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Comment by _peeley | Hacker News Reader

Looks like there's a typo in the link for Urbit, should be https://urbit.org if anyone wants to take a look. Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network.

Probably the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because it's the pet project of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, known (somewhat infamously, a few of his talks at conferences have been pulled) for his association with the neo-reactionary political/philosophical movement.

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> Personally it seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network.

> not much based on the lofty promises of a new OS/language/social network.

You can literally set an urbit up and join a not-dead distributed social network right now, this second, in probably less than 3 minutes — it's explicitly not vaporware if people are using it to build thriving communities.

Where are you getting an Urbit ID in 3 minutes? I am not super familiar with Urbit. But my understanding is that even getting a temporary Urbit ID (a commet) takes hours.

I just booted with a new temporary ID and it took 50 seconds to generate the cryptographic key. After 3-4 minutes, Urbit had bootstrapped itself and was accessible over HTTP.

You can try with these commands, using Mac in this example:

  mkdir urbit
  cd urbit
  curl -JLO https://urbit.org/install/mac/latest
  tar zxvf ./darwin.tgz --strip=1
  ./urbit -c mycomet

Oh cool. I didn't actually try it myself, since I read in the docs that it would take a long time. Good to see it's quick. Urbit looks like a really interesting system with great design underpinnings and philosophy.

Arguably that's the reason most people stay away from it. If you can put aside your feelings about the now-departed founder and boot it, you may find that it's everything you're looking for. I'm totally dumbfounded at the rationale people are invoking in recent days not to use urbit but instead some other derivation of previously tried technology.

It's not vaporware — I use it everyday to interact with many people. It's not where it hopes to be but it's going there at quite a clip.

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