Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love

Hacker News · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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A two-decade retrospective of launches Hacker News dismissed. And what happened next.DropboxApril 2007“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.”“It does not seem very ‘viral’ or income-generating.”“It’s pretty nice, and I was thinking to myself — hey cool, I could make an online backup of my code. Then it occurred to me — who the hell is this guy, and why should I trust my code to be on his server!?”“It’s a pretty crowded space. And XDrive gets you 5 GB for free, 50 GB for $9.95 a month. I think competitors can duplicate Dropbox’s nice front end.”The most famous bad take in HN history — the ‘I could build this myself with existing unix tools’ archetype.What happenedDropbox IPO’d in 2018 at a $12B valuation. Drew Houston later thanked BrandonM by name when Dropbox went public.Read the post on HN →GitHubApril 2008“I still don’t exactly understand what they are offering? Is there an advantage to using GitHub versus dumping some (yet to be created) virtual machine image on a cheap virtual server?”“Don’t you think that git’s advantage over SVN evaporates when there is only one user on a team? I run my private Subversion repository which I use for everything (not just code).”“Doesn’t the pricing seem a bit too granular, though? I suspect the pricing categories will collapse into 3, maybe 4, levels eventually.”The opening comment literally couldn’t see the point. GitHub was perceived as ‘just a git host’ — the social layer, the network effects, the open source ecosystem it would enable were all invisible.What happenedMicrosoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion. GitHub now hosts 100M+ developers and 420M+ repositories. It became the connective tissue of the entire software industry.Read the post on HN →BitcoinJune 2009“Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.”“I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the logistics of this...”The entire thread had just 3 comments and 5 upvotes. Three comments. For what would become a $2 trillion asset class.What happenedA single bitcoin went from fractions of a cent in 2009 to over $100,000 by 2024. Total crypto market cap exceeded $3 trillion.Read the post on HN →DuckDuckGoFebruary 2009“I can’t ever see anyone saying ‘just duckduckgo it.’ The name just sounds silly. It makes me think it’s a search engine for toddlers.”“DuckDuckGo is childish. I think that name will hold them back.”“How many people would go to Google and search for ‘new search engine’? DuckDuckGo is not even in the top 10 pages.”“I don’t find their actual search engine very useful at all.”The name — the name! — was the biggest objection. Nobody could get past it. Meanwhile, Google itself was once mocked for being a misspelling of a number.What happenedDuckDuckGo grew to over 100 million daily search queries and became the default search engine in many privacy-focused browsers. Valued at over $600 million.Read the post on HN →UberSeptember 2010“Unfortunately taxis are a regulated industry in most major cities. The entrenched interests of the taxi companies are simply too big — and they have the political clout — to let this one slide under the radar.”“If this service became at all popular, it is very likely that cities would immediately include ‘mobile hailing’ as also requiring a license.”“Driving a gypsy cab (which is what UberCab is) is a dangerous business. A bad guy could simply place an order for an out-of-the-way alley or warehouse and know that the cabbie is going to be driving a really nice car.”“The first time an UberCab driver gets into a wreck without insurance or licensing should be interesting.”“This drastically idealizes UberCab profiles. It gets a lot shadier when UberCab is one of 10 companies doing this, and when it starts to become worth it to game profiles.”Two months after this thread, Uber received an actual cease-and-desist from San Francisco — seemingly validating every skeptic. Travis Kalanick’s response was to ignore it and expand to five more cities.What happenedUber IPO’d in 2019 and is now worth over $160 billion. NYC taxi medallions, which sold for $1.3M in 2014, collapsed to under $80K. The regulation that was supposed to stop Uber became its origin story.Read the post on HN →AirbnbMarch 2011“All my experiences with it as a user have been too unreliable to expect that it can scale to truly massive usability. I just don’t see it swallowing up the whole hotel industry.”“This exchange cements my concerns about Airbnb only being huge if they can end-run the hotel regulatory system.”“Airbnb is almost more like a dating service than a marketplace… a buyer and seller who prove compatible will never need to use the service again.”“Airbnb is great unless you’re the kind of person that doesn’t trust strangers. Sadly, in the United States, the tendency to not trust strangers has been on the upswing for the last few decades.”The top comment sided with the skeptics. Commenters argued Airbnb couldn’t scale, couldn’t survive regulation, and couldn’t solve the fundamental trust problem of sleeping in a stranger’s home.What happenedAirbnb IPO’d in 2020 at a $100B+ valuation and is now worth over $80 billion. One of YC’s most successful companies ever.Read the post on HN →StripeOctober 2011“I really don’t get or see how Stripe is different? Why would I use it instead of PayPal, 2CheckOut, e-junkie, etc?”“I have no need of a fancy API either — PayPal lets me specify the basics and fire off a simple Post from my PHP code.”“Stripe gets added to the bookmark collection for ‘services to use should I ever have a problem with PayPal.’”“Pretty much every company in payment processing that does not use segregated merchant accounts sooner or later goes bust.”The launch thread was full of commenters doing unfavorable price comparisons to PayPal. Posted by Patrick Collison himself.What happenedStripe reached a $106B+ valuation and processed $1.4 trillion in payments in 2024. The ‘fancy API’ became the default payments infrastructure for the internet.Read the post on HN →InstacartAugust 2012“A lot of really smart people have tried and failed to accomplish this sort of thing before. Amazon invested $60 million in Kozmo.com back in the late 90’s, and they couldn’t make it work.”“I just do not see how this scales, as your marginal labor costs have got to be a very high portion of your revenues.”“Having a delivery fee is a non-starter. ‘I can get it in 2 days free with Amazon, or $4 today...’ People will spend huge amounts of time and effort to not pay delivery charges.”“I’ve built a few real-time delivery businesses, and I’m pessimistic. Real-time operations are costly to manage. Not being Amazon and not being able to control inventory hurts.”The top comment pointed to the graveyard of companies that tried before. The entire thread read like a post-mortem for a company that hadn’t even launched yet.What happenedInstacart IPO’d in 2023 and is worth over $12 billion. COVID-19 turned grocery delivery from a novelty into a necessity.Read the post on HN →SegmentNovember 2012“It includes code to load up various analytics tools even if you never use them. For example, if I only use GA and Mixpanel, do I really want to serve the bytes for all the other plugins?”“It’s going to be really hard to make a generic, non-lossy mapping in a static, stateless JS script.”“I was hoping that this would be an open source version of Google Analytics.”“Google Analytics has a new API currently in beta that is also called analytics.js. This will be confusing.”Commenters argued the abstraction layer couldn’t work across fundamentally different analytics providers. The founders later wrote ‘From Show HN to Series D.’What happenedSegment was acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020 — one of the largest acquisitions in developer tooling history.Read the post on HN →TypeScriptOctober 2012“I think you’d be a damned fool to invest in this technology for any serious project. Right now this is a toy.”“I have more than a sneaking suspicion that this project is essentially a proof-of-concept, and that it is not heavily used at Microsoft.”“Where’s all that great refactoring support if everything is made dynamic and stringly typed?”Microsoft + new language + compile-to-JS triggered every distrust reflex at once. The phrase ‘damned fool’ was deployed with full sincerity.What happenedTypeScript is now used by 80%+ of JavaScript developers and is the default language for virtually every major web framework. It’s arguably the most impactful programming language of the 2010s.Read the post on HN →ReactJune 2013“This is terrible. Did we really not learn anything from PHP days? Are we seriously going to mix markup and logic again?”“OMG, JSX… why? Just why?? Stop ruining JS people!”“The current fad of quasi-declarative web components looks like early Ext to me, and I think everyone knows how that turned out.”“Mixing JS and XML syntax, variables in docblocks, DOM components that are not really DOM components… Yikes. Thank you, but no, thank you.”“Meh.”The developer community overwhelmingly felt React violated fundamental software engineering principles. ‘Separation of concerns’ was the rallying cry against it.What happenedReact became the most popular UI library in the world, used by over 20 million developers. In 2025, Meta donated React to the Linux Foundation.Read the post on HN →Product HuntFebruary 2014“I mean this in the most helpful way possible: the interface is really, really bad at serving one of its basic, fundamental functions.”“I can get everything I need on HN. Ultimately the best products will make the front page here, no need to look around.”“I looked at the page for like 30 seconds, thinking to myself, ‘What is this?’… lit