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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely made an effort to understand this platform, including going to their offices to write some code during one of their events, and I felt like a complete programming novice. Had to implement floating point using their primitives before I could do something and stalled on that.

I think this is a thing that if it takes off like Bitcoin I won't be mad that I couldn't capitalize because I literally don't know how to. At this point I've given up on it.

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I'm a non-programmer who is just skilled enough with computers to do some damage. Completely clueless about mathematical and information theory concepts, etc. Here's my measly two cents:

I've been running my own Urbit for a few years that I've connected to broader communities, and have found it to be a really exciting and fun platform. It feels like when I first found Usenet and MUDs as a teen in the 90s, except people are nicer. What I understand about its essential purpose sounds great — a decentralized identity that I own and can make communities with.

I am mostly a tech outsider, but I find it strange to see such a normally open-minded community (hackers) shut it down with such vehemence whenever it comes up

> such a normally open-minded community (hackers)

What community are you referring to? I'd like to go there.

You should try out Urbit. I hear they have a community like that in there.

Hmm. Elsewhere in this thread, centimeter was talking about "extreme arcanity" to keep out "entryist parasites". I'm not sure I can reconcile your two viewpoints. ("Welcoming after you prove that you're not an entryist parasite" is the best I can come up with, but I'm not sure it's very believable...)

I don't know who "centimeter" is and never claimed to agree with their viewpoints, so I'm not sure what the other viewpoint is that you're referring to.

The Chinese language looks extremely arcane to me, but that doesn't make it so. Quantum computing is pretty arcane-seeming too. Urbit probably seems arcane to those that know nothing about and haven't invested the time to learn. Fortunately, the docs are very good[1] and updated frequently[2]. They're also publicly available and lots of people[3] are working pretty hard to make them understandable.

Urbit is really welcoming to everyone, should they take a moment to ask about it. Here's[4] where you can find out how to get in and get set up. Here's a place where, earlier today, I offered a free planet to someone that asked[5]. And here's[6] what ended up happening.

[1] https://urbit.org/docs

[2] https://github.com/urbit/docs/commits/master

[3] https://github.com/urbit/docs/graphs/contributors

[4] https://urbit.org/using/install/

[5] https://twitter.com/cjremus/status/1334140349900611584

[6] https://twitter.com/cjremus/status/1334304210750464004

The other viewpoint is centimeters; I had thought that I made that clear.

You say the community is welcoming. centimeter says that they're using deliberate obscurity to keep people away. You aren't responsible for centimeter's views, and don't agree with them, but they clearly are a different view on what the community is like toward outsiders.

But I should have been more clear. "Reconcile" isn't the only possibility; the other is that (at least) one of you are wrong. And I'm leaning against "reconcile" as being possible...

Less vehement, more resigned, I think. It isn't about the platform as an application. It's about the platform as a development platform.

The glyphs, the whimsical naming, Hoon itself. Overall, I tried and I just couldn't do it. If it isn't clear, I'm not disparaging the thing, I'm disparaging the (thing, me) tuple.

Given how aggressively they've pivoted their communications away from the esotericism, I get the impression that they're pretty cognizant of this. They seemingly have their fundamental platform somewhat pinned down, given their release of OS1. I've got my fingers crossed that as they increase accessibility on the frontend, they'll also be working to make the dev experience friendlier to those of us who didn't buy into the cultishness of Urbit early on.

Eager to see what people build on top of it. I've still got my old ships (or planets) somewhere.

Canvas is pretty cool: https://github.com/yosoyubik/canvas

There's a bittorrent tracker you can read about on the mailing list too which is pretty neat.

There are a couple of folks working on supporting ship-to-ship bitcoin payments, which is very nearly to a working demo.

If you haven't been on in a while, Landscape (the web client that ships with Urbit) itself is also really awesome.

> ... strange to see such a normally open-minded community (hackers) shut it down ...

Well, hackers tend to hate pretentiousness.

> it strange to see such a normally open-minded community (hackers) shut it down with such vehemence whenever it comes up

It isn't really that strange, Urbit is the antithesis of the hacker mindset in multiple ways. Hackers value free exchange of information; Urbit is deliberately obscuratinist. Hackers tend to lean libertarian; Yarvin is an out-and-proud authoritarian and Urbit is explicitly designed around that ethos.

I don’t understand how it’s obscurantist. I’m a novice and am having fun learning the language. It’s open-source.

I gave it a go a couple of years ago, and couldn't figure out a single thing. Like, not only did I not achieve "hello world", I never managed to figure out if "hello world" is a meaningful thing you can even attempt.

Maybe it's different now, but I cannot fathom a programming novice making any kind of sense out of urbit.

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