from Hacker News

Pullup, the site you join via pull request

by eluos on 2/11/14, 6:14 PM with 49 comments

  • by EpicEng on 2/11/14, 8:59 PM

      "We figured pretty much everybody knows JavaScript"
    Haha, that's funny. I guess all of the world's software runs on the web and is written in Silicon Valley. Oh wait, what's that you say, some programmers actually work on all those weird machines like satellites, assembly lines, medical devices, power plants, and even my car?! People actually write new operating systems, compilers, web servers, load balancers, and device drivers?! No way! Why don't they just make a web app for that stuff?

    Yeesh. I realize that you can't please everyone, but some people chose to live in their own little worlds.

  • by zheng on 2/11/14, 6:43 PM

    From the about page

    > We figured pretty much everybody knows JavaScript

    Even with the implied "everybody" being "everybody that would be interested in joining our site", this is a poor assumption. Not everyone is a ninja-rockstar web developer. In fact, some of the best content on HN comes from people who most likely don't know JS. I get the idea for the site, but the description seems very naive.

    (FWIW, I do know JS)

  • by derefr on 2/11/14, 8:40 PM

    You know, it just occurred to me: if instead of pull requests, they just accepted all pushes... that'd sort of make this the programmatic equivalent of a wiki, wouldn't it? A site anyone could edit, in a more literal sense: not just the content, but the features.

    Oddly enough, you wouldn't necessarily require people to use the command-line for this, but nor would you need to build any editing UI; instead, the site could just, say, provide a context menu that contains links to the GitHub code-editor view of all the source files, and content files, that were used to render that particular element.

    If you really wanted to do this, to be practical, you'd need a pretty good continuous integration server to block the deployed build from failing, but for the codebase itself, I think it'd be a fun experiment to just let people do whatever they like.

    ---

    ...or, on a different tangent, you could have something like a CI server that evaluates and accepts/rejects pull requests based on arbitrary criteria. This'd basically be a black box (not part of the editable codebase) serving the same purpose that the site administration currently does.

    This process could have very specific rules, like, say, that not only does every test have to pass, but that the commit can't delete any code from a test. So features can be added to a codebase through this black box, but not removed.

    Attaching such a black-box-evaluator + automatic CI deployment process to the public web would almost be like throwing a genetic algorithm at your codebase: it would "evolve" roughly according to the constraints of the algorithm, even though people are doing the work.

  • by nthitz on 2/11/14, 6:53 PM

    The top link on Pullup is a link to this HN post with the title: "Pullup HN Update post, everyone upvote/comment"...

  • by codegeek on 2/11/14, 7:17 PM

    "We figured pretty much everybody knows JavaScript"

    Honest question and not trolling. Can I send a pull request to update this text to "We figured JavaScript is very popular these days....."

    EDIT: I just did it anyway. Feel free to accept/reject

  • by betawolf33 on 2/11/14, 6:54 PM

    Interesting idea.

    One thing that this would be good for is almost by default members get experience working with the technologies the site is running -- they learn to use Github, deploy node.js, etc. It gives them a working technology base for their own projects.

    One problem I foresee is that without a clear discussion about where the site is going, it could quickly become rife with lots of poorly-interacting features. Another is that delays in merging might well turn away valuable members.

    Still, interesting project.

  • by unfunco on 2/11/14, 7:20 PM

    Wouldn't it be easy to join by simply coming up with a username and adding it to https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/blob/master/config/userl... – and then submitting a pull request for the merge?

  • by spindritf on 2/11/14, 6:59 PM

  • by 1qaz2wsx3edc on 2/11/14, 8:13 PM

    Yea, they still have a workflow problem that was never solved: https://github.com/larvalabs/pullup/pull/5

    On the bright-side at least the project is MIT. Good ol' MIT.

  • by drcode on 2/11/14, 7:54 PM

    > We wondered what a site would be like where every user had contributed some code. It should mean no spam..

    HAHAHAHA, good luck with that.

    (But still, a nice idea for a site)

  • by seshakiran on 2/11/14, 7:20 PM

    why cloning hackernews?