Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love

by ohong • 5 months ago

224 150 5 months ago

The entire site (including page margins) being a link to HN is an annoyance

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.

H8crilA• 5 months ago

Thank you. HN delivers.

jasaldivara• 5 months ago

Not just Tailwind; most of the listed criticism are still valid and relevant, even after those products had success.

benoliver999• 5 months ago

In fact a lot of these helped shape our miserable dystopia. HN didn't see that coming

Terretta• 5 months ago

"Everyone adopted it, therefore it won" can exist at the same time as "sometimes the crowd is not wise."

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.

embedding-shape3• 5 months ago

Kind of feel like saying that HN didn't/did love those projects is a bit too black and white. Many of those submissions do have a lot of dismissive comments, but lots of them also have a lot of comments praising the project one or another way, explicitly or implicitly. Some of the highlighted comments also aren't even the top 3 comments, yet they're used as indicative of what the HN community loves or not.

But I guess that isn't as interesting to people today, nuance seems to be something people try to avoid, rather than seek out.

ultropolis• 5 months ago

Pshar, this comment will be on hackernews.love in three years when hackernews.love has it's 10 billion dollar IPO

embedding-shape3• 5 months ago

Well, at least nuance won a tiny battle if so, and I'm happy I could contribute to it.

Betelbuddy3• 5 months ago

5 billion dollars will be the price of a Big Mac meal, after President Trump fourth mandate and the dollar collapse.

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"

nindalf• 5 months ago

Honestly, if every HN thread was just filled with positivity it would make this just a worthless circlejerk. No one would bother reading the comments because we'd already know what they say.

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.

abirch• 5 months ago

It's hard to have nuance in KPIs.

_cenw• 5 months ago

This website makes the error of assuming that being criticized on HN automatically implies your idea is not marketable.

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.

jacquesm3• 5 months ago

It's a viewpoint issue: how you define success is what makes the difference here.

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.

panta• 5 months ago

Not everyone shares this view. Some have a different definition of winners and losers.

saberience• 5 months ago

If you have enough comments on literally ANY project, you will be able to say Reddit didn't love it, or Twitter didn't love it, or Hackernews didn't love it.

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.

TimCTRL• 5 months ago

i have a few qualms with this app...

notenlish• 5 months ago

I really like the idea of this site, however I think it would be better if it was explained how these tools became popular and what problems they solved and/or what features they had.

sylware• 5 months ago

Try to talk about noscript/basic (x)html browser interoperability on HN, namely the web without the engines from the whatng cartel.

You'll see...

oytis• 5 months ago

My takeaway is that enough capital trumps all engineering, legal and other considerations.

Typescript is cool though. Not like cool cool, but definitely an improvement to plain Javascript.

jacquesm3• 5 months ago

This is a valid observation. Capital breeds more capital and just like water seeks the lowest point capital will seek to enable those who are willing to bend or even break the rules. This is embodied in YC's application questionnaire in interesting ways, it is effectively capital testing for exactly those properties. I think 'ethical' should be made explicit in your list, and not lumped in with 'other'. Because that is one of the more important ones and it usually is also the first to be thrown out.

Oras• 5 months ago

Capital allows reaching a wider audience, experimenting with different angles and use cases, and addressing multiple pain points.

So yes, you're right.

larsmaxfield• 5 months ago

Don't hijack scroll.

dwedge2• 5 months ago

It's my own fault but my only mobile browser is webview and this site kept scrolling back to the top

inexcf• 5 months ago

Yeah, impossible to read this site. Let me place the content where i want. If your screen is big enough you can literally not scroll on this site because it just jumps to the next chapter.

dwedge2• 5 months ago

Duckduckgo is begging the question that their name didn't hold them back. 600m is nothing really in that market. I still feel daft saying their name

nkrisc• 5 months ago

Doesn't feel any more daft to me than saying nonsense words like "Google" or "Spotify".

If anything, the problem with their name is it's too long.

jfyi• 5 months ago

I think it's more that total reduplication sounds off to most western ears. Spotify has the same number of syllables.

stunpix• 5 months ago

A clear "survival's bias": no one knows/talks about the thousands who died.

snvzz• 5 months ago

At a glance, most of them remain bad ideas.

oniony• 5 months ago

Does the author not know the difference between Git and GitHub?

agmater• 5 months ago

What an infuriating website. I know complaining about bad websites is frowned upon, but they are actively making it hard to read and click through the links, yet that is the entire service. What is the point of keeping this online if a HN comment or a README offers a superior product? ;/

ohong8• 5 months ago

fixed!

lloydatkinson• 5 months ago

BrandonM is never going to live down that very fedora-wearing comment in regards to Dropbox...

nubinetwork• 5 months ago

Is a programming language really a "project", in that you get a tangible object at the end? I was thinking I'd see more actual products and services on the list. /shrug

MrFurious• 5 months ago

Many projects on that page are rubbish and have made the world a little worse.

ifh-hn• 5 months ago

I can't say that I disagree with the React comments...

jakeydus2• 5 months ago

Just about every summary in here has an em dash in it. The whole article feels very AI-y to me.

makach• 5 months ago

well, that was awkward. that said, some I didn't love some I absolutely did. Is this fair?

sintezcs• 5 months ago

All comments about React are still valid

giancarlostoro• 5 months ago

If the author can read this, no mention of Bun being bought out by Anthropic, which is a big win for the project. ;)

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...

ohong8• 5 months ago

good one! will add

m_mueller• 5 months ago

This looks like an underhanded comment about Openclaw. Tbf. I might be exactly that kinda person the site is referring to, but I have a really hard time seeing this thing as any more than one of those blips on the radar that gets forgotten about quickly again, e.g. more clubhouse (remember that?) and less dropbox.

ilaksh• 5 months ago

It's already proven to not be just a blip on the radar. Even if everyone forgets about it today.

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?

gaigalas• 5 months ago

The scroll feels like reading a book on the wind.

ohong8• 5 months ago

oops, should be fixed

Gigachad2• 5 months ago

The funny thing is a lot of the criticism of Dropbox ended up being true. Dropbox wasn’t a massive money generator, and every tech company replicated it as a value add to their existing ecosystem rather than being much of a product itself.

mittermayr• 5 months ago

Dropbox wasn’t a massive money generator

Depends on who you ask. I guess Drew, who posted it here, may beg to differ.

Betelbuddy3• 5 months ago

So does Adam Neumann...

Gigachad2• 5 months ago

In the short term sure it was a good payout. I guess the main flaw in the criticisms is overestimating how quickly big tech would catch up. It did happen but there was enough time to sell for a large sum first.

Bnjoroge2• 5 months ago

yeah I'm sure it wasnt a massive money generator for the folks who invested in their pre-seed round.

a3w• 5 months ago

I still hate 15 out of these 22 things for the company owning them, the UX or base promise, or the tech itself.

codingdave• 5 months ago

Every great project was once called a bad idea

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.

sigmoid10• 5 months ago

The issue here is that the people commenting on whether something is a good or bad idea usually don't have the necessary insight to give useful comments either way. But with certain trendy topics, many people still feel the need to express their shallow opinions. That is especially true on HN, because many like-minded people will chime in, upvote and increase visibility as long as they themselves feel validated, irrespective of whether what was said is true or not.

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.

dependency_2x• 5 months ago

Looking at the list, I feel timing makes a big difference*. You need to be early enough that people think you are a bit crazy, but not too early that the tech isn't there or even early adopters are not ready.

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.*

ohong8• 5 months ago

exactly! haha you kinda predicted my next project: startups.rip

hajrice• 5 months ago

Love the mobile UX. You nailed the scrolling experience

omgmajk• 5 months ago

This site is blocked by Cisco Corporate Security, so can't read it. I wonder why.

joosters• 5 months ago

Re: OpenClaw in particular, I had never realised that simply getting lots of stars on Github meant that your project was actually a success...

StingyJelly• 5 months ago

Got the guy hired by openai trough

gabrielso• 5 months ago

Meh, I still hate at least half of those products/companies...

hnlmorg4• 5 months ago

Some 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 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.

oscillik• 5 months ago

Back before Google was huge, no-one used any of the other popular search engine names as a synonym for 'searched the world wide web'. We didn't say "I Yahoo!'d for recipes", or "I Excited the latest film releases". We can go back.

hnlmorg4• 5 months ago

The point isn’t that we can’t use generic adverbs. It’s that DDG’s name makes it unrealistic to use their brand as an adverb, which loses them more exposure.

ok123456• 5 months ago

They did "Ask Jeeves about" it.

pedrogpimenta• 5 months ago

The obnoxious hijacking of the scrolling is present on desktop too. Can't read the small box because it'll scroll to the next project. Why?

hayleox• 5 months ago

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 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.

nailer• 5 months ago

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.

tacitusarc• 5 months ago

I would be willing to bet money they used AI to scrape and curate the comments. The justifications have that feeling of knowledge the sentiment is negative coupled with a lack of understanding about its accuracy.

thiht• 5 months ago

The DuckDuckGo name and mascot are still the main reason I don't use it, they're just too dumb, in a not fun way

jaredklewis• 5 months ago

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.

itemize123• 5 months ago

yet those flaws didn't matter. qualitative right. quantitative wrong.

butterNaN• 5 months ago

I "don't love" this. Seems very low effort and lacking any basic nuance.

rorylawless• 5 months ago

The bitcoin entry is off. jdoliner‘s criticism ended up being more true than false; it isn’t wildly trusted as a medium of exchange and it being an “asset class” doesn’t disprove that.

Betelbuddy3• 5 months ago

If you take that page and apply one simple filter, that is which of these are actually profitable standalone businesses as of 2026, the list collapses fast. And only a small minority, Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, maybe Uber after 13 years...are slightly profitable. Many others were acquired early, remain VC subsidized, or are open source projects.

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...

petercooper• 5 months ago

“I don’t find their actual search engine very useful at all.” (me in 2009)

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.

embedding-shape3• 5 months ago

Same, I tried DDG a bunch of times over the years, maybe once every 2 years or so, but never got to the point where it felt it could replace Google.

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.

PacificSpecific4• 5 months ago

I tried kagi started years ago. It had some really interesting and deep results when I was planning my wedding but failed elsewhere. I should try it again.

Imustaskforhelp3• 5 months ago

I think Kagi is neat/fantastic but I also feel like unless you want extreme customizability, DDG is absolutely amazing and I really love DDG.

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.

danesparza2• 5 months ago

There is nothing on Google I can't also find on duckduckgo.

selbyk• 5 months ago

I do also think its name _has_ held it back.

PacificSpecific4• 5 months ago

I've tried so many times to make DDG work. In fact I'm currently commenting via Android DDG browser and still I find myself switching to Chrome/Google more than half of the time because the DDG search is just not working for me. I suspect the problem is I do a lot of geospatial type searches.

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.

Fnoord3• 5 months ago

The blacklisting feature of Kagi is a killer feature to me. I also like to pin Wikipedia to the top. It baffles my mind this ain't possible in Google. And while I pay for using Kagi, I still have to say the most interesting (and most expensive) part of alternative search engines is when they have their own search index instead of being a glorified proxy with UI and branding slapped on top of it.

darepublic• 5 months ago

On my pixel 6, viewing on Firefox, the weird scroll snap system prevents me from actually being able to click the original Bitcoin post. I can see it as I pull the web page upward but the page can never settle with it present in the viewport. What I failed to realize is that most viewers of web pages don't care they are more smitten by the love tld and nice font family. The link to og content can be clicked by claw probably just need a mini swarm for that

ohong8• 5 months ago

could you try now?

jmye2• 5 months ago

Why did you code it in in the first place? Just get rid of it. There's absolutely no reason to scrolljack on a text-only website.

KORraN• 5 months ago

I'm sorry, but that's a pass for me. I can't even read the first story about Dropbox, cause at one point it just jumps to the next story.

erelong• 5 months ago

Good site; frequently see comments on here that sound like those on the site

Granted, popularity doesn't prove such projects are good projects and some criticism might be otherwise justified

fruitworks• 5 months ago

the autoscroll is killing me. I can't really read the "what happened" blurb at the end. I guess my phone is too narrow

c0brac0bra• 5 months ago

It is indeed awful.

antonyh• 5 months ago

Same on desktop, it's broken by design on all devices.

m-hodges• 5 months ago

The “summary” under GitHub:

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.

xnorswap• 5 months ago

“I think you’d be a damned fool to invest in this technology for any serious project. Right now this is a toy.”

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.

nepeckman• 5 months ago

I think its disingenuous at best that the projects from recent years are all LLM based. Those were all significantly worse on release! All the negative comments were true! Compare to most of the older projects, which while they got better over time, offered _something_ usable on launch that the comments were overlooking. Also its wild to include anything from this year. We have no idea where OpenClaw will be in 5-10 years or even in December. This site is billed as a retrospective, how can we retrospect on something that is actively happening right now?

PacificSpecific4• 5 months ago

So this site Cherry picks a few comments and that's supposed to be a HN consensus?

Whoever made this has a massive chip on their shoulder.

Bnjoroge2• 5 months ago

Always incredibly to see the confidence with which they say these things too.

literallyroy• 5 months ago

Weird 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

jakeydus2• 5 months ago

That summary in particular gave me a visceral physical reaction.

alabhyajindal• 5 months ago

Looks like they changed it:

Warp raised a $50M Series B led by Sequoia Capital and grew to over 500,000 engineers on the platform.

lukeasch21• 5 months ago

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?

hiccuphippo• 5 months ago

Now do one for all the projects with the same kind of comments that ultimately didn't work.

(Also looking forward to see my comment on that site when it IPO's for billions)

magicstefanos• 5 months ago

Meh

mrgoldenbrown• 5 months ago

“I just do not see how this scales, as your marginal labor costs have got to be a very high portion of your revenues.”

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.

danesparza2• 5 months ago

I happen to think every single one of the comments about OpenClaw are still valid, and have not actually been addressed or overcome.

some_furry• 5 months ago

I still dislike almost everything on that list (GitHub is still the least bad offender so far).

latexr3• 5 months ago

Of course BrandonM’s Dropbox comment was the first one. How predictable. Just know that every time you bring that up as a bad example, you’re disappointing dang.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281

ohong8• 5 months ago

I mean… that’s like making a list of best playwrights and not including Shakespeare

latexr3• 5 months ago

Not when the interpretation is wrong. To your analogy, it’s more akin to finding out Shakespeare didn’t write any of his plays and still including him in the list.

barcodehorse• 5 months ago

This whole thing feels very snarky. "HN is wrong about everything!!! They're so stupid!!!" People made valid criticisms about products. Isnt that what people post on things like HN for? For criticism and to find ways to better their project? Formatting said criticism in curly font and passing it off as the complaints of a group never satisfied with anything feels infantile.

ohong8• 5 months ago

I love HackerNews! This is more for builders who might otherwise be discouraged by rough early feedback.

joshuamoyers• 5 months ago

i love how half the comments are literally doubling down and simultaneously angrily complaining about auto-scroll. hacker news has become worse than mid 2000s irc.

jmye2• 5 months ago

What an empty complaint. Do you think those criticisms aren't valid (about the projects or auto-scroll)? Or are you just desperately trying to pass snark off as additive insight, instead of snide "caring about things is dumb, you dummies"-level analysis?

Perhaps it's time to look in the mirror?

amelius• 5 months ago

Here's a project that Hacker News absolutely loved but afaict not much came from it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846540

ohong8• 5 months ago

that's a great find! they were ~10 years too early...

leumon• 5 months ago

favicon is still the default nextjs one ._.

joncoded• 5 months ago

Yeah I always do the opposite of what Hacker News commenters say!

creepy• 5 months ago

Hey this the great project to get inspiration!

maw• 5 months ago

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

jarek83• 5 months ago

React bit actually held up and criticism is still valid today. It's just the Facebook/Meta push that it stayed on top.

fxtentacle• 5 months ago

This website offers a very venture capital take on ideas. They present it as if the single determining factor if an idea was great is the valuation at which it was sold. I don’t really understand why they think that should nullify valid criticism about the early beta versions of software that turned out popular later.

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.

spprashant• 5 months ago

I think it proves that you could have valid criticisms about the viability of the product but markets are often irrational. Bitcoin is probably the most blatant example, a product which has close to zero utility but is currently has a market cap of 1 point something trillion.

gurghet• 5 months ago

also, the fact that they succeeded doesn't automatically mean they should have succeeded. Look at React for example. Now you can't start any serious front end project without someone proposing it as a framework.

hknceykbx2• 5 months ago

Here’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?

jakelsaunders94• 5 months ago

I use it all the time and have worked in several startups which do. For me personally, inline styling is the point. I can open up any tailwind project and see exactly how that element is styled without cmd + clicking around through layers of CSS.

Obviously it’s all personal taste, but in my mind it feels like the successor to bootstrap in a lot of ways.

zaphodias• 5 months ago

A lot of companies use tailwind. Here's an extract from https://claude.ai (the chat interface after logging in):

    <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">
    <div class="mx-auto flex w-full flex-col items-center gap-7 max-md:pt-4 max-w-2xl">
    <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">

hknceykbx2• 5 months ago

I see. But it looks horrible, no? I mean I get that it’s a purely taste issue.

dubeye• 5 months ago

devs are not business people.

omoikane• 5 months ago

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.

drcongo• 5 months ago

HN was right about React.

hintymad• 5 months ago

Speaking 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?

eggbrain• 5 months ago

I'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.

tasuki• 5 months ago

Nice.

I don't love that light/dark toggle though: you know there's `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)` in css?

croes• 5 months ago

In wouldn’t call Bitcoin, Uber, AurBNB and OpenClaw great. Successful but not great

davidcollantes• 5 months ago

It would be nice to have the user comments linked to their original. That way we can enjoy reading the child comments.

ivanjermakov• 5 months ago

What cherry-picking show is this?

Garlef• 5 months ago

I found the react comments funny: Obviously a huge success but we're still discussing the same criticisms.

Fnoord3• 5 months ago

All I see is valid criticisms which 'builders' can take at face value. Criticism shouldn't demotivate them, it should empower them. At worst, it is defamation and BS. If it is good, constructive criticism (which I see a lot of on the website) then it is very valueable.

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.

Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love

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