I agree with your sentiment and hate the lame titles programmers apply to themselves, but you're missing a key point. Calling yourself a programmer is fine when your company's product is the software you write. If I work at id or at a company that sells iPhone apps and I call myself a programmer, it's obvious what value I create. But for the people making internal business software (90% of programming jobs according to Patrick) a programmer is associated with costs rather than profits, so it's a bad idea to craft an identify as a "programmer".

We're not talking about replacing TCP as the standard transport protocol. But if you're a mobile app developer and you control both the client (via a native app) and the server you can use whatever you want. If someone provided client and server implementations of a more efficient networking protocol it could become popular.

I have no idea about monetization though. I doubt just charging for the code would work.

What time of the week was it previously posted to HN? Something like this will likely do better on the weekend, when there's less going on in general, and people have more time to watch hour long videos.

Oh come on, I think we're intelligent enough here to consider a metaphor without getting emotionally twisted out of shape.

Spoken like someone who has never seen a HN discussion about apple before ;)

The infantilizing of movies has been very disappointing for me personally. I seem to have a lot of friends that only want to see CG movies, usually from Pixar or Dreamworks. Sit them down to watch a live action drama and in fifteen minutes the iphones come out to play Angry Birds. Very frustrating.

I agree the developers aren't entitled to these improvements from Google, but if I were Google I'd be doing everything I can to pacify developers.

Oh, I absolutely agree. It's in Google's interest to keep developers happy, for sure. As a developer, though, the idea that I have "rights" of any kind (past what's specified in a contract) is hilarious.

> Are they really that horrified by game mods containing nudity, or are they just control freaks?

I'm sure it's the latter. Having complete control over distribution makes it far easier to monetize the content. See the iphone app store for example.

> Not sure what to call the iPhone, what category it is, but did they erect any barriers to keep Google out of it?

The "no developing apps with cross-platform toolkits" policy is pretty anti-competitive.

> As long as they control their own platform they're happy.

Then why the patent suit against HTC?

Not to mention the whole subtle warning to Google not to implement multi-touch. Google finally opened up that can of worms after the organizations had a falling out.

Every company would describe itself as a meritocracy though. In github's case they're probably still small enough for that to be true.

Agreed, but in this case I actually believe them. As soon as you've got two layers of management that probably is the first to go out the door.

I've never understood why a startup would choose to grow to the size where it needed two layers of management, unless the individual product they were working on was really of a complexity too high for a small team to manage (like, say, a nuclear reactor.) For products that stay the same size, but gain new sub-products, cross-products, side-businesses, etc., why not just "undergo mitosis" and become two startup-sized companies, each handling a single facet of the business but sharing a treasury and building?

There was a company (BSO) that did just that, they split every time they got to a certain number of employees (I believe the magic number was 50). They were hugely successful.

You can read all about it here: http://www.extent.nl/articles/entry/the-evolution-of-bso-and...

I agree that constantly being nagged about updating sucks. What's worse though: update nagging or occasionally having an app or service you depend on breaking temporarily due to a bad update?

If regressions are somewhat rare then I think I prefer automatic updates, even with the risks.

This is the norm with all web applications. The frequency of regressions will depend on a lot of factors. One of the reasons I think this works well for web apps is that the deployment environment is exceptionally consistent and stable when compared to the world of desktop os's. It would be awful if your text editor broke while you were in the middle of using it, but that is the situation I am in right now with my email. How much trust do you give the developers?

yes. Whether it's desktop apps, local os, iphone apps, android apps, any interest in this stuff in the future will be just some kind of steampunk sentimentality. The only desktop app that should be developed and upgraded is the browser. Web dev is a superior expression of division of labor, and regression management. Software dev is so increasingly worthless, the only viable platform for it is web, embedded specialties withstanding.