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Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

repl.it

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Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#181

Post by mistersolomon »

amasad wrote: post #156
throwaway473 wrote: post #62

Repl.it's current business model appears to be giving cloud services away for free, attracting lots of users, and using their high user counts to get more venture capital funding to spend on giving away cloud services for free. Am I missing something, or is this basically the programming equivalent to MoviePass? Surely as soon as they start trying to be profitable, people will find some other startup to give them clo…

I see you keep creating throwaways to spread misinformation. I answered you elsewhere but here we go again: we've been bootstrapped and profitable for a while before we got funding and we still make lots of money. We grow our MRR from classroom and hacker plan more than 5% monthly: https://repl.it/pricing Go find something better to do.

If you check the timestamps, I actually posted this before writing my reply to you elsewhere in this thread, but the post was killed immediately. Maybe HN has a naughty word filter banning people from mentioning MoviePass in threads about YCombinator startups.

Dunno why it came back, guess some other users thought it was informative enough to vouch for.

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#182

Post by TeMPOraL »

tekromancr wrote: post #172
Klathmon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't answer your questions, but I firmly believe this is the major reason node took off in popularity. Npm let you install packages minutes after being installed, and they went right into a folder right there, and they didn't conflict with any other packages on your system. I was like you and played with python for years but never anything larger than small scripts, and every time I went to do "real" python I…

On the other hand, as someone who knows a little js from the bad old days but has been doing python for over a decade, trying to get up and running with a modern js environment seems totally cray cray to me. Usually, for me, I start by installing node. Ok, so I guess I need to install npm now. No problem, I guess that's like pip. Oh, I need yarn. It's better? Ok, I guess python had the same growing pains with easy_in…

Seconded. I keep going back to the modern JS world every couple months, because either the job or a side project requires it. And I still can't get used to things.

I still remember my first attempt, years ago. I shopped around for front-end frameworks, and picked Ember, which was in vogue then. I proceeded to create a default "hello world" with ember-cli, only to discover the newly generated project had ~70k files in 150k folders. I bailed out immediately and went back to jQuery.

The situation in Node-land is much improved now, but I'm still uncomfortable with so many moving parts you have there, all constantly changing, which can - and do frequently - break at any moment. And just when I think I finally have things under control, my professional front-end developer friend comes out and says, "no no no, you're doing it wrong; throw out library X and use Y instead, add webpack, and while you're at it, use Yarn, and here you have this config which adds a newest linter...".

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#184

Post by TeMPOraL »

Avshalom wrote: post #171
darkerside wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a counterpoint. It's ok that you don't know what docker is. It's ok that you don't know what a shell is. What exactly is the nature of the dismissive attitude from others that has held you back from learning? Perhaps these are real opinions, but consider the source. If they are smarter than they are rude, and their opinions hold value, maybe suck it up and learn something. If it's not worth it to you, ignore t…

Yeah it's fine not to know what docker is in like a moral sense. But when it comes to wanting to write anything beyond hello world you start running into package and environment and container managers that everyone is arguing with everyone about. I mean hell this thread is like three different recommendations for python that all end with "fuck it use JavaScript". That shit is discouraging and the annoying thing--comi…

> A decade ago you just downloaded a library and put it in the folder you were writing in.

And you run software by downloading a .zip, unpacking it and executing the program in that folder.

I miss the times when both development and use was that simple. And it was what, like 10 years ago?

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#185

Post by amasad »

mistersolomon wrote: post #179
amasad wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. We've been arond longer than most in this space (since 2011) 2. We've been profitable and bootstrapping for a long time. We have paying users like Facebook, Google, and Stripe, Hackreactor, HCT (biggest college in the UAE) and so many more: https://repl.it/pricing 3. We're probably like 5-10x Koding users base. 4. You keep creating accounts to spread misinformation. Go find something better to do.

1. Koding was launched in January 2012. 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18278979 seems to say you aren't profitable at the moment 3. In other words, you're giving away like 5-10x the amount of free servers Koding did. If burning money didn't work for them then how would burning it five times faster help you? Are you trying to make it up in volume or something? 4. Alright, just for you I'll stop using throwawa…

> 3. In other words, you're giving away like 5-10x the amount of free servers Koding did. If burning money didn't work for them, then how would burning it five times faster help you? Are you trying to make it up in volume or something?

In Sep we spent $15k for all of our infrastructure cost and we made all of it back and then some with subscriptions. It's serverless, we only spend resources when people actually execute code (most of the time they're just typing the code) or when servers are responding to traffic (most of the time they're idle). Unlike C9/Koding/etc which were all VMs :-)

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#186

Post by ploxiln »

7ewis wrote: post #113
sixhobbits wrote: post #77

Python, the "second best language for everything", has had a huge impact for teaching people programming. Beginners can do useful and interesting things and solve real problems after a few hours of learning. And yet the number of times I've seen beginners completely discouraged or even give up programming forever because they have conda and pip and brew and pyenv installed and can't run a basic script after 4 hours o…

I've been using Python as my go-to language for a while. It works well and I feel like I understand the basics, but pipenv, pyenv, pip etc. seem needlessly complex. Especially when I'm trying to create a serverless framework package, or upload a zip to AWS Lambda. Never know what tool to use to install packages, or how to specify the python version... or even change the python version on my Mac. Homebrew Python, syst…

You can get very far with any python on your system, and just the standard library. Don't bother with pipenv or pyenv. Once you have experience solving problems with the standard library, learn where pip puts things (probably /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages), use "pip freeze" to list current versions of stuff, and keep it tidy. Don't make a big mess, it won't be a mess.

One nifty trick is using the (built-in) subprocess modules to exec some other tool, like rsync or ssh. I recently had sufficient motivation to remove a dependency on the "awscli" package from my deploy system, and implemented an aws api request signing function in about 50 lines of python3.5 using only the standard library. (For bootstrap convenience, my deploy system depends only python3.5 and some standard cli utilities.)

For some non-trivial web services, I use tornado. Running under python3, it depends on nothing else, and can take you very far. (Running under python2.7 it has 4 small dependencies.)

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#187

Post by dpe82 »

Klathmon wrote: post #126
7ewis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Python as my go-to language for a while. It works well and I feel like I understand the basics, but pipenv, pyenv, pip etc. seem needlessly complex. Especially when I'm trying to create a serverless framework package, or upload a zip to AWS Lambda. Never know what tool to use to install packages, or how to specify the python version... or even change the python version on my Mac. Homebrew Python, syst…

This doesn't answer your questions, but I firmly believe this is the major reason node took off in popularity. Npm let you install packages minutes after being installed, and they went right into a folder right there, and they didn't conflict with any other packages on your system. I was like you and played with python for years but never anything larger than small scripts, and every time I went to do "real" python I…

Along the same line, I think this is also a big part of why Perl was so popular back in the day. CPAN was to Perl what NPM is today. It made finding and installing modules in a local user project directory dead simple which made getting started on a project frictionless.

Though I have to say, CPAN was much better organized and documented...

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#188

Post by lacker »

tekromancr wrote: post #172
Klathmon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't answer your questions, but I firmly believe this is the major reason node took off in popularity. Npm let you install packages minutes after being installed, and they went right into a folder right there, and they didn't conflict with any other packages on your system. I was like you and played with python for years but never anything larger than small scripts, and every time I went to do "real" python I…

On the other hand, as someone who knows a little js from the bad old days but has been doing python for over a decade, trying to get up and running with a modern js environment seems totally cray cray to me. Usually, for me, I start by installing node. Ok, so I guess I need to install npm now. No problem, I guess that's like pip. Oh, I need yarn. It's better? Ok, I guess python had the same growing pains with easy_in…

Nowadays there are usually better tools than the process you describe here. For example if you are making a React application you can start off with the `create-react-app` tool. If you're using Vue then `vue create ` is similar. They will take care of the bundling and providing a modern language environment for you.

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#189

Post by lacker »

mistersolomon wrote: post #181
amasad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you keep creating throwaways to spread misinformation. I answered you elsewhere but here we go again: we've been bootstrapped and profitable for a while before we got funding and we still make lots of money. We grow our MRR from classroom and hacker plan more than 5% monthly: https://repl.it/pricing Go find something better to do.

If you check the timestamps, I actually posted this before writing my reply to you elsewhere in this thread, but the post was killed immediately. Maybe HN has a naughty word filter banning people from mentioning MoviePass in threads about YCombinator startups. Dunno why it came back, guess some other users thought it was informative enough to vouch for.

Why are you constantly creating new throwaway accounts? Just... don't do that.

Re: Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others

#190

Post by mistersolomon »

lacker wrote: post #189
mistersolomon wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you check the timestamps, I actually posted this before writing my reply to you elsewhere in this thread, but the post was killed immediately. Maybe HN has a naughty word filter banning people from mentioning MoviePass in threads about YCombinator startups. Dunno why it came back, guess some other users thought it was informative enough to vouch for.

Why are you constantly creating new throwaway accounts? Just... don't do that.

I usually just do drive-by comments and not often enough to remember the login info. Although I suppose for all you know I might not even be the one who made those posts
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