gabrielecirulli's success has been one of my favorite moments I've witnessed on HN. Congratulations to him, it was/is an amazing phenomenon. I also think we c

gabrielecirulli's success has been one of my favorite moments I've witnessed on HN. Congratulations to him, it was/is an amazing phenomenon. I also think we can take a few important lessons here to take the tech world a little more out of the shadows. 1) As a few have said, show your friends the source code and say "if you could learn to do this, you could have made 2048". It's not too intimidating of a codebase and it might make some more people want to learn to code. 2) If you've ever met anyone who didn't see the point of open source, the 1000s of 2048 derivations are a public monument to FOSS. I have tried to explain to my friends a million times what Github is, but then all I had to do was say "yeah for that clone someone just forked the original repo and changed yellow to blue" and suddenly they get it. I know that leaves out the part of open-source where people contribute back to the original but it's a good starting point. 3) This, or some variation of this, is why many of us do what we do. The power for a few thousand keystrokes to become a worldwide phenomenon with the only cost being $0.00 and some time. It's amazing how much influence you can have from behind a laptop monitor. When people explain why I code/blog/read HN for fun, what i tell them is that programming gives you an amazing sense of mental potency. 2048 really maxed out the gauge on how potent you can be.