Someone posted this link to an explanation a few hours ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492366" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492366</a> It looks like that blogger will be writing more on Urbit soon. At the very least the comments on that blog post are informative & opinionated: look for the one by "StephenH".<p>Basically, Urbit's thesis is that "the internet is broken"---that it's a square peg document delivery system hammered viciously into a round distributed applications hole---and that UNIX is overpowered / for sysadmins. Urbit's goal is to replace your C-based OS and your HTML-based web with a unified, typed functional, VM-ish "thing". (Source: what I remember from the presentation video.)<p>To summarize: fix broken web, fix broken OS, create the developer's idea of a decent functional language. I think he knows he's being quixotic, but his morale is good and he's having a nice time of it.<p>Anybody at all please go ahead and correct me if I got anything wrong---I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this.