Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by nialv7 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

nialv7

Sure... you `git add` the context text generated by AI and `git commit` it, could be useful. Is that worth 60 million?

View on HN

It’s good to know that a few decades later the same generic Dropbox-weekend take can be made.

99% of projects the take applies to are massive flops. The Dropbox weekend take is almost always correct.

Sorry for by ignorance, but what's the Dropbox Weekend

Many, many years ago, when ~persia came ashore~ dropbox was announced on HN [0] The top comment was quick to point out "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Yeah I guess why would anyone build anything, 99% of projects are flops.

I mean a dev tool that's seemingly failing to resonate with developers as to why they would pay for this is a pretty good way to tell if it's going to fall in the 1%.

The Dropbox take was wrong because they didn't understand the market for the product. This time the people commenting are the target audience. You even get the secondary way this product will lose even if turns out to be a good idea, existing git forges won't want to lose users and so will standardize and support attaching metadata to commits.

> This time the people commenting are the target audience.

Nah. People post about k8s on here all the time, but that doesn't mean I'm the target audience. Just because _someone_ on HN has a bad take doesn't mean they're the person who needs this. Nor does it mean they even understand it.

Survivorship bias. How many failed and commenters were right?

predicting that a startup will fail is.. well, you got a ton of probability on your side there. so it isn't a particularly impressive thing to be right about.

Unimpressive doesn't mean incorrect, sometimes it's good to take the side of the most probable. And yet at the same time I am reminded of this quote:

> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes adapting oneself is, in fact, progress.

I'm not disagreeing, just soliciting. Does anyone have examples of products that failed in the early stages because their implementation was too trivial?

How exactly are we supposed to hear about something that failed in the early stages?

There are a number of ways. Obviously Dropbox would be one case of "early and didn't fail" that could have been "early and failed", and we would have heard about it.

By listening to your friends and circle

People keep saying that, but it's hardly the same thing. We're talking about developer workflow here. It's like someone coming up with Brancher. It's a git branch manager. Use `brancher foo` to replace `git checkout -b foo`. "Remember that comment about rsync and dropbox? Brancher is to git, what dropbox is to rsync"

How is LangChain doing? How about OpenAI's Swarm or their Agent SDK or whatever they called it? AWS' agent-orchestrator? The crap ton of Agent Frameworks that came out 8-12 months ago? Anyone using any of these things today? Some poor souls built stuff on it, and the smart ones moved away, and some are stuck figuring out how to do complex sub-agent orchestration and handoffs when all you need apparently is a bunch of markdown files.

Cough https://ycgraveyard.iamwillwang.com/

Just saw a Discord-weekend take on reddit! Haha. Guy was saying he could create it in a day and then self-host it on his servers so that he doesn't have to put Nitro ads on top of it

> It’s good to know that a few decades later the same generic Dropbox-weekend take can be made.

The dropbox-weekend take wasn't made by the intended target for the product.

This is.

It's funny how HN'ers frequently judge ideas based on complexity of implementation, not value.

I still remember the reaction when Dropbox was created: "It's just file sharing; I can build my own with FTP. What value could it possibly create".

It's a common trope. (Some) artists will often convey the same message; art should be judged on how hard it was to create. Hence why some artist despise abstract art or anything "simplistic".

We forget that human consumption doesn't increase with manufacturing complexity (it can be correlated, but not cause and effect). At the end of day, it's about human connection, which is dependent on emotion, usefulness, and availability.

I mean that's the beauty of a form full of engineers

Dropbox value was instantly recognizable, but I feel I have zero use for Entire.

I mean, I CAN see the value in pushing the context summary to git. We already have git blame to answer "who", but there is no git interrogate to answer the "why". This is clearly an attempt to make that a verb git can keep track of. It's a valuable idea.

I also seen examples of it before. I've got opencode running right now and it has a share session feature. That whole idea is just a spinoff on the concept of the same parent that led to this one.

Isn't "why" what commit message bodies are for?

That's actually not a bad idea. Idk about any tools that do that tho

They raised 60 million. The investors think it’s worth 600M+

It's the valuation that is wild to me (I think the idea itself has merit). But these are the new economics. I can only say "that's wild" enough before it is in fact no longer wild.

These aren't new economics, it's just VC funds trying to boost their holdings by saying it's worth X because they said so. Frankly the FTC should make it illegal.

That's not how it works at all. Why stop at $300M, why didn't they just say $1BN out the gate?

Of course it's how it works, how else do you justify a company that is making negative profit into some how being worth $300M? Like that's just the game, IDK why people accept it. It's not democratic and all it does it prime the population for fraud and abuse.

Yeah, that's not the game at all. Have you ever invested in startups?

I don't need to "play the game" to realize private valuations are just marketing fluff not based in reality. It's literally "the greater fool" theory in action. When the incentives are to just lie and not put out something with some actual scrutiny like a 409A, it's quite clear what game is being played.

But yes, I would totally love to invest in startups with people's pension funds. It seems like the perfect scam where the only losers are the public that allows such actions.

Almost all of the world's most valuable companies were once VC investments that I'm sure you would have dismissed as just greater fool nonsense.

But more to the point, I was talking about how you apparently think VCs just make up super high valuations of the companies they invest in to justify those investments? Are you not aware that VC is a competitive market?

That is where I’m shocked being in a position of raising for a startup myself, what was in their pitch deck/data room that convinced them of this valuation? Or is it due to the founders reputation and not the substance?

Its like github - with the word Ai. <end>

I LOVE THIS FOUNDER - I am a 10 out of 10 - YES!!!

Take my (investors) money

That's not impressive. That's an incredible amount concentrated in the hands of a few looking for a place to live. It has to end up somewhere. Some of it goes everywhere.

Discord is not prized because you can send a message to a chatroom, or any of the hooks and functions.

It's because of everybody there.

Currently no one is on Entire - the investor are betting they will be.

I think discord became popular in the first place because it was so much better than the alternatives, at least for the gaming/ hanging out with friends use case. Discord was initially competing with a bunch of self hosted stuff, vent/ mumble etc with higher barrier to entry and less features and Skype which was terrible.

Discord really became big because it had 0 obstacle onboarding. In an age of Skype, Ventrillo, Teamspeak and Mumble, all "installation" software with "server addresses" and "setup your user config", Discord shows up, says "press this link", and done, you're ready to go. Install link? No, it's in the browser. Account? No, you literally got a temp account made for you. You just talked. Yes, with a button in the corner that says "Claim this account" which just wants an email and a name, but point is, you didn't even have to do that much. This is why the comparison to it is IRC despite the two being so far apart, IRC was the only other chat software with this small of a barrier to entry.

Everything else about the featureset was copy pasted from Slack. No one cares about that part.

We have had this for ages now.... I just don't have access to the sort of people willing to pass me 60m for that. I never thought it to be worth anything really ; it was a trivial to implement afterthought.

Well a famous name is attached, could be the start of the product that replaces github, building github2 would give oppertunity to fix mistakes that are too entrenched to change at github, and who better to try? I'm uncharacteristically optimistic on this one, I'd give it a try!

I love this one so much! The arbitrary decision to cherry-pick critique a particular product to this degree, when it’s something that could be said about 99% of the stuff SV churns out, including in all likelihood anything you’ve ever worked on.

Good thing the comment you're replying to does not lionise 99% of the stuff SV churns out, including in all likelihood anything they've ever worked on. I guess we should just not critique anything out of SV because it's all shit?

That is their first feature.

If it were also their last, I would be inclined to agree.

The unannounced web collaboration platform in-progress might be.

Couldn't we capture this value with a git hook?

300 million, apparently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com