[githulhu]

Compared to web development, those communities you mentioned are very closed to most people. With Javascript, there's no special equipment needed, and you can pretty much just pick it up and go...there's tons of freely-available knowledge in blogs, and open source code to read/get involved with.

Where's the github for assembly line firmware code? I would be very interested in learning more about other non-web-development domains, but it seems like unless you get hired right out of school to program something like cars or satellites, you're pretty much shut out forever.

[EpicEng]

There are plenty of repositories with code for micro-controllers and non-web related projects, but again, that's not the point. The single quote that "pretty much everyone knows javascript" was the focus of my comment.

Sure, maybe the author meant "pretty much everyone [who we think will be interested in our site] knows javascipt", but that's not what they said, and I don't understand that attitude at all. It's unnecessarily exclusionary, especially when their plan is to host content in a similar way to HN.

[githulhu]

Maybe another take on the idea could be to allow anyone to join who could sign in a with a github account that had had at least one accepted pull request on any repository. Easily hacked I guess, but perhaps that would solve the "just Javascript" problem while still serving to boost the average level of tech cred of submitters/commenters.

[krapp]

Surely there would be a way to check this through github's api once there was a username to check against. It sounds like a good idea and it might encourage supporting open source software while avoiding those issues.

But then I guess the downside would be fewer people contributing to your own site.