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Comment by newsat13 | Hacker News Reader

Someday I hope to understand what urbit actually is :-)

This is probably our best general overview: https://urbit.org/posts/overview/

We just did a podcast with Software Engineering Daily also: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/01/20/urbit-with-c...

But the blog really highlights well what we're trying to accomplish in the near-term.

Urbit is a VM/library/io it runs programs, sometimes local, sometimes remote, sometimes distributed.

It's Jboss.

If you want to be generous it's Inferno.

I never could work out what JBoss was meant to be either.

Lets go see what their website says. How bad can it be?

> Red Hat® JBoss® Middleware is a family of a lightweight, cloud-friendly, enterprise-grade products that help enterprises innovate faster, in a smarter way. The ideal middleware portfolio for open hybrid cloud environments, our products and services help you accelerate application development, deployment, and performance, integrate data and applications efficiently, and automate business processes across physical, virtual, mobile, and cloud environments.

Its bad.

You're not alone

Let's start with this... If you ran your own server, what sort of uses do you think you'd have for it?

Email, document sharing, custom web apps, etc, does urbit do this?

Not well, yet. But that's the plan. All in the blog post.

> All in the blog post.

Email and file sharing aren't mentioned. What can it do now?

It has a webserver and networking and it can access the filesystem and it can send messages to other users securely. There's also an ntalk kind of app and a simple threaded discussion things but they're more like demo apps than things you'd use intrinsically.

I think it's fair to say the only reason to run this is to develop for it right now, it's not something end users have a use for.

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