alt Hacker NewsHacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
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Here's a project that Hacker News absolutely loved but afaict not much came from it:
Some of those comments are completely fair:
> Dropbox: I think competitors can duplicate Dropbox’s nice front end
That’s exactly what happened.
> Bitcoin: “Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.”
This is still true even now
> DDG: “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.”
And I still think the name holds them back. I say to my friends “I googled…” or “I searched…” because DDG sounds ridiculous.
> DDG: “How many people would go to Google and search for ‘new search engine’? DuckDuckGo is not even in the top 10 pages.”
This is completely legitimate feedback. Not a criticism.
> Uber: 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.
So they’ve literally said that the comments were correct here and still published it anyway.
> AirBnB: “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.”
Which is completely correct.
> Stripe: “I really don’t get or see how Stripe is different? Why would I use it instead of PayPal, 2CheckOut, e-junkie, etc?”
That’s a question, and a valid one at that.
I gave up reading after that because of the obnoxious hijacking’s of the scrolling on mobile.
Weird AI piece. There was a post a few days ago looking at historical sentiment of HN posts; it looks like someone slapped that info into an LLM and asked for a neat website.
Just read the “outcome” for Warp:
> … and became the most popular modern terminal. Login removed, telemetry made optional — every criticism addressed.
Insane
“I don’t find their actual search engine very useful at all.” (me in 2009)
I'm quoted on here so I thought I should give an update! :-)
I still don't think DDG was very useful in 2009. A noble idea, but the quality wasn't there for the searches I did. In the past several years, I've found it to give Google a good run for its money, both through DDG's index getting better and Google's getting worse. I'm delighted they've made a real go of it.
The entire site (including page margins) being a link to HN is an annoyance
edit: also, the autoscroll thing
The Tailwind CSS complaints aren't wrong even today; any time I want to apply a Stylus CSS to fix someone's janky site---particularly, weekly offers from area grocery stores, where I fix it once or twice and enjoy a much better UI for a year or two---and then all I see is class="rounded-lg shadow-primary-400 my-4 md:px-4 bg-white py-20 pt-8 dark:border-gray-600" for every single element... it gets me seriously aggravated! It's a hassle to modify and a hassle to parse. I imagine it's only convenient to write/maintain because you use a separate tool and compile it into the garbage it becomes.
Of course BrandonM’s Dropbox comment was the first one. How predictable. Just know that every time you bring that up as a bad example, you’re disappointing dang.
> “I think you’d be a damned fool to invest in this technology for any serious project. Right now this is a toy.”
This comment about Typescript was correct. Typescript had a major fundamental re-write fairly early on in it's history.
This quoted comment was written before Typescript even had Generics, let alone Union types.
My takeaway is that enough capital trumps all engineering, legal and other considerations.
Typescript is cool though. Not like cool cool, but definitely an improvement to plain Javascript.
If you take that page and apply one simple filter, that is which of these are actually profitable standalone businesses as of 2026, the list collapses fast. And only a small minority, Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, maybe Uber after 13 years...are slightly profitable. Many others were acquired early, remain VC subsidized, or are open source projects.
This list does not show HN is bad at predicting outcomes, it shows how strong survivorship bias can be, when only remembering the rare successes.
Remember the founders of Google, tried to sell their business for one 1 million dollars, even discounting at a point to 750k... and still had no takers...
The “summary” under GitHub:
> 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.
I don’t mind using LLMs to write and summarize. But I do wish creators would at least do an editorial pass of their own just so everything wasn’t the same writing as everything.
The funny thing is a lot of the criticism of Dropbox ended up being true. Dropbox wasn’t a massive money generator, and every tech company replicated it as a value add to their existing ecosystem rather than being much of a product itself.
“I just do not see how this scales, as your marginal labor costs have got to be a very high portion of your revenues.”
If only we could have known how much of a race to the bottom the gig economy could be for workers. We were so naive.
This looks like an underhanded comment about Openclaw. Tbf. I might be exactly that kinda person the site is referring to, but I have a really hard time seeing this thing as any more than one of those blips on the radar that gets forgotten about quickly again, e.g. more clubhouse (remember that?) and less dropbox.
the autoscroll is killing me. I can't really read the "what happened" blurb at the end. I guess my phone is too narrow
Re: OpenClaw in particular, I had never realised that simply getting lots of stars on Github meant that your project was actually a success...
Always incredibly to see the confidence with which they say these things too.
The bitcoin entry is off. jdoliner‘s criticism ended up being more true than false; it isn’t wildly trusted as a medium of exchange and it being an “asset class” doesn’t disprove that.
On my pixel 6, viewing on Firefox, the weird scroll snap system prevents me from actually being able to click the original Bitcoin post. I can see it as I pull the web page upward but the page can never settle with it present in the viewport. What I failed to realize is that most viewers of web pages don't care they are more smitten by the love tld and nice font family. The link to og content can be clicked by claw probably just need a mini swarm for that
I happen to think every single one of the comments about OpenClaw are still valid, and have not actually been addressed or overcome.
This whole thing feels very snarky. "HN is wrong about everything!!! They're so stupid!!!" People made valid criticisms about products. Isnt that what people post on things like HN for? For criticism and to find ways to better their project? Formatting said criticism in curly font and passing it off as the complaints of a group never satisfied with anything feels infantile.
I really like the idea of this site, however I think it would be better if it was explained how these tools became popular and what problems they solved and/or what features they had.
Good site; frequently see comments on here that sound like those on the site
Granted, popularity doesn't prove such projects are good projects and some criticism might be otherwise justified
This website makes the error of assuming that being criticized on HN automatically implies your idea is not marketable.
Every point about ChatGPT and Claude Code is true. Not only is their material value detached from reality (as tends to be the case in hype cycles), but a few of the criticisms, especially the first about ChatGPT are about the social impact and not how much money the idea can make.
Feels dishonest to me.
I can't say that I disagree with the React comments...
So this site Cherry picks a few comments and that's supposed to be a HN consensus?
Whoever made this has a massive chip on their shoulder.
Looking at the list, I feel timing makes a big difference*. You need to be early enough that people think you are a bit crazy, but not too early that the tech isn't there or even early adopters are not ready.
Openclaw for example could have been built in 2023, but it did well in 2026. I don't think 2023 was ready for it :-)
* Modulo survivor bias, execution, funding, brilliant fouders, great advisors, pure luck etc.*
> Every great project was once called a bad idea
What a concise explanation of 'survivor bias'. Well done!
The problem is that every bad idea had someone behind it saying it was a great project, and the number of such bad ideas vastly outnumbers the actual success stories. To be fair, if the point is to say "Don't listen to the haters", that remains a good point.
If the author can read this, no mention of Bun being bought out by Anthropic, which is a big win for the project. ;)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...
i love how half the comments are literally doubling down and simultaneously angrily complaining about auto-scroll. hacker news has become worse than mid 2000s irc.
What an infuriating website. I know complaining about bad websites is frowned upon, but they are actively making it hard to read and click through the links, yet that is the entire service. What is the point of keeping this online if a HN comment or a README offers a superior product? ;/
Is a programming language really a "project", in that you get a tangible object at the end? I was thinking I'd see more actual products and services on the list. /shrug
Does the author not know the difference between Git and GitHub?
I think its disingenuous at best that the projects from recent years are all LLM based. Those were all significantly worse on release! All the negative comments were true! Compare to most of the older projects, which while they got better over time, offered _something_ usable on launch that the comments were overlooking. Also its wild to include anything from this year. We have no idea where OpenClaw will be in 5-10 years or even in December. This site is billed as a retrospective, how can we retrospect on something that is actively happening right now?
Duckduckgo is begging the question that their name didn't hold them back. 600m is nothing really in that market. I still feel daft saying their name
I still dislike almost everything on that list (GitHub is still the least bad offender so far).
This site is blocked by Cisco Corporate Security, so can't read it. I wonder why.
Just about every summary in here has an em dash in it. The whole article feels very AI-y to me.
A clear "survival's bias": no one knows/talks about the thousands who died.
Many projects on that page are rubbish and have made the world a little worse.
At a glance, most of them remain bad ideas.
If you have enough comments on literally ANY project, you will be able to say Reddit didn't love it, or Twitter didn't love it, or Hackernews didn't love it.
By that metric, X didn't love any project either, neither did Reddit.
You could also just as easily say Reddit loved all these projects and Hackernews loved all these projects.
That is, you can cherry pick positive comments about OpenClaw just as easily as you can cherry pick negative comments. Guess what, that's just how people work.
Now do one for all the projects with the same kind of comments that ultimately didn't work.
(Also looking forward to see my comment on that site when it IPO's for billions)
Love the mobile UX. You nailed the scrolling experience
I still hate 15 out of these 22 things for the company owning them, the UX or base promise, or the tech itself.
All comments about React are still valid
BrandonM is never going to live down that very fedora-wearing comment in regards to Dropbox...
i have a few qualms with this app...
I "don't love" this. Seems very low effort and lacking any basic nuance.
Kind of feel like saying that HN didn't/did love those projects is a bit too black and white. Many of those submissions do have a lot of dismissive comments, but lots of them also have a lot of comments praising the project one or another way, explicitly or implicitly. Some of the highlighted comments also aren't even the top 3 comments, yet they're used as indicative of what the HN community loves or not.
But I guess that isn't as interesting to people today, nuance seems to be something people try to avoid, rather than seek out.