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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Yeah - I don't really like piling on, but Replit and Roam both give off massive alarms for me regarding the founders.

Both seem to think they're Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious software companies on earth, both products seem pretty underwhelming.

Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they're doing. At least Steve Jobs was actually building stuff that was revolutionary. Elon Musk is building reusable rockets and pulling EVs from the future to modern day. Roam is making another centralized document editor?

In terms of software ambition neither of them come close to Urbit in what they're trying to accomplish, and Galen is not an ass about it.

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Right? REPL.it is - unironically - a weekend project, that the founder loves to pretend is a marvel of engineering

I don't know if I'd go that far - I think dev environment set up is a massive pain, especially for newbies and it scares a lot of people away from development because of constant issues.

Solving this would be helpful for teaching and I think it's not trivial to do well. I think there's an argument that being good at troubleshooting and debugging is 90% of programming so the shitty dev environment setup currently is a bit of a filter, but I generally think that's a bad status quo rationalization.

All this is to say - I think there's a market and the product is likely valuable, but I also don't think it's reusable rockets or rebuilding the internet or the 'most ambitious software company in history'. This kind of framing turns me off and when paired with stuff like this post leads me to avoid the company entirely.

Recently repl.it announced they will integrate nix pkgs into their environment. They are simply building a better ux on top of existing open source technology.

> "For a Linux user, 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. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Building a better UX isn't done 'simply' - and the result is often worth billions.

If u are looking at this from a profitable angle then getting ux right is about gaining more users and making them pay. Technical innovation is about creating something which wasn't possible before and not making a start-up wrapper over existing stuff. In today's misaligned businesss models of marketing and advertising, there is less core technical research and more fluff

That depends on where you draw the line of "innovation". Is it an innovation when it's created, or when it changes the status quo?

I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier.

Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?

Right, I get the same impression from Replit. I don't know why I got subscribed to some weird accelerator newsletter they started and the wording is akin to the nigerian prince scam (and as a side note a REPL website creating an accelerator for sure gives me some dotcom bubble vibes).

I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.

Well, these are things that most tech people know, we just don't discuss them because we're polite.

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