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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Living in SF, where self-driving cars are a constant daily sight, I recently went back and read a HN thread from five years ago with comments like, “I work in the industry. There’s no way you’re going to be seeing them in 5-10 years.”

Someone should do a roundup of these kind of posts: the Dropbox announcement, etc

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The infamous FTP top answer on the Dropbox launch is what led me to open source a solution to the Dropbox problem [1] after spending a bit too much time on the drawing board trying to understand the limit of FTP and why we couldn't have a Dropbox solution based on FTP. From that reflection I then made it work with every possible file transfer protocol you could think of.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

There was a comment 10 years ago about Facebook's acquisition of Instagram comparing it to Google/Youtube which was especially notable because it asked readers to "check back in 2022".

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818055)

> This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade.

> Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.

The interesting thing to me was their comment wasn't 'wrong' per se, but just that their logic was founded on that false assessment ("photo service"). In fact, their assessment of the value/success in YouTube's acquisition could have been applied to Instagram (in that it let Facebook access a different type of image-based social sharing).

Both the YouTube and Instagram acquisitions gave me a feeling of, “This is either going to be the best acquisition of its generation or the worst.”

Do you see them in bad weather?

It's not about the 99% where it works.

It's about the 1% where it loses the info from it's sensors and fails.

Self-driving cars are still a terrible idea; and there's a reason why SF has famously terrible urban design.

> and there's a reason why SF has famously terrible urban design.

... which is?

Mostly, a lack of imagination due to severe car brain.

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