What Urbit is

Hello! I'm one of the Urbit devs.

1. Has this ever actually happened? I'd be quite disturbed by that. We're more than happy to have people learning about Urbit, although we're not particularly active on social media.

2. Curtis is certainly controversial. None of us share his views, but we do enjoy working together. I'd like to think we live in a world where people who don't agree can still collaborate professionally.

3. Learning Hoon is much easier than it looks. In my experience it's absolutely designed for usability — although it doesn't appear that way at first. We're actively working to better explain how Hoon works and teach people the language. It would be totally against our interests to do otherwise. I do think our new docs do a much better job: http://urbit.org/docs

4. There is a company behind Urbit, but it's not technically possible for us to control the project in the long term. Urbit is definitely not behind any kind of 'firewall' — it's designed to be owned by the community.

I'd encourage you to check out the posts on our beliefs and principles [0], address space [1] and company [2].

0 - http://urbit.org/posts/principles/ 1 - http://urbit.org/posts/address-space/ 2 - http://urbit.org/posts/company/

"As for "race," you can learn way more about someone from a minute of conversation than from a full genome sequence -- even if we knew how to decode the information in the sequence, which we don't. As for politics, there is essentially no one sane who thinks of themselves as evil or wanting to do evil. I have lots of progressive friends, and you'd be surprised how many ways we can find to see the world in the same way."

What a monster!

1. I'm really not sure how that happened to you. I'm interested in Urbit and play around with it (and actually own a galaxy), but am not an employee, and I've been more than happy answering questions from people via :talk who are starting out or wanting to learn more. I've never seen anyone mocked, publicly nor privately, and I really hope that it isn't still happening if it was.

2. The author had an alt-right blog under a pseudonym. Some people think that makes him literally a Nazi. I don't agree with, er, basically any of his views, but I do enjoy reading his posts simply because they are fun to read. They aren't racist, except in the non-PC way, and has been nothing but nice when interacting with his online. None of those views bleed into Urbit, so I really don't care what political views Yarvin holds on his own.

3. Saying "only dedicated people would learn it" is just being mean. Hoon is unique from Lisp, and isn't even intentionally hard to learn - it's just different from nearly all other languages, because it compiles down to Nock, and builds primitives that make sense in the context of running on that VM. It's strongly typed, unlike Lisp, along with being pure. It's analogous to Lisp that you write code that is turned directly into an AST, but quite different. The part that is "completely foreign" is the weird syntax, which looks much harder to learn than it is, which they've recently admitted is too hardcore for newbs: They added keyword style in the last Hoon revision, so that you can code in nearly normal looking syntax, if you want. `:if(a b c)` instead of `?:(a b c)`.

Nock is kinda a Lisp variant, but there is a good reason behind having a small, perfect VM that never changes with some nice features, which are iterated in the docs and LambdaConf slides.

4. Urbit is open-source. https://github.com/urbit/urbit. If you read the website, they pledged a lot of the galaxies and Urbit namespace to what will become a non-profit spinoff. Not only that, but you can fork the entire network if Tlon turns out to be Evil Company Inc., by changing the hard-coded galaxy keys. I'll admit that there is a big difference between "open source" and actually being developed in the open, and hopefully they will open up about where they want to go with Urbit more, but it's by no means behind a company firewall.

Claiming that some ethnic groups are genetically good slaves is "not racist except in the non-PC way?"

He tried to explain that opinion further: "The ability to survive as an agricultural slave is a talent."

I've no idea whether Spaniards and Englishmen really did find Indians unfit for slavery but I guess the argument that is being made is that more of them might have been kept alive if they were able to provide greater economic value to their conquerors. Sick, I know.

Agree that it's not an opinion fit to be voiced in modern society, however, it doesn't seem to be the opinion that people are trying to cast it under.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...