This might be the most revolutionary technology in the world, but I really have no idea because your landing page is full of the vaguest most utopian promises. You might say, well, you should go read the "technical docs", but have read about so many hyped techonologies that came to nothing at this point that I am incredibly skeptical.<p>If you can't tell me what you are doing in a single paragraph, then you've got a problem. If you can, why doesn't your homepage reflect that? Show me! I don't want to scroll through another website with 16 point font.<p>We all love the Unix philosophy and puppies, too.<p>Please take this as the constructive criticism it is.
I dunno. This thing is weird, but they put a lot of work into it, and you can download something that runs.<p>What they want to build, from the user perspective, seems to be a federated social network. Like Diaspora, only with some of the problems solved. The two big user-level problems they claim to solve are 1) spam, and 2) being tied to a service provider.<p>The solution to 1) is that you have to buy an identity from someone. You can't create identities for free. This is a profit center for someone, although I'm not clear whom. Not clear how much a personal identity costs, but there are only 2^32 of them.<p>The solution to 2) is that you can pick up your ball and go home - take the entire state of your online presence and move it to another server. The routing gets fixed somehow. Sort of like cell phone number portability.<p>Those are both good features. Right now, they apparently power only an online chat system and the ability to host web pages driven by programs in their language. Somebody could potentially build a Facebook-like system on top of that.<p>The terminology and the cult-like aspects are seriously annoying. It reminds me of Xanadu and its team. (I knew that crowd. Mostly extreme libertarians. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.)<p>I wonder if this could be used as a lightweight container system for server-side web applications. It has a container system, and those containers can serve web pages and talk to other containers. Unlike, say, Docker, you don't have to lug around a whole Linux environment in your container. Being able to move your container to a new hosting service very quickly would force hosting services to be competitive.
It's a cult creation technology: anyone who expends enough effort to launch a ship will have convinced themself that this is really cool, and that they are very much smarter than the average bear.
From a purely academic standpoint, I find this project and it's goals intriguing... And I'd be interested in playing around with the environment, if only it weren't for the "Hoon" language. I'm fine dusting off lisp, or erlang, or any of the myriad imperative languages I know to play around, but I have no desire to learn an esoteric language that only works in one esoteric system! If someone ever makes a cross-compiler from a sane language let me know!
>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.<p>This kind of sums up the approach taken here. I'm out. I'm too dumb for this project.
I met with the founders of Urbit over Dinner a few years back, part of a community meetup at the Thiel Fellowship Finalists Round in 2014 (yeah, bring out the pitchforks) and they seemed like pretty amazing guys.<p>What I don't understand, however, is the need to romanticize software. There's too much magic in this. I get the feel that this is something very important, but I don't understand what it is. Anyhow, best of luck to the team!
I'm reserving my judgement on the system. Just sharing a few videos which might help in understanding Urbit better. Start with this LamdaConf talk: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I94qbWBGsDs</a> and pair with this demo video after: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp9aCEfA6ao" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp9aCEfA6ao</a>
I want to like this, but I feel like they are trying to solve too many things at once. Which is just another kind of problem. New CLI, new language...<p><a href="https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/" rel="nofollow">https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/</a>
All I got from this is "we want to sell you a domain name that is unrecognized by all existing software and infrastructure, please give us money"<p>If I wanna join a cyber-utopian hacker-hippie commune, I'm not going to pay a cult to do so. Especially not an inarticulate cult. I'll build it myself? It sure doesn't sound understandable to regular people if the HN crowd doesn't know what they're talking about.
Wow, before I read the HN comments, I felt really dumb for not understanding a word of what that page meant.<p>I thought it was one of those strange things all the cool kids are into these days whose appeal I cannot understand or explain.
A good summary of some unhappy comments is that its an experimental reboot of a vast new system. Most of the people who are unhappy went into it expecting something very small like "uber for the jvm" or "the twitter of functional programming" or similar.<p>Progress in IT / CS has dramatically slowed over my life. Urbit feels much like 80s home computing, where forklift upgrades of everything you know was "normal" in the extremely rapid transition from Altair CP/M to an Amiga to a SunOS box or whatever path. Nothing is new in the last 20 years, at least compared to the incredibly rapid pace of change in the first 10 years I was into computers. I'm just saying that however unthinkable a forklift upgrade is culturally in 2016, in 1986 it was considered to be "great fun" not a problem or a downside.
People may also be interested in the LambdaConf talk from a few weeks ago: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkZ3GkeU9kg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkZ3GkeU9kg</a>
I haven't read the whitepaper, but from what I've gathered, urbit is a virtual machine that runs on a network, maybe with support for untrusted nodes? If that's the case then that's amazing, and it's understandable how esoteric it all seems. But that's quite an extraordinary development and I'm skeptical.<p>It would be nice if they would give a clear description of what is they've made. Does this enable running a server jointly with a partner you don't trust, with neither party having physical access, and without involving any third party?
The scope of the project is big. It mentions gmail, ifft and others. The api integrations for the third parties is measured in terms of years due to breaking changes and sheer amount of work. How is the urbit team managing that?
Just a reminder, you can learn more about the folks behind Urbit, their objections to democracy, women's suffrage, and general agenda at <a href="http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis" rel="nofollow">http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis</a>
Urbit is purposefully obfuscated. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the docs:<p><a href="https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/" rel="nofollow">https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/advanced/</a><p>There is no reason to gensym all of your concepts like this. It is different just for the purpose of being different: apparently you can't sell people on a "revolutionary technology" without <i>appearing</i> to be extremely different.<p>Nock is also not a good virtual machine. Recognizing blessed sequences of bytecode and replacing them with opaque blobs of code is not a valid approach to optimization. No one can actually run a pure Nock VM, so what is the point of having Nock in the first place?<p>Someone else on HN gave the best summary of Urbit I've seen yet: an elaborate cup and ball game, meant to give the impression of innovation and technical excellence.
I'm not entirely sure I buy the arguments that "made-up words" are a bad thing. All words were made up at some point. And the English language on the surface seems extremely redundant in its vocabulary, but each element of a cluster of words can contain separate nuance, so we keep them around. Perhaps this doesn't have a place in computing, but perhaps it does. Consider, for example, the most jargon-y field of mathematics of all, category theory:<p><a href="https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trinitarianism" rel="nofollow">https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trinitarianism</a><p>Proofs = Types = Categories; all related, all translatable in terms of one another, yet all different. New words in a technical vocabulary let you be both concise but also on occasion familiar.<p>I find arguments about obfuscation maybe a bit more credible. It's hard to say. I'll venture that getting people to pay attention to your ideas by throwing you off of previous convention could potentially work, but time will tell.
<i>Urbit is a republic. Its government has one task: promoting, preserving and protecting Urbit. It may take any legal action which advances this goal.</i><p>That sounds a bit scary!