GitHub Blocks – waiting list signup | Hacker News Reader

GitHub Blocks – waiting list signup

blocks.githubnext.com

123 pointsmsoad42 comments

Looks rather cool but right now there's only a signup page.

Yes, and you only get added to a beta list once you go through their complicated signup flow.

Signup pages aren't really on topic for HN. This looks like a cool project but it should be submitted when there's something for people to actually try.

Looks nice initially but I worry it is akin to closing an open standard, ie embracing and extending and... . I'm not saying that was the intention, but if there is other stuff added to what should ostensibly be a simple Markdown file, it will be harder for me to migrate elsewhere if I think GitHub is lacking in other respects in the future, a form of vendor lock-in.

100% this. I skimmed the site and no mention of open source, let alone an intent of making it an open standard.

Openness makes all the difference. Hard pass.

I think this is part of the point.

I'd love to see the tech behind this get open sourced, so GitLab and whoever else can adopt it as a standard.

Besides being GitHub-exclusive, the bigger issue IMO is that this only works online. GitHub is not my file browser: I don't want to constantly load webpages to see a repo's content surrounded by GitHub's UI. I'd rather download the repo and browse code in IntelliJ or neovim. It's not just me, there's a big reason Markdown is the dominant README format and readable text is the dominant code format.

Now if they add the extra README details and file metadata that are stored in the files themselves, then this is a great idea. Although that also means it's essentially an open-standard and competitors like GitLab and SourceHut can adopt the features.

Also, a major reason for Git as a VCS is being able to store and distribute copies. Otherwise, why use commits at all? Why not just store all data in the cloud and turn every file into a Google Doc? That's actually not a terrible solution and I can see someone like GitHub adopting it - but it's not Git.

But what I liked about git readmes was that they were static and easy to reason about.

So keep using them?

GitHub Next here!

Kyle Daigle's "Building with :heart:" session[1] in just under an hour is going to show this off, and we'll be getting people into the thing as quickly as possible! No long waitlist here.

https://githubuniverse.com/events/detail/virtual-schedule/a0...

What is ‘GitHub Next’? Is this an official GitHub project? It’s not on the github.com domain, so it doesn’t look like it. What signals do I have to know that this site is trustworthy?

I click ‘get started’, and it wants me to hand over access to my GitHub account to see all private resources I have and "act on [my] behalf" to some unknown "blocks" third party.

How do I determine whether this website is some kind of phishing scam, or legit? Everything everyone always says ("check the domain!") rings alarm bells.

A couple of proofs!

next.github.com redirects to the site

You can see Blocks and Hey, GitHub! on https://github.com/features/preview

Watch Kyle's universe session linked elsewhere in the thread, he's going to be showing off a variety of projects from GitHub Next

There are some very good reasons why we exist outside the primary domain — mostly security-related! The blast radius of our experimentation should not include github.com :D

The oauth prompt reads "Not owned or operated by GitHub"; should get that changed if this is operated on behalf of the company.

FYI, the website is a mess for me on Safari for iOS and iPadOS

Will this become an open source project / standard like markdown?

imho that is a really, really important piece of this puzzle.

The SSO authorization requires "Act on your behalf" permissions, and says "Not owned or operated by GitHub" at the bottom of the authorize page. This is suspicious to me.

I would expect the messaging to reflect this is owned by GitHub if GitHub Next is owned by GitHub.

Github blocks = Notion style blocks and Jupyter notebook style code execution in your GH repository text files

Its sad to have to open a new web page/App for everything. Happy to see things go the integration-direction and hopefully seeing some synergies.

Seems like..embeddable Github Pages? Maybe only on your project readme (or elsewhere, can't really tell)?

I just hope everything is able to be persisted in files that are committed to the repo.

Does this have anything to do with the Block Protocol [1]?

[1]: https://blockprotocol.org/

If you don't add metadata to the README so I can still just open with any editor, I'm all for it.

Is this officially by GitHub?

Yes!

GitHub Next is a small research lab, formerly known as the Office of the CTO

Heh, OCTO. Nice.

That was my first question. GitHubNext sounds like the perfect phishing page.

On Firefox this is rather messed up and is not rendering well. Doesn't give me much confidence.

We're a small team, and we don't have a whole marketing and web team to build stuff for us.

They're experiments! Think of this like an 0.1 of an open source project; it's gonna have bugs, it's going to have rough edges. We aren't going to pretend otherwise :D

That's totally understandable but it doesn't take the expertise of a marketing team to notice the problems here. Just think whether you personally would like to find out about some neat new feature of a tool you use through some weird janky scrolljacking page which then takes you to a waitlist. And then something about a video presentation and a pinky promise the waitlist is short. I'm guessing you probably don't, like most people. A 0.1 of an open source project can have a lot of rough edges but doesn't have any of this ceremony.

It looks the same on Chrome and Firefox for me. Sure you're not being tricked by the empty block at the beginning? I initially thought that was a rendering error but I guess it's representing the sandbox nature.

Make your window less wide. That fixed it for me! Seems like some broken CSS media queries.

Same with Chromium (Linux). Is this even an official GitHub project?

I'm on chrome and the scrolling is messed up as well.

Same in Safari 16.1

I'm currently building a static site generator, which will generate something like jsFiddle, but can be deployed using github page.

If only I had known this, I would not spend time on it.

But I wasn't able to try it:

Uh oh, something went wrong! Failed to fetch

How funny that timing is. It showcases P5 which has absolutely awful bundle sizes because the code is written in a way that tree shaking (unused code removal) isn’t possible. It attaches everything to the p5.prototype.

This took a site I have from loading 200kb to 1.1mb. It also includes browser polyfills that haven’t been needed for years. Unacceptable.

I hope that P5 can get some attention as a result of Blocks to refactor it to solve this.

https://github.com/processing/p5.js/issues/5740#issuecomment...

how typically hn for that to be downvoted

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