February 23, 2026
Hot takes, cold shoulders, trillion-dollar glow
Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
HN’s “bad takes” hall of fame sparks a fight over cherry‑picking, hindsight, and awful UI
TLDR: A retrospective highlighted old Hacker News threads that dismissed now‑huge products like Dropbox and Bitcoin, sparking arguments over cherry‑picking and hindsight. Commenters bickered about framing and even the site’s bad UI, reminding everyone that early skepticism can coexist with success—and that context matters
Hacker News is reliving its greatest misses: the old threads that shrugged at future giants like Dropbox, GitHub, Bitcoin, DuckDuckGo, and Uber. The exhibit’s star is the classic “I could build this with Unix tools” dunk on Dropbox—now a meme for tech’s most confident wrong takes. But the community reaction? Spicy.
The loudest voices accuse the piece of cherry‑picking and hindsight bias. One commenter says it’s “black and white” to claim HN didn’t love these launches when threads had praise mixed with snark. Another points out that criticism doesn’t mean “not marketable”—sometimes people were debating social impact, not profits. Meanwhile, the peanut gallery roasted the site itself: autoscroll chaos, links glued to every margin, and yes, a drive‑by on modern CSS. You came for the receipts; you stayed for the UI rage.
There were jokes, too. Folks crowned the “I could build it myself guy” as HN’s unofficial mascot, with eye‑rolls at the “DuckDuckGo sounds like a toddler toy” hot take that aged like milk. The big takeaway: the internet loves a gotcha, but a lot of people want nuance. Was HN wrong about everything—or are we just curating an entertaining dunk reel? The debate rages on at Hacker News
Key Points
- •The article reviews 22 projects initially dismissed on Hacker News and contrasts those reactions with later success.
- •Dropbox faced skepticism as replicable with Unix tools but IPO’d in 2018 at a $12B valuation.
- •GitHub was initially misunderstood; Microsoft acquired it for $7.5B in 2018, and it now hosts 100M+ developers and 420M+ repositories.
- •Bitcoin’s launch drew minimal HN attention; by 2024 a single coin exceeded $100,000 and the crypto market cap surpassed $3T.
- •DuckDuckGo’s name was criticized, yet it grew to 100M+ daily queries and a valuation over $600M; UberCab faced early regulatory pushback, including a San Francisco cease-and-desist.