission.

Your final quote refers to the power the senate of galaxies has to manage the
address space. (currently limited to 4b personal nodes. If scarcity becomes
problem, galaxies can vote to increase availability.)

~~~
iudqnolq
You're right. I misinterpreted. People can buy power, but not of the more
serious kind I thought initially. Thanks for the correction.

~~~
miss_haru
My pleasure.

fwiw, I don't blame you for your misunderstanding.

The project is quite young and not quite stable/mature enough for the faint of
heart.

Having said that, the water's fine for swimming. :)

------
my_urbit_alt
Idle question for whatever tlon'ers are reading this: have you considered
putting a bitcoin in an urbit and challenging the world to get it out, as a
publicity stunt slash bug bounty?

To me, the most interesting thing about Urbit is the explicit design goal of
(eventually) becoming so simple and straightforward that it needs no further
updates, as described in Toward a Frozen Operating System[0].

So, urbit is supposed to be a safe place to store my precious files, right?
I'm supposed to be able to put my blogs and my bitcoins in there, leave it
running, and come back in five years or fifty, and they'll still be there,
right? So, why not put that to a real test - publish the identity of a running
urbit with a prize on its filesystem, and see what happens? If it gets
cracked, you get valuable feedback about your product for a bargain price
(albeit with egg on your face). If not, you get some hard evidence that urbit
does what it claims to on the side of the tin.

0: [https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-
system/](https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system/)

~~~
tern
Love this idea, but as things stand, it very well might turn out to be
trivial. Urbit is theoretically much more easily secured than today's popular
systems, but not yet hardened.

------
cryptozeus
All I see is ocean and stone images. Please if you are reading this, hire a
marketing firm. I am sure you have worked hard on this but I can't understand
what your product is. How can that be that you want to be the last computer
but most can't even understand first thing about it.

~~~
chippy
> most can't even understand it

That is the point, they want it like that!

The _crazy_ idea is that only those who have devoted significant time can
understand it and should use it (and I suspect that it plays into some kind of
non egalitarian idea about how society should be structured with only elite
brainy people on top).

~~~
matildepark
It's not deliberate, just a bit of an ongoing challenge. We've historically
been very engineering-focused while honing the system; poking our heads out
into the world, we now have to describe it.

The problem, I think, is that there's a lot of inference gaps to clear in
terms of how people understand computers and how they understand the internet
that we simply dispose of. A lot of the project is an attempt to re-architect
the entire stack to resist the flaws of the modern internet — everything we
take for granted as 'the way it is,' from the annoyances all the way to the
downright evil.

High level, start with the Wikipedia entry. [1] Then peek through some higher-
level, overview docs. [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit)

[2]
[https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/arvo/](https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/arvo/)

~~~
cryptozeus
Instead of us doing the work of going through Wikipedia links and your docs,
you can explain this by one simple diagram or video. Unless your goal is to be
mysterious, I cannot understand how can a company go through all this trouble
of creating something, building a website and can’t get the message across
even to the HN community.

~~~
matildepark
I agree. I think this feedback is super valuable.

------
icebraining
This post is still the best thing I read about Urbit:
[https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-
vul...](https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-why-
urbit-matters/)

(note: I haven't actually _that_ much on Urbit)

~~~
tptacek
I don’t know whether this matters, and I guess it probably doesn’t, but he was
kicked off the Popehat blog not long after writing this, for virulent (and,
since then, increasingly theatrical) racism.

~~~
Thorrez
Was the racism on Popehat or elsewhere?

The departure announcement post[1] seems at least somewhat amicable, since it
contains an advertisement for Clark's new website.

[1] [https://www.popehat.com/2015/12/30/i-cant-see-what-my-
future...](https://www.popehat.com/2015/12/30/i-cant-see-what-my-future-has-
in-store-maybe-i-will-be-no-more-but-i-move-forth-with-the-strength-of-a-
condor-the-courage-of-a-warrior/)

~~~
user982
"I became increasingly unhappy that Clark was writing for the blog in 2015.
That unhappiness was a result of a number of factors, including the content he
wrote here, which I felt reflected badly on the blog and on me, both in terms
of quality and content. I was concerned, for instance, that if my clients
encountered the blog they would question whether I was hostile to them based
upon their ethnicity or religion. I became embarrassed he was a co-blogger."

[https://www.popehat.com/2017/05/24/about-clark-being-
purged-...](https://www.popehat.com/2017/05/24/about-clark-being-purged-from-
popehat/)

The links to Clark's tweets in this post don't work because he since got
kicked off of Twitter too.

------
dang
Many previous threads—good luck:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=urbit.org%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story)

~~~
tomrod
Thanks Dang! I've become interested in alternative forms of Internet due to
the recent .Org/ICANN news. Is it okay that I post these (also posted gnunet)?
I'm learning a lot from people's comments.

~~~
dang
I don't see a problem. If things get repetitive people will start complaining,
but in the meantime these posts have been upvoted out of interest.

------
pjior
There are users in this thread that aren't fully disclosing that they work for
Urbit, despite commenting about the software from a third-party perspective.

Just a heads up.

~~~
MoronInAHurry
What's the point of making an accusation like this without naming the users?

------
iudqnolq
> In Urbit OS 1, a community shares a set of modules. (Think of a module like
> an app without the data lock-in.) One community may choose to chat and share
> a forum. Another may choose to chat and watch the crypto markets. And yet
> another may chat, share links, ebooks, and a to-do list. Anyone can develop
> a module, and anyone can create a community.

Sounds awesome, _in theory_. Website had nothing I could find describing what
has been built, instead of what theoretically could be built by other people
on their platform.

To paraphrase Steve Yegge's platform rant, Facebook had an awesome platform,
but that wasn't worth shit without the killer app they had from day: one
Facebook the website.

If I signed up for Urbit today, would I get the "ability to create"
applications or would I get applications? This is supposed to replace my
computer. Can it run Firefox? Microsoft Word?

~~~
belisarius222
Today, Urbit has chat, blogging, a basic weather app, and a lot of programming
facilities. Eventually it should be able to run a document editor, and you can
do things similar to internet browsing even on today's Urbit.

Urbit is a long-term project starting from the foundations and working up the
stack. It'll be stable soon, but it probably won't be ready to run something
as heavy as a modern web browser for a while. That being said, it does work,
and it's fun to play with as-is.

~~~
iudqnolq
Thanks for the in-depth response.

------
KMuncie
Got an invite recently, got it setup, but have had endless networking issues.
Can't join any of the chat groups they advertise in the documentation.

The sheer amount of jargon you have to learn to do literally anything is
insane. Nothing is intuitive, especially for someone used to a unix command
line. I get upset every time I try and learn about it. All the videos about in
on YouTube are 3+ years old.

------
ShamelessC
I found the descriptions to be far too abstract and mysterious. I guess it
gives the project a sort of cool hacker vibe, but I really just want a few
screenshots of the interface of the actual OS. As it stands, I have no clue
whether it's an actual operating system like Windows/Linux/MacOS or if it just
vaguely fits the definition of an OS.

I've seen in other comments here that it's both an "Overlay OS" and a VM that
you can supposedly run in the cloud or on your laptop. First, what exactly is
an "overlay OS"? Am I understanding correctly that this would be running "on
top of" an existing OS? Maybe something like the "Seamless mode" in virtual
box? Second, how is it being virtualized?

Ultimately though, it looks cool, but I think just putting some screenshots
front and center instead of abstract graphics explaining metaphors about the
design would go a long way.

~~~
SrslyJosh
The project is exclusionary by design--instead of using an existing
programming language or even keywords/terminology from an existing human
language, the creator decided to make everything up, right down to new names
for existing symbols. F'r example:

gar >

hax #

hep -

kel {

sel [

ser ]

sig ~

soq '

Have to agree about the screenshots--if there's something useful here, why not
show it off?

~~~
api
It may be marketing genius if the goal is to appeal to the type of nerd who
loves obscure systems and occult jargon... the kind that geeks out on the
complexities of D&D while chatting you up about the rococo details of Eastern
Orthodox dietary restrictions and how they may have impacted renaissance
fashion. Everything about Urbit seems designed to be candy to these types.

~~~
ShamelessC
I'll admit, it did appeal to me in that way. But the other part of me just
felt like it was snake oil. Being intentionally vague in order to not reveal
some crucial flaw.

I've learned a bit more about it from these comments and I don't think it's
snake oil, but it is 100% not what I was expecting from the language used in
the copy.

So yeah, seems like a good project that foregoes familiarity in order to
create something cool albeit niche. But anyone who isn't on board with the
vague descriptions will definitely feel mislead.

~~~
tern
In fact, most of the naming in Urbit is deliberately meaningless and bizarre
in order to prevent the project from congealing too soon. The intention is to
keep things provisional and annoying enough that future programmers won't
forget to revise past temporary decisions.

------
farrelmahaztra
I heard of Urbit a while back and still cannot for the life of me figure out
what it does or what it's for.

The comments here are helping me figure out how it works, but it still leaves
me with the question of what can I do with it that I can't accomplish with my
good ol' OS or internet or (whatever the closest conventional analogue for
Urbit is).

~~~
matildepark
It's because it's a system trying to pitch itself as a product. The system
being a top to bottom rewrite of the stack in such a way so as to sidestep the
client/server relationship entirely. A lot of services rely upon positioning
themselves as the server, as the big computer you have timeshared access to,
and they monetise your usage. For things like photo storage, or basic
communication, or permissioned access to your files, this is pointless. Any
computer could do it, but the internet is itself based upon asking a server
for something and getting it. And running a server sucks.

Any other peer to peer solution is partial, and therefore not able to compete
with the internet as is. Urbit basically plans around an identity system that
prevents spam and abuse; a hierarchical packet routing structure for those
identities that doubles as a de facto governance model (due to having a vested
interest in the network, the higher up you go); a kernel designed to freeze,
and its entire OS on top a series of event logs that mark down computations
and new states; a functional language for this "internet where every computer
is a database", and the encrypted networking protocol that uses UDP while
still ensuring packets always find you.

So if you wanted to, say, have a group of people set as a peer list that
others can subscribe to or join, or build or use applications that lets that
peer list join chats or see a set of files based upon some arbitrary marker
(like giving you $5/mo?) ... you don't need a million services to spread the
load, one task per service, each person joining each service. You can just use
your own computer. It's a personal server platform for a peer to peer
internet. It's an internet designed to resist bad actors, and to resist AOL,
to resist Facebook and Google — an internet that facilitates and preserves a
Usenet-esque model of small communities doing stuff together on their
computers.

(Obvious disclosure that I work on the project, again.)

~~~
sillysaurusx
What you just wrote needs to be at the top of any marketing related to Urbit.
It’s the first thing I’ve read that made me excited about the project.

It also sounds similar to PGP’s web of trust model, which failed horribly. But
you mention that you can get paid for renting out your resources. If you can
somehow make that dream into a reality, then yes, it could be a big deal.
Right now everyone tries to solve this partially: you can get paid to rent out
your GPU (vast.ai) or your disk space (filecoin) but you seem to imply a more
unified model, where payments can be continuous and effortless based on
arbitrary metrics.

The whole “planet” and “galaxy” stuff is just confusing. Sure, metaphors are
useful, but a basic explanation of the problem statement and the proposed
solution would be better. Your explanation here has been the first time that
someone put Urbit into terms that I could concretely go “okay, I see the
point.”

------
meter
Didn’t the founder of Urbit (Curtis Yarvin) leave the project last year? My
impression of Urbit has always been that Curtis was fundamental to the vision
of the project. Does anyone know how the project has changed since then?

~~~
mushufasa
yes, wikipedia says he left.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit)

seems like the whole project has been mired in controversy because of the alt-
right / anti-egalitarian political views of the founder
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin)

if urbit got $1.2m seed from thiel in 2013 (listed on wikipedia), they should
be out of that money by now even if they had stretched it.

~~~
ttul
Yarvin sounds like a loon.

~~~
Apocryphon
Or, at least, a hoon.

~~~
blotter_paper
Nock off the name calling!

------
cookiecaper
The goal is noble, but Urbit is destined to become a case study in the dangers
of isolation and obstinacy.

This project has gone so deep into its own inner sanctum that they've lost
tabs on wider reality. While the result may have glimmers of technical
excellence for brave souls to excavate some day, the impact of the
juxtaposition between latent expertise and overwhelming derangement is enough
to scare away (literally _scare away_ ) basically everyone.

This style of issuing a large corpus of dicta that comprise "the One True Way"
never works, not even in actual bona fide religion. Systems and protocols that
last are built iteratively by collaborators across institutions, each piece
finding immediate utility as it's integrated and deployed.

The big question around Urbit is not whether it will succeed -- rather, it's
whether Yarvin will appreciate that he's rapidly disproved the nascent brand
of proto-monarchist philosophy Urbit was meant to realize. [0]

See also: Pontormo at San Lorenzo [1], Xanadu [2]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment)

[1] [https://blog.garrytan.com/always-be-shipping-a-lesson-
from-j...](https://blog.garrytan.com/always-be-shipping-a-lesson-from-jacopo-
da-po)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

~~~
nabla9
>the One True Way" never works,

It works for Apple.

~~~
cookiecaper
Apple doesn't have a One True Way -- they have a relatively-simple and
relatively-uniform product line that represents their interpretation of human-
computer interaction. They focused on building systems that everyone could use
and love immediately, and it turns out that a lot of people appreciate that
emphatic commitment to the human over the machine.

Jobs insisted on elegance and simplicity throughout, creating products that
were instantly loved and admired, products that people would be proud to own
and display. Technobabble was worthless to him and he did everything possible
to keep it away from his customers. He expected his engineers to deliver
something decent and real and trusted them to figure out the details, focusing
exclusively on the vision of shipping usable, beautiful products that provided
immediate value to every user, regardless of technical background.

Steve Jobs's devotion to elegance resulted in products so appealing and
downright _seductive_ that they fundamentally changed the public's
expectations from computers and consumer electronics generally -- not just
once (Mac), not just twice (iPod), but _at least_ three times (iPhone;
honorable mention: NeXT/OS X).

We lost him too soon.

Meanwhile, in Yarvin via Urbit, we are offered a ground-floor rate of only
$512 per placard in The One True E-fief. Urbit is here to show us that they
know best. That we'd be better off if we'd just raise our eyes out of the mud
long enough to recognize our obvious inferiority, take our oaths of fealty,
pay our taxes, and some day, when They've decided the time is Right, They'll
bestow upon us The One True Network.

There could not be a starker contrast.

~~~
asjw
We haven't lost him out of misfortune, as many other things he made horribly
wrong and nobody talks about anymore, because, you know, survival bias, he
also thought cancer could be cured with diets.

He was man that even his daughter despise for being inhuman with his own flesh
and blood, for denying she was her child for years.

Having interacted with Apple users since 1984, the only common trait they have
is exactly believing there is only one true way, not that their way is better
thanks to the sum of well though technical factors, but because it's a faith,
that, as any other faith, is impenetrable to critics and doubts.

The fact that the failure of Next is still told as a great success speaks
volumes.

Another famous example is the Apple III, costed a fortune to build, sold
poorly and the people who worked at it remember that

"The Apple III was designed by a committee headed by Steve Jobs, who would
demand one thing one day then the opposite the next."

Jobs built a cult, not a technical revolution.

~~~
robenkleene
> The fact that the failure of Next is still told as a great success speaks
> volumes.

NeXT resulted in the web browser and the iPhone.

------
scarejunba
This project is described in the most abstruse form that it can be. I, too,
did not comprehend it until I went there and tried it out (and got the T shirt
;D)

It’s ultimately a hosted OS (it resides on top of Linux) with an immutable
file system with the additional purpose that you build applications
distributed-first in a manner where clients store their own data. There’s also
other stuff in there obviously with Hoon and Nock and all that.

The Ethereum stuff came after so obviously it’s not crucial to the idea. The
planets and all that are just names so you can communicate. The names are
anonymous but persistent, sort of like if Neal Stephenson’s PURDAH was just a
name.

------
Rainymood
Is this some kind of over-the-top joke that I'm not in on? I've browsed and
read but honestly still can't understand what Urbit is. When I saw the picture
of the stone with the thing on top I thought I was finally "in" on the joke,
but they seem to continue on.

~~~
antielectronite
Yeah I'm seeing all kinds of weird analogies/ abstractions that try to explain
what this thing is but not a single use-case or an example of somebody getting
utility out of it. Is this a parody?

~~~
miss_haru
Use case: this conversation, except between our own computers.

Typically, we 'log in' to 'our accounts' on some company's server and use
whatever fuctions the company grants us. They are not really our accounts in
any meaningful way.

If one were to be banned by hackernew(or twitter), she would have no access to
her data, social connections, et c.

In the urbit world, any data you have authored and any messages you have
received are YOURS. They are forever available on your own server.

It is simply not possible for 3rd parties to ban/delete/control your
conversation, when the model is peer to peer.

~~~
kart23
Ok, so what's stopping one party from changing the data? How would one party
prove they have the right data? Is this like blockchain messaging?

~~~
miss_haru
No, this is not blockchain messaging.

"How would one party prove they have the right data?" Before two urbit servers
communicate, they exchange and verify public signing keys. Then, all messages
are signed with verified public key.

If you mean what's stopping one party from changing their local copy of your
data.... Nothing that I know of.

But they're the only ones who will see their local data.

------
trianglem
These guys keep coming back every few months/year and it worries me. These
people are trying to build something esoteric that is trying to tap into the
draw of ritualistic enigmas all with the aim of forwarding their racist views
on society. I really wish they would go away.

------
jstewartmobile
Everyone's going off on Yarvin's vanity politics, but has anyone read the BS
on this urbit site? Reads more like an advert for skin cream than the " _next
big thing_ " in computing.

A small number of contributors, re-inventing the wheel, in systems where
giants have struggled, and fell short of the mark. Hard pass.

[https://github.com/urbit/urbit/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/graphs/contributors)

------
pcr910303
I also had a hard time understanding this project, but my understanding is
that this is basically a binary that runs on a UNIX machine.

It transparently uses UNIX APIs and implements the stack from bottom to top:
it’s an OS in the sense that the web browser is called the OS.

This ‘OS’, or binary interacts with other computers and create an
decentralized web.

The developers documentation & how to run part is clearer about what this
is... but urbit really should document what it ‘really’ is...

------
pickdenis
Does anyone know how Urbit's solving the problem of being incredibly slow?
It's running on a naively simple virtual machine and they claim that higher
level operations can be abstracted and implemented in native code (called jets
last time I heard) to make the overall execution time reasonable.

Or, alternatively: Does anyone even actually use urbit? I tried once and it
was so god damn slow it made me sad. It's so cool.

~~~
matildepark
(Obvious disclosure that I work on the project.) Slow, like, literally the VM
is slow? There's infrastructure work being done to rewrite the VM at the
moment, though there's been some major work in the last six months on this
front as well that personally have felt like night and day. Slow, like, the
network is slow? There's an update going out shortly with a rewrite for Ames
that makes it a bit easier to work on. There's a good blog post [1] our CTO
put out on how the infrastructure cost this year has been predominantly on
planning a very resilient stack, rewriting a lot of archaic code to be easier
to modify by more than just a handful of kernel engineers, more pliant. I feel
pretty confident about the performance in future.

[1]: [https://urbit.org/blog/stable-arvo/](https://urbit.org/blog/stable-
arvo/)

~~~
all2
I'm curious: why reinvent the VM "wheel"? Why is LLVM inadequate? Or any other
VM?

More specifically, what functionality does Urbit require that makes a bespoke
VM necessary?

~~~
dpc_pw
Many reasons. The VM is minimal, has a precise mathematical spec and is
tailored to be a base for a purely-functional OS. The details of the VM are
usable in the higher layer. It's more like a Lisp-machine, than LLVM.

~~~
all2
So... WASM, then?

------
sdan
Actually got a invite to Urbit... but haven't got the time to
understand/install it.

Is it an OS? Will it affect any dev work I'm doing now? I understand that this
is a huge and large project and support the fundamental ideas behind it, but
maybe a super-distilled version of what exactly it is to the layman would be a
bit better (in addition to what's already there).

~~~
bronzejaguar
It’s an overlay OS, a VM made to allow anyone to run their own server easily

~~~
weare138
Well that begs the obvious question, what the hell is an "overlay OS"? It's
not an industry standard term and doesn't explain anything.

~~~
belisarius222
Overlay OS might not be a great term.

Urbit is a program you can run on Linux or MacOS intended to provide a
complete personal computing experience on its own. It runs as a virtual
machine for now, although it could run as a unikernel on bare metal (good
project for a contributor who's interested!).

This VM acts like an operating system, in the sense that it loads and runs
other applications within itself, and in the sense that it presents an
application switcher and overall system management tools to the user.

This VM is designed from scratch to be as simple as possible, based on the
thesis that the reason everyone has thought of a personal server but nobody
runs one is that it's too complicated to do your own sysadmin.

Why is it complicated to do your own sysadmin? Because Linux is 15 million
lines of code, and then there are tons of layers on top of that. What
percentage of programmers even know how the internet works? A fair number of
programmers have a decent sense for some corner of the modern computing world,
but even seasoned professionals don't usually know the full structure of the
digital world. How does BGP interact with the IP protocol? How do you make
sure fsync() actually did what you wanted it to do? How does Linux
overcommit_memory work? etc.

Urbit is weird, but that's mostly because it's a parallel universe of
computing, not because it's inherently crazier than the alternative. We all
have Stockholm Syndrome about 'ls -alH', and don't tell me 'grep' is an
intuitive name.

In fact, there are very few basic building blocks in Urbit: binary trees of
integers, the idea of a persistent event-log-based computer, and cryptographic
identities. Pretty much everything is constructed out of those components.

And it's designed for a modern world with billions of users who might not all
be completely trustworthy, so whole categories of complexity go away -- such
as NATs.

So there's no standard industry term for describing this system, because there
are no direct analogs or competitors.

~~~
weare138
> _Urbit is a program_

So what exactly makes it an OS? JVM is a virtual machine but we don't consider
it an OS. So why not just call Urbit a virtual machine?

> _What percentage of programmers even know how the internet works? A fair
> number of programmers have a decent sense for some corner of the modern
> computing world, but even seasoned professionals don 't usually know the
> full structure of the digital world. How does BGP interact with the IP
> protocol? How do you make sure fsync() actually did what you wanted it to
> do? How does Linux overcommit_memory work? etc._

Seeing how Urbit runs on OS's such as Linux, uses TCP/IP for networking over
the Internet, which itself relies on all those fun WAN protocols like BGP to
make it work, it's not really solving those problems, just hiding it beneath
another layer of complexity and terminology.

------
woah
For context, here is the same thread from 6 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320)

------
ajflores1604
I've never come across this project before, but I've been playing around with
a similar idea...

Essentially I want to scrape data from my own accounts and anything I'm
interested in following, on a home server and push that data to a sort of
"dashboard" interface. To watch either on my phone or laptop or, in theory,
anywhere.

I've always hated current phone interface paradigm. I see a grid of app icons
like having a wall full of TV's, one for each channel. I don't care about
apps, I care about intent. If I'm hungry I want my server to tell me what
places I already like are nearby, whats in my budget by pulling data from bank
account, and whats within my daily macros by hooking into MyFitnessPal. Or if
I want to catch up on news, have my server scrape full articles from RSS feed
links... Default to an auto summary view, and highlight terms using named
entity recognition to make things even more quickly skimmable. If I want to
catch up on sports, pull in football scores, my fantasy points, top sports
news, and my sports groupchat in a single view. If the stock market drops over
1% in an hour, take over my homescreen with data on how my current positions
are doing, a muted Livestream of Bloomberg, and top financial headlines that
are currently trending. Not the most flushed out examples but one gets the
idea. Server side processing of all the data I generate or consume, and
present it in custom views based on intent. I feel like a lot of the
smartphone anxiety ppl have comes down to fear of missing out. You look at
your grid off apps, each one a portal into its own separate world and you
don't know what's going on in each one. What you're missing out in each world,
so you go into each one trying to stay up to date with each. Vs having a
system that pulls all that data in and you can trust will catch you up on
anything important that happened on your own time.

Breaking the current app paradigm would also make foldable devices a much more
practical class of device. Instead of Samsungs sad multitasking demo of trying
to stuff 3 app ui's on a galaxy fold, one could have a much more dynamic
single view if the data from the apps if the data from them could cross talk.

Right now I'm playing on an old desktop computer (hard drive died so this
whole thing is on pause rn), but it would be cool to get something like this
running on raspberry pis using elixir (just started learning, my current
scraping experience is with Python and zmq but elixir seems like a much
cleaner and resilient base to manage scraping and organizing data from various
sources in a more hands off way). Power users could easily scale by adding
more pis or even a specialized processor if you're doing something more unique
like parsing video.

If every user could have their own cluster that pulls in their own data, it
would be much easier to take control and sell that data, instead of current
system where it gets gathered regardless. Or not sell it if that was their
preference.

For instance, it would be cool if my "cluster" knew my route to work, and that
there was a certain delay, and a more optimal route was available.... But
beyond that, know what coffee places are on my way, and in an ad exchange kind
of way, allow these locations to have agents that bid on my business by
offering dynamic discounts. Like if my reroute traffic path brings me closer
to their location, and I'm running late, maybe they offer less of a discount
because they provide value thru more convenience. Maybe another location sees
they're now more out of the way and decides to bid lower, or maybe they see
that they're located next to my favorite donut place, and the automated agents
of those two business negotiate something between each other in order to
provide me with some sort of combo deal. >> All this happening behind the
scenes and I see a unified view of my new map route and a pop-up pins on the
map of the offers if I want to accept them.

Lots of other interesting scenarios could be thought up, especially with smart
homes. But in order to make that leap, I feel like the first step is to
aggregate all your data into one place in order to take back some control of
it and open up new possibilities of it's use by combining it together. Maybe
I'm misunderstanding what Urbit is, but it sounds like a cloud hosted version
of this core first step.

~~~
mendelmaleh
Sounds like you want to self-host google xD

~~~
erikpukinskis
In what sense has Google implemented the above?

------
_of
A completely bizarre project. Not very far from ”TempleOS”. Urbit is the
outcome when spending too much time alone.

------
dgellow
About the author, Curtis Yarvin:

> Curtis Guy Yarvin (born June 25, 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius
> Moldbug, is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer
> scientist.[1][6] He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker
> Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas
> behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated
> with the alt-right.[7]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin)

~~~
mellosouls
Wikipedia has an unfortunate habit of labelling anything as "far right" that
is described as such by left wing or gullible journalists in left of centre
mainstream publications.

Mencius Moldbug _may_ be far right, but he may alternatively just be a thinker
not afraid to challenge liberal received wisdom.

It's ok to disagree and fervently oppose but it's unfortunate when we descend
into soundbite mud-slinging in service of that opposition.

~~~
sterlind
I'm on the left. I think Urbit is quite neat as a technology. Yarvin has very
unusual political views, so I'm not sure where to put them, or if you'd
consider this "sound-bite mudslinging" (if you do, please suggest a more
palatable way of providing evidence:)

He seems pro-monarchy:

 _Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in
which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never
happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer,
more civilized, and more pleasant.[29]_

but anti-democracy:

 _When we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me
as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and
focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism:

_ He seems to regard political power as property, which makes a sort of sense
with his monarchism: Political power is a property right, however you slice
it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or "human" right. And it
has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.[40]

Here is yet another (idea for good government): restrict voting to homeowners.
Note that this was widely practiced in Anglo-American history, and for very
good reason.[41]*

(He also favors property ownership as a requirement for voting, which aligns
with Urbit's governance but seems... dated, politically.)

And he seems to view slavery as a potentially healthy relationship:

 _Modern Americans have enormous difficulty in grasping hierarchical social
structures. We grew up steeped in "applied Christianity" pretty much the way
the Hitler Youth grew up steeped in Hitler. The suggesting that slavery could
ever be or have been, as Aristotle suggests, natural and healthy, is like
suggesting to the Hitler Youth that it might be cool to make some Jewish
friends… We think of the master-slave relationship as usually sick and
twisted, and invariably adversarial. Parent-child relationships can be all
three. But they are not normally so. If history (not to mention evolutionary
biology) proves anything, it proves that humans fit into dominance-submission
structures almost as easily as they fit into the nuclear family_

It's hard to classify Yarvin anywhere politically, but given some very extreme
views on slavery, democracy and dictatorship, I think "far right" is as
accurate a label as any. His views are expounded upon in the Dark
Enlightenment article in the summary.

 _(Sources are all from Wikiquotes)_

~~~
jevgeni
His views are all just hand wavey fascism. At no point does he make a
tractable argument.

As a counterpoint: take all countries today that have functioning (i.e. non-
figurehead) monarchies and compare them with democratic, capitalist countries.
You can use prosperity, GDP per capita, average literacy - whatever as a
metric and monarchies will fail.

~~~
mellosouls
Untrue, or at least questionable claim. Monarchies are economically better-
performing.

Eg. [https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/monarchies-
good-...](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/monarchies-good-
economies/)

~~~
jevgeni
They demonstrably do not. Look at any competitiveness index, or standard of
living index, or anything measurable.

The article you’ve linked is banal. It talks about how monarchies are good at
protecting established property rights. Duuuuuh. That’s their entire purpose.

Thinking that stability of property rights is equal to economic performance is
moronic. So either you think that I am one or _you_ are one.

Here’s a quick test you can do: look around you and count how many items
around you are produced in the Kingdom of Lesotho? Or Kuwait? Or Madagascar?
Or Bhutan?

Such post-industrial powerhouses of economy those must be.

~~~
mellosouls
I don't need to look around, a quick Google on monarchies and GDP before your
initial post would have given you the information you needed to not post it.

Eg the first link:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/23/shut-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/23/shut-
up-royal-baby-haters-monarchy-is-awesome/)

Btw your jeering tone and determination to classify either of us as morons is
unhelpful.

~~~
jevgeni
You peddling horsesh*t is unhelpful. Your fluid goal posts don’t help either.

Obviously any U.K. style “monarchies” and republics with a figurehead. Your
best bet therefore would be Middle East monarchies, which are obviously a
product of the extraction industry. So even that is not an argument.

Remember how China realized that the communist system isn’t sustainable and
introduced elements of monarchy? No? Me neither, because they went with (very
light) democratization.

If you want to talk facts, here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\)_per_capita)

But my favorite part is when I suggest you to look for immediate evidence in
the real world and you’re like: “No, here’s a cherry picked article”. This
disregard for facts is just plain offensive.

~~~
mellosouls
How on earth is the first link in a Google search "cherry picked"?

At least half of those states in _your own link_ are monarchies!

Placing quotes around the _archetypal_ monarchy seems like an act of last
resort tbh - as do the repeated insults; so I'll consider this particular
micro-debate conceded to me.

~~~
jevgeni
Mate, what good is a monarchy if the monarch doesn't have any power? It's just
a monarchy in name. Following your logic, North Korea is a democracy, because
it has the word "democratic" in its official name. This is a crap level of
discourse and hence you are getting all the smacktalk. Don't think that you
are entitled to people letting your stupid arguments slide. This is not the
USSR.

This is why you are cherry picking. The original comment that you are replying
to specified "actual monarchies, not figurehead states":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674965)

 __What 's so difficult to understand? __Does UK fall under that category? No.
Material power is with the parliament and PM. You are disproving your own
point, when you bring them in as an argument!

I even gave you a hint. Saudi Arabia might be a stronger argument. Monarchy
has power and they have economical clout. I mean, their GDP is only slightly
higher than Walmart's annual revenue, but hey - at least you would've had a
fighting chance.

------
beders
Somebody's gonna run the servers and it won't be paid for by funny money.

~~~
belisarius222
Yes, that's an important point. You'll have a service contract with the
infrastructure node responsible for routing packets to you -- you'll pay them
to route to you. There are two layers of infrastructure nodes to facilitate
scaling and hopefully maintain a healthy competitive market for routing
services.

------
kemonocode
I'm still unsure what this _actually_ brings to the table and what necessity
it actually tries to solve. Bitcoin actually tries to solve the issue of
trustless, decentralized money (Whether or not it actually does that is a
topic in itself, but it tries), then you've got endeavors like Ethereum but
for distributed computing (In fact, as far as I can tell, some of Urbit's
aspects are built on top of Ethereum), Namecoin for domain names, and so on.

It makes for interesting computing outsider art, I suppose, but being compared
to TempleOS might not be too desirable.

~~~
bianothername
What it brings to the table:

\- peer-to-peer networking for every node on the network

\- secure networking as the default

\- an identity system built in to the network layer (no more usernames and
passwords)

\- A functional programming language that doubles as a serialization layer (no
more JSON/XML impedance mismatch)

\- A simplification of the local software stack OS (<1% of the LOC of the
linux kernel, though there is still functionality missing)

\- Deterministic computing

The urbit developers imagine that in the future, things like twitter or hacker
news will be peer-to-peer apps rather than giant mainframe computers
controlled by a single entity

------
trianglem
So this is the 3rd time these guys are coming back here and because of the
tepid reception they’ve received in the past it looks like they bought shills
along this time.

------
paggle
The concept of signing into untrusted hardware to get access to your entire
digital life was interesting in around ~2004, when people had enough stuff
online to be useful but laptops were heavy and didn’t have network access.
With a modern phone, and an LG gram laptop for desktop tasks, there’s no
reason to expose yourself to the massive security pwnage of signing in on
hardware you don’t own.

------
IronBacon
I don't recall to have heard about it before and to be honest the far right
and racists remarks posted by others about the project founder make me
uncomfortable, but the last few lines where they introduce the _" Dojo"_ with
a REPL and a Lisp like syntax, that was interesting...

~~~
matildepark
Check it. [1]

A lot of people work at Tlon with a lot of different perspectives on the
world. It's not a vehicle for one guy. This is sadly a frequently asked
question in itself. [2]

[1]:
[https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/setup/](https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/setup/)

[2]: [https://urbit.org/faq/#who-is-curtis](https://urbit.org/faq/#who-is-
curtis)

------
CodiePetersen
I think the novelty terminology makes this more confusing than it needs to be.
If the hippy "its a movement not a trend" speak was taken out of the
descriptions I'd probably be able to understand what this is supposed to be.

------
badrabbit
The first step to a decentralized network is establishment of identity and
authentication protocols and network anyone can use with ease. Everything else
should be built upon that foundation.

------
davidy123
I think people would be better off tracking Solid. It's not moving super fast,
but has good momentum, and is based on web and decentralized standards
including Linked Data.

------
ZguideZ
I find it completely interesting that I came across Urbit while doing a random
search about alternative operating systems - and then I come back to HN and
find a raging discussion going on. I tend to think that such 'coincidences'
are not coincidence at all. I wonder what is going on in the world right now
that is driving new interest in Urbit? I've also seen quite a few references
to Industrial Society and its Future of late - What else is the online
intelligence driving people towards?

------
macawfish
Is this some kind of crypto cult?

~~~
bjoli
It has been labeled crypto-fascism before (but not crypto as in
cryptocurrency).

------
jevgeni
Bad sign if you have to claim your product is not vaporware on your promo page

------
buboard
question: can we have such a network with conventional internet , if we all
run a number of web services on our home routers?

------
zamadatix
tl;dr for those not wanting to dissect abstract art this afternoon: peer to
peer network via blockchain focused on social communication.

~~~
pickdenis
It seems that you need to do more dissecting yourself. It would be unjust to
summarize urbit like that. It really is as they say, an "Operating Function."

~~~
zamadatix
"Operating function" is just more abstract woo. My description says what it
was made to do not how it is supposed to make you feel or the fancy terms
people have come up with to describe how it goes about making you feel that
way.

Is it not "peer to peer network via blockchain focused on social
communication."? If so feel free to explain why and what the website means
when it talked about each of those things. If it's more then please talk about
how it's more but please stick to why that means it's not the above and is
instead designed to do something else (and what that something else is).

Sidenote: is there an internet law coined describing the inverse relationship
between the size of the main landing page image and the actual amount of
content in the landing page?

~~~
belisarius222
Urbit only uses a blockchain as a ledger of who owns which addresses within
the network and root DNS for peer discovery.

The OS itself runs as a VM on your machine (either a Linux or MacOS host, for
now), and that is the only place your data lives.

Urbit does implement a peer-to-peer encrypted, authenticated network among
these VMs. It's not solely socially focused, though.

It's also intended to be your personal archive for things like your personal
financial data, pictures, nusic, notes, and private documents like tax records
and medical histories.

And not only an archive, but also your personal "agent", in the sense that
it's a program that's on all the time, on the network on your behalf, to serve
your blog, for example.

You can access Urbit through the command-line or a webpage that it serves for
you.

The state of an Urbit VM is a folder on the host OS. You can zip it up, move
it to another computer, and restart it there seamlessly.

None of these features by themselves is particularly interesting. What's
unique about Urbit is that all of this is accomplished using a very small set
of primitives, making it easier to write applications that don't go through
some huge company that tracks your every move and has a conflict of interest
between serving you and serving advertisers.

If you're interested in learning more details of how it works, there is
actually quite a bit of technical documentation at
[https://urbit.org/docs](https://urbit.org/docs)

We're obviously still trying to figure out how to describe this thing. It
doesn't occupy a slot that people already have in their minds for a piece of
software, except maybe "personal server", but even that is somewhat vague.

Because there's a different world of computing inside Urbit, with its own
libraries, apps, languages, etc., it can take a while to wrap your head
around.

What's funny about this is that the Urbit world is orders of magnitude simpler
than a standard Unix-based stack. We've just spent so much time learning
things like DNS A records vs. CNAMEs and what 'xzvf' do for tar, that a
parallel universe of these constructs seems bewildering again.

~~~
p1esk
The best way to describe it is to tell us why we would want to use it. Also,
don't say "it's a computer". It's not. A computer is what I'm typing this on -
a piece of hardware.

So - why would I want to use Urbit? Which problems does it solve? How will it
make my life easier? Does it have any features that will make me say "wow,
this is so cool!"

~~~
belisarius222
I do work for Tlon, if that wasn't obvious. I also find the "computer"
terminology misleading, so I'm with you on that.

Why would you want to use Urbit? The same reasons you want to use the modern
consumer internet, which Urbit intends to pave over and replace with something
better.

How is Urbit better? Because you'll have all your data and programs on one
machine, which you control, using an open source operating system. You can
build a peer-to-peer twitter or facebook clone on Urbit in a day or two,
because the OS handles more of the distributed systems and identity problems
that have killed most peer-to-peer projects in the past.

It's still in alpha, so it's a bit slow and buggy, and a lot more work has
been put into kernelspace than userspace so far. What will make you way "wow
this is cool" varies widely, but some good candidates are: \- an internet
experience not predicated on surveillance capitalism \- no ads \- control over
your UI \- a minimal aesthetic \- interesting people to talk to on the network
\- lack of the twitter "thunderdome" feel \- if you like to write programs,
the Urbit system is fascinating to work with; I've learned a lot more CS from
working on it

The other thing that's cool is that this new world isn't yet fully settled.
You can write a little talkbot or something and still have a big effect on the
culture.

~~~
p1esk
_you 'll have all your data and programs on one machine_

Which machine? The laptop I'm typing this on? It's too small and too
unreliable to hold all my data. Some cloud server? Who owns it? How would this
be different from storing my data on Google or Apple servers? Some network of
machines BitTorrent style? Something else entirely?

What do you mean "no ads"? Internet is funded by ads. Do I pay some monthly
fee? How much? How reliable will it be? Why should I trust you with my data?
If no fees and no ads, how will this be funded?

------
blotter_paper
Oh dear. Let me start by saying that I find Urbit interesting in it's own
right. I'm generally interested in distributed systems, and Urbit's Nock and
Hoon are weird languages that I'm interested in despite not coming close to
groking. That said, we should also remember where it came from (without
throwing the baby -- if there is a baby -- out with the bath water). Curtis
Yarvin previously wrote a blog called Unqualified Reservations under the
penname Mencius Moldbug. _Ur_ bit takes it's name from this blog. He voiced a
number of regressive views there, including very racist and anti-democratic
ones. Some choice quotes:

> No one who condones Che, Stalin, Mao, or any other leftist murderer, has any
> right to ask anyone else to dissociate himself from a rightist who didn't
> even make triple digits. Anders Behring Breivik is a terrorist. Nelson
> Mandela is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is the most revered living political
> figure on our beautiful blue planet… If you ask me to condemn Anders
> Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you'd like to
> fuck.

> Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and
> intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it
> is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either.
> These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human
> populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the
> Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political
> correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves
> and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most
> parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.

> Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not
> deserved. It is not a natural or "human" right. And it has no more to do
> with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.

Curtis Yarvin is a libertarian. As an anarchistic, I consider libertarians my
non-committal brethren. I don't have a̶n̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ much against
libertarians, but the weird thing about Curtis Yarvin is that he's a
_monarchist_ libertarian. He literally wants a strong man ruler who enforces
libertarian policies through an iron grip. He also believes in binary genders,
which is reflected in Urbit's requirement of the user to identify as a Lord or
a Lady. His personal views aren't just an aside, they're reflected in the name
and workings of this system.

Some more quotes, in case you're not yet convinced of how horrible Curtis
Yarvin is:

> Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in
> which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never
> happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer,
> more civilized, and more pleasant.

> Modern Americans have enormous difficulty in grasping hierarchical social
> structures. We grew up steeped in "applied Christianity" pretty much the way
> the Hitler Youth grew up steeped in Hitler. The suggesting that slavery
> could ever be or have been, as Aristotle suggests, natural and healthy, is
> like suggesting to the Hitler Youth that it might be cool to make some
> Jewish friends… We think of the master-slave relationship as usually sick
> and twisted, and invariably adversarial. Parent-child relationships can be
> all three. But they are not normally so. If history (not to mention
> evolutionary biology) proves anything, it proves that humans fit into
> dominance-submission structures almost as easily as they fit into the
> nuclear family.

> In my opinion just about every country on earth today would benefit from a
> transition to military government…

> It's a reality of modern American life that race confers privilege. As a
> reactionary, how can I possibly object? A society without hereditary
> privilege is like a cheeseburger without cheese.

Again, none of this means that Urbit doesn't have interesting ideas that could
be used/forked. But this is the context that this system was created in, and
it _is_ reflected in the system.

~~~
maehwasu
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that HN is the HR department at
your company. Pointing to someone's opinions and shrieking doesn't really fly
here.

Particularly when the opinions are fairly defensible. (I.e. the only moral
principle by which Breivik (whom I abhore) is worse than Che is "anything done
in the service of left-wing causes is ok.")

~~~
blotter_paper
I'm under the impression that a lot of people in these comments seem unaware
of the history of this project, and how the views of the Yarvin/Moldbug shaped
early decisions such as naming and user titles. I'm not under the impression
that you speak for HN; I've seen the comment you're replying to fluctuate
between 2 and -2... and that's with Tlon employees engaging in the comments
without showing good faith (e.g. not identifying themselves). I would call the
comment you're replying to controversial, but I don't think it's fair to call
the comment "shrieking" or say that it "doesn't really fly here." So far it is
getting both upvoted and downvoted, repeatedly.

Yes, he mentioned Che. He dwelled on Mandela. Is 1962 South Africa comparable
to 2011 Norway? I feel like that excerpt has 2 purposes, arguing for political
violence being equally valid no matter the circumstances of the state you're
living in, and race-baiting. He didn't dwell on those examples at random. Do
his lines about the natural predisposition of black people towards slavery
seem "fairly defensible" to you? I tried to include enough absurd quotes that
most folks could find _something_ that would make them understand where this
character is coming from, even if they agreed with some small part of his
thinkings.

------
throwGuardian
It's like a Hollywood sci-fi writer first wrote a bad script describing tech
in fictioud terms, and someone though it a good idea to use the movie script
as the site copy, user manual and FAQ.

How can anyone take this seriously if there's not even a half attempt to
describe the product and features honestly

------
sneak
The project founder’s wikipedia page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin)

It has leaked over to the project WP page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit)

I personally choose not to run this software or support this project. YMMV.

~~~
maehwasu
The reason I found Yarvin’s (awesome) writing in the first place was because
of a post like this on Twitter.

I figured that if vinegar-drinking scolds hated him, he might have something
interesting to say. Your post will probably have a similar effect for a couple
lucky people.

~~~
pron
The difference between Yarvin and vinegar-drinking scolds is that Yarvin
merely repeats _yesterday 's_ vinegar-drinking scolds. If you like his
writing, there's literally centuries' worth of it (in fact, it only stopped
being the norm rather recently), and if you go study history at a university
you'll read quite a lot of it. It does seem less fresh, though, once you read
it in proper chronological order, and with appropriate context, rather than
somebody posting a stuffy, safe, and dull 1897 text as a surprising,
reactionary 2012 blog post. He served cold leftovers and seemed like a chef to
people who'd never had a good meal.

~~~
maehwasu
I actually agree strongly: one of the best things in his writing is his
references to primary sources, many of which I found extremely enjoyable to
read. The past is a foreign country more interesting than any tourist trip you
can take.

If the only thing the Moldbug posts did was link to that material, that would
be a service in itself.

To give Yarvin his due though, he does a good job synthesizing it all into a
general theory of power being a necessary and sufficient explanation of
motivations in most cases.

~~~
pron
Except for two problems: his understanding of the material is well below that
of a first-year history student (he's a layman more than an amateur), and any
decent college book or course contains far better references. Second, there is
nothing new about his positions. They're a rehashing of the old mainstream,
that was rejected over time because of societal and technological changes he
doesn't know and certainly doesn't understand. As someone who studied both
physics and history in grad school, his writing about history seems to make as
much sense to someone who has actually learned that history as the multitude
of texts about Reiki and channeling aliens that mention "quantum energy" make
sense to someone who has actually studied physics. It only looks interesting
(in a serious way) when you know virtually nothing. I read it in the same way
I read about Reiki: a sort of curious anthropological entertainment from an
epistemology that diverges sharply from science and scholarship. Sort of like
a modern person would enjoy reading medieval texts about body humours or the
four elements. So it's interesting to me to see the alternative constructions
people who have no real scholarship make in order to understand the world
around them.

~~~
NaggingGranpa
> his understanding of the material is well below that of a first-year history
> student

Met plenty of history grad students in grad school. Well-read but
intellectually very limited, and very herd-minded. But, then, I did not go to
an Ivy with a tradition of excellence in the humanities.

> Second, there is nothing new about his positions

Of course there is, it's just the nutty cypherpunk stuff like crypto-locked
nukes.

> As someone who studied both physics and history in grad school

You're a member of an extremely small class. He does not write for people like
you. It makes no sense to write for people like you if power is the goal.

Marx's writing was childish beyond belief. He did not even know calculus. Yet,
look at how much has been unleashed on his behalf.

~~~
pron
Oh, I have no doubt Yarvin's writings could unleash something, if only because
they already did. They're a rehashing of what became mainstream opinions
following Romanticism [1]. Eugenics [2] was taught in numerous universities at
the beginning of the 20th century. Clearly, some people can find Romanticism
appealing today for the same reason they found it appealing in the 19th c.,
and they will find it appealing, yet again in the 23rd. The only defense is
knowing how and why it arose the first time around, and why it was ultimately
rejected.

If you want to read a book about the struggle of Romanticism and Humanism,
read Thomas Mann's _The Magic Mountain_.[3]

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain)

~~~
zozbot234
Eugenics emerged in modern times as a _Progressive_ -era policy. It seems kind
of vague and perhaps misleading to link it to Romanticism, when actually it
follows along the exact same lines as the secular, "scientific" Humanism that
you evidently find so appealing.

~~~
pron
It emerged as a result of _both_. Reactionary/romantic ideals have _always_
co-opted what they viewed as scientific knowledge or technology in the service
of their imagined past. That progressive ideals may have also ultimately
employed horrific tools goes without saying, and that some conservative forces
have sometimes opposed them is also true. But that's my point: any
presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is
wrong, regardless of whether it's done intentionally by a scholar wishing to
push an agenda, or unintentionally by name-dropping, bloviating ignoramuses
like Yarvin.

~~~
zozbot234
> But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative
> leading to a conclusion is wrong

All simplified models are wrong. Some are useful. (And it's very hard to avoid
'appeal' being a critical factor in the popularity of any model or narrative.
It acts as a single point of failure in _any_ truth-seeking mechanism,
including academia and the like. This of course explains much about the
popularity of some contemporary ideas.)

~~~
pron
Well, Yarvin's "model" is both very wrong (much more wrong than most models by
actual scholars) and not useful; we know that because that "model" was once
mainstream, and quite harmful.

~~~
NaggingGranpa
Harmful to whom?

~~~
pron
To a far greater portion of human society than those it was perhaps useful
for, if anyone.

~~~
NaggingGranpa
Yet, it was the horrible, _horrible_ Europe that Moldbug mythologizes and
romanticizes that made virtually all advances in science and technology until
a few decades ago.

Ancient Greece produced mechanical computers. Only recently did the great
civilizations of China and India overcome Hellenic science & technology.
Having Mandarins cataloging the Emperor's property is not a great use of human
capital.

~~~
pron
What? Non-sequitur much?

While the so-called European Miracle of the past 500 years is a fascinating
and complex area of research that will undoubtedly be studied for generations
and centuries to come, I wasn't aware that anyone considers modern (18th c.
and beyond) romanticist ideology to be _the_ major driving force of science
and technology.

~~~
zozbot234
"Romanticist ideology" is a remarkably vague term, but I think one could make
a case that something like it ended up being very much a factor. Of course,
the reverse is also true; in the absence of 18th- and 19th-century science
(including advancements in the social sciences, mostly coming from the
"humanist" side as Carlyle knew quite well!) no "romanticist" ideology would
even exist.

------
iudqnolq
Urbit's design directly comes from the founder's neo-monarchical political
theories. Therefore, I think his political theories, which include sympathies
for neo-nazism ('Yarvin wrote that, although he was not himself a white
nationalist, he felt “the urge to defend” the ideology'), a hatred of
democracy, and the desire to replace it with a model that grants more rights
to wealthier individuals are relevant to this discussion.

So I submitted an article on those beliefs to HN. I'd like to see what other
readers think of their relevancy to the product.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21673760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21673760)

> In one design sketch for Urbit, Yarvin made the link between monarchies and
> the platform more explicit, classifying users as “Lords,” “Dukes,” and
> “Earls.” The design behind the titles, he writes, “is standard Lockean
> libertarian homesteading theory.” At the end of the sketch, Yarvin indicates
> that he’s reserved a special title for himself: “The prince (because he
> spent 8 years working on this project, without being paid), has reserved 32
> duchies for his exclusive personal benefit."

Note: Curtis Yarvin resigned from his startup. I still find his ideas
relevant, because he designed and started the startup in question.

------
bronzejaguar
I’ve really been enjoying the recent blog posts. The one about the idea maze /
design space of building out a PKI was especially good.

