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Comment on Show HN: A developers-only news site you join via pull request

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It's amusing because I've seen so many people mad at HN's lack of features, and spend so much noise demanding pg add this or that, or creating bookmarklets to "fix" it, or even forking the entire site just to try to modify a part of its functionality. But when offered the chance to collaboratively control the whole thing, on github, now it's "meh? why would anyone want that".

It's almost as if there are different people demanding different things for varying reasons or something.

Nah, just like Reddit, HN is a hivemind, and we all want the same thing at the same time. Any contradiction is evidence of our hypocrisy, not of the disjointed nature of our composition.

People seem to be questioning the validity of having domain knowledge in node/heroku/mongodb and an approved pull request be a prerequisite for joining a site not obviously about node development, not to the idea of an open source site in and of itself. If people had to learn Arc and have a pull request approved just to join HN, there would be maybe two or three people here.

Node, Arc, MongoDB, and Heroku are not difficult to learn at all. All are borderline facile.

I don't think it's an unreasonable boundary at all and I strongly dislike those specific technologies.

If you don't have the willpower or gumption to contribute to the community, then I don't really care to read what you have to say at all.

tl;dr lazybones need not apply

Well, I managed to get a local instance running, poke around then hack together something. I would by no means call it 'borderline facile' though, just a set of annoying dependencies to install and hoops to jump through. That said, getting it set up was easier than I anticipated. (though granted, nobody has to do any of that to submit a pull request...)

You could make design changes using github's web interface and submit a pull that way.

Ah, you're right.

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