Comment by urbit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by urbit | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your question about the lookup service is an excellent one.

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language

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

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

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