Ask HN: Your must-read HN post?
If you had to choose 1 HN post, that you think every other HN visitor should read, which one would it be?
My suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943749
My suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943749
It's a rare insight into a first product launch to the world with comments on a focused community.
"you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
Oh, thanks bro.
It is probably the most cited HN comment of all time (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Entire rants have been written about it, and not nice ones. Fortunately the commenter has been a good sport about this over the years, given that it's hindsight fallacy.
People don't remember this now, but before Dropbox succeeded it was widely taken for granted that file synchronization was pointless to work on because no one would ever make a business of it. Joel Spolsky wrote a famous post mocking the idea: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro... ("Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.") In 2007, it was common 'knowledge' that most consumers wouldn't want such a thing and technical people would just roll their own, so a viable business couldn't be created out of it. In BrandonM's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), the word "app" referred to YC application, not software apps, and you can see in his point #3 the widespread assumption that no one would ever pay money for this.
The surprise was that Dropbox proved the common knowledge wrong, but that didn't happen till later. When YC funded Dropbox, it was because they believed in Drew, not file synchronization, which is also information that wasn't available till later. So if we are to look at that thread fairly, in context, we should see it as a successful conversation with a graceful ending, rather than mocking someone for not knowing the future.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
Ed Colligan CEO of Palm on rumors of Apple releasing a phone.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
The main things Taco complained about:
No wireless - the iPod was already popular before the iPod Touch
Less space than the Nomad - even though later iPods had up to 160GB of storage, the most popular ones were the Shuffle and the Nano that had little storage.
My absolute favorite.
Other contenders, plucked from my favourites
• The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018) ::: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875
• Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? ::: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072
• Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend ::: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314
• Bullshit Jobs ::: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874320
The Google thing was part of the htps for Google Fiber, a now-abandoned promising Google Project.
The rest of the things sound like predictions you could make for 2030.
It's default setting is all posts ever posted sorted by popularity.
This site act as a filter of HN, so you can find original content easier. The idea behind is also interesting.
(I'm not the OP)
to remind me how great one man can change the world.