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Comment by voldacar | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh.

The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy.

Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and alien, which is strange because its goal basically seems to be weird and alien. This is actually quite excellent. Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit, with a healthy dose of NIH.

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It may not have been. The author of Urbit is Moldbug, who is... controversial.

On the other hand, I just read the article, and none of it seems particularly bad faith. I vaguely remember something about Urbit using planets and galaxies as some kind of ownership metaphor, so I expected the article to go on at length about how strange this seems. But it seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of Urbit, and is pretty clinically detached.

And there I was, thinking that the first four paragraphs pretty much summed up the frame of mind with which it was written.

On the contrary, I think the author spent a lot of effort to understand the underlying tech stack - honestly I can't understand why, but maybe they were exceptionally bored? This is the first time I learned that the underlying VM is single-threaded, for example.

Why would you think he spent a lot of effort? The second sentence literally says that he did not.

True. Just a couple of hours.

On the other hand... is walltime the only criterion worth considering?

Well, would you consider someone who'd only spent a couple of hours of wall time on Unix to be an expert whose opinion was worthy of serious consideration?

Not that I'm flogging Urbit -- or not flogging it, for that matter. I looked at it a while back and decided that I didn't understand it, and wouldn't understand it without spending far more time than I had available. However, that just renders my opinion on the topic useless.

Hmm, that's an interesting point.

I would encourage them [= someone who only spent a couple of hours on Unix] to dig further... broader. Mostly by demonstrating that there are real world problems for which Unix is better suited than competition.

IMO in Urbit -- there was not much more to explore after the few hours. Short of digging even further into the guts of it... and that was very unappealing.

Other people here in the comments mentioned that there's no killer app for Urbit. So my intuition was probably correct [to stop digging].

I haven't seen Urbit advocates contest the things he's saying (and he's not the only one that's said them). They'll say "it's a work in progress" or "that's not what were trying to accomplish" or other deflections.

A cogent retort would advance the conversation, but it won't happen because what he says is largely correct.

I think the people working on Urbit have learned that it is not productive to engage with the HN community. If you view the previous discussions (going back years now) it rarely goes beyond "hoon is intentionally obscure" and usually devolves in to CY politics bashing (e.g. see current thread). It is safe to say that Urbit is the most hated project on HN.

It is unfortunate because we need more weird projects out there, and less articles on javascript framework updates. Given the state of the web and social media today, I think we would do well to encourage projects like this and others like them. Or we can just all download MS Teams, live with FB and uBlock Origin, and say it's all good.

> Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit,

Which is why I found the point that they've implemented their UI in javascript interesting

Agreed. That does seem strange. I guess if you want a UI that just works and is flexible, most people will turn to a web browser

I'm not aware of any self-hosted apps that perform encryption at rest. Maybe Urbit should be held to a higher standard because it's an "OS" but then again it's not really.

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