Urbit: a personal cloud computer

http://doc.urbit.org/

by aberatiu • 12 years ago

460 265 12 years ago

doc.urbit.org

Can someone explain what is going on? Is this a new OS built from the ground up with it's own technologies ?

rm445• 12 years ago

At present it's a bunch of programs that run on UNIX systems. I guess the Hoon interpreter is a C program that uses readline, talks to the network over sockets and the like. But everything on top is quite self-contained and in principle one might remove the layers underneath.

But I'm not sure that's necessarily the aim. As I understand the project's aims (and I'm not involved, I just read all the docs a few months back), it's more important that the Internet of the future is not a tangled mess of technologies that are insecure on different layers. Then it doesn't matter so what OS people's local machines are running.

I hope the essay at the URL below is still relevant, it seems to describe the aims rather well. "The result: Martian code, as we know it today. Not enormous and horrible - tiny and diamond-perfect."

http://moronlab.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/urbit-functional-prog...

comboy• 12 years ago

http://moronlab.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/urbit-functional-prog...

My brain did not enjoy any wall of text that much since I read the bitcoin whitepaper. Now I want to learn more and be up to date.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

I guess the Hoon interpreter is a C program that uses readline

"or even readline - this is not readline, it's internal to Arvo"

pxndx• 12 years ago

This is either a very elaborate joke or the future of computing.

johnloeber• 12 years ago

I can't tell what this is, but it looks very impressive.

weinzierl• 12 years ago

I think it's neither, it's an interesting experiment.

jeremyrwelch• 12 years ago

It's both.

gfodor3• 12 years ago

They had me going in the Nock spec until "We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right."

pavlov• 12 years ago

The same spirit seems to apply everywhere. The Hoon tutorial shows an incredibly elaborate way to build a decrement function, and it notes:

"As you may remember, to decrement 'a' we need to count up to it."

callahad2• 12 years ago

To be fair, that's also pretty close to exit code semantics on most POSIX systems, where 0 is success and non-zero is failure...

gojomo6• 12 years ago

Here's one possible intuition:

There is one ground truth, origin, fixed point like the North Star: zero. There are an infinite number of possible falsehoods: all nonzero numbers. But Urbit chooses 1 as the canonical false.

krick5• 12 years ago

I absolutely understand your reaction, but, believe me or not, I remember myself wondering as a child why it is opposite. That time it seemed to me completely intuitive and natural that 1 should be "false" and 0 — "true".

However, years later I was introduced to boolean algebra, where 1 should be true and 0 — false, if we want multiplication to be "and" and addition "or". And it feels right, because intersection of two sets is (intuitively) multiplication, and joining — addition.

So, yeah, it doesn't seem like a good idea to me as well after all these years.

javaexpert1015• 12 years ago

And it also doesn't matter one bit, because they are `%.y` and `%.n` for all practical purposes.

chatmasta• 12 years ago

Docs: http://doc.urbit.org/doc/

olh• 12 years ago

Is it for real? Finally a computational machine based on hyperoperations I can use.

1ris• 12 years ago

So, is it back? Launched again?

zerker20002• 12 years ago

Not as such, http://urbit.org stands. If people still want to explore unofficially, github is their oyster.

dtf• 12 years ago

For some reason I feel like I'm reading a Jorge Luis Borges story.

rsofaer• 12 years ago

It's probably the Jorge Luis Borges quote on the setup page.

chops• 12 years ago

Code on Github: https://github.com/urbit/urbit

This seems crazy ambitious on its own, and add to it that it's public domain. Very curious where this will be headed.

krick5• 12 years ago

Could you please explain what being "public domain" adds to it?

jevinskie2• 12 years ago

It enables use (personal and especially corporate) with as little licensing fretting as possible.

gfodor3• 12 years ago

Is there an EAP for "Urbit in Action?"

eluos• 12 years ago

This video does a good job explaining Urbit: https://vimeo.com/75312418

marknadal3• 12 years ago

I really like the foundations of this, but I like design - how could I start building a UX interface for this?

jqm2• 12 years ago

By re-writing CSS to use a different syntax? You could call it Noom....

yebyen17• 12 years ago

Spoiler: there is already/about to be a new interface you haven't seen yet.

Do you mean the webshell, or the templating markup language? There is something you might want to look at called "Sail"

Having trouble finding you a link, but there are some mentions about it here:

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/search?utf8=✓&q=sail

Ah..

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/main/pub/...

marknadal3• 12 years ago

and how long till Urbit can render marl marx and mane? aka how long till I can make a UX using web technologies that runs on Urbit?

sjclemmy2• 12 years ago

I know enough to be interested. Not enough to know if its nonsense.

Although, I read this:

"A pier is an Urbit virtual machine that hosts one or more Urbit identities, or ships. When you run bin/vere -c, it automatically creates a 128-bit ship, or submarine. Your name (a hash of a randomly-generated public key) will look something like:

~machec-binnev-dordeb-sogduc--dosmul-sarrum-faplec-nidted,...

and I laughed. A lot.

GuiA2• 12 years ago

Urbit is a weird thing that feels like it comes from a parallel universe of computing. It's a bit hard to wrap your head around it at first, but it has some neat ideas.

I like this article which introduces it:

Urbit is perhaps how you'd do computing in a post-singularity world, where computational speed and bandwidth are infinite, and what's valuable is security, trust, creativity, and collaboration. It's essentially a combination of a programming language, OS, virtual machine, social network, and digital identity platform.

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2013/12/a-brief-int...

walterbell• 12 years ago

"Despite messages between ships being encrypted, the founders state that they've purposely designed the network to make it as easy as possible for governments to regulate and control. It's not entirely clear why this is supposed to be a good thing."

Quequau2• 12 years ago

My take on that is that this design choice arrises from the anti-democratic authoritarian sentiments which (at least one of) the developers apparently hold. At least they have repeatedly expressed these sorts of sentiments in their rather long winded blog(s).

DennisP2• 12 years ago

Darn. Most of my interest in it just evaporated.

urbit34• 12 years ago

I definitely wouldn't endorse this description - it's a bit secondhand.

What I'd say is that Urbit is not designed to be a darknet. It is not Tor and it's not Bitcoin. Also, it is not designed for external governments, or even its mysterious and sketchy founders, to govern - it is designed to govern itself. (Through user-level reputation mechanisms which have yet to be built, but are relatively easy to build - because the limited supply of identities controls Sybil attacks.)

In particular, Urbit should be quite good at enabling anonymous free speech beyond the reach of governments. A self-hosted node in your closet is quite practical and effective. There is no anonymization / onion routing (and you can't trivially route Urbit over Tor, because Urbit uses UDP), but someone could build that.

Although I don't want them to. I want to enable anonymous, or better yet pseudonymous, free speech. I don't want to help people buy drug$ or childpron through the mail. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are already much better tools for that.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Have you seen their previous video ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6439329

if no, you're gonna experience even weirder things

amelius3• 12 years ago

So let me get this straight. This project is going to define

1. A new computing model, similar to how combinators work.

2. A programming language which produces expressions involving these combinators.

3. An operating system built on the above.

4. A cloud computing environment built on the above.

Sorry, but while interesting, this sounds a little too ambitious, even by HN standards :)

callahad2• 12 years ago

Going to? All of those already exist and run, today. :)

GuiA2• 12 years ago

s/This project is going to define/This project is defining/

There's code that you can run and can play with. It may sound super far fetched (and it is), but the guy behind it is putting sweat into it.

amelius3• 12 years ago

And what is the reason why an existing language and compiler doesn't suffice for 1 and 2?

For example, Haskell and GHC took decades to become what they are now (a powerful language and compiler). It seems quite wasteful to rebuild that work. If absolutely desired, Haskell can also be converted into combinator form, and vice versa, so why not use it? Seriously.

adamnemecek• 12 years ago

It also appears that the new language defines 0 as true and 1 as false: "A loobean, or just bean, is 0 or 1. 0 is yes, 1 is no:"

http://doc.urbit.org/doc/hoon/tut/1/

Reading this feels a lot like dropping acid.

That being said, I'm curious what will come out of this.

tcdowney• 12 years ago

It's as if it were inspired by all of the bad parts of a Dan Friedman text. :)

gojomo6• 12 years ago

Here's an idea: maybe anyone accusing someone else of being "too ambitious" should share one of their own projects that demonstrates exactly the right level of ambition.

pyre3• 12 years ago

So in your opinion nothing is ever too ambitious? Or is it just that no one should every be allowed to utter the words "too ambitious?"

urbit34• 12 years ago

Or as I sometimes say: "on the bottom it's a new kind of math, on the top it's a new kind of social network." This is kind of shameless hype but not as much as you might think.

Sounds like a 10-year research project, right? Actually I started working on Urbit in 2002, as a sort of "unsupervised PhD thesis." I figured it'd be done by 2008 or so.

We seeded a startup last fall and are busy turning a prototype into a product. You can now write a pretty decent web app in Urbit, but it's still too raw to stand the light of day. For instance, the network works, but we often run global flag days when we shut the whole planet down and change the protocol.

One of the main problems with Urbit is that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If you're going to ship something this crazy, it has to work extremely well right out of the box. We had a sort of abortive non-launch last year when the project kind of got accidentally leaked, and decided we had to "unlaunch" and go back into quiet mode. I hate selling things I can't quite deliver.

amelius3• 12 years ago

But can you please explain why you couldn't use existing math (language and compiler) on the bottom layers (1 and 2) before replacing them by your own? That would help me understand the level of your ambition :)

kazagistar• 12 years ago

They already basically have all of the above, as a working tech demo. They actually had it like a year ago or more, but bits are missing or in progress still.

easytiger2• 12 years ago

Ambitious failures with technically brilliant visions have happened before. enlightenment is not easy.

tyrion• 12 years ago

Is this free software? I don't see a license in the Github repository.

SEMW• 12 years ago

Oh the author's blog[0], he states that all his code is in the public domain.

[0] http://moronlab.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/moron-lab-goals-princ...

happybeing• 12 years ago

That description sounds like http://MaidSafe.net, which is rapidly approaching launch.

abrichr• 12 years ago

This seems super interesting. One of the people behind it is David Irvine [1], who apparently "was Designer / Project Manager of one of the World’s largest private networks (Saudi Aramco, over $300M)." [2]

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/04/08/beyond-bi...

[2] https://github.com/maidsafe/MaidSafe/wiki/unpublished_papers...

melchebo• 12 years ago

MaidSafe looks more similar to the original idea of Wuala. But they noticed they basically needed storage servers anyways, because the p2p nodes on people's computers and laptops had too much churn to keep enough copies online.

rogerbraun• 12 years ago

It's made to confuse and mystify. The Borges quote from ' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' gives it away.

Really well done, though!

sjclemmy2• 12 years ago

This guy should have been a comedy writer, not (and?) a programmer. I found this whilst backtracking: http://moronlab.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/moron-lab-goals-princ...

hawkice• 12 years ago

"Comedy writer" isn't quite how I'd describe it, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Urbit is run by the guy who writes/wrote under Mencius Moldbug, who is perhaps one of the more controversial people to achieve internet fandom. If you read through all the archives on his site and have no opinion (probably somewhere in the "I hate him" or "I find this reasonably convincing" statistical clusters), then your sense of outrage has been diminished, I would say.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/

Note: I myself am unconvinced by his writings, and find him to be just another ironic instance of the ironic nature of American culture, eager to avoid the appearance of naivete by abandoning all hopes that are fragile. Do with that what you will.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Urbit is to computing what Thelema is to spirituality.

egypturnash• 12 years ago

This sentence made me laugh more than it should have. Or maybe exactly as much as it should have, given that I spent a year drawing a Tarot deck that riffs on the Crowley/Harris Thoth...

samatman• 12 years ago

You have no idea.

http://mnemnion.github.io/blog/2013/12/19/commentary-on-ax/

sz4kerto• 12 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320

I've been watching this since it's started. It has some magical atmosphere around it and you never now whether it's serious or not; whether it's a real technical project or some kind of artistic performance.

I think I have a destroyer somewhere.

canjobear• 12 years ago

Lots of negativity in the previous discussion. Did the page used to be phrased in a combative way or something?

djur4• 12 years ago

Earlier versions of the site featured a larger quantity of Moldbug's baroque, trollish prose style. Plus there was an extended argument about language design, due to the author being present in the thread.

Frankly, I'm disappointed. It used to be clearly the personal work of a lunatic. Now it feels more like a quirky open source project.

state4• 12 years ago

I hate to break it to you, but it's quite real.

thibauts• 12 years ago

I can't decide if it's a science fiction novel written in code form, a programming environment, a game, a radical creative take on computing and networking ... Whatever it is, it's genius.

Animats• 12 years ago

Was this written by a program?

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

Uber-hackers of the future will write code for nanobots that cause them to self-assemble in to an android, the android will then write a program that generates a system like this that describes a new programming paradigm.

Or, something.

This reminds me of the Newton-Liebniz debate on creation.

sheerun• 12 years ago

Stop wasting my time...

cwyers4• 12 years ago

"More specifically, Urbit is a personal cloud computer. Right now, the cloud computers we use run OSes designed for minicomputers in the '70s. An ordinary user can no more drive a Linux box in the cloud than fly an A320. So she has to sit in coach class as a row in someone else's database. It's definitely air travel. It's not exactly flying."

I doubt very much that the average person wants to either fly their own airplane or manage their own cloud computers, no matter how simple you try to make either of them.

lexcorvus4• 12 years ago

I doubt very much that the average person wants to…fly their own airplane

You don't think the average person would want to fly their own airplane if it were as easy as driving a car?

cwyers4• 12 years ago

What's so easy about driving a car? Over 30,000 people die per year in the United States due to automobile accidents. And that's after requiring every driver get a license, and teaching basic driving skills as part of our high school system. Driving a car isn't all that easy, and we're terrible at it. There's a reason that Google is inventing self-driving cars, not personal airplanes.

And the amount of possible simplicity is constrained by the problem you're trying to solve -- you can't manage to make a plane as simple as driving a car, because the car only has to navigate in two dimensions while the plane has to navigate in three. If a car stops, the car's just sitting there, whereas if a plane stops gravity is going to pull you down in a likely to be fatal incident. You can't make a plane as simple to use as a car without changing it into something other than a plane.

frostmatthew• 12 years ago

You don't think the average person would want to fly their own airplane if it were as easy as driving a car?

Most people don't enjoy driving. Presumably (for most people) flying would be just like driving - exciting, interesting, and liberating at first, but would eventually become a dull and boring chore.

kungfooguru• 12 years ago

It is so purposely obfuscated it has to be a troll.

Estragon2• 12 years ago

Is nock designed to run untrusted, potentially hostile code with guaranteed identical results on all platforms?

I'm looking for a virtual machine (or NaCl-like sandbox) which does this.

Edit: To anyone who downvoted me, could you please let me know why?

lexcorvus4• 12 years ago

I'm just speculating, but the HN upvote/downvote arrows are tiny, and it's easy to click on the wrong one accidentally. (This is especially true on tablet devices.) Your comment clearly doesn't deserve a downvote, though, so I've thrown you an upvote to help make up for it. :-)

urbit34• 12 years ago

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

Estragon2• 12 years ago

Thanks. How close are you to achieving that?

k2enemy• 12 years ago

I found this video helpful in understanding the project: http://vimeo.com/75312418

hyyypr• 12 years ago

Thanks, sums it up pretty good.

And somehow makes it even more magical than when you read the docs.

jevinskie2• 12 years ago

128-bit submarine vs 32-bit destroyer reminded me of IPv6 vs IPv4.

javaexpert1015• 12 years ago

Its fairly distinct. A destroyer is like owning a bunch of submarines, in a way. This is the one point where the model kind of breaks this layer, though.

Basically, it can't run out of address space because of the abundance of subs.

state4• 12 years ago

I can't say we were expecting this, but it's nice to see that people are still interested in what we're working on. Thanks!

What we're brewing in the lab has diverged quite a bit from what's publicly available. Even these docs are quite out of date.

If you're interested in keeping up with what we're doing: either sign up at http://urbit.org or send me an email, galen at tlon.io.

_dps• 12 years ago

From the article:

"It's definitely air travel. It's not exactly flying."

This phrase has an Alan Kay-ish quality, and was enough to pique my interest. Anyone seriously trying to execute on a project that addresses this concern seems worth following. Who knows, you might even succeed :)

andyidsinga2• 12 years ago

i thought that was interesting too.

i find it an interesting exercise to explain to non-technical folks that i have several virtual computers running in the cloud. .. looks on their faces says it all.

duckingtest2• 12 years ago

Seems fun, because I didn't understand everything while skimming the website.

We use so many of these ASCII glyphs that we like to be able to read them out loud. A language is meant to be said.

That's a very weird idea there. A painting is a form of language, but can a painting be said?

meepmorp• 12 years ago

A painting is a form of language, but can a painting be said?

I suppose if you use a very broad definition of language, that might be true, but in the sense of natural languages, paintings are not generally a form of language. They may be a form of symbolic expression, but that doesn't make them a language.

duckingtest2• 12 years ago

A programming language is not a natural language. The quote refers to Hoon specifically.

krick5• 12 years ago

I definitely was thinking about something like this, but not exactly this. I mean, yeah, the only way to save ourselves from damnation is to finally announce "enough of 70's!" and rewrite everything from scratch, so the idea is dear to me, but that actual implementation of the idea is… maybe "weird" is the right word. I'll continue reading, but I already have a feeling that after I'll get myself completely familiar with it, I will hope it will not succeed.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

I hope it will succeed but that it won't be the only thing that will succeed and that some will take inspiration from it to build something even better. Challenging the status quo as such is a useful property and showing that you can in fact reboot is useful as well.

That said, the more I read about it (a couple of hours so far) the more I'm thinking it will not succeed because of some of the weirder philosophical decisions that have already been cast in stone.

It's basically a variation on the 'landgrab' theme. Think bitcoin or the domain name system with half the space grabbed up by the ruling corporation, with an arbitrary 'ingroup' and a very large 'outgroup'.

You'd think that by now the whole point the web rammed home with its unbridled success is that open is better but I guess the mobile walled gardens have whetted the appetite of future wannabe corporate overlords.

Anyway, I still wish them best of luck, that's an economic move on my part, it costs nothing and I suspect they are self limiting enough that it will not achieve the world domination they are dreaming of. See also: the singularity.

urbit34• 12 years ago

I prefer to think of it as: you can be "free as in beer" or "free as in speech," but not both. Sith Lord Zuck has set you free as in beer, but not in speech. Urbit will set you free as in speech, but not as in beer.

The difference is simply that while there are a limited number of Urbit identities (or at least memorable identities, ie, 32-bit "destroyers") in the world, and therefore they can't possibly be made free as in beer, neither I nor my evil minions have any practical power over a destroyer once we create it.

Moreover, if you genuinely think of any individual or organization involved with Urbit as evil, there are plenty of independent carrier-holders you can get a destroyer from. (~del, for instance, will ship destroyers when we do, I think. He's some guy in Rochester whom I don't know from Adam. So, we'll let him serve the first 16 million people who want to escape from our evil dictatorship.)

Yes, by default the normal way to get onto Urbit will feel like the normal way to get onto Facebook. However, even if you are initially issued and hosted by us, you can move your image at any time to any other host, or to your own machine. Currently there's no way to stop using your issuing carrier for network services, such as firewall hole punching, but this is obviously a 1.0 feature. By design, there is no sort of leverage you can't escape from.

So Urbit strikes a sort of balance between governed and ungoverned networks. The limited address space will hopefully make it economically impractical to abuse the network for profit - a spammer is always a Sybil attacker. But as a destroyer you are not ruled by any master you can't easily escape from. The only thing you can't escape is your own reputation. Which you shouldn't be able to escape from.

We should probably highlight this difference a little more in the doc...

macu3• 12 years ago

I read partway through and began to worry that maybe old age has finally caught up to me at 25.

Zillion• 12 years ago

The choice of 0 for true and 1 for false is _wrong:_ On the Curry-Howard correspondence (and above) a type corresponds to a false sentence when it is not inhabited, like 0, and to a true sentence when it is. The Curry-Howard correspondence is fundamental, and so that is the. correct way to go, absent evidence in the other direction. I don't know whether Nock is a better foundation for a programming language than the Lambda Calculus, but it is at least as elegant—I'm glad someone is seeing where it leads I'm a fan of internet freedom, which often requires anonymity, and so I have my doubts about an OS that preserves exerything as a feature of the design.

jdpage• 12 years ago

Aside from the zero/one thing, if I'm understanding this right, Nock is based on the SKI combinator calculus, where the combinators are

S: λxyz.xz(yz)

K: λxy.x

I: λx.x

From there, you can express anything from the lambda calculus, and vice-versa. So I think it's reasonable to say that Nock is just a machine-friendly way of expressing the lambda calculus.

urbit34• 12 years ago

I wouldn't say it's based on SKI - just relatively similar. There are a lot of ways to skin this cat.

SKI is obviously a lot simpler mathematically, but I wouldn't want to try to use it as a compiler target...

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

The 'I' is optional, all you need is S and K. I = (SKK)

You can go simpler still: Iota.

urbit34• 12 years ago

IANAM, but I thought really if there was one great lesson of 20th-century mathematics, it's that nothing (ie, no system of axioms) is fundamental and superior to all others. For instance, Church-Turing equivalence does not tell you that Church's model of computing is more fundamental than Turing's or vice versa.

If you look at where lambda comes from, it comes out of this same project of metamathematics that originates in the 19th century with people like Frege - how do you describe math in terms of math? Then it was discovered that this project could be repurposed as a definition of computing. Reusing old standards is a thing that happens, but sometimes you'd come up with a different approach if you were starting from scratch. As I've pointed out elsewhere on this thread, the shared theoretical foundation of lambda does not lead to a family of languages that are compatible in any meaningful sense.

It was probably a bad decision to make 0 true and 1 false, but not for mathematical reasons. There is always a lot of C coupled to Urbit, and what ends up happening is that the easiest way to handle this problem is to write C in a sort of dialect in which 0 is true and 1 is false. This is slightly cumbersome, and the perceived elegance of 0 == true isn't at all worth it. However, it's also nowhere near awful enough to revisit the question, which would be quite tricky considering the self-compiling nature of the system!

loqi3• 12 years ago

It's been sorta mentioned elsewhere on the thread, but there is another (IMO simpler) mathematical intuition behind 0:1 :: false:true that doesn't involve any lambda fundamentalism. It's the algebraic analogy disjunction:conjunction :: addition:multiplication :: union:intersection :: ... which also turns up pretty often in computing.

For instance, if you've got anything like regular expressions, then you've got something with a structure where the "unit" (trivial match) is an identity for sequencing, and the "zero" (failed match) is an identity for disjunction and a zero for sequencing. It's not exactly a formal argument for preferring booleans to loobeans, but a failed regex match sure feels like a "false" to me.

I don't doubt that it's not worth changing at this point, but don't throw the semiring baby out with the lambda bathwater.

javaexpert1015• 12 years ago

Or you could consider that they are freaking isomorphic to each other and therefore neither is better than each other

jqm2• 12 years ago

I'm just wondering if it will run on TempleOS.

urbit34• 12 years ago

TempleOS is a competitor, not a partner. Privately, between you and me - that guy is going down.

macu3• 12 years ago

It seems like a work of genius, but it may be many years before an artificial intelligence can fully interpret its unique significance.

In fact it reminds me about a massive book on cellular automation that I once picked up, which went to incredible length in interpreting the potential of dynamic patterns in 2D space. It was a monument to extreme intellectual rigour and dedication, if nothing else. If only I could remember the title.

zenlikethat• 12 years ago

Was it "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram?

macu3• 12 years ago

That's the one. Thank you

tunesmith• 12 years ago

Sounds like Wolfram's New Kind Of Science.

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

Don't really get what this is technically, but conceptually I do understand it and would love to back a company like this. Technologies like this could kill Microsoft (Windows) and many others.

jabits• 12 years ago

Why would this be any better? Then this is the big company that screws things up.

emmanueloga_2• 12 years ago

Interesting distribution of contributors [1]. Usually what I see on most projects is one or two guys contributing the most of the code since the start of the repository, with minor contributors coming and going. These contributors chart seem to show different guys taking the helm at different points on time though.

1: https://github.com/urbit/urbit/graphs/contributors

Scaevolus• 12 years ago

Not quite. It looks like urbit has imported the histories of multiple other projects.

LibUV: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors Re2: https://code.google.com/p/re2/source/list

state4• 12 years ago

Hm. Not sure how that happened. We have had a number of different contributors.

emmanueloga_2• 12 years ago

BTW, since I know how much does the hackernews crowd appreciate baseless speculation (sorry!), I'd add this: I wonder if Ryan Dahl is involved with this project. Working on something like this would be compatible with some of the things he wrote about before disappearing [1].

1: http://xahlee.info/comp/Ryan_Dahl_on_software_complexity.htm...

andyidsinga2• 12 years ago

i loved everything i read on that page ...especially the part about it being not good formanyting but screwin around!

BTW - re Hoon ...a reference to the sea faring settlers in Brin's uplift series?

hunnypot• 12 years ago

This gives me a weird Daemon vibe.

comrh• 12 years ago

This is like if Douglas Adams and Greg Egan did pair coding. Super interesting.

JDulin2• 12 years ago

Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?...

First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's destined to be the future, but I sure as hell hope it is.

I had the privilege of interning at Tlon, the company working on Urbit's development, this summer. It owns most of the namespace (Personal cloud computer IP addresses, essentially.) and is where the architect of the system works full-time. They are funded, well enough, by VCs you know of. Urbit is not really launched yet though - We spent the summer doing a lot of work getting the network, file system, protocols, and application layer in "Industrial grade" shape, and I believe more of that is happening this fall.

Because the system is still unlaunched and the docs are being retooled, I imagine these pages are discombobulating. That's... expected. Urbit has a lot of odd ideas that take time to appreciate. However, if you do take the time to understand the motivation behind the design of everything from Hoon's appearance to the network protocol replacement for TCP to the vision for future social networks, you'll find some of the best and most complete computer science research done in decades in networks, systems, and functional programming. The essential idea is not an outlandish one - We need a new basis of computing and networking to build digital identities with, and 1970s system software is not up to the task.

It's unfortunate that ambition and a sense of humor can be misinterpreted as a joke today. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it [1] that these guys are deadly serious and have the technical chops to back up their ambition. Future documentation and applications built on the OS should soon make that more immediately evident.

[1] Or start reading the tutorials!

lumpypua• 12 years ago

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/ames...

There are hundreds of lines of noise. This makes perl and forth look absurdly readable. What on earth do the directory and file names mean?

I dunno how familiar people on HN are but the original author of urbit is Mencius Moldbug, a neoreactionary blogger. His style of writing is absurdly obfuscated and purposely impenetrable if containing some interesting ideas. The exact same thing is true of urbit. Interesting ideas but obfuscated the point of utter inaccessibility.

Here's sort of the wider group of blogs he philosophically aligns with:

http://rationalwiki.org/w/images/d/d5/Scharlachs-visualizing...

His views are likely unpopular around here but I am a fan of a bunch of those other blogs, and I've tried to dive into Moldbug's blog Unqualified Reservations a few times. It's kind of insane—the guy is clearly very intelligent—yet writes in his own discursive style that is absolutely opaque.

valvar• 12 years ago

I haven't read all of Unqualified Reservations, but what I have read so far (Dawkins, Open Letter, Gentle Introduction) has not been difficult to read at all. Perhaps long and winding, but not opaque. In fact, I find Moldbug to be much more accessible than his sources of inspiration (which are standard fare if you even want to even begin with political theory).

MrBuddyCasino2• 12 years ago

He does have really odd political views. I know HN shouldn't be about politics, but this was a really interesting read:

http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/

It looks like he thinks that the benevolent-dictator-for-life model is how countries should be run. And Peter Thiel seems to agree with him.

urbit34• 12 years ago

Stepping away from the Algol keyword tradition is obviously a risk. At the same time, after using a keyword-free syntax for a while, reserved words feel really weird.

Someone just emailed and pointed out that he couldn't check out Urbit on Windows, because it has a file con.c. Oh, right, reserved filenames. How are reserved words different? The difference is - you're used to them.

Also, perceived usability (while it matters for marketing) is not the same thing as actual usability. Actual usability is something you only find out when you try to actually use something. We have a good bit of experience inflicting the syntax on coders of various abilities and backgrounds, and we're pretty satisfied with the result.

It helps that the syntax is quite a bit more regular than it appears at first glance. It's much more regular than Perl, and it also comes with a vocalization model that makes it easy to say out loud.

For instance, "=+", which more or less declares a variable, is "tislus." A lot of things like "=+" also start with "=", ie, "tis." You wind up learning about a hundred of these digraphs or "runes," which is a lot less than, say, Chinese.

Speaking of Perl, have you heard - Larry Wall is a Christian? I don't think this makes Perl a Christian programming language, though.One of the joys of our engineering inheritance from the 20th century, which was really humanity's golden age of political insanity, is that we get to stand on the shoulders of loons. We fly Christian astronauts into space on Nazi rockets programmed by Communist physicists. And it works...

rgrieselhuber• 12 years ago

Is that image of associated blogs generated using some tool?

ricardobeat• 12 years ago

Wow, now I'm curious about the language. Looks like made-up gibberish at first sight:

    ++  lax                                           ::    lax:as:go
      |_  [her=ship dur=dore]                         ::  per client
      ++  cluy                                        ::    cluy:lax:as:go
        ^-  [p=life q=gens r=acru]                    ::  client crypto
        ?~  lew.wod.dur  !!
        ?.  =(fak.ton r.i.lew.wod.dur)  ~|([%client-wrong-fake her] !!)
        :+  p.p.q.i.lew.wod.dur
          q.q.i.lew.wod.dur
        (haul r.q.i.lew.wod.dur)
      ::

JDulin2• 12 years ago

As a coder of "various ability and background", I found that Hoon source code was a relaxing joy to read and write after a few weeks of dedicated study.

It is, believe it not, designed with readability as a first-class priority. However, a common meme in language design today is that "Code should read like prose." This sounds good, because it means languages are easy to learn. Who wants to learn a bunch of symbols and patterns and junk? I want to code (Python, JavaScript, etc.) now!

But when we program, we aren't dealing with the trivial knowledge English is efficient at exchanging in an email, or the subtly it portrays in a novel. We are talking to a computer. The ideas we explain to a computer are often much more complex than we can explain precisely with English in any reasonable amount of time, so complex we often lose ourselves in them.

Mathematicians and physicists gave up on making human language explain specific technical ideas long ago. Have you ever read a paper on cosmic topology or quantum field theory? There's a comforting padded bumper of English framing the ideas, but the reason the paper is published is in symbols which would appear to the uninitiated as "hundreds of lines of noise." The English is usually just an introduction.

I think Hoon is wonderful [1] because it has both power and predictability. Power lets you express complex ideas concisely and easily, while predictability lets you read and understand someone else's code without frustration. Perl is powerful because it's dense, but it does so at the cost of predictably. Mathematics symbols are terribly powerful, but wildly unpredictable [2]. Python is sort of powerful and sort of predictable. The seductiveness of English simulacra programming languages is that you often don't realize how much power you're giving up because it's just so relaxing to not think about symbols and patterns when your code has the predictability of an email.

Hoon's power is in the zoology of runes (Digraphs) and it's predictability is rooted in its homoiconicity. Every symbol on the keyboard is utilized to build powerful runes, each of which in turn is utilized to append predictable structure onto your AST. When you understand the basic patterns of these constructions and reductions, it's not hard to read someone else's library and understand it in an afternoon. I can't say the same for the Java SDKs I come across. [3]

I'm not saying it isn't inaccessible at first and doesn't take time to learn. I am saying it is worth it.

[1] It's my favorite language - It is just plain fun.

[2] That's why the English frame around a physics paper is there - It tells you what each symbol represents in this paper and what they're trying to do.

[3] The language design also includes several decisions to avoid the pratfalls of other homoiconic languages (Primarily the readability of Lisp), but those are explained in the docs.

jcburke• 12 years ago

Wait, so they wrote their own bytecode, functional language (complete with compiler and libraries), functional operating system, TCP replacement, and distributed storage protocol? And will presumably write all their own apps, or some kind of interface layer that will allow non-Hoon code to run on their system efficiently? That has to be one of the most ridiculously ambitious projects I've ever seen. Good luck to them I guess, but I've always been a believer in not reinventing too many wheels at once

urbit34• 12 years ago

Perhaps it makes a bit more sense if it's explained that the original goal was to keep the whole codebase (outside of the C support layer, which adds no semantics) at 10Kloc. Unfortunately this is now rapidly slipping toward 20.

Of course, Kloc is a deceptive measure of algorithmic simplicity in a functional language, if compared to procedural. Also there is about another 15Kloc of C in the interpreter and another 10K that wraps an event layer on libuv.

Bear in mind that Urbit can also be seen as an ACID database on the log-and-snapshot principle - events are transactions. You can of course export application state to some other storage system, but you don't have to. (If you change the source code, your app reloads - you do have to write a function that maps your old state to your new state, though.) So there is a lot of strange futzing around with mmap at the bottom.

guscost2• 12 years ago

I never would have guessed that Urbit has funding. That sounds like a very interesting job.

djur4• 12 years ago

Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of both neoreactionarism and various types of out-there futurism; I wouldn't be surprised if he's involved, and I'm sure he's not the only jillionaire with similar interests.

nnq• 12 years ago

It's probably the second time that I come across Urbit and found it attention worthy, but... how hard would it be to explain at least some of the concepts in plain English and with some nice intuitive drawings/schemas on the side, really?

I mean, this http://doc.urbit.org/doc/hoon/tut/1/ is supposed to be a "tutorial" but it's definitely not what anyone else would call a "tutorial". It's more like a "philosophical introduction" to a PhD paper, which would be ok if labeled as such. A tutorial should be about "how do I do X using Y, without bothering to really understand Y" because this is what a tutorial is about, a "mostly wrong" "mental shortcut" that you take in order to gain some kind of "feel for how something works" before actually delving deeper and reading up on the theory.

state4• 12 years ago

This is solid and thoughtful feedback. Thanks.

Our documentation has advanced since this was posted. I'd be interested to talk more out of band, but can't find your email. If you're up for it I'm galen at tlon.io.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

This is fun stuff. Reading around a bit I found this:

"While nowhere near the simplest such automaton known, and certainly not of any theoretical interest, Nock is so stupid that if you gzip the spec, it's only 374 bytes. Nock's only arithmetic operation is increment. So decrement is an O(n), operation; add is O(m * n)... "

Don't they mean 'subtraction' rather than 'add'?

edit: This is so fascinating, it has me totally enthralled. Think smalltalk meets lisp meets some wild eyed programmer who knows just how to appeal to the general frustration most programmers should have (do they?) about the state of our art.

Best post on HN in a long time, very curious how this one will turn out in the long term. May all your ships come in ;)

edit2:

Digging around a bit more: Peter Thiel and a bunch of others have apparently invested in this through a vehicle called 'Tion', https://angel.co/tlon (the Thiel reference is that Thiel backed John Burnham, who is co-founder in Tion).

Chattered2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure on the specifics here, but I'd have thought that subtraction would be O(n). To perform n - m on a simple register machine with only increment, you just count from m up to n (and count from 0 up to n, outputting 0 if you reach n, since subtraction is partial).

EDIT: It seems they are going for a naive implementation where subtract just repeatedly calls decrement, so yes, that's going to be O(m*n).

auggierose• 12 years ago

It depends on what the n means in O(n). If n means anything other than "the number of digits of x" (i.e., n = log(x)), then this is absurdly slow.

yebyen17• 12 years ago

The "corporate tentacle" as they call it is actually called Tlön, not Tion, though you got the link right...

It is a reference to something out of Jorge Luis Borges

WorldWideWayne• 12 years ago

Are there a lot of women using Urbit or something?

path411• 12 years ago

I always find the forceful use of female gender pronouns to be very odd. If you are conscious of and disagree with the general use of male gender pronouns, wouldn't you wan't to push the use of gender neutral pronouns?

Personally, I'd rather see the use of some of the new made up neutral pronouns than thinking swapping male to female pronouns is a viable long-term solution.

vesche• 12 years ago

When I read through the urbit git page and it finally clicked to me what this is and what it could mean, I literally said out loud in my room "Oh, that's really fucking cool."

DennisP2• 12 years ago

For those of us who it hasn't clicked for, could you lend us a hand?

newuser882734• 12 years ago

The project is based on a fundamental insincerity, which makes me suspicious. All material about Urbit makes a big point of their minimal spec, again so in the linked piece: "The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes."

What do people expect when they read a thing like that? I don't know about you, bit I'd expect that I could ignore the obfuscated strangeness of their higher level languages etc and just implement stuff to that minimal spec.

So you expect you can do that. But you can't. That minimal spec might as well not exist; you can't just read it and go on to implement, say, a programming language on top of Urbit.

"But you can!" you might object. Try it. Read nothing but that spec and implement, say, a tiny BASIC on top of it. Compile some simple programs. Run them. Now, what happens? Nothing, for now. But look, my processor core is heating up. Something must be happening! Just wait. Wait. Wait. No, still nothing. Wait some more. Just a few years, maybe? No, still nothing (except heat). Etc.

So no, that elegant spec doesn't give you anything but a way to heat your computing cabinet.

Realizing this, I put Urbit in the "suspicious, may be a con" bin. Hasn't escaped from there, yet.

perlgeek2• 12 years ago

The project is based on a fundamental insincerity, which makes me suspicious. All material about Urbit makes a big point of their minimal spec, again so in the linked piece: "The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes."

Last I read something like this (I don't know if it was about Urbit or something else), it turned out that there was no IO included in that spec. So, useless for any real-world purpose, and as you said, insincere.

yebyen17• 12 years ago

The IO are events, and the events come from unix (for example: signals, files and sockets).

Urbit is not meant to replace Unix. "They call us, we don't call them" is the fundamental precept in play here. I assure you there is I/O in Urbit, the vanes include an HTTP server, a Hoon-interpreting shell which accepts keyboard input from a terminal, and a UDP layer for facilitating ship-to-ship communications. All of that is written in Hoon, which compiles into Nock.

newuser882734• 12 years ago

This goes even deeper. Let's just go on and assume that Urbit's spec-bearing T-shirt includes everything you need for IO. Now consider this promise from Mr Yarvin, found in the older Urbit thread someone linked to: "And actually, if you don't like Hoon [Urbit's strange, obfuscated high level programming language] you can build your own language on this platform. So long as it compiles to Nock [purportedly documented on that T-shirt]"

So you hook up your new Nock back end to your favorite compiler, painstakingly hand-crafted to generate Nock code perfectly conforming to the T-shirt spec. You compile a few programs. You run them. Heat radiates from the CPU... and nothing else happens. You wait, patiently at first, then way beyond patience, yet nothing (except heat). Don't you feel cheated, just a little?

tromp2• 12 years ago

My Binary Lambda Calculus is specified in a few paragraphs in http://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html and includes basic IO. It blc-zips to only 29 bytes (size of self-interpreter).

The 25-lines-of-obfuscated-C interpreter is on the very shirt that I wear on my (clickable) homepage picture.

wmf• 12 years ago

Run them. Now, what happens? Nothing, for now.

Can you explain what the actual problem is? "Only X lines of code" puffery is endemic in programming so I'm not sure why Urbit should be singled out.

easytiger2• 12 years ago

"The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes.

If the spec expands does the guy wearing the t-shirt have to eat lots of pizza?

roboben2• 12 years ago

the only bad things seems that everyone is dependent from a server run by one company. why is there a need for this kind of registry? wouldn't be a distributed system better for this?

yebyen17• 12 years ago

Man, I just wrote you a big long explanation of how you can update your filesystem even if your parent ship is gone, with shell command examples, but then my battery died before I had a chance to post it, and I'm totally not rewriting it now because I'm sure you don't care that much, and the real punchline is all of this information is about to be obsolete anyway.

The long and the short is, there are carriers (I have one), who are enumerated in the source code (like by public keys) and they are not dependant on each other, except for the sake of being able to route to child ships. So if ~zod is down, and everyone depends on ~zod, the network is indeed hosed. Everyone with active links can continue talking to each other, but nobody new can find anyone, and nobody can find anyone new. Every ship depends on a carrier for routing.

By convention, every time you launch from your pier, you get a new random port number and any ship that was looking for you at your old address needs to hear about your new address from a higher-up ship.

So it is distributed, but finitely distributed. There are only 256 carriers allowed, and they are the only ships that are really independent. Though there has been talk about fleshing out how ships can be separable from their "sein" domain, or parent ships, currently almost everyone is from the same lineage and thus depends on the same pair of servers for pretty much everything regarding the network.

This "centralized" design is indeed a core feature of the network, and it even relies on DNS to be bootstrapped, another centralized system. Now, can you show me a decentralized system that doesn't need any of that? I don't know exactly how magnet links or tor, or freenet work, but I am skeptical that they are honestly less centralized than this when it comes to bootstrapping.

yebyen17• 12 years ago

Follow-up: As I suspected, regarding magnet links

The first time a client joints the DHT network it generates a random 160-bit ID from the same space as infohashes, and then bootstraps its connection to the DHT network using hard-coded addresses of clients controlled by the client developer.

This sounds really quite like the process of creating a submarine, and reaching out to the carrier ~zod. The fact that the init process is hardcoded to trust ~zod doesn't change that you can really init your ship's filesystem from any other ship, provided you can reach it.

Carriers are all found through the existing DNS infrastructure. Other ships are able to be reached "in-band" by asking a carrier for an introduction. Without this seed or hardcoded list (or by conducting a brute-force search), or some kind of broadcast mechanism, bootstrapping a distributed network is not actually possible.

jacquesm5• 12 years ago

Urbit: a personal cloud computer

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