Like most platforms, it's valuable IFF a lot of people build on it. But the fact that I can make an on-topic, constructive and informative comment about it and still get downvoted tells you everything you need to know…
Sorry if I was unclear, it's a hard thing to summarize, but the useful part of it is in being a platform for app development, not just the fact that it hosts stuff. "End user server-side apps" isn't really a thing that…
100% urbit. The idea behind it (briefly: "personal server", an easy-to-use, no-frills place for an end-user to run server-side use cases like storing important files, hosting a blog, etc that's portable between cloud…
I really like the idea of Kelvin versioning for an OS: instead of counting up and adding features forever, count down until you're done.
Thanks for working on this. Have you considered abandoning urbit references and nomenclature? I've been casually following urbit a long time, and think there's a case to be made that it has accumulated enough toxic…
The problem isn't that you're wrong, it's that this is the same cutting insight everyone has in their first five minutes of exposure to urbit. It's like going to Australia and telling everyone you meet that vegemite…
If you decided to make a fork of linux, and wrote an article explaining why, would you expect it to be easily comprehensible to someone who's never used linux?
It's disappointing how much low-effort bashing there is in this whole thread. Sure urbit is weird and has a lot of baggage and questionable design decisions, but the project we're discussing is explicitly an attempt to…
My (relatively unbiased and informed) summary of what urbit is from the last time it came up is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31124343 As someone who thinks urbit would solve an important use case but is…
There's no rollback, it's an atomic transaction. The certainty that messages are always handled completely or fail completely is one of the big design constraints that made the whole thing so hinky.
Yes, but the receiver can be faulty. If it acknowledges the message and then crashes before handling it, you've got at-most-once, and if it handles the message and then crashes before acknowledging it, you've got…
You don't have to understand the linux kernel to buffer overlow a linux application; If they do something like "Here's the IP of a running urbit with 100BTC in it, good luck!" and it's still up in a few years, that'd be…
Is it even realistic to make a provably secure/stable applications on an OS like windows or linux? This (provable correctness of programs, at the expense of performance) is one of the explicit design goals or urbit. I…
How do you keep apps from accessing other apps' data on linux? By creating separate user accounts with limited permissions for the apps to run under, right? Same deal here. Except that in urbit, "different user account"…
Urbit is an OS, apps have access to whatever you give them access to. If you want one app (say, a dating profile) to not have access to data stored by another app (say, your bitcoin wallet), you run them under separate…
I agree, I was being terse; it'd be more accurate to say you can be banned off of the urbit network entirely if everyone hates you, but if only most people hate you, you can still use it (but may only be able to talk to…
FWIW here's an explainer I wrote up a year ago for a friend who asked. I'm not affiliated with urbit, except that I want a product that does what it does (which at this point means I'm hoping someone reinvents it,…
Like most platforms, it's valuable IFF a lot of people build on it. But the fact that I can make an on-topic, constructive and informative comment about it and still get downvoted tells you everything you need to know…
Sorry if I was unclear, it's a hard thing to summarize, but the useful part of it is in being a platform for app development, not just the fact that it hosts stuff. "End user server-side apps" isn't really a thing that…
100% urbit. The idea behind it (briefly: "personal server", an easy-to-use, no-frills place for an end-user to run server-side use cases like storing important files, hosting a blog, etc that's portable between cloud…
I really like the idea of Kelvin versioning for an OS: instead of counting up and adding features forever, count down until you're done.
Thanks for working on this. Have you considered abandoning urbit references and nomenclature? I've been casually following urbit a long time, and think there's a case to be made that it has accumulated enough toxic…
The problem isn't that you're wrong, it's that this is the same cutting insight everyone has in their first five minutes of exposure to urbit. It's like going to Australia and telling everyone you meet that vegemite…
If you decided to make a fork of linux, and wrote an article explaining why, would you expect it to be easily comprehensible to someone who's never used linux?
It's disappointing how much low-effort bashing there is in this whole thread. Sure urbit is weird and has a lot of baggage and questionable design decisions, but the project we're discussing is explicitly an attempt to…
My (relatively unbiased and informed) summary of what urbit is from the last time it came up is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31124343 As someone who thinks urbit would solve an important use case but is…
There's no rollback, it's an atomic transaction. The certainty that messages are always handled completely or fail completely is one of the big design constraints that made the whole thing so hinky.
Yes, but the receiver can be faulty. If it acknowledges the message and then crashes before handling it, you've got at-most-once, and if it handles the message and then crashes before acknowledging it, you've got…
You don't have to understand the linux kernel to buffer overlow a linux application; If they do something like "Here's the IP of a running urbit with 100BTC in it, good luck!" and it's still up in a few years, that'd be…
Is it even realistic to make a provably secure/stable applications on an OS like windows or linux? This (provable correctness of programs, at the expense of performance) is one of the explicit design goals or urbit. I…
How do you keep apps from accessing other apps' data on linux? By creating separate user accounts with limited permissions for the apps to run under, right? Same deal here. Except that in urbit, "different user account"…
Urbit is an OS, apps have access to whatever you give them access to. If you want one app (say, a dating profile) to not have access to data stored by another app (say, your bitcoin wallet), you run them under separate…
I agree, I was being terse; it'd be more accurate to say you can be banned off of the urbit network entirely if everyone hates you, but if only most people hate you, you can still use it (but may only be able to talk to…
FWIW here's an explainer I wrote up a year ago for a friend who asked. I'm not affiliated with urbit, except that I want a product that does what it does (which at this point means I'm hoping someone reinvents it,…