> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As I’ve said twice already now: DDG is a shitty name for those of us might want to use the company name as a verb.
My comment is no more profound than that.
I’m not making any comment about social norms. And nor am I saying it’s impossible to describe searching for content online without “verbing” the company name.
I’m just saying DDG is hard to use as a verb.
Edit: I did say “adverb” in my previous comment. Obviously I meant “verb”. My painkillers hadn’t kicked in yet so excuse the faux pas there.
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.
"Y'know wasn't always like this, not very long ago.. just before your time.. right before the towers fell.. circa 99 this was catalogues, travel blogs a chatroom or two, we set our nights and spent our nights waiting for you."
"It was always the plan to put the world in your head."
"Could I interest you in everything all of the time? Apathy is a tragedy and boredom is a crime. Everything and anything all of the time"
Oh yeah my bad. I was listening to the song and wrote it as it came. I definitely agree that it was hand, I may have (mis-listened?) it.
The song is so good! I agree and actually the In your hand discussion is even more relevant now than my accidental type of head that it can be a relevant discussion in it of itself.
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"
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.
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.
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.
"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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.*
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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? ;/
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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