I like how Dropbox kept coming back as the prime example of something that HN mispredicted, and it's usually that comment about FTP on top. It's like HN version of Slashdot's iPod review.
Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
131–140 of 158 posts
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#132HN was right about React.
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#133Some of those comments are completely fair: > Dropbox: I think competitors can duplicate Dropbox’s nice front end That’s exactly what happened. > Bitcoin: “Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.” This is still true even now > DDG: “I can’t ever see anyone saying ‘just duckduckgo it.’ The name just sounds silly. It makes me think…
Yeah, I find the "we showed those idiots!" attitude kinda dumb when a lot of these concerns are completely real and valid. Like all of the comments about Tailwind are just "hey this is not a great way to do things"; it becoming popular doesn't disprove that. And for Warp, "No one should use a for-profit terminal emulator, especially one created by a VC-backed startup, full stop." -- I still agree with this! Also the…
> No one should use a for-profit terminal emulator, especially one created by a VC-backed startup, full stop.
I use Warp. I like it - notifications for failed processes, terminal pages so you can easily navigate between input+output pairs, and yes sometimes I'll use the AI rather than remember the syntax for every command.
But just make it commercial open source, let me pay 20 bucks a year for a build. I think the company deserve to profit from their work (I'm not sure why people think that profit is bad) but I'm not going to use it as my editor.
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#134Some of those comments are completely fair: > Dropbox: I think competitors can duplicate Dropbox’s nice front end That’s exactly what happened. > Bitcoin: “Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.” This is still true even now > DDG: “I can’t ever see anyone saying ‘just duckduckgo it.’ The name just sounds silly. It makes me think…
So I guess the lesson is that ideas can turn into successful, profitable businesses even if there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of those ideas?
Or maybe it is that HN tends to correctly point out flaws in ideas, but maybe doesn’t also point out the good points of ideas, which can give readers an incorrect impression that those projects can’t succeed?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose, but as for me, I would be very happy with myself if I had founded Dropbox, even if it isn’t a flawless business.
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#135Speaking of Cursor, we use cursor's agent nowadays more than its IDE. But then why should a company pay for Cursor instead of just signing deals with the top model providers and then using things like OpenCode or their own coding agent? That will be more cost efficient as the company won't need to pay for the markup per token added by Cursor?
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#136I'm curious -- are there any stories of projects that launched on Hacker News, Hacker News loved it, and it ended up _also_ being a big success?
E.g. we have stories like Dropbox where HN seemed to be dismissive only to be proven wrong, and there are numerous launches where HN was dismissive and they were proven right, but I'd be more curious when the HN crowd got it right in a positive way.
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#137Weird AI piece. There was a post a few days ago looking at historical sentiment of HN posts; it looks like someone slapped that info into an LLM and asked for a neat website. Just read the “outcome” for Warp: > … and became the most popular modern terminal. Login removed, telemetry made optional — every criticism addressed. Insane
Agreed. What message is being communicated if they can't be bothered to put any introspection into the projects they're presenting until someone points out a mistake?
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#138Here’s a question. Does anyone seriously uses tailwind in real projects? It is indeed just inline styling why would you do that? And about claw, do you think it’s more than just hype?
A lot of companies use tailwind. Here's an extract from https://claude.ai (the chat interface after logging in):
I see. But it looks horrible, no? I mean I get that it’s a purely taste issue.
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#139Nice.
I don't love that light/dark toggle though: you know there's `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)` in css?
Re: Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
#140Here's a project that Hacker News absolutely loved but afaict not much came from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846540
that's a great find! they were ~10 years too early...