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Comment by Klonoar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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