
What Urbit is - rgbrgb
https://urbit.org/posts/overview/
======
joeykrug
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](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177)]
- very cool!

~~~
um_ya
There is no such thing as a trustless app, unless you are doing basic
mathematical algorithms contained within the same system. Ethereum adds no
value to Bitcoin because any useful apps you want to make NEED a centralize
source to provide data to it. For example, if I want to make an app that sends
coins to someone when bitcoin is at a certain price, I would inherently be
relying on the trusted source, that provides the bitcoin price data. Similarly
for sport payouts or property contracts, they all rely on the external
centralized source for information. The only thing Ethereum can do, is basic
operations contingent on values within the same system, otherwise you break
the "trustless apps" veil.

~~~
joeykrug
> There is no such thing as a trustless app

Reread my post, I said almost. Nothing in life is trustless [for instance,
solar flares could effect my computer's state], but you can get close. So we
agree there

> Ethereum adds no value to Bitcoin because any useful apps you want to make
> NEED a centralize source to provide data to it.

This is called the oracle problem --- it's a difficult problem, but not
intractable. Augur doesn't use a centralized source to resolve its markets, it
has groups of reporters who do that [with a whole set of incentive structures
surrounding truth-as-schelling-point and relying upon bonds to cause monetary
loss to people attempting to "cheat" the system. Your cost to cheat the system
will almost always be more than potential profit [unless there's only 1 market
in a system with a ton of volume and no other activity, which means it's
basically dead anyway and there are 2 backstop mechanisms surrounding this as
well]. Anyway given infinite money anything is attackable / not trustless.

Second, you're missing _a lot_ of the benefits of Ethereum. It can control
funds programmatically. To run a prediction market using bitcoin you have to
hold customer funds, on Ethereum you don't [this is a huge opex]. On Bitcoin,
you have to process the trades, on Ethereum you don't [hello more opex!]. On
bitcoin you're forced to use a multisig 3rd party or have counterparty risk to
trade prediction market assets, on Ethereum you don't. You have to resolve
markets yourself [or with multisig of a handful of people, because bitcoin
cannot support multisigs beyond 20]. People can't create their own markets and
add liquidity to them on your platform if it's on bitcoin without trusting you
either. Could go on and on, but _unless_ you're referring to a sidechain of
bitcoin you can't do any of that.

As far as the example here: "For example, if I want to make an app that sends
coins to someone when bitcoin is at a certain price, I would inherently be
relying on the trusted source, that provides the bitcoin price data." is
wrong. On Etherex on ethereum I can get data for he btc-eth price and do a
transaction based on the exchange rate without trusting anything in the
outside world

------
placeybordeaux
All of these comments seem to be saying that this is so well written.

I still have no idea what it is actually trying to accomplish. Is it a
decentralized storage/compute platform? Why are they calling it an OS? Why
does it only reference existing technology to say it isn't that?

None of the links are working for me either.

~~~
urbit
Sorry, the server was struggling for a moment. We fixed it.

It's an OS admittedly in the metaphorical sense -- the same sense that your
browser is an OS. That is, a platform that runs higher-level programs. Urbit
doesn't run on bare metal, though it could, in the same sense that your
browser could.

In fact, one way of describing Urbit is "the browser for the server side." In
the same way that your browser replaces a bunch of individual client apps with
one native client that's a platform for higher-level programing, Urbit
s/client/server/. Does that help?

~~~
profeta
so it is a place that will centralize all my credentials so it can fetch and
parse my mail, IMs, stock trades, files, etc to then inter-process that to my
liking and possible talk to a client on my phone or such?

why a chain of specialized posix programs would fail for that?

~~~
urbit
Yes, Urbit is (or at least is designed to become) a personal server which
solves this problem among others.

One: a chain of specialized Posix programs would work for that. You would have
to be someone who can manage a chain of specialized Posix programs, though.

Two: serving as a general-purpose stateful HTTP client is a subset of what
Urbit does, though an important subset. It's also a server on a public
network.

The second problem can also be solved with Posix programs, but it pretty much
seals the requirement for a trained professional. It is possible to imagine a
high-usability personal Linux (Sandstorm, for instance), but not really a
high-usability general-purpose Internet server (at least if it implements
social apps via decentralized protocols).

(In fact, it's not even clear that trained professionals are comfortable with
decentralized protocols -- see under, Google doesn't even want your XMPP
traffic, etc.)

Urbit may or may not be the perfect solution, but I think it's clear that if
ordinary humans are going to have their own personal servers, they're going to
need _some_ kind of new system software.

~~~
placeybordeaux
You still haven't made it clear who is running 'my' urbit programs and why
they are doing that.

If they are doing it for free this won't scale. If I am paying them why don't
I just pay someone to maintain standard software.

I find this very strange because I love all of the work on distributed and
decentralized systems. I am normally excited to read more about a new
approach, but I still don't understand what you are trying to do and feel like
I am just being fed marketing terms like "The browser for the server side"
wtf? Do you mean CGI?

~~~
yarvin9
When I say "the browser for the server side," what I mainly mean is the
isolation layer between the browser and the OS.

For example, suppose someone designing the first JS environment at Netscape
had suggested that since JS is so great, you should be able to make POSIX
system calls from it. Or link to locally stored libraries. Or use a language
someone had heard of before. I think you'll agree that if this decision had
been made, most people would never have heard of JS.

The browser is a second-level OS which provides a service no first-level OS
offers; it loads applications almost instantly and sandboxes them securely.

Now, _in theory_ , you could modify a Unix to solve this problem. Arguably,
it's a problem any OS ought to be able to solve. We are certainly much closer
with containers. But still, imagine what it would take to replace webpages
with Dockerfiles. (sandstorm.io is the closest to something like this;
definitely check them out as well.)

Urbit's semantics are isolated from the platform in just the same way. The job
of a general-purpose personal server is very different from the job of a
general-purpose client -- they have almost nothing in common. But the
isolation layer over the current systems platform is the crucial element.

------
bshimmin
This page was so clearly written, and its content so compelling, I was
actually left wondering whether it was the same bafflingly pretentious Urbit
that I'd stared at in mesmerised bewilderment in years past.

This makes sense, looks great, and I might well give it a try!

~~~
zekevermillion
I for one enjoyed reading about the bafflingly pretentious Urbit even though I
wasn't sure what to make of it.

------
captainmuon
So ignoring the abstruseness and pretentiousness for a moment [x], what I
don't like is this model of immutable networking Urbit has. Maybe I am in a
minority position, but I fear the future where everything is cryptographically
signed, verifiable and irrefutable.

I want to be able to go on a website and post bullshit that I'll regret 15
years later. And if after 15 years someone unearths that post, I want to be
able to say "that proves nothing, anybody with a text editor could have forged
that". You might say a prospective employer wouldn't buy that argument even
now, but I want to live in a world where people _do_ buy that argument. Where
you can post party pictures on the internet, because it's trivially easy to
fake pictures, and everybody has accepted that pictures have no proving power,
so everybody feels free to post them, even my boss. Let technology drive
society to be more laissez faire.

A similar thing with bitcoin. My utopia doesn't involve cryptographically
secure, ideal money - it rather involves no money at all. I'd rather put my
energy into developing a new kind of society based on free association (rather
than labor & money) than using algorithms to cement this society.

I believe cryptography is great for being CRYPTic, i.e. providing anonymity.
But using it to prove identity etc. should be used very sparingly and not
without thinking about the consequences.

[x] And I don't want to denigrate this project. It seems to be a great
technical and theoretical achievement - it's just that their ideals are not
necessarily mine.

~~~
urbit
I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities,
but by using disposable identities.

If you bound an identity cryptographically to your real name, that's permanent
-- no getting around it. We all make mistakes. However, one of the benefits of
Urbit is that you can build a reputation around a pseudonym that _isn 't_
linked to your real-life identity.

There's a place for the 4chans of the world, with totally disposable one-time
identities. You can do this with Urbit as well -- use a 128-bit self-signing
identity (comet). But most people tend to want a little more stability and
permanence.

~~~
tzs
> I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic
> identities, but by using disposable identities.

A problem with disposable identities as usually implemented is that they are
too cheap and easy to make. This makes it easy to make a new identity every
place you want to be an asshole. The end result is that places get tired of
this, and ban such identities from their spaces.

I think what we might need are semi-disposable identities. You can make a new
one whenever you want, but it costs something to make a new one, and that cost
goes up with each new semi-disposable identity you make.

~~~
urbit
This is exactly the way Urbit works. (It's sincerely hard to tell from your
post whether you've read the documentation, or you just had the same simple
idea yourself.)

Anyone can create a 128-bit comet. But once the comet system starts being
abused by assholes and bots, signs will go up all over Urbit. These signs will
say "humans only" and deny admission to comets -- essentially blocking anyone
who has not invested any real stake in their identity.

The normal quantum of reputation and of human identity is the planet (32 bits,
like an IPv4 address). Ideally a virgin planet would cost about $10.

Basically, if this cost is far above the amount of money that a spammer can
make before a reputation system catches up with the swine, there will be no
_commercial_ abuse. This leaves reputation systems to deal with the much
easier job of wrangling random creeps and weirdos.

So if you invented this design yourself, yes, it's a very good one...

~~~
Gaelan
There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible
planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-
scale?

BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)

~~~
yarvin9
~bitret, I remember you from a while back!

A planet is like a car -- it's not a toy, it's a tool for a responsible
grownup. There are about 4 billion adults in the world. And not all of them
are even Internet users.

Of course, the population keeps growing. Eventually either people have to
learn to share, or the price will go up, or humanity will learn how to stop
expanding exponentially.

Think of a planet as a unit of autonomy and reputation, not of personality.
The global supply of autonomy is 2^32 units. That's not perfect in any sense,
but if the supply is infinite the network is ungovernable, and the value of
each unit is zero.

It's also an improvement on a world in which there's one unit of autonomy, and
its name is Mark Zuckerberg. Urbit does a lot for digital freedom, but we're
not in the miracle business here. No one can do infinity for digital freedom.

~~~
kefka
> A planet is like a car -- it's not a toy, it's a tool for a responsible
> grownup. There are about 4 billion adults in the world. And not all of them
> are even Internet users.

There's a reason why the IETF decided to switch to 2^128 for IP6. Mainly,
because there are more computers and devices that need addressing than IP4 can
handle.

I have to question the design of Urbit why you chose to go with 2^32
addressing space?

> Of course, the population keeps growing. Eventually either people have to
> learn to share, or the price will go up, or humanity will learn how to stop
> expanding exponentially.

Again, the future is "Pay to Play", just like Ethereum? And, is that a
population control argument? How would you propose to "stop expanding
exponentially"? Chinese method? Ender's Game method, or something else
unsavory?

> Think of a planet as a unit of autonomy and reputation, not of personality.
> The global supply of autonomy is 2^32 units. That's not perfect in any
> sense, but if the supply is infinite the network is ungovernable, and the
> value of each unit is zero.

Ah, so you are the "governor", hence why it must be governed? This is
literally artificial scarcity on something that could easily have been near
infinite

> It's also an improvement on a world in which there's one unit of autonomy,
> and its name is Mark Zuckerberg. Urbit does a lot for digital freedom, but
> we're not in the miracle business here. No one can do infinity for digital
> freedom.

So switching from one master to another makes better "freedom"? I get being
against walled gardens. I'm against them as well. But you make no point why
Urbit isn't just another walled garden (using funny language to hide behind it
no less) with you at the helm.

~~~
yebyen
> I have to question the design of Urbit why you chose to go with 2^32
> addressing space?

They haven't. They went with base 256, for easier recognition of 32-bit (and
16-bit, and 8-bit) numbers. You can get a 2^128 identity or a 2^32 identity
(or others.)

The fact that 64-bit numbers (like ~novfes-lodzod-sibfes-talzod) in Urbit's
base 256 are twice as long as 32-bit numbers (~sibfes-talzod) which are twice
as long as 16-bit numbers (~dalryp) and down to 8-bit numbers, which are the
most memorable and highly coveted (disclosure: you're looking at a comment
written by ~del, aka Hex number 0x25) is something between a feature of
Urbit's networking stack, and an unavoidable consequence of doing math and
dividing things up between persons that are remote from each other, therefore
each needing addresses to be identifiable.

Identities that are made of 128-bit numbers are free, and essentially
unlimited. They are basically public key hashes and the risk of a collision is
sufficiently low that there is no need for them to be generated by a single
authority and centrally assigned. (Note that this does not necessarily scale
to the population of the earth and beyond as a solution to addressing graph
nodes and efficiently routing traffic between them.) Identities that are made
of shorter numbers _are_ limited in number and assigned hierarchically; even
if there are a boat-load of 64-bit numbers, it's not half as many, it's ½^64
times as many. Certainly there are more 64-bit numbers than humans on Earth
today, or for the foreseeable future.

Whether you consider this to be more problem or solution will probably depend
a lot on which side of the spam-wars you find yourself on. Currently there is
no Urbit software or infrastructure that I am aware of that algorithmically
discriminates against one kind of numbers or another.

You won't expect one authority to differentiate each of 8-billion humans and
make sure that each one is granted a separate identity (but not more than
one), will you? How about 256 such leaders? Still seems far-fetched, doesn't
it... especially given the difficulty of coordinating 256 separate leaders.
65536 very smart individuals probably also cannot be expected to coordinate
the identities of the rest of the humans in the world. It would be gargantuan
undertaking just handling it when some of these leader-folks have forgotten or
lost their passwords (and potentially disastrous for the 0.0015% of the
world's population under their charge.)

64 bits of hierarchical ID space is enough for every 32-bit identity (planet)
to individually dole out as many 64-bit numbers (moons) as there were 32-bit
numbers to begin with. Urbit takes advantage of this roughly to make scaling
the network's identity framework to rather immense proportions, happen at
least a bit more naturally.

If your 32-bit leader gives a lot of 64-bit IDs to people that turn out to be
spammers, you run the risk of being lumped in with those spammers by
algorithmic processes. Imagine such a process that tries to discriminate
against spammers and keep them from spamming everyone who is known on the
whole network, at any scale. It's not a simple proposition, at all!

------
killercup
I love that they even introduced convenient ways of pronouncing the ASCII
symbols Hoon uses. Last time I saw it, I created this gist:
[https://gist.github.com/killercup/be14570af13cbddb5dbc](https://gist.github.com/killercup/be14570af13cbddb5dbc)

(Haven't checked if anything changed since then.)

------
bitwize
I think Jay Maynard said it best: Urbit is "INTERCAL as OS". Alternatively,
it's a New Kind of Computing (by analogy with Wolfram's New Kind of Science).

This paper didn't really tell me anything about Urbit that I didn't already
know. But it's good to see them have a nice clean readable rationale.

~~~
tripzilch
INTERCAL is a whole other level of crazy hard opaqueness though. I admit I
never tried to write anything in one of these two funny urbit languages, but
from what I've seen in the docs, they don't intend to go out of their way to
be impenetrable.

I read INTERCAL documentation twice. First time for fun & crazy and I had some
good laughs. Then a while later I came across a challenge to write X in
INTERCAL (I forgot what X was), so I got the documentation again, this time
reading it with intention to write code, ... I gave up halfway, in horror.

INTERCAL was designed to be "most unlike any other programming language" and
didn't stop for any feature if it could be twisted into being more unlike any
other language. And it shows, it's hilariously hard to program in, and gets in
your way on purpose.

Ubrit also seems so far to be very much unlike many or most systems, ever. But
it's more about trying something new, with an idea, it uses its weirdness to
support the idea, but it doesn't stop at nothing to keep pushing the weirdness
over the top. There's another goal in mind. But the goal is not very funny so
that's an extra barrier it has over INTERCAL.

------
xemdetia
This is the first time I've heard of this, there just seems to be a bunch of
holes in it. OK, so you have a basic embedded-style ROM vm with a light layer
of application code above it. Hard, solvable problem that they seem to have
covered.

If it is supposed to be for the people how am I supposed to find a route
between hosts behind a NAT? Is this galaxy.urbit.org the DNS _and_ the TURN
relay? Is the expectation of the 'server cluster that is yours alone' still
dependent on someone else running the relay? How can my servers have friends
that aren't part of my trust network? How do I run my own trust network
between people I want to trust?

The weirdest thing is that there doesn't seem to be a designed way for an
operator of an Urbit to talk to their/other Urbits. Where's the classic plain
text protocol to at least say HELO? How do I fix it?

This just ends up looking like a specific-use estoeric lang + runtime to me,
which I do enjoy as an exercise. I just can't see how the UX problem is going
to pan out based on what is presented.

~~~
urbit
A planet, like ~tasfyn-partyv, has a parent chain going back to the galaxy:
~tasfyn-partyv (32-bit), ~doznec (16-bit), ~zod (8-bit). zod.urbit.org is
directly DNS mapped.

Not using TURN and STUN specifically as the RFCs, but in effect it's the same.
Routing will STUN (establish a direct peer-to-peer connection) so long as
either side has full cone NAT.

As a planet, you need _some_ star to route for you. Right now, the network is
small and friendly enough that trust problems aren't an issue. As we grow,
we'll put in an escape protocol so that you can switch stars if you have an
issue -- there are 2^16, after all.

Urbit is not PGP. It's designed to feel more like the early Internet, ie, a
wide-area world of nontrivial default trust. At present, it would be foolish
to go full cypherpunk, because we're a long way from being worth attacking.

Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" \-- that term is reserved
for languages which genuinely don't care about usability.

~~~
xemdetia
> Urbit is not PGP. It's designed to feel more like the early Internet, ie, a
> wide-area world of nontrivial default trust. At present, it would be foolish
> to go full cypherpunk, because we're a long way from being worth attacking.

It's not as much that. If I am going to be owning a service that I want to use
among my peers generally someone has to run the thing and generally I am that
person. If I am relying on urbit.org then the goal described in this overview
of "Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service. And
since it's yours, open source and patent-free, it never shows you ads. Or
loses your data. Or updates without your consent." is not met. If urbit.org is
so entrenched and the galaxy lookup so well defined how do I use this when you
are gone? The galaxy lookup is clearly one of the most critical pieces of the
design yet seems the most weak. In the world of online games the lookup
service is what has a community live or die, and I did not see a better answer
after writing the comment.

It seems that the only way is to recompile and distribute an alternate version
of the software.

> Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" \-- that term is reserved
> for languages which genuinely don't care about usability.

I would class it as such because there doesn't seem to be a description (going
by the whitepaper) of modularity/code layout/best practice sort of thing.
There is also the complexity of symbol management from bash/perl/php land that
seems to be in Hoon too. I work with grammars all day and I guess I was just
looking for a more formal description of the language.

~~~
urbit
Your question about the lookup service is an excellent one.

One: it costs 20 bucks a year to run urbit.org in its capacity as a DNS server
for binding 256 names to IPs.

Two: at present, there are about 50 galaxy holders, so if between them they
can't scrape up 20 bucks a year to keep urbit.org registered, Urbit has worse
problems than centralization.

Three: the use of DNS as a root routing table is an implementation detail in
the Unix process, completely isolated from Urbit. When Urbit wants to route a
UDP packet to galaxy X, it routes to the reserved range X.1.0.0. If the DNS
itself collapsed, we could probably find other ways of mapping this table.

I would not call bash/Perl/PHP "esoteric" either -- it has a very specific
meaning:

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

Hoon is a little under-documented and should have its grammar specified
somewhere, although the easiest way to do so would be just to clean up the
Hoon parser (a parser combinator written in Hoon).

(The original plan was for the Hoon parser to look as pretty as a spec
grammar, which many parsers in Hoon do. But looking at ++vast in hoon.hoon,
you'll see we fall a little short of that goal.)

------
rgbrgb
They just released a really clean new homepage too. Big stuff!

[https://www.urbit.org/](https://www.urbit.org/)

~~~
Mithaldu
If by "clean" you mean its fallback behavior without JS is to show a white
page with nothing, then it is squeaky clean. :D

~~~
state
Sorry about that. Since this page is built with urbit it's easy to just
request the raw Markdown.

Here's plain text for anyone interested:
[http://urbit.org/posts/overview.md](http://urbit.org/posts/overview.md)

Edit: it should be easy for us to stick that link inside a noscript tag be
default. Issue here:
[https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/149](https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/149)

~~~
lucb1e
To be honest, the site could use some work. Low-hanging fruit mainly, I'm not
even asking for anything browsers didn't do in the 90s.

You're doing a lot of work yourself: loading pages (why not let the browser do
that, catch errors, display progress, etc.? Now it shows a spinner and if I
hadn't backgrounded the tab already I'd have given up on loading because
"clearly the spinner isn't doing anything"); opening links (I can't ctrl+click
because, hey, you're handling the opening of links yourself; why not let the
browser do that?); changing the title happens only after the new page loaded,
which takes 20 seconds, during which time a white page is displayed with the
old browser and the new URL already (the browser would change it to "loading
new page" for you); and there are some cross-origin resources (alright, the
browser doesn't do this, but it's almost difficult to mess that up with the
widespread TLS support these days). I probably caught most of my personal
things, but the general idea is to be more lazy ;)

~~~
state
Yeah, I agree (and I worked a lot on the frontend). The site is hosted with
the default frontend for Urbit — so it's built to do a lot more than what it's
doing in this specific case.

The links not opening on ctrl+click is ridiculous (issue here:
[https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/10](https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/10))
as are the cross-origin resources. Loading in the title is a good idea (issue
here:
[https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/11](https://github.com/urbit/tree/issues/11)).

Being lazy is good. I'm with you there!

------
Bino
Pro tip: I'm mildly clever. However I wan't able to understand the value or
reasoning of this. Make it more clear and resell it to me

~~~
ZenoArrow
Consider what you would do with a personal server. Now imagine it's easy
enough for anyone to use and maintain. Now imagine everyone's personal server
could connect and communicate with each other seamlessly and securely,
transferring data of any type.

That's the promise of urbit.

~~~
rspeer
If you ended with "That's the promise of the Information Superhighway", it
would be an MCI commercial from the '90s.

~~~
yarvin9
I remember that commercial!

Exactly right. Just think of Urbit as the Information Super-Duperhighway, and
you can't go wrong.

------
dpc_pw
I was checking out Urbit before, and it's an amazing idea. I can highly
recommend anyone investigating it a little, just to get a notion how things
could be.

I need to check the current progress. I hope the previous "invitation/ticket"
I had is still working. :)

~~~
state
Yep — your ticket still works.

------
bovermyer
This seems very exciting, in a way that I'm hard-pressed to define. Maybe
because it seems to offer a greenfield opportunity to build...something. Or to
be something. Unique.

------
lisper
Hmmm...

"Addionally, we're creating an open political and economic process, with a
small, fixed-price public presale of Urbit address space."

Why does an "open political and economic process" require (or even allow) a
"pre-sale of address space" by a central authority?

~~~
tjbiddle
Maybe it's for vanity names?

~~~
yarvin9
Urbit ships are synthetic names that sound like human names in a foreign
language. Eg, ~sondel-forsut. This is just a 32-bit number in a phonemic
base-256.

Our experience is that people rapidly bond with their ship names. Apparently
no one is too old to want a secret codename. And human beings of a more
grownup character can interact pseudonymously through dignified, impersonal
synthetic names -- instead of retarded juvenile handles as on Wikipedia etc,
or real names as on Facebook.

------
applecore
Technology aside, this is a masterpiece of clear and concise technical writing
for a general audience.

------
frou_dh
Well it certainly has more grounds for a get-in-on-the-ground-floor impulse
than App.net did a few years ago

------
shaunxcode
Finally getting down to brass tacks: "Is this a lisp? Is this basically emacs?
At a certain level this is basically emacs."

------
faizshah
If you're having trouble viewing the page (like I was) the text is here:

[https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org/blob/master/main/posts/ov...](https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org/blob/master/main/posts/overview.md)

At least I think this is the text, I can't check.

~~~
pcmonk
This is correct.

------
cronjobber
> _For example, your urbit runs a single shopping app, which downloads
> catalogs and uploads orders. This app is one store which sells everything in
> the world, with a salesman who 's 100% on your side and always has the best
> price._

That's written under the heading "The Urbit future". I presume that it is
meant to describe how things would pan out if Urbit is a success.

But how is this vision enforced... or even made _likely?_ Why would powerful
monopolies like Amazon submit to this, instead of supplying an app
specifically and exclusively for shopping at Amazon?

------
dreamdu5t
This is the most interesting and important project since the WWW.

~~~
wmf
Or maybe even the most interesting and important project since Xanadu.

~~~
Animats
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.

~~~
philippeback
Worth learning. Not so easy to do I am afraid.

Nock is very nice. Hoon bends the mind, which is actually a nice thing.

This whole thing bends my mind anyway.

A good option for avoiding Alzheimer by training those neurons... interesting
internal feeling trying to grok it for sure.

------
kefka
I was looking into this, as I have connections to the devs via our
hackerspace.

After research, I steered away, and hard.

1\. Newbies trying to grok the platform are mocked mercilessly. Publicly over
reddit and twitter.

2\. The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general. Now, ad
hominems aren't "good"... but if I work on it, I get lumped into the similar
group. Just no.

3\. It uses "Hoon" to program, which is in reality a Lisp variant. They wanted
something completely foreign so "only dedicated people would learn it".
Seriously. Use Lisp.

4\. It's another company interests driving the project. Projects like these
have the potential of changing everything on the internet. Locking it behind a
company "firewall" means if they die, the project does as well.

~~~
adbge
> The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general.

Oh, good. This again. Curtis has stated publicly, "I am not an 'outspoken
advocate for slavery,' a racist, a sexist or a fascist." See:
[https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-
lam...](https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lambdaconf-
anyway-35ff8cd4fb9d#.qyt5cdzh3)

~~~
gjm11
Anyone can _say_ they aren't an outspoken advocate for slavery.

Take a look at this [http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/why-c...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters.html) and see whether
you find it plausible to say that the author is not an outspoken advocate for
slavery.

~~~
justadude1
I have read it and I don't think the author is an outspoken advocate of
slavery.

The passage most frequently cited as evidence of this charge is:

 _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._

A charitable reading of this, in my mind, goes:

 _Some slavers had an opinion about who made good slaves and who didn 't. If
one wanted to rationalize a basis for that opinion, which historically
existed, the easiest/laziest answer would be genetic traits common to the
populations in question_

Check the definition of "parsimonious" and assume the author used it on
purpose.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
It's a very strange interpretation, especially given that there is a strong
body of historical sociology on exactly this question. I'm thinking primarily
of Orlando Patterson's _Slavery and Social Death_ - which would suggest that
while Native Americans could potentially escape back to their people, African
slaves had a much harder time alone, which was precisely the slavers' plan.

~~~
justadude1
No doubt you are right. I'm sure the slavers had all sorts of tactics, and
opinions about both their tactics and the enslaved, which were wrong.

The author seems to be positing the "easiest" explanation for why a particular
opinion took hold among the slavers. Personally, my parsimonious explanation
would be groupthink/received wisdom. Which, if it had to have a "legit"
origin, was probably a multitude of factors such as you describe.

But, I'm not the author, and was just trying to explain why I don't think that
passage is the heinous smoking gun that so many people think it is.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that your gloss was a strange interpretation
(I'd say your summary is reasonable), just the original was.

