The Inuit agree on a common writing system - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/10/03/the-inuit-agree-on-a-common-writing-system <comment><USER4> Wow... It's very rare that a HN post intersects so closely with my current work... I say, as I look out the window into downtown Iqaluit. Interestingly enough newer versions of Windows allows users to easily add support for both Inuktitut Syllabic and Latin languages, I have yet to see a physical keyboard.

What irks me the most, is the lack of server-side language support for cloud offerings, on-premise Enterprise products, etc. If Microsoft can support Klingon for translation purposes, then just maybe they could support Inuktitut a little better.

<comment><USER5> Holy fuck I had to look that one up on the map....you are OUT there. I realized when I saw the map that I was just reading about that place the other day! That's incredible. I honestly never thought in my whole life I would ever meet someone who had been there, even on the internet. I would be super interested to hear ANYTHING you have to share about that place. What it's like getting there, being there, what you're doing there, the people, the life, anything.

<comment><USER4> It's a very interesting place - the people are welcoming and friendly (well YMMV, but if you are willing to listen and understand the local challenges and culture - then you will have a good time).

Food security is a challenge for people who do live here, due to the general high-costs. Interesting fact - at one point in time, Amazon Prime shipping to Iqaluit was 2-3 times the national average for Canada (and that probably increased with their purchase of Whole Foods - items, which may be most expensive through Amazon for the rest of Canada can often be cheaper than purchased 'locally') - [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iqaluit-amazon- prime-1....](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iqaluit-amazon- prime-1.4193665)

The landscape is beautiful (personally, I am a sucker for mountainous/rocky terrain and ocean) - it is above the Arctic circle, so - no trees! The weather is currently really nice - a little rainy today, but no snow - the big freeze hasn't happened yet. Myself, I find that even during winter months, the cold is not unworkable - as technically the local climate is considered a polar desert zone, so the reduced humidity helps.

Myself, I don't live here - but I do come up every 2-3 months, primarily working on Microsoft-stack products and technologies.

Most often, one gets here from a flight from Ottawa - almost 3-hours in duration. (And hey... you still get a hot meal in-flight!) However, it is possible that you might fly in from another territory or community - <USER2> the summer there are some flights to/from Greenland.

All data/communications connectivity currently occurs over satellite connections (your flight lands, your phone connects to a local "LTE" network, but that is then bridged back over satellite automatically - no extra charges ;-)) - this can be challenging during weather events, heavy rain, snow or fog can often interfere.

There are plans for undersea fiber, but that will take a few years - <USER3> upcoming newer LEO satellite networks will bridge the gap until that arrives.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any recommendations for people who want to visit it?

One of the reasons I have a curiosity about learning Inuktitut was its different writing system, so the Inuit officially moving away from it saddens me.

<comment><USER7> Not OP but: Stay at the Airbnb, there's one run by the only parole officer in Nunavut. Check out each of the restaurants and the Nunavut brewing company ^_^ check out Sylvia Grinnel Park, walk down to Apex and the old HBC outpost. I hear prices went up at the museum, but there's a fantastic local art scene, and Janet Armstrong is a great local artist. You can always hang out at the restaurant at the Frobisher and get better deals directly from the artists.

Watch out for airfares, they're crazy high, $1200-1600 usually round trip on Canadian North out of Ottawa, but they partner with Aeroplan and with enough advance planning Aeroplan only charges 7500mi + $30 each way, and you can transfer from AMEX Membership Rewards. [1]

[1] [https://travelupdate.boardingarea.com/first-air-and- canadian...](https://travelupdate.boardingarea.com/first-air-and-canadian- north-merger-and-redeeming-aeroplan/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for replying (OP here - I have been "heads down"), yes - have had a friend stay at the Airbnb, he loved it. (Better internet than at the 2 hotels)

Oh - and the art is amazing - and yes, when at the Frobisher, local artists will always be showing their work for you to buy directly, but there are stores as well.

Also - make sure you tour the Legislative Assembly (when open) - [https://www.assembly.nu.ca/faq](https://www.assembly.nu.ca/faq)

Come in the Winter if you like snow - come in July/August if you want to get out on the water or like rocky hiking.

Get some coffee at the Black Heart Cafe - [https://www.facebook.com/BlackHeartCafe/](https://www.facebook.com/BlackHeartCafe/)

There are about 4-5 good restaurants, 2 attached to the current hotels, but I also recommend "Yummy Shawarma" and "Big Racks BBQ".

Something interesting for the HN crowd - a new hotel is going up, built from modular shipping-container sized units - [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iqaluit-hotel-rooms- bui...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iqaluit-hotel-rooms-built-in- shanghai-china-1.5212876)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had no idea that Inuktitut had more than one writing system. For a language with such a small population, that's a surprising and serious pain-point.

The Inuit are one of the few indigenous groups in Canada that managed to keep their culture relatively intact - most other groups have lost much of it through centuries of colonial rule and ultimately with residential schools, while the Inuit were comparatively neglected - both in positive and negative terms.

Good to hear steps being taken to protect the language.

<comment><USER9> >The Inuit are one of the few indigenous groups in Canada that managed to keep their culture relatively intact

Because they aren't wealthy enough to be worth a lot as taxable income and didn't control an area with dense/lucrative enough natural resources to be worth subjugating. Without money or something that could be converted to money there was no reason for the city slickers to go out of their way to impose/integrate (word choice depends on which side you're on) their culture. You can see this pattern more or less worldwide. On every continent there are people who live in the remote parts, nominally under some government but are mostly left to do their own thing because they have little to take and take little from the government. If you want to be left alone it's best to be someone not worth bothering.

I agree that it's nice to see them become more of a defined culture (language and all) since being obviously delineated from the rest will help them maintain their own autonomy and culture.

<comment><USER6> There is quite a lot of natural resources in the Far North--North Slope oil comes to mind. However, the environment is so inhospitable to getting resources out of the area, that it has for the most part been economically infeasible to exploit them, at least until the latter half of the 20th century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't help but being sad for the official end of the Inuktitut syllabic: it was such a unique system or writing, and it seemed to fit Inuit languages well.

Unicode can handle a zillion characters, and I don't remember having problems with missing fonts in any of my devices for at least half a decade. If the problem is people talking in English on their cellphones because of lack of input support, couldn't the government of Nunavut work in making iOS/Android keyboards with a good syllabic input method?

<comment><USER11> I feel a bit sad too. I looked at it last week, it was a really nicely designed syllabic alphabet and well suited to the phonology of the language. I planned to learn it this week for the fun.

I don't think developing a keyboard for it is too difficult. Actually I could try to do it myself. The problem is probably more about making users install it when it's not preinstalled on the device and thus requires downloading an application. Heck, even languages such as Chinese or Japanese requires a (first party) download on Android. I found iOS handles better multilingual input and is less confusing to get started with new keyboards.

<comment><USER12> > I don't think developing a keyboard for it is too difficult.

I've made IBus input methods for conlangs before and it's literally as simple as making a plaintext table of physical keys and corresponding characters. I can't imagine it'd be any more difficult on IOS or Android. Despite this I can't find any Inuktitut keyboards on the Play Store.

<comment><USER11> Well it's depends. On desktop OS plain text file method has limitations, for example on macOS it may not work if the name is too long and it ignores leading 0 for conversion which is super annoying. Then there are third party middleware like Open Vanilla which are more customizable and finally there is the solution of using native frameworks which is hellish.

On mobile OS, at least on iOS, developing a keyboard means also creating the layout keyboard and managing its state, so it's a bit more work than a single mapping text file.

> I can't find any Inuktitut keyboards on the play Store

I found my next side project haha. I need one for another app I planned to do.

<comment><USER13> > I found my next side project haha. I need one for another app I planned to > do.

You might want to base it on [https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/](https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, I thought they had already agreed on a standard a few years ago

In any case, Syllabics are a very interesting writing system. I'm planning on doing an in-depth video about them at some point, but Tom Scott's introduction is great [1].

There are some major advantages to using Syllabics.

Consider that the languages that use them are polysynthetic, meaning that the 'words' are quite large and encompass a lot of information, and that they mostly use a Consonant-Vowel syllable structure that is perfect for a syllabary, where one character represents both a consonant and its vowel [2], or an abugida, where the consonant is the important part of the character, and the vowel markings are secondary [3]. An alphabet creates large, unruly words. Qaliujaaqpait and Ojibwe also double their vowels to lengthen them, making romanized text very long.

Look at this Ojibwe word for coffee: "makade-mashkiikiiwaaboo", in syllabics, it's the much less unruly "ᒪᑲᑌᒪᔥᑮᑮᐙᐴ".

And Syllabics themselves are amazing, there are different shapes for the consonants, and their rotation determines the vowel sound [4]. Just awesome, and very easy to learn

However, sadly, there are many disadvantages to the awesome system. For one, roman letters are everywhere, there's good software support, there's always going to be a need to know them as the new generation learns English and French. Not to mention rotation-based characters are no good for, say, someone with dyslexia. I'm not shocked at this decision, it was the right call.

First Nations and Inuit languages need standardization, and more importantly, as much literature as possible, to compete. That's hard to do when everyone is writing in a different way.

I'm writing syllabic converter software that should hopefully be more accurate than the current ones online today, if you're interested in helping or learning about it, feel free to send me an email

1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW4hI_METac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW4hI_METac) 2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary) 3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida) 4: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Ojibwe_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Ojibwe_syllabics)

<comment><USER15> Hangul is an interesting hybrid with aspects of syllabary and alphabet and seems to work pretty well. Also lends itself well to typesetting. It's also nice and compact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Two observations without much substance:

1\. I love the logo of the ITK. So joyful! (See [https://www.itk.ca/itk-board- of-directors-adopts-inuktut-qal...](https://www.itk.ca/itk-board-of-directors- adopts-inuktut-qaliujaaqpait-as-unified-orthography-for-inuktut/))

2\. The comments section of [https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/national- inuit-org-app...](https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/national-inuit-org- approves-standard-roman-orthography-for-all-dialects/) and [https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inuit-qaliujaaqpait- th...](https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inuit-qaliujaaqpait-the-product- of-history-and-determination/) contains considerable toxicity. I was expecting general upvoting among a people here but I guess I expected too much from a comments section of a newspaper.

</comment><comment><USER17> Being an programmer, I wonder if a simpler writing system could be devised that doesn't rely on special symbols. For example, one could dedicate Q as an escape character, and what follows could specify sounds that don't exist in English. Then, one could write the language using conventional ASCII.

<comment><USER6> Inuit languages are relatively restricted in their phonology. It's a three vowel system (6 if you count long/short separately), fourteen consonants (2 of which are unfamiliar to Germanic/Romance speakers), allows gemination of consonants (i.e., consonants can be short or long), and mostly follows a C?VC? syllable scheme. The only unfamiliar consonant without a general transliteration to ASCII text is the /ɬ/ sound; q is already familiar to people who transliterate the Arabic /q/, and ng is common for /ŋ/.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how far apart Inuktitut and Greenlandic are, could Greenlandic use the syllabic script w/o changing much?

</comment><comment><USER19> Unpaywalled text: [https://outline.com/486wJ9](https://outline.com/486wJ9)

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://outline.com/486wJ9](https://outline.com/486wJ9)

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes, but tabs or spaces?</comment>


No comments - a history of online commenting on the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/magazine/no-comments.html?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> How does one cover a history of comments on the net and skip over Usenet?

<comment><USER3> Perhaps they thought that explaining discussion threading (by Msg-ID & References) would be too difficult?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should we seek a funding partner? - <AUTHOR>

I'm part of a small startup that produces a kitchen-oriented TV show. Owner handles the content, I handle the production. It airs locally, viewers like it, and we have a solid business plan. Owner of the business is a good salesman and entrepreneur, but comes from another line of business and has always operated as a sole trader.
There is a good lot of sweat equity but it's time to move past that stage; in short, we need to capitalize so we can monetize - mid 5 figures, then mid-6; mid-7 is a possibility but we'd prefer to generate positive cashflow before that.
What we don't have is professional capital-raising skills - although we're comfortable explaining the show and the business, we feel we need to look beyond our social circle for potential investors. We also need someone who understands capital structures, fiscal oversight and so on - a CFO type, basically.
We're put some ads up on Craigslist, but I'd welcome any advice on how to recruit such a person (or indeed, how not to do it). <comment><USER2> What is the deal you are offering to an investor? How many customers? Do they pay a monthly subscription?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, 10% ROI + 1-2% equity (suggestions welcomed). Now <5; hiring sales (we sell ad time/sponsorship, semi-pay 2 air). Email in HN profile.</comment></comment>


A Lloyds Business Banking Experience - <AUTHOR> Trying to remove myself as a signatory on a business account:
1 - I go into a branch, they try to do it but their IT systems fail. I talk to a manager who tells me that I need to do it online anyway and they cant do it in branch (this is after a good hour of the person on the front desk trying anyway)
2 - I login to online banking to fill out their online form (which requires that I fill out details about the business even though im logged in)
3 - They email me a PDF which I have to print out and sign myself (along with one other person, which is hard as that person doesn't live in the same country as me) and then MAIL BACK TO THEM!?
What on earth is going on? Anyone who works for a bank care to share their thoughts on this? <comment><USER2> You need to understand that this workflow was designed by overpaid people with bullshit jobs having meetings for the sake of having meetings, there was never any concern about actual user experience nor security.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an educated guess (I don't work, and have never worked, for Lloyds)...

Funding initiatives to move from paper to online are likely to be given priority based on metrics. These will be things like league tables, customer satisfaction surveys etc.

The question "how was your experience removing yourself as a signatory of a business account?" probably doesn't come up much in any of those, so the workflow has probably never been funded. However, parts of it may have been e.g. all business forms must be available online, or some such.

It's possible that certain actions on accounts must be received in writing (not 100% sure about that). Otherwise, this will probably get resolved at some point but likely through a cost reduction exercise rather than a workflow one.

Anyway, don't see this as some form of justification, it clearly isn't. But I have a reasonable amount of experience in how organisations like this function.

</comment><comment><USER4> Haha this brings back memories.

It was an absolute mess 3 years ago when I did it - an hour on hold only to find out you'd been given the wrong information, "you have to sign the downloaded form and fax the form, no email" that kind of thing.

It confirmed to me that I'd never Business Bank with them again.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are lots of employees from the banking industry are talking about this, check it out!</comment>


Show HN: I'm too lazy to read news articles, so I made an app to help – NewsCues - <AUTHOR> http://newscues.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> When I read news on my phone, I bounce around multiple news apps, scanning all the headlines but never really reading any of the articles. But I still knew a lot about what was going on because the headlines had a lot of information. This gave me the idea for News Cues. News Cues collects current news stories from multiple sources, uses some NLP and AI logic to filter and sort the stories, and then presents it in an easy to digest format.

iTunes: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news- cues/id934892341?ls=1&m...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news- cues/id934892341?ls=1&mt=8)

Google Play: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cullaborat...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cullaboration.newscues)</comment>


Urbit - <AUTHOR> https://urbit.org/ <comment><USER2> I have seen Urbit a couple times but never really understood it. From the "Understanding Urbit" page -

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

>And when you do, your entire OS appears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has to be a better way to explain this.

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

<comment><USER3> The part you buy is dns that runs on ethereum (iirc), but with artificial scarcity because they want to make money. This part is completely pointless, because the actual system could work as well on ens directly, or even dns.

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

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

<comment><USER4> That's a bit cynical, I think. The address space has had a few "official" rationales because it serves a handful of duties at the same time; again, explaining a system is different than explaining a product, but pitching a system as a product is difficult. You often end up framing the system-as- product a specific way each time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER5> These sorts of optimistic beliefs that all people have some inherent good inside them, and that good-faith attempts will rule the day, never seem to survive any _actual_ economic incentives.

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

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

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For all the other commenters who couldn't understand what the heck this is (like myself)... Wikipedia at least gives a fairly straightforward explanation [1]:

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

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

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

<comment><USER7> Worst naming convention I've ever seen. Did they just draw from a hat of cooky names? What ever happened to the concept of choosing names relevant to the thing you're describing? I start to understand what's going on, then they throw words like "Hoon" and "Arvo" at me, and now I'm confused again. I still don't understand what it does, but now I don't care.

<comment><USER8> From [https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders- farewell/](https://urbit.org/blog/a-founders-farewell/) :

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

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

<comment><USER9> Anyone else ever work on a project without a firm definition?

Anyone ever finish those projects?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So if I buy my "last computer" from Urbit a "senate" made up of people who paid them money early on can do whatever they want to my data --- ahem "upgrade the logic" \--- without my having any say? I'm not sure if I want some ChromeOS-analogue with automatic updates from the Reddit/4Chan --- ahem early cryptocurrency adopter --- hive mind.

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure how you got your first assumption from the rest of your quotations.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER10> You're right. I misinterpreted. People can buy power, but not of the more serious kind I thought initially. Thanks for the correction.

<comment><USER11> My pleasure.

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Idle question for whatever tlon'ers are reading this: have you considered putting a bitcoin in an urbit and challenging the world to get it out, as a publicity stunt slash bug bounty?

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

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

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

<comment><USER13> Love this idea, but as things stand, it very well might turn out to be trivial. Urbit is theoretically much more easily secured than today's popular systems, but not yet hardened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> All I see is ocean and stone images. Please if you are reading this, hire a marketing firm. I am sure you have worked hard on this but I can't understand what your product is. How can that be that you want to be the last computer but most can't even understand first thing about it.

<comment><USER15> > most can't even understand it

That is the point, they want it like that!

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

<comment><USER4> It's not deliberate, just a bit of an ongoing challenge. We've historically been very engineering-focused while honing the system; poking our heads out into the world, we now have to describe it.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER14> Instead of us doing the work of going through Wikipedia links and your docs, you can explain this by one simple diagram or video. Unless your goal is to be mysterious, I cannot understand how can a company go through all this trouble of creating something, building a website and can't get the message across even to the HN community.

<comment><USER4> I agree. I think this feedback is super valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This post is still the best thing I read about Urbit: [https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non- vul...](https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-why- urbit-matters/)

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

<comment><USER17> I don't know whether this matters, and I guess it probably doesn't, but he was kicked off the Popehat blog not long after writing this, for virulent (and, since then, increasingly theatrical) racism.

<comment><USER18> Was the racism on Popehat or elsewhere?

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

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

<comment><USER19> "I became increasingly unhappy that Clark was writing for the blog in 2015. That unhappiness was a result of a number of factors, including the content he wrote here, which I felt reflected badly on the blog and on me, both in terms of quality and content. I was concerned, for instance, that if my clients encountered the blog they would question whether I was hostile to them based upon their ethnicity or religion. I became embarrassed he was a co-blogger."

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many previous threads—good luck:

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

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

<comment><USER20> I don't see a problem. If things get repetitive people will start complaining, but in the meantime these posts have been upvoted out of interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are users in this thread that aren't fully disclosing that they work for Urbit, despite commenting about the software from a third-party perspective.

Just a heads up.

<comment><USER22> What's the point of making an accusation like this without naming the users?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > In Urbit OS 1, a community shares a set of modules. (Think of a module like > an app without the data lock-in.) One community may choose to chat and share > a forum. Another may choose to chat and watch the crypto markets. And yet > another may chat, share links, ebooks, and a to-do list. Anyone can develop > a module, and anyone can create a community.

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

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

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

<comment><USER23> Today, Urbit has chat, blogging, a basic weather app, and a lot of programming facilities. Eventually it should be able to run a document editor, and you can do things similar to internet browsing even on today's Urbit.

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

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the in-depth response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Got an invite recently, got it setup, but have had endless networking issues. Can't join any of the chat groups they advertise in the documentation.

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

</comment><comment><USER25> I found the descriptions to be far too abstract and mysterious. I guess it gives the project a sort of cool hacker vibe, but I really just want a few screenshots of the interface of the actual OS. As it stands, I have no clue whether it's an actual operating system like Windows/Linux/MacOS or if it just vaguely fits the definition of an OS.

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

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

<comment><USER26> The project is exclusionary by design--instead of using an existing programming language or even keywords/terminology from an existing human language, the creator decided to make everything up, right down to new names for existing symbols. F'r example:

gar >

hax #

hep -

kel {

sel [

ser ]

sig ~

soq '

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

<comment><USER27> It may be marketing genius if the goal is to appeal to the type of nerd who loves obscure systems and occult jargon... the kind that geeks out on the complexities of D&D while chatting you up about the rococo details of Eastern Orthodox dietary restrictions and how they may have impacted renaissance fashion. Everything about Urbit seems designed to be candy to these types.

<comment><USER25> I'll admit, it did appeal to me in that way. But the other part of me just felt like it was snake oil. Being intentionally vague in order to not reveal some crucial flaw.

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

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

<comment><USER13> In fact, most of the naming in Urbit is deliberately meaningless and bizarre in order to prevent the project from congealing too soon. The intention is to keep things provisional and annoying enough that future programmers won't forget to revise past temporary decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I heard of Urbit a while back and still cannot for the life of me figure out what it does or what it's for.

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

<comment><USER4> It's because it's a system trying to pitch itself as a product. The system being a top to bottom rewrite of the stack in such a way so as to sidestep the client/server relationship entirely. A lot of services rely upon positioning themselves as the server, as the big computer you have timeshared access to, and they monetise your usage. For things like photo storage, or basic communication, or permissioned access to your files, this is pointless. Any computer could do it, but the internet is itself based upon asking a server for something and getting it. And running a server sucks.

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

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

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

<comment><USER29> What you just wrote needs to be at the top of any marketing related to Urbit. It's the first thing I've read that made me excited about the project.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Didn't the founder of Urbit (Curtis Yarvin) leave the project last year? My impression of Urbit has always been that Curtis was fundamental to the vision of the project. Does anyone know how the project has changed since then?

<comment><USER31> yes, wikipedia says he left. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit)

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

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

<comment><USER32> Yarvin sounds like a loon.

<comment><USER33> Or, at least, a hoon.

<comment><USER34> Nock off the name calling!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The goal is noble, but Urbit is destined to become a case study in the dangers of isolation and obstinacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER36> >the One True Way" never works,

It works for Apple.

<comment><USER35> Apple doesn't have a One True Way -- they have a relatively-simple and relatively-uniform product line that represents their interpretation of human- computer interaction. They focused on building systems that everyone could use and love immediately, and it turns out that a lot of people appreciate that emphatic commitment to the human over the machine.

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

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

We lost him too soon.

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

There could not be a starker contrast.

<comment><USER37> We haven't lost him out of misfortune, as many other things he made horribly wrong and nobody talks about anymore, because, you know, survival bias, he also thought cancer could be cured with diets.

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

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

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

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

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

Jobs built a cult, not a technical revolution.

<comment><USER38> > The fact that the failure of Next is still told as a great success speaks > volumes.

NeXT resulted in the web browser and the iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This project is described in the most abstruse form that it can be. I, too, did not comprehend it until I went there and tried it out (and got the T shirt ;D)

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

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

</comment><comment><USER40> Is this some kind of over-the-top joke that I'm not in on? I've browsed and read but honestly still can't understand what Urbit is. When I saw the picture of the stone with the thing on top I thought I was finally "in" on the joke, but they seem to continue on.

<comment><USER41> Yeah I'm seeing all kinds of weird analogies/ abstractions that try to explain what this thing is but not a single use-case or an example of somebody getting utility out of it. Is this a parody?

<comment><USER11> Use case: this conversation, except between our own computers.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER42> Ok, so what's stopping one party from changing the data? How would one party prove they have the right data? Is this like blockchain messaging?

<comment><USER11> No, this is not blockchain messaging.

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> These guys keep coming back every few months/year and it worries me. These people are trying to build something esoteric that is trying to tap into the draw of ritualistic enigmas all with the aim of forwarding their racist views on society. I really wish they would go away.

</comment><comment><USER44> Everyone's going off on Yarvin's vanity politics, but has anyone read the BS on this urbit site? Reads more like an advert for skin cream than the " _next big thing_ " in computing.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER45> I also had a hard time understanding this project, but my understanding is that this is basically a binary that runs on a UNIX machine.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone know how Urbit's solving the problem of being incredibly slow? It's running on a naively simple virtual machine and they claim that higher level operations can be abstracted and implemented in native code (called jets last time I heard) to make the overall execution time reasonable.

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

<comment><USER4> (Obvious disclosure that I work on the project.) Slow, like, literally the VM is slow? There's infrastructure work being done to rewrite the VM at the moment, though there's been some major work in the last six months on this front as well that personally have felt like night and day. Slow, like, the network is slow? There's an update going out shortly with a rewrite for Ames that makes it a bit easier to work on. There's a good blog post [1] our CTO put out on how the infrastructure cost this year has been predominantly on planning a very resilient stack, rewriting a lot of archaic code to be easier to modify by more than just a handful of kernel engineers, more pliant. I feel pretty confident about the performance in future.

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

<comment><USER47> I'm curious: why reinvent the VM "wheel"? Why is LLVM inadequate? Or any other VM?

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

<comment><USER48> Many reasons. The VM is minimal, has a precise mathematical spec and is tailored to be a base for a purely-functional OS. The details of the VM are usable in the higher layer. It's more like a Lisp-machine, than LLVM.

<comment><USER47> So... WASM, then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Actually got a invite to Urbit... but haven't got the time to understand/install it.

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

<comment><USER50> It's an overlay OS, a VM made to allow anyone to run their own server easily

<comment><USER51> Well that begs the obvious question, what the hell is an "overlay OS"? It's not an industry standard term and doesn't explain anything.

<comment><USER23> Overlay OS might not be a great term.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER51> > _Urbit is a program_

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> For context, here is the same thread from 6 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320)

</comment><comment><USER53> I've never come across this project before, but I've been playing around with a similar idea...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER54> Sounds like you want to self-host google xD

<comment><USER55> In what sense has Google implemented the above?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> A completely bizarre project. Not very far from "TempleOS". Urbit is the outcome when spending too much time alone.

</comment><comment><USER57> About the author, Curtis Yarvin:

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

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

<comment><USER58> Wikipedia has an unfortunate habit of labelling anything as "far right" that is described as such by left wing or gullible journalists in left of centre mainstream publications.

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

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

<comment><USER59> I'm on the left. I think Urbit is quite neat as a technology. Yarvin has very unusual political views, so I'm not sure where to put them, or if you'd consider this "sound-bite mudslinging" (if you do, please suggest a more palatable way of providing evidence:)

He seems pro-monarchy:

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

but anti-democracy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 _(Sources are all from Wikiquotes)_

<comment><USER60> His views are all just hand wavey fascism. At no point does he make a tractable argument.

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

<comment><USER58> Untrue, or at least questionable claim. Monarchies are economically better- performing.

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

<comment><USER60> They demonstrably do not. Look at any competitiveness index, or standard of living index, or anything measurable.

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

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

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

Such post-industrial powerhouses of economy those must be.

<comment><USER58> I don't need to look around, a quick Google on monarchies and GDP before your initial post would have given you the information you needed to not post it.

Eg the first link:

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

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

<comment><USER60> You peddling horsesh*t is unhelpful. Your fluid goal posts don't help either.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER58> How on earth is the first link in a Google search "cherry picked"?

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

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

<comment><USER60> Mate, what good is a monarchy if the monarch doesn't have any power? It's just a monarchy in name. Following your logic, North Korea is a democracy, because it has the word "democratic" in its official name. This is a crap level of discourse and hence you are getting all the smacktalk. Don't think that you are entitled to people letting your stupid arguments slide. This is not the USSR.

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Somebody's gonna run the servers and it won't be paid for by funny money.

<comment><USER23> Yes, that's an important point. You'll have a service contract with the infrastructure node responsible for routing packets to you -- you'll pay them to route to you. There are two layers of infrastructure nodes to facilitate scaling and hopefully maintain a healthy competitive market for routing services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm still unsure what this _actually_ brings to the table and what necessity it actually tries to solve. Bitcoin actually tries to solve the issue of trustless, decentralized money (Whether or not it actually does that is a topic in itself, but it tries), then you've got endeavors like Ethereum but for distributed computing (In fact, as far as I can tell, some of Urbit's aspects are built on top of Ethereum), Namecoin for domain names, and so on.

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

<comment><USER63> What it brings to the table:

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

\- secure networking as the default

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

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

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

\- Deterministic computing

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> So this is the 3rd time these guys are coming back here and because of the tepid reception they've received in the past it looks like they bought shills along this time.

</comment><comment><USER64> The concept of signing into untrusted hardware to get access to your entire digital life was interesting in around ~2004, when people had enough stuff online to be useful but laptops were heavy and didn't have network access. With a modern phone, and an LG gram laptop for desktop tasks, there's no reason to expose yourself to the massive security pwnage of signing in on hardware you don't own.

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't recall to have heard about it before and to be honest the far right and racists remarks posted by others about the project founder make me uncomfortable, but the last few lines where they introduce the _" Dojo"_ with a REPL and a Lisp like syntax, that was interesting...

<comment><USER4> Check it. [1]

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

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think the novelty terminology makes this more confusing than it needs to be. If the hippy "its a movement not a trend" speak was taken out of the descriptions I'd probably be able to understand what this is supposed to be.

</comment><comment><USER67> The first step to a decentralized network is establishment of identity and authentication protocols and network anyone can use with ease. Everything else should be built upon that foundation.

</comment><comment><USER68> I think people would be better off tracking Solid. It's not moving super fast, but has good momentum, and is based on web and decentralized standards including Linked Data.

</comment><comment><USER69> I find it completely interesting that I came across Urbit while doing a random search about alternative operating systems - and then I come back to HN and find a raging discussion going on. I tend to think that such 'coincidences' are not coincidence at all. I wonder what is going on in the world right now that is driving new interest in Urbit? I've also seen quite a few references to Industrial Society and its Future of late - What else is the online intelligence driving people towards?

</comment><comment><USER70> Is this some kind of crypto cult?

<comment><USER71> It has been labeled crypto-fascism before (but not crypto as in cryptocurrency).

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Bad sign if you have to claim your product is not vaporware on your promo page

</comment><comment><USER72> question: can we have such a network with conventional internet , if we all run a number of web services on our home routers?

</comment><comment><USER73> tl;dr for those not wanting to dissect abstract art this afternoon: peer to peer network via blockchain focused on social communication.

<comment><USER46> It seems that you need to do more dissecting yourself. It would be unjust to summarize urbit like that. It really is as they say, an "Operating Function."

<comment><USER73> "Operating function" is just more abstract woo. My description says what it was made to do not how it is supposed to make you feel or the fancy terms people have come up with to describe how it goes about making you feel that way.

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

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

<comment><USER23> Urbit only uses a blockchain as a ledger of who owns which addresses within the network and root DNS for peer discovery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER74> The best way to describe it is to tell us why we would want to use it. Also, don't say "it's a computer". It's not. A computer is what I'm typing this on - a piece of hardware.

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

<comment><USER23> I do work for Tlon, if that wasn't obvious. I also find the "computer" terminology misleading, so I'm with you on that.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER74> _you 'll have all your data and programs on one machine_

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Oh dear. Let me start by saying that I find Urbit interesting in it's own right. I'm generally interested in distributed systems, and Urbit's Nock and Hoon are weird languages that I'm interested in despite not coming close to groking. That said, we should also remember where it came from (without throwing the baby -- if there is a baby -- out with the bath water). Curtis Yarvin previously wrote a blog called Unqualified Reservations under the penname Mencius Moldbug. _Ur_ bit takes it's name from this blog. He voiced a number of regressive views there, including very racist and anti-democratic ones. Some choice quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER75> You seem to be under the mistaken impression that HN is the HR department at your company. Pointing to someone's opinions and shrieking doesn't really fly here.

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

<comment><USER34> I'm under the impression that a lot of people in these comments seem unaware of the history of this project, and how the views of the Yarvin/Moldbug shaped early decisions such as naming and user titles. I'm not under the impression that you speak for HN; I've seen the comment you're replying to fluctuate between 2 and -2... and that's with Tlon employees engaging in the comments without showing good faith (e.g. not identifying themselves). I would call the comment you're replying to controversial, but I don't think it's fair to call the comment "shrieking" or say that it "doesn't really fly here." So far it is getting both upvoted and downvoted, repeatedly.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> It's like a Hollywood sci-fi writer first wrote a bad script describing tech in fictioud terms, and someone though it a good idea to use the movie script as the site copy, user manual and FAQ.

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

</comment><comment><USER77> The project founder's wikipedia page:

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

It has leaked over to the project WP page:

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

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

<comment><USER75> The reason I found Yarvin's (awesome) writing in the first place was because of a post like this on Twitter.

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

<comment><USER78> The difference between Yarvin and vinegar-drinking scolds is that Yarvin merely repeats _yesterday 's_ vinegar-drinking scolds. If you like his writing, there's literally centuries' worth of it (in fact, it only stopped being the norm rather recently), and if you go study history at a university you'll read quite a lot of it. It does seem less fresh, though, once you read it in proper chronological order, and with appropriate context, rather than somebody posting a stuffy, safe, and dull 1897 text as a surprising, reactionary 2012 blog post. He served cold leftovers and seemed like a chef to people who'd never had a good meal.

<comment><USER75> I actually agree strongly: one of the best things in his writing is his references to primary sources, many of which I found extremely enjoyable to read. The past is a foreign country more interesting than any tourist trip you can take.

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

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

<comment><USER78> Except for two problems: his understanding of the material is well below that of a first-year history student (he's a layman more than an amateur), and any decent college book or course contains far better references. Second, there is nothing new about his positions. They're a rehashing of the old mainstream, that was rejected over time because of societal and technological changes he doesn't know and certainly doesn't understand. As someone who studied both physics and history in grad school, his writing about history seems to make as much sense to someone who has actually learned that history as the multitude of texts about Reiki and channeling aliens that mention "quantum energy" make sense to someone who has actually studied physics. It only looks interesting (in a serious way) when you know virtually nothing. I read it in the same way I read about Reiki: a sort of curious anthropological entertainment from an epistemology that diverges sharply from science and scholarship. Sort of like a modern person would enjoy reading medieval texts about body humours or the four elements. So it's interesting to me to see the alternative constructions people who have no real scholarship make in order to understand the world around them.

<comment><USER79> > his understanding of the material is well below that of a first-year history > student

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

> Second, there is nothing new about his positions

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER78> Oh, I have no doubt Yarvin's writings could unleash something, if only because they already did. They're a rehashing of what became mainstream opinions following Romanticism [1]. Eugenics [2] was taught in numerous universities at the beginning of the 20th century. Clearly, some people can find Romanticism appealing today for the same reason they found it appealing in the 19th c., and they will find it appealing, yet again in the 23rd. The only defense is knowing how and why it arose the first time around, and why it was ultimately rejected.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER80> Eugenics emerged in modern times as a _Progressive_ -era policy. It seems kind of vague and perhaps misleading to link it to Romanticism, when actually it follows along the exact same lines as the secular, "scientific" Humanism that you evidently find so appealing.

<comment><USER78> It emerged as a result of _both_. Reactionary/romantic ideals have _always_ co-opted what they viewed as scientific knowledge or technology in the service of their imagined past. That progressive ideals may have also ultimately employed horrific tools goes without saying, and that some conservative forces have sometimes opposed them is also true. But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative leading to a conclusion is wrong, regardless of whether it's done intentionally by a scholar wishing to push an agenda, or unintentionally by name-dropping, bloviating ignoramuses like Yarvin.

<comment><USER80> > But that's my point: any presentation of history as some appealing narrative > leading to a conclusion is wrong

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

<comment><USER78> Well, Yarvin's "model" is both very wrong (much more wrong than most models by actual scholars) and not useful; we know that because that "model" was once mainstream, and quite harmful.

<comment><USER79> Harmful to whom?

<comment><USER78> To a far greater portion of human society than those it was perhaps useful for, if anyone.

<comment><USER79> Yet, it was the horrible, _horrible_ Europe that Moldbug mythologizes and romanticizes that made virtually all advances in science and technology until a few decades ago.

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

<comment><USER78> What? Non-sequitur much?

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

<comment><USER80> "Romanticist ideology" is a remarkably vague term, but I think one could make a case that something like it ended up being very much a factor. Of course, the reverse is also true; in the absence of 18th- and 19th-century science (including advancements in the social sciences, mostly coming from the "humanist" side as Carlyle knew quite well!) no "romanticist" ideology would even exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Urbit's design directly comes from the founder's neo-monarchical political theories. Therefore, I think his political theories, which include sympathies for neo-nazism ('Yarvin wrote that, although he was not himself a white nationalist, he felt "the urge to defend" the ideology'), a hatred of democracy, and the desire to replace it with a model that grants more rights to wealthier individuals are relevant to this discussion.

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER50> I've really been enjoying the recent blog posts. The one about the idea maze / design space of building out a PKI was especially good.</comment>


Breaking the encryption scheme of the Moscow internet voting system - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05127 <comment><AUTHOR> Abstract: In September 2019, voters for the election at the Parliament of the city of Moscow will be allowed to use an internet voting system. The source code of it has been made available for public testing. The encryption used in this system is a variant of ElGamal with key sizes that are too small. We explain how to retrieve the private keys from the public keys in a matter of minutes with easily available resources.

Notes:

\- Not mentioned in the abstract but the system relies on an Ethereum smart contract.

\- The author is a researcher at Loria Nancy (France) which I consider to be one of the best teams in the world on this topic. Among other things he worked on Belenios ([http://www.belenios.org/index.html](http://www.belenios.org/index.html)).</comment>