But I guess that isn't as interesting to people today, nuance seems to be something people try to avoid, rather than seek out.
Historians now refer to 2029–2032 as The Great Trumparinflation. It began when President Trump, in a surprise move, appointed Kid Rock as Chair of the Federal Reserve because he "understands America and probably money too"
I rely on comments for giving me a more realistic picture of something. I'm not saying OP should change their site to do this, but asking an LLM to generate a thread consensus/sentiment would be more honest. And for every Dropbox there's a WeWork, which got slated here for being absolutely delusional.
Just read the “outcome” for Warp:
> … and became the most popular modern terminal. Login removed, telemetry made optional — every criticism addressed.
Insane
> Warp raised a $50M Series B led by Sequoia Capital and grew to over 500,000 engineers on the platform.
edit: also, the autoscroll thing
The Tailwind CSS complaints aren't wrong even today; any time I want to apply a Stylus CSS to fix someone's janky site---particularly, weekly offers from area grocery stores, where I fix it once or twice and enjoy a much better UI for a year or two---and then all I see is class="rounded-lg shadow-primary-400 my-4 md:px-4 bg-white py-20 pt-8 dark:border-gray-600" for every single element... it gets me seriously aggravated! It's a hassle to modify and a hassle to parse. I imagine it's only convenient to write/maintain because you use a separate tool and compile it into the garbage it becomes.
There is an increasing pre-chasm drip over past 5 years posts discovering modern HTML, CSS, and JS. They talk through the monster abstractions then show how to handle with the foundations at a fraction of code and future cost.
It'd be interesting to see this realization, however slowly it has started, catch on all at once.
> 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 it’s a search engine for toddlers.”
And I still think the name holds them back. I say to my friends “I googled…” or “I searched…” because DDG sounds ridiculous.
> DDG: “How many people would go to Google and search for ‘new search engine’? DuckDuckGo is not even in the top 10 pages.”
This is completely legitimate feedback. Not a criticism.
> Uber: Two months after this thread, Uber received an actual cease-and-desist from San Francisco — seemingly validating every skeptic. Travis Kalanick’s response was to ignore it and expand to five more cities.
So they’ve literally said that the comments were correct here and still published it anyway.
> AirBnB: “All my experiences with it as a user have been too unreliable to expect that it can scale to truly massive usability. I just don’t see it swallowing up the whole hotel industry.”
Which is completely correct.
> Stripe: “I really don’t get or see how Stripe is different? Why would I use it instead of PayPal, 2CheckOut, e-junkie, etc?”
That’s a question, and a valid one at that.
I gave up reading after that because of the obnoxious hijacking’s of the scrolling on mobile.
Also the claims they make about the success of some of these technologies are very dubious. TypeScript is definitely not used by 80% of JavaScript developers, not even close. I know your average WordPress or Drupal developer is not using a compiled language. Perhaps it is used by 80% of GitHub repositories, but there is a lot of code that is not posted to GitHub.
And P.S. the scroll hijacking is no less annoying on desktop.
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.
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.
I'm quoted on here so I thought I should give an update! :-)
I still don't think DDG was very useful in 2009. A noble idea, but the quality wasn't there for the searches I did. In the past several years, I've found it to give Google a good run for its money, both through DDG's index getting better and Google's getting worse. I'm delighted they've made a real go of it.
I understand why the results are worse but that doesn't really matter to the general populace.
I wish them the best though. We need search market fragmentation.
Tried Kagi when it launched, and I'm not sure if it was because Google had deteriorated so much at that point, or Kagi was simply better, but I got way better results in Kagi, and still do. Kagi ended up being what I thought DDG was aiming for, but was never able to reach.
I also think that though its name might've hold it back a little bit but its absolutely great right now the way it is. I mean I am trying to remember the google proxy of sorts thing and I remembered it in way longer time than DDG (Mentioning https://www.startpage.com/)
So to me I remember duckduckgo a 1000x times more than startpage. Honestly not that big of a deal when you think about it as well but for what its worth, it was valid concern at the time.
Imagine if I create frogfrogjump as say idk an openrouter alternative and uploaded it as show HN. People would reasonably question its name don't you think.
Though to be fair frogfrogjump is sounding a lil cool when I am thinking about it...
Also an interesting story that I found trying to find the name origin behind DDG which I want to share which I found on wiki page of DDG
"We didn't invest in it because we thought it would beat Google. We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News." - Fred Wilson, 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York[34] (Wikipedia)
This is pretty cool when one thinks about it and actually made me want to use DDG even more just seeing a mention of someone investing in DDG because they wanted people of hackernews wanting/seeing they might use it.
Although I think that people of HN love both DDG/kagi and I think both are acceptable decisions imho.
Typescript is cool though. Not like cool cool, but definitely an improvement to plain Javascript.
So yes, you're right.
This list does not show HN is bad at predicting outcomes, it shows how strong survivorship bias can be, when only remembering the rare successes.
Remember the founders of Google, tried to sell their business for one 1 million dollars, even discounting at a point to 750k... and still had no takers...
Also, just because a company has a lot of revenue that doesn’t automatically make it a successful company. Economics crashed and burned while still growing revenue day over day. And the jury is still out if OpenAI will ever be able to pay back the billions it borrowed.
This comment about Typescript was correct. Typescript had a major fundamental re-write fairly early on in it's history.
This quoted comment was written before Typescript even had Generics, let alone Union types.
Depends on who you ask. I guess Drew, who posted it here, may beg to differ.
> The opening comment literally couldn’t see the point. GitHub was perceived as ‘just a git host’ — the social layer, the network effects, the open source ecosystem it would enable were all invisible.
I don’t mind using LLMs to write and summarize. But I do wish creators would at least do an editorial pass of their own just so everything wasn’t the same writing as everything.
He got 221000 (as of today) GitHub stars, motivated thousands of projects, and immediately some of the largest companies on the planet attempted to hire him. And he settled on a job with the most popular AI company. The guy who invented the term "vibe coding" declared that tools like his were a new category above LLM agents.
But your comment is just dismissive.
I think the point of the HN love thing is that if founders take the tone of individual comments like yours or the overall HN response to heart, then that could be a fatal mistake.
If he had posted earlier and gone by comments like yours that dismissed it, then that would indicate he should not continue to put energy into it. Why would he have kept putting his time into something that the only thing worth saying about it is that it's going to be a blip on the radar?
If only we could have known how much of a race to the bottom the gig economy could be for workers. We were so naive.
By that metric, X didn't love any project either, neither did Reddit.
You could also just as easily say Reddit loved all these projects and Hackernews loved all these projects.
That is, you can cherry pick positive comments about OpenClaw just as easily as you can cherry pick negative comments. Guess what, that's just how people work.
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.
Obviously it’s all personal taste, but in my mind it feels like the successor to bootstrap in a lot of ways.
<main class="mx-auto mt-4 w-full flex-1 px-4 md:px-8 lg:mt-6 max-w-7xl h-full !mt-0 flex flex-col items-center gap-8 md:px-14 3xl:px-20 pt-[10vh] md:pt-[20vh] max-sm:!px-1 relative">
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<div class="ml-0.5 inline-flex items-center gap-1.5 rounded-lg h-8 px-2.5 text-center font-small sm:font-base bg-bg-300 text-text-500 select-none">Granted, popularity doesn't prove such projects are good projects and some criticism might be otherwise justified
Openclaw for example could have been built in 2023, but it did well in 2026. I don't think 2023 was ready for it :-)
* Modulo survivor bias, execution, funding, brilliant fouders, great advisors, pure luck etc.*
Every point about ChatGPT and Claude Code is true. Not only is their material value detached from reality (as tends to be the case in hype cycles), but a few of the criticisms, especially the first about ChatGPT are about the social impact and not how much money the idea can make.
Feels dishonest to me.
To someone that just made a few billion and who externalized the cost of that billion, say 100 billion onto society they are successful. From the point of view of society they just cost us all a fortune. But we don't judge the winners by social impact but by the size of their bankroll.
What a concise explanation of 'survivor bias'. Well done!
The problem is that every bad idea had someone behind it saying it was a great project, and the number of such bad ideas vastly outnumbers the actual success stories. To be fair, if the point is to say "Don't listen to the haters", that remains a good point.
In fact I'd love to see an inverse to this list. I.e. shit people celebrated here that failed miserably. Although failure as a business can have many reasons and must not necessarily be due to the core business idea. It's probably much harder to get this data than searching early HN threads for high value IPOs. You'd have to search for popular threads and then track down the companies and find out what happened eventually.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...
You'll see...
Whoever made this has a massive chip on their shoulder.
I don't love that light/dark toggle though: you know there's `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)` in css?
(Also looking forward to see my comment on that site when it IPO's for billions)
Market cap or getting hired by a VC grift aren't good examples of success though. They only look like such on the surface. I mainly see grifts or otherwise overrated tooling here. Bitcoin: still near zero use in 2026. Openclaw: grift, since it doesn't handle the security aspect (ie. this existed long ago, but the security aspects couldn't be dealt with so it never took off). Openclaw in particular is so disruptive, it sets a new lowest common denominator for automation at the expense of security (the afterthought "we'll figure that part out later" never works out well). It disgusts me, because it is unfair.
Frankly, a lot just exists because of network effect, hype, and because people in power can use value out of it. But the very useful things, aren't the ones which get popular (for long) here. For example, on 39C3 a couple of talks stood up there. I really liked the one about starting your own hardware company in Europe, and also the one about A-GPS near the Baltic. Neither will be remembered since they're not (American) product launches, but they are valueable to me.
Right now, if you want to be successful, there are easy markets to go with, but also more difficult. For example, a company who'd start right now in the DRAM market could get a lot of traction, and spending on defense and data sovereignty in Europe is also gonna go up.
Companies like Discord, Flock, and Palantir get a lot of flak because they deserve it. Their core business isn't build on serving the general people, but a selfish interest which doesn't add up for the general population. A website like this appears to ridicule them.
Perhaps it's time to look in the mirror?