Ed Colligan CEO of Palm on rumors of Apple releasing a phone.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
The main things Taco complained about:
No wireless - the iPod was already popular before the iPod Touch
Less space than the Nomad - even though later iPods had up to 160GB of storage, the most popular ones were the Shuffle and the Nano that had little storage.
It's hilarious to see Mr. "I have a few qualms with this app" as the first comment.
"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"
Could you please not post like this to HN? Your snarky comment is worse than the one you're putting down; he was obviously trying to be helpful and responded sweetly to Drew's reply in the original thread. His real mistake was being unlucky enough to have people posting internet-jerk comments about it 13 years later.
It is probably the most cited HN comment of all time (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Entire rants have been written about it, and not nice ones. Fortunately the commenter has been a good sport about this over the years, given that it's hindsight fallacy.
People don't remember this now, but before Dropbox succeeded it was widely taken for granted that file synchronization was pointless to work on because no one would ever make a business of it. Joel Spolsky wrote a famous post mocking the idea: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro... ("Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.") In 2007, it was common 'knowledge' that most consumers wouldn't want such a thing and technical people would just roll their own, so a viable business couldn't be created out of it. In BrandonM's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), the word "app" referred to YC application, not software apps, and you can see in his point #3 the widespread assumption that no one would ever pay money for this.
The surprise was that Dropbox proved the common knowledge wrong, but that didn't happen till later. When YC funded Dropbox, it was because they believed in Drew, not file synchronization, which is also information that wasn't available till later. So if we are to look at that thread fairly, in context, we should see it as a successful conversation with a graceful ending, rather than mocking someone for not knowing the future.
I checked the 2010's predictions. This is the highest voted comment on that post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025802). It is creepily accurate.
These posts humbly drive the point how it was impossible before the internet to find out what opinions the general public held in the past.
As someone 2 or so years into coding professionally and constantly looking at my own work and sort of frowning, refactoring, wash rinse repeat, I keep telling myself this is the process and that's ok.
I believe your past work is a great indicator of your progress. If you look at your past work and frown, chances are you are frowning because you now know something you didn't back then. This is a great sign of improvement. If you look at your past work and go meh, it was great back then and it's great today, chances are you've not learned anything new.
Pro tip: There's always room for improvement.
I agree there is no one size fits all solution. This question is aimed at HNers who thought a post was important to them for some reason and they think it would benefit others for the same reasons. The reader is free to choose the posts he/she finds interesting.
It's a rare insight into a first product launch to the world with comments on a focused community.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863