I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.
But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has roughly the same priority as “try out a more exciting shower gel”. But did you ever step on a LEGO brick while walking to the bathroom at night? That pain is immediately obvious.
Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends. If you look at how VC (or really any network) funding circulates, it’s just people who are allowed to enter that circle and money just flows between them constantly. On one hand, you have trusted people who you are willing to give money, on the other hand, this inherently creates a clique.
It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slogan, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is a bit farcical given that it is impossible for the club members not to engage in commerce.
Another thing I've noticed is how when you go on the website for a VC funded B2B startup and look at the customers or testimonies they have listed, most of them will be other B2B startups funded by the same VC. It makes me wonder how much of that market is essentially a few friends standing in a circle and passing a $100 bill around, but on a larger scale.
The founder of GitButler is the co-founder of GitHub. It doesn't matter what he builds, the VC is going to throw money at them.
"Money is given to friends."
While that's completely true, I do think it misses a key underlying point: VCs (and many breeds of investor) are not ultimately selecting for value creating ideas, or for their friends: they're selecting for investments they believe _other people_ will pay more for later.
In the case of startups, those people are most likely other VCs (at later rounds), private equity (at private sale) or retail investors (at IPO).
Very rarely is the actual company profitable at any of those stages, demonstrably and famously.
So the whole process is selecting for hype-potential, which itself is somewhat correlated to the usual things people get annoyed about with startup cliches: founders who went to MIT; founders who are charismatic; founders who are friends with VCs; etc...
So yeah, they invest in their friends, but not because they're their friends. Because they know they can more reliably exit those investments at a higher value.
It hasn't been organically popular here[0] among people who would be forced to actually use it, so they have to build hype from investors instead.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gitbutler
> money just flows between them constantly
This is also true for how HFT guys make money. It's not that they are very good in investments. The Fed injects money constantly from the top which gets distributed or trickle down to such firms. Because in a tight economy which is not akin to gambling, it should be near to impossible to make money so easily.
I don't think describing them as friends is entirely correct. People give money to people they trust. And friends often are in that subset of people. But that's not a strict requirement.
They trust people who look and smell like them or the people they golf or drink with or are part of the same fraternity or tennis club.
I'm not sure what your point is. Of course people who see and observe others on a daily basis in the flesh can determine much better whether they are trustworthy or not. They sure as hell don't think some random person who has no credibility is trustworthy.
The point is the definition of trust is flawed if what you're trying to measure is technical impact and quality or ability to execute?
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I'm sure VCs give money to friends but I didn't know any investors when I raised millions. They invested money because they thought it was a good idea.
More like an idea decently likely to be resold for more.
Good ideas are a decent subset, but you could also have a bit of "Greater Fool Theory" compliant ideas.
Sure, but that doesn't really change anything. The poster plainly states:
> Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends.
I have an obvious counter example. I'm sure money is invested for all sorts of reasons to all sorts of people. I'm also sure that money is not exclusively invested based on friendships, and I'm quite sure that money is at times invested based on the merits of an idea. Obviously those merits have to correspond to the ability to form the basis of a successful company, unless it's a philanthropic investment.
What I meant is that yes, good ideas will get funding, if they like you and if you are a good ROI (though, not all are required). This also may allow you to enter the clique/network. However, a lot of this money circulates between the same network. Convincing the right person of the value of your idea can enable you to join the network and access that money at a much, much lower threshold later on.
Obviously, it is not that cut and dry, but it is kind of impressive how much of the money circulating around is between the same people. I’m not really condemning it. I think it is a natural consequence because humans trust other humans they know. People should be more aware of it and need to make sure they keep it in check. Otherwise, you eventually start getting high on your own supply.
The reason “ideas don’t get funding” is usually (but not always) true is that usually a good idea alone doesn’t mean much. So usually you have to have good idea plus something else the investor feels is a proof point or evidence you can execute.
The clearest of these is that you have already built it, or an MVP of it that is more than just smoke and mirrors, and there’s users and customers.
If you have excellent proof points and actual revenue growth, you could show up with no pants smelling like weed and somebody might fund you. Then they’d call their press people to do an “eccentric genius founder” piece about the person who showed up stoned with no pants and their pitch was that good. That’s cause if your graph goes up and to the right you’re not crazy, you’re “eccentric.”
If you don’t have any proof they fall back on secondary evidence, like credentials and schools and vibes. The latter, yes, often overlaps with cronies.
And unfortunately that by necessity includes most ideas that cost a lot to prototype, which means credentialism and croneyism tends to gate keep fields with a high cost of entry.
Ideas shouldn’t get funding - ideas are just mere results of thought that haven’t been played through in depth.
Do you need a working product to get funding? No. But you do need a compelling investment thesis - which takes months and even years of deep thought to come to fruition. Of course you can shortcut this process by smooching but only a select few can pull that off.
> Money is given to friends.
Money is given to ideas that might become billion dollar businesses and teams that look like they can do it. Pedigree, domain expertise, previous exits.
That works under the assumption of the "wisdom of the markets", and we assume VC possesses that wisdom, but laid bare it's just as vulnerable to cronyism as any other institution.
Yeah, OK. There’s a lot hidden in that word, “pedigree”.
If you're being handed millions of dollars in early venture capital and don't have revenue/pmf to show, they're going to want to see a top university, FAANG, relevant industry experience, etc. How else would they underwrite the risk?
Team matters. What other proxies are there?
Skin color, political tendencies, gender.
Lately, for founders, to which prison they went.
So it will be exactly like git, but with a monthly subscription fee.
And AI... always add AI!
Upon every commit, AI will review your code to check if it's worth committing or not (after all, disk space is expensive these days!). If the AI finds the code is not up to scratch, it will be reverted and you'll be given a chance to try again.
Then, we will develop (read: sell) AI agents that will ingest a proposed code change (created by your front-line agent), and iteratively refactor it until the commit agent accepts it.
If the AI finds the code is not up to scratch, it will be reverted and you'll be given a chance to try again.
That's the Platinum Premier tier. If you're on the regular tier, paying the minimum, the AI will silently fix all that right up for you.
Should have known better than asking the monkey paw for more decentralized compute.
And regular subscription price increases. They never forget those!
or at least should be
This is the way!
> ... and sort LEGO bricks by colour
You never sort by color, ever! You sort by form, and then throw every color of that specific form in one bin. If you throw every red brick in the same bin, you'll never find a specific formed red brick because to many red bricks. But if you first search by form and then by color, you are much faster.
As any DBA worth their salt knows.
Index the many valued column, not the column with few discrete values.
Are you sure that's a good strategy if every unique index value requires you to buy a physical container?
You would use arrays: http://brickarchitect.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_639...
How about arithmetic coding? That will give you the highest amount of entropy reduction for any possible number of containers. Which probably means that you’ll sort similar pieces far apart but group by colors that are easy to separate, like red+yellow, brown+green
You can put a few shapes into one container and it's still much faster than searching color-first.
Radix sort. Decide how many containers you're fine with, and group accordingly.
As someone who tried to sort many lego sets lately, I do like this. The problem lies that modern lego has so many unique forms that it feels like you'll have many bins with one or two pieces in.
As the “Disturbing the Piece” podcast points out - you “sort” the good important parts you want easy access to and you “bin” everything else in the giant box you can dig through if needed.
https://youtube.com/@disturbingthepiecepod
That's why you buy different sized bins, and then you can even combine some forms into one bin (but be careful not to combine similiar forms, this counters the goal).
You need to get some bins that have a top shelf like a toolbox. The low item counts go in the top shelf, segregate the bottom for efficiency. Bin by color.
I love that we are ignoring Git and taking Legos.
Anyone have a solution for another annoying problem: 1 missing piece.
Somehow got lost halfway through the build.
If you know the ID, I think you can get Lego ship it to you.
It’s always under the most annoying thing to move or get to. Under table legs, couches, etc.
Also, Lego will send you any missing pieces for free.
Thank you!
Just keep those in a single bin
counterpoint (don't take this to seriously):
there are to many types of bricks to sort by form. unless you have an inventory the size of a brick factory you can only sort by category or by size.
otherwise, sorting by color makes your collection aesthetically pleasing, and when you build, you usually want to use specific colors only to make your model look good.
That's why you have to group similar forms. - Bricks - Plates - Narrow Plates - Wheels - Windows/Doors - Smooth pieces - People bin
And then if you like to sort further you sort out the smallest of each bin because those always fall to the bottom when mixed together
sorting by size needs to come first. from my own experience, you can't find any small pieces if they are mixed/covered by larger ones.
There are less different forms than any normal brick enjoyer has bricks of a specific color. Therefore the lookup is faster ;)
Unfortunately there are so many bespoke LEGO brick forms that this doesn't work.
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> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
Because solving problems isn’t the goal, the goal is money (and sometimes a little fame) with the least possible effort, and software can be changed on a whim and is very cheap to manufacture and distribute and “fix in flight”, it’s the perfect vehicle for those who are impatient and don’t really care about understanding and studying a need.
people love solving problems, but most solutions are not VC fundable (fortunately/unfortunately)
sometimes it's just wait until your kid grows up and learns to put the LEGO away
there's a lot of people working on hard problems that are pretty far from software
being cynical about early stage software (and any company that is overpromising like Theranos, Nikola, etc..) is warranted, but also money as a reward motivates a lot of innovation (PV panels, batteries, EUV lithography)
The problems are in fact that...
the founder does not want to risk money for his own idea
while
funders have simultaneously also too much money while believing they don't have enough.
That very simple dynamic is what is driving investment in the Silicon Valley, itself praised worldwide as the forefront.
That's what bringing our own civilization on the economical (AI bubble), ecological (AI bubble, car brain) and democratic (surveillance capitalism, privacy zuckering) cliff.
> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably ...
People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.
Is it unrelated though?
> Today, with Git, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a tool built for sending patches over mailing lists. That's far from what is needed today.
Investor narrative pointing out a relationship is not the same as substantive technological overlap.
HN has always been skeptical of VC, ironically, so that's no indication of anything in the overall industry.
HN is not a hive mind with a single opinion. You get the extreme opinions of both sides and every nuance in between. There are people here who despise VC and people who live for it and think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
No, but trends are very prevalent, it is not a uniform random distribution.
Unless you've done a study of sentiment on HN (please link if so) then you have no idea.
For what it's worth, that LEGO vacuum does exist[0], it was on Shark Tank[1]. I assume they stole the idea from The Office. It doesn't sort the bricks, but I assume that was more of a stretch goal based on the insane amount of money being discussed. After all, the LEGO vacuum only cost $495k to get to market.
[0] https://pickupbricks.com
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25MIpQqLIU
That one needs to be operated manually. I was thinking more along the lines of robot dog + OCR + 6 dof arm on the robot's back.
This video is from 8 years ago:
https://youtu.be/wXxrmussq4E?si=bgDdDvZODVov3sSC&t=15
I'm sure, by now we could make them for <$1k per robot, if we wanted to.
EDIT: BTW did you see that the page you linked to has this at the bottom of their landing page:
"Example product"
"This area is used to describe your product’s details. Tell customers about the look, feel, and style of your product. Add details on color, materials used, sizing, and where it was made."
so I wonder if they actually sell anything.
Roborock Saros Z70 is about a year old:
https://us.roborock.com/pages/roborock-saros-z70
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0AGhb6p8sE
> EDIT: BTW did you see that the page you linked to has this at the bottom of their landing page:
I'm not seeing it. When I search for "example" nothing comes up, but maybe I'm looking wrong.
I see it on Amazon as well, with reviews and videos from "customers", so I assume it's not vaporware and that is more an issue with people not filling out the full website template, which is also not a great sign.
https://www.amazon.com/Pick-Up-Bricks-Compatible-Accessories...
i noticed the example product page too on their website. But why not make it like a bigger rumba on wheels?
> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.
The world doesn’t need this. It would just be more plastic and electronic trash.
You and your kids have hands. Pick them up. It’s what we do in my house.
If you don’t have hands, use your feet.
> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works.
Perhaps you should have. Based on the link it seems like it's more an extension to than replacement for Git.
The page is mostly sort of fluffy AI hype, but the concrete bits are things like integrating issue tracking and PR logic in one tool/repo, like e.g. fossil does.
Also git proper could use some love too. The UI is still a mess. And the large file support and the submodule/subtree/subrepo situations are quite dismal.
> $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size.
Doing this robustly is probably quite far from robotics SOTA.
Yeah it also sounded to me like they just want to extend git. Zed is trying the exact same thing.
Neither of them is doing to be remotely prepared for what I'm going to do, which is actually replace Git.
I like git, it works perfectly fine on my command line.
I do wonder, though, if it would have been designed differently if the whole “code forge” sort of application (or whatever GitHub and the like are called) was envisioned at the time. Pull requests aren’t even a concept in git proper, right?
It seems like a kind of important type of tool. Even though git is awesome, we don’t need a monoculture.
Generates a pretty email requesting someone to pull commits from your online repository. It's really meant for Linus to pull a whole bunch of already-reviewed changes from a maintainer's integration branch.
The rough equivalent to GitHub's "pull request" is the "patch series", produced by:
Docs: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patchWhich lets you provide a "cover letter" (PR description), and formats each commit as a diff that can be quoted inline in an email reply for code review.
You are right, PRs are not in git. format-patch and request-pull are originals designed for mailings lists. Github just put UI on top.
Interesting that DAG model means any branch from anywhere can be merged... the forge is just coordination.
Explored here if curious - https://vectree.io/c/git-graph-theory-logic
> I do wonder, though, if it would have been designed differently if the whole “code forge” sort of application (or whatever GitHub and the like are called) was envisioned at the time.
I would argue that it was purposefully designed in contrast against that model.
GitHub is full of git anti patterns.
> or whatever GitHub and the like are called
GitHub is a social networking site that just so happens to have code hosting related features.
People keep saying this but I can't really find much anything social about GitHub.
You can follow, star, favourite and comment on things, you get a feed where recent updates on stuff/people you've interacted are listed, you can customise your profile page with snippets about yourself, a photo, a status, contact info and add whatever else you want (including more photos, images, charts etc) in markdown. It now has discussions which are essentially a forum.
It's as much a social network/collaboration tool as it is place to store your code these days.
Some people spend most of their time in issues and PRs, which are social features mapping social interactions.
Is Bugzilla also a social network?
To the degree that it emphasizes communication between individuals over being a dumb database, yes, a bugtracker can be a social network. Bugzilla is a bit too close to the "database" side of the spectrum, whereas GitHub is at the other end; Jira sits somewhat in the middle.
Sorceforge predates git by about 11 years. As do several other projects like google code. Its not a new idea. Or basically most source control systems. Git, actually, is the more unique idea, of a DVCS... versus a cVCS...
git is not a new idea, various features of git existed in various SCMs for decades. The distributed aspect existed in Bitkeeper too, for example.
But it took a big brain with a systemic view of the problem and solutions space to bring them all together - in a lighting fast implementation to boot.
I don't think technical features were the key to git's success. What really made the difference was:
1. it was free;
2. it was sponsored by the most fashionable project of the time (Linux);
3. it did not require a server;
4. because it was FOSS, people could extend it without asking anyone's permission; and...
5. ...once GitHub appeared, simplifying the PR process, the network effect did its thing.
Git was hard to use and to understand. It did not win on technical features alone, as you said there were plenty of alternatives. It won because of community and network effects.
> Git was hard to use and to understand
So is ffmpeg and ImageMagick. Or Blender. Or Freecad. There are domains that do require some learning and training to properly use the available tool.
À pull request is just you requesting someone to pull from you in git proper.
So the maintainer adds you as a remote and pulls from you.
There’s really nothing resembling a “pull request” that’s used by 99.999% of git users. We have merge requests. But we call them pull requests for some dumb reason.
Indeed they're not; they live on the 'user layer' rather than the 'application layer'. That's not to say many git-frontends (IntelliJ, Sourcetree, Github desktop) don't support them, but "git pullrequest" isn't a thing.
Edit: see "git request-pull" as mentioned below (file:///C:/Program%20Files/Git/mingw64/share/doc/git-doc/git-request-pull.html) but what it does is write "a pretty email" (the other poster's words) to STDOUT.
> mentioned below (file:///C:/Program%20Files/Git/mingw64/share/doc/git-doc/git-request-pull.html)
What? Is the intention, that I access your C: drive? Also is it common to have a file:// link on MS Windows? I thought this was a unix thing.
Sorry. For some reason I used to get `git help ...` redirect me to the (URL of) the actual website.
I think the file:/// is so that you can fire off "[cmd /c] start FILEPATH" to load the default browser, while also not having to worry about spaces in the path.
They sure aren’t. Before github you set up remotes or emailed patches.
Perforce had change sets and there were lots of tools for code reviews that worked a lot like GitHub before GitHub (review board, phabricator, another one I can’t remember).
"Pull requests" are part of git though since it was originally a DCVS it meant you would pull from an individuals git repo ... services like github etc centralized the concept
Not to shoot down your comment with sarcasm, I'm being really honest: I changed my shower gel with an expensive one this week, and it really had an unexpected, exciting effect. Small stuff can really have consequences much bigger than themselves.
That said, if you ever decide solve the tidying the toys problem, start a kickstarter, I pledge to pledge support! :D
i may be dense or something but what effect?
It smells better, my skin feels better after using it, and I feel happier. Showering may take little time, but I have my skin all the time :)
Some people are not sensitive to quality. A car is a car, a shower gel is a shower gel, etc. In the computer world, they curiously congregate around Microsoft...
I find that sometimes changing the font in my IDE can give me an inexplicable boost
> one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.
And what's the next step? I can't even imagine how rich (and how large the their houses) the parents need to be for them to comfortably buy such dedicated tool. Perhaps 100x~1000x richer than me?
And, while this is just pulled out from my rear side, I feel even getting this passed safety regulation would cost your $17M. It's a fully automated machine working next to toddlers!
On the contrary Github is a proven product.
Thing i learned about raising capital it, you need to build or have a network. Thats YC is great, accelerators, incubators help you do that. Network and story you tell. Also, every stage you raise, you have to make sure the folks you raise from help you craft the narrative for thr next round.
I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
Irony of thr market is, just like tinder 20% of the companies attract all the attention rest of them try to gran the attention. Those who need capital get the capital, those who need the capital die trying.
Enough friday pessimisim.
> I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
My previous employer was like this. A 20yo company with a nice always increasing ytoy growth. The CEO told for 20 years that he would never raise any money. It was an incredible place to work : nice compensation, product and consumer centered, we had time and means to do the right things.
Until the CEO changed his mind and raised money anyway. But we didn't have to fear anything because those investors were very different and not like the other greedy ones.
Well I'm not working there anymore for a hella lot of reasons that are just the same as everywhere else.
But at least the CEO who was already rich is now incredibly rich.
VC by default are founder friendly in my experience.
If you find a greedy VC then most likely they are real VC and often gets attracted when your business is not doing great.
Reputation travels in this industry therefore people care.
> VC by default are founder friendly in my experience.
Founders are only one stakeholder. There are employees ( I think they fall into that category ), customers, suppliers, and the wider society.
It all comes back to why does the company exist - and for which stakeholders. I think that's the point the original author is making.
I don't buy the argument that making money in the end is a perfect surrogate for overall good - it's not - it's an imperfect surrogate - and to pretend it is a perfect surrogate is just an excuse to behave like an arsehole.
To make that concrete, let's say you are a chemical company making paints - really important job, paints are needed the cheaper you can make them, the more people can have them etc, but if you knowingly pollute a local river just because you can get away with it and increase your profits - saying that increased profits justifies polluting the river based on the assumption that river pollution is correctly priced ( free ) is an obvious convenient excuse to be a selfish arsehole.
I dont this wisdom can be applied generically. Lets consider your example, if leader or founder comes across the fact that a river is getting polluted whether it makes profit or not, they will not take that decision as it would impact longer term.
What you are mixing is founder led business vs ceo led business. CEO often takes a short term view, when stakeholders are PE Firm, wall street, short term gains are prioritized. But for, a long term investor, would not incentivize you to take calls that would harm in long run.
What could be wrong is that, you wouldnt know all the consequences and causality of your decisions and thats very human thing in my opinion.
LLMs are major generators of pollution: digital pollution.
I wish the companies understood the tremendous cost to society of polluting our well of knowledge.
But no, as your mention it is free for them to pollute, so they do liberally
Clearly LLMs are tools which can be used for good or ill. The supplier of raw chemicals to the paint factory isn't really responsible for the river pollution.
However you are right to point out there is a problem. Typically societies ( via governments ) try and fix by appropriately pricing the behaviours via regulation/laws ( fines or prison for the people doing it ).
However making regulation/laws is hard. What's your proposal to fix the problem you've identified?
Oh it'll fix itself. Nature is like that.
You might hit a moment where a lot of people whose only purpose in life is using Claude Code, um, well, starve. But yeah, nature is metal like that.
Perhaps - but not necessarily in an optimal way - cf climate change.
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> I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
This is why VC is a cancer on society. If you don't have a healthy business growing well, your business shouldn't get bigger.
If the business is not growing well and VC invests money. I think that gambling and not true venture capital.
> I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
This is the reason why I don't wish for VC investments if I do something preferably.
Also I feel like your comment is highly accurate, I feel like this narrative though can sometimes be the only thing that matters, something like a vibes based economy.
I don't like this so much because some idea's technical prowess is taken at the back seat while its the marketing which ends up mattering, like many other things, it feels like that tends towards something akin to influencer level marketing and its something that I sometimes personally dislike.
To be honest, the reason why I am seeing YC investments especially from say people my age 18-19, is that, it is becoming a point of flex for them and just a capitalization of hype that they might have. It really does feel like it to me that when we boil down people and interactions sometimes into how much money they have, we lead inevitably to societies like ours.
The network is something that I understand can be hard to make though. I do believe network plays a role and I do feel like I have bootstrapped my own network by just talking with people online and helping, but I do believe one issue in that, that particular network isn't my business market sadly, and I do feel unsure about how to network to them and so I would be curious if others face somewhat of an similar issue.
I am twice your age so i would assume i have some wisdom here.
Flex often dont translate to value. I often say dont look at what others are doing, head down focus and execute. Raising capital is actually the starting point, i would say it is not an achievement.
I think anyone can network. You dont have to be sales person, you have the increase your probability to be in the right place at the right time.
Thanks for responding, I had to think properly as to how I may respond so thus the delay but here are my thoughts.
I feel like, my issue which can be a more society based issue is that we are all at the end of the day too busy with ourselves which can be fine, but what this leads to is that even with my extended family, I have seen people treat just a slight but observable way differently to elder cousins, one who make money and who doesn't and I do believe that cousins who might not earn money in the moment already have stress but it piles it on them maybe just a bit more too.
So I think that most of the world just somehow tries to quantify a person with one dimensional quantity sometimes, and this is why we see people whose only metric is to reach that goal and I am starting to feel like, its not the technical rigor or passion which matters sometimes but basically something akin to influencer-style marketing (Cluely has basically become a skit channel which has hundreds of millions of dollars by a16z I think)
And I feel like what this influencer-style thing is leading to is that our society, as a whole and people who build things, are jumping on the latest trends even when not understanding them (Claw-code was essentially the peak point of this-all) and we are basically adopting all the things wrong with the influencer-style culture and things are getting even more alienated from reality.
Our Industry/World-in-general is having grift and I am not saying it never had grift but I am witnessing something similar to algorithmic form of rage-baits being created by some people for them to not be left behind and we as a society, are now lacking the ability to have discourse with nuance in many-times/places.
> you have the increase your probability to be in the right place at the right time.
I completely agree with you but I do sometimes wonder if I am on Hackernews or if it is the right place. I mean, I am here first and foremost because I like talking here but from that viewpoint you mention, I have sometimes wondered if I should use twitter but I refuse to use it pretty much for most things simply because I feel like I would be yet another part of this cycle of rage-bait and being sucked into it and I am not sure if it would be well worth it. I am not sure if twitter etc. are worth it and I feel like even with things like Youtube etc., in both of these it becomes a very number game with things like followers etc.
Atleast within Hackernews, you don't have the concept of followers, so at one hand it is great but on the other, I question from that perspective if HN is the right place and where do you find people for businesses. Linkedin perhaps?
So in essence, I think I would say that I am unsure about the probabilities and what definition of right means. I would love it if you can talk more about it and thanks for commenting that comment, I appreciate it and I wish you to have a nice day!
Not to mention the irony that they need $17M to try and recreate/improve what Linus built in a week.
That’s not really fair. That first week prototype was proof of concept, not the Git we use today. It would easily have taken $17 million for a private team to put in equivalent work to all of the open source effort that has made Git into the tool we have today.
granted how much did Linus spend on Git? probably well south of $17M and he's not beholden to the likes of a16z
The first version was written in ten days apparently, so more in the ballpark of $17k.
I want people to read this sentence from https://www.linux.com/news/10-years-git-interview-git-creato...
> So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to avoid doing.
Just so that people know that creating software is not only coding.
My comment is unrelated on the point you are making about expenses.
at the time he was probably thinking about how much time it would _save_ him
Unsure if you want the real answer, but the financials on gitv2 will be much more appealing to a VC. Hardware is hard, slow, expensive, risky. Finally, China is the place to build physical things not the US.
What would "the financials" be on a git replacement? No one makes money on git itself. Probably not much even on the services around git, given that Microsoft funds github for its own reasons, and gitlab is constantly running out of money.
One reason I don't read HN as much as I used to is because I can't help translating numbers like that into the amount of research that could be accomplished with the same amount, and then I get angry.
VCs have no clue. They have money and therefore they are in a dominant position. Everybody around them (professionally) is trying to flatter them and convince them that they should invest in their project.
I had a few interactions with VCs (both professional and personal), where I didn't care because I wasn't benefitting from them. One of them was "an expert in CRISPR and blockchain" (WTF?) and... well I didn't need much time to see that he did not understand what a "hash" was. He was mostly an expert at repeating stories he had been told about how he would make a ton of money with the latest bullshit he didn't understand.
The truth is, it's like trading. You diversify the investments and hope that the economy goes up (respectively that one of the startups you invested in gets profitable). The only thing a VC has to do is verify that they don't invest in a fraud, but even that is hard given that they never understand the technology enough to say it's worth it (they often invest in shiny bullshit).
In fact, a certain amount of investment in frauds is acceptable and desirable; if you give £10m to 9 frauds who spunk it straight up the wall and to 1 true visionary who builds a unicorn, that's money well spent. Plus of course you can always hope that the fraudster is good enough to sucker the next guy so you can get out.
Per Matt Levine, the optimum amount of fraud is non-zero. Tune your detector too loosely or too tightly and you'll miss out.
The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero only because detection is expensive as you get close to zero. Getting less fraud needs to always be in mind. When someone gets away with fraud others will try to copy it so anything that has happened before has a much higher value to detect.
But for fraud that hasn't happened yet don't worry about it and hope nobody figures out how to do it.
An expert on crisps maybe XD? i'm not really sure about your last point on investing in frauds, i guess they only care if and when the fraud gets exposed, they might purposely choose to do exactly that given the right conditions though, it is a completely perverted and deranged system at this point.
Yeah sorry, I was saying "frauds" for "bullshit", I guess? Lacking some vocabulary to express this in a nuanced way.
To be fair, many times founders are extremely convinced about their idea, they don't necessarily consciously sell bullshit to the VCs.
It just feels like what matters is to be very good at convincing VCs, not at building something real. When you're so good at getting money, of course eventually something will work (because you will be able to hire competent people to do the job). And then you will be called a "visionary", and people will say "we need HIM as a CEO because nobody else would be able to hire tons of competent people to build stuff with billions of dollars" :-).
> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. [...] Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such a vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company, investing this amount of money - if it worked - would be a rounding error), I will rather analyze the point that you raised:
It is a very common situation that the workflows of companies is deeply ingrained into some tool
- that they can't get rid of (be it Microsoft Excel (in insurance and finance), be it Git (in software development), ...)
- that is actually a bad fit for the workflow step (Git and Excel often are)
So, this is typical for the kind of problem that companies in sectors in which billions of $/€ are moved do have.
I am actually paid to develop some specialized software for some specialized industrial sector that solves a very specific problem.
So, in my experience the reason why nobody [is] solving actual problems (in the sense of your definition) anymore is simple:
- nobody is willing to pay big money for a solution,
- those entities who are willing to pay big money often fall for sycophantic scammers/consultants.
> While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such a vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company, investing this amount of money - if it worked - would be a rounding error)
The first Roomba prototype from iRobot was two weeks and $10k in 1999 [1], and S. C. Johnson's funding was up to $2M [1]. The public estimate for total pre-launch program cost is $3M. [2]
In 2026 $, that's about $19k, $4M and $6M respectively.
[1] https://nymag.com/vindicated/2016/11/roombas-long-bumpy-path...
[2] https://dancingwithroomba.com/funding-tertill/
As someone who makes things it always confuses me when millions just disappear whenever a company or government contractor makes things. Give me $17M and I'll build a vacuum robot prototype in under 2 years, I can't imagine 10 engineers getting paid $100+k/year can't do it in less time? Tooling is expensive, but not THAT expensive...
I would agree. CNC-ing POM also tends to work extremely well for prototype plastic parts.
Also, I already built a robot arm, a robot car, and a custom camera in my free time. So I’m having a hard time imagining that a robot vacuum prototype wouldn’t be possible for me to build in a year, let alone with the team size that $1m in annual salaries buys.
The robot vacuum is already there. The Chinese buit a better, cheaper one and the original company went bankrupt.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1lr75lp239o
Get it approved in a lot of large markets? Deal with ongoing supply issues as suppliers change and you need to maintain your product? Market it? I could keep going on, but making a prototype is the easy part, making a sustaining business out of it is the hard part.
Moving the goalposts so soon.
You sure? You ever ran a business? Prototyping costs, machines, licenses, overhead etc. etc.
The prototyping and machine costs are easily under a million. It's one custom-built vacuum.
You can do it with 0-3 digits of license cost too.
There's no sane way the business overhead more than doubles things.
For $17 mil you can't replace Git either. Can't get it done.
The problem is that the cost of replacing git isn't measured in money, it's measured in time.
It's one of the few programming projects that no amount of money can buy, and ironically getting more money often means having less time.
At the same time, you just can't scale up a company then decide to disruptively innovate on your core tech. You either put your nose to the grindstone or you let yourself play and explore but you can't do both at once.
The author is a founder of GitHub, he could raise $17m for “git but it’s called pit and a repository is a hole and committing code is called burying it” if he wanted to, investors care about pedigree.
pedigree is a great word here and being upfront about it (if true) would make for some fun VC slogans:
"We've replaced due diligence with a DNA test."
"No mutts, no miracles. Three generations of wealth or GTFO."
"Your bloodline is fine. Don't fret the cap table."
"You forgot to attach the pitch deck, but we really like your family crest."
I would use this tool. Ship it
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> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
Because that’s too risky for investors.
But we are not even get a replacement for git, we are getting a CLI on top of git. Since agents can use GH CLI and mcp very well, I'm very interested to see what is it that Git butler can do so much better (I also might be a bit sceptic, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt).
> Git butler can do so much better
Not be tied to Microslop and migrated to Azure?
Sounds like great use of 17M.
>Scott Chacon is a co-founder of GitHub
Thought so until saw this. Man, he is the co-founder of Github and already seed-funded. How can someone refuse him? 17M is a small amount considering the valuation VS Code Agent wrappers are getting
> For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.
Just write down how you'll spend the money to make that, what it'll eventually cost to produce, what the market size will be, and what the price will be, and if it's enough return you can easily convince someone to give you $17m to do it all.
Totally agree - most of these co's that get funded are pointless. FWIW, the general math here is that you'd spend < 2-3mm developing new git and most of the money goes into distribution.
We've strayed really far from where technical innovation began
> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money
Well, cofounding Github helps
To be fair, discovering a new shower gel that smells better or feels better is a nice experience.
Hasn't someone already built that robot? At least my kids tell me this exists every time I tell them to clean up their Legos. Actually it just does Legos, not the general toys.
It's primarily focused on "take from someone else" rather than create something new and useful.
Consider that many of the tech posts here are of the form, "i did X but with Z" as the poster hopes they will be recognized as some master of execution.
You see, the actual problem is raising the money.
I think it’s always good to dig a bit deeper on these things.
This seems ridiculous to you, compared to a very obvious win with a Lego sorting vacuum.
Lego isn’t niche, and the explanation isn’t a weird technical thing that only experts would get and understand how important or valuable it is.
Yet it’s not being done.
Is there nobody who has realised this gap but you? Has nobody managed to convince people with money that it’s worthwhile? Have you tried but failed?
Or is it not many many thousands of people who are wrong but you?
Is the problem harder than you think? I’ve worked with robotics but not for a long time and I think the core manipulation is either not really solved or not until recently. I don’t know about yours but my kids also don’t fully dismantle their Lego creations either so would the robot need to take them apart too? That’s a lot of force. And some are special.
How people want Lego sorted is pretty broad. Kids don’t even need it sorted that much. And the volume can be huge for smaller buckets of things.
Is the market not as big as you think? Is it big enough for the cost, I’d buy one for £100 but £1000? £10,000?
How does it compare for most people against having the kids play on a blanket and then tipping it into a bucket? Or those ones that are a circle of cloth with a drawstring so it’s a play area and storage all in one? I 3d printed some sieves and that’s most of the issue right there done.
People are solving actual problems, but lots of problems are hard, and not all of them are profitable.
As a gut feeling, there is such a large overlap of engineers and large Lego collections and willingness to spend lots of money and time saving some time sorting Lego that the small number of implementations usually split over many years is very telling about the difficulty.
For what it’s worth I want this too.
I feel exactly this way
Why are we trying to replace git? What is the problem with git?
It's the old broken. Clearly it must be replaced with the new hotness.
The same reasons the world needed AI for cats funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. How do you expect those precious people to do anything at all without a bi-yearly expenses-paid trip to Cabo and on-site baristas?
When the sock bot dries the socks, matches and folds them together we're at peak robot. Come to think of it, its got to not lose either of them also. Current tech falls short of this.
> When the sock bot dries the socks, matches and folds them together we're at peak robot. Come to think of it, its got to not lose either of them also.
Missing socks (and containers or their lids) are still great unsolved problems in 2026. Solving this issue is like fusion, always 10 years away.
Git is still pretty lacking in the area of big files. This is quite annoying if you're dealing with big deep learning data. So your LEGO vacuum robot could actually benefit from a better Git.
Didn’t dvc try to fill this niche and absolutely fail at it?
I ask myself this all the time, I have ideas now and then that I need to start writing down. Its just sad, we have so much potential as a society, but all the money goes to things like AI and bitcoin blindly. While I love some aspects of AI, and hope to someday be like the Jetsons and have a robot in my home that helps with things, and frees up me and my wife to doing other things with our family, I also don't trust something that is feeding my most intimate events from my home to a server somewhere.
I feel like git started to feel outdated overnight as the company I work for went agentic development first.
I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since I'm no longer looking at code - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.
Branches are now irrelevant since all agents work in worktrees by default. But worktrees are awkward since you run out of disk space fast (since we're in a monorepo).
There is a constant discussion ongoing whether we commit our plans or not. Some argue that the whole conversation leading up to the PR should be included (stupid imo).
The game changed completely. It isn't weird that people are wondering if the tools should as well.
Definitely feels like there's opportunity to build something better
You guys cannot be serious, it feels like Poe’s Law day everyday in here!
It really is insane how much this topic is dividing technical folks.
What GP wrote sounds like an absolute nightmare of tech debt and unmaintainable spaghetti code that nobody understands anymore to me.
But I guess for some people the increased speed outweighs all other concerns?
"Where are we? Are we where we wanted to be?"
"I'm not sure. But at least we got here fast."
I have to agree that the comment you are referring to seems to be nothing other than sarcasm despite that it doesn’t read that way at all. If it’s true, the world is definitely in trouble…
if you can't get ai to handle git, that's certainly a skill issue
Have you considered returning to actual software engineering and workflows that tools were designed to support instead of playing the LLM slot machine?
Funny the replies you're getting here when already we see companies with engineers not having written a single line of code since late last year when models became good enough to go end to end.
We see companies running web apps on top of Oracle or not using any version control at all, let alone agentic coding; it doesn't mean it's a good idea because someone is crazy enough to do it.
I thought the consensus what that vibe coding is a bad idea and you're supposed to review whatever is machine-generated, however "good enough" you believe it to be.
Where did I say it was a good idea?
Okay, please explain why the replies are funny.
Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog, you learn more but you kill it in the process.
It was a joke? It comes across like you pointing out someone missing evidence and being wrong. Obviously you used the word "funny" but that's not usually a word that goes in a joke.
Nevertheless the joke is already dead. There's no reason not to explain.
>Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRzIOna2oQ
GitV2 - It's what Devs Crave.
You missed the boat, baskets that open out into a giant play mat have flooded amazon and temu. Something like this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Storage-Organizer-Lego-Play/dp/...
I've long had the same idea.. this one has legs.
you just need pedigree. any kind. where you went to school, where you worked etc.
It’s probably because you’re not willing to lie enough. There was some founder back in the 2010s, I forgot his name, but he’d go around giving talks on fundraising and he basically said he just lied all the time.
For example, instead of building a robot to pick up Lego bricks, say you’re building a platform for personal robotics, and it’ll cook you food, do your laundry, repair your fridge. It doesn’t matter if you have any idea how to do this, just say you need $50M and you’ll hire some robotics and vision guys to figure it out. The bigger and bolder the lie, the better.
17M seems like a rounding error these days with all the AI investments. Probably some spare cash in a fund that needed to be closed or something.
Solving actual problems are hard, and even harder to get money for (see research). Most VC’s are in it for the returns only, not actually making a change, there are some exceptions but they are far and few apart.
4 McDonalds. That’s a better way of measuring it.
Honestly it is. Investors value my company like 4 Mcdonalds.
Exactly. A safe bet vs a great bet.
I’m also contemplating a lego sorting machine.
jacquesm did that impressively 9 years ago: https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889 (follow-up posts with more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14280569, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14654223).
It doesn't solve the picking-up-off-the-floor problem.
Definitely sounded like a shower gel moment.
@fxtentacle I’m at the airport and spat out my coffee reading your comment .. this is legendary and super funny ! Happy Friday to you kind sir
> sort LEGO bricks by colour and size
I just looked into this out of idle curiosity, after watching some guy build a LEGO sorting machine. (They work in a warehouse that sells used bricks for model builders.)
Interestingly, this is on the cusp of viability, but training the ML model would still be cost-prohibitive (for me). With $17M, it's within reach, but there's still the obvious mechanical hurdles: Kids don't disassemble their Lego, the conditions are "less than ideal", and even vibrating belts in a warehouse scenario have a lot of trouble keeping bricks separated for the camera to get a clear image.
Robot hands are nowhere near the point where they can reliably (or even unreliably!) take apart two arbitrary Lego bricks that are joined, let alone anything of even mild complexity. This is hard for most humans, and often requires the use of tools! See: https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help-topics/article/lego-...
The machine vision part is... getting there! You could pull some clever tricks with modern hardware such as bright LED lights, multi-spectral or even hyper-spectral sensors, etc. The algorithms have improved a lot also. Early attempts could only recognise a few dozen distinct shapes, and the most recent models a few hundred, but they're about 2-3 years old, which means "stone ages".
A trick several Lego recognition model training runs used was to photo realistically render 3D models of bricks in random orientations and every possible color, which is far faster than manually labelling photos of real bricks.
These days you could use the NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to heavily accelerate and automate this.
You mean the one they try to build in The Office?
You're fine with how git works, many others aren't.
I am actively looking for a replacement for GitHub and would prefer something that is not based on git.
Solutions to more actual problems are more expensive. It’s easier to ask millions of people for $0.01 than it is to ask thousands for $100. Things that are easy to sell to millions of people for $100 are rarely innovative (transportation, food, entertainment, etc), and if they are, they’re world-changing (cars, supermarkets, smartphones, etc).
Yes!
I mean who tf gives some small team millions to put some Nvidia GPU into space and thinking we will have market disrupting GPU clusters in space in 10 years?!
There are so many low hanging fruits in IT Industry to just being solved.
Even just having something like well build, open smart home products whould have been disruptive years ago (until someone like ikea decides to enter that space).
On the other side, people who were using, say, Perforce, also thought there can't be anything better. Still, BitKeeper appeared as an innovation in the area, eaten later by Git, created by angry Linus (because of BitKeeper licencing changes).
So, even though Git seems to be ok (people who store large binary files or who run huge monorepos would probably disagree), maybe we can do better.
Altavista was kind of okeish for search, yet Google managed to figure out something that was (at that time) way better.
i am actually fine with how svn works.
Guessing you aren’t working with hundreds of collaborators in a distributed offline system. Which is what git was for and why svn wasn’t enough for that type of use case.
The vast majority of git users are using github as a central repository. There a a few other not github but serves the same purpose central repositories. Distributed sounds cool, but almost everybody wouldn't notice a thing if git was centralized.
u guessed right. im one of the world's few solo software developers left (behind).
Keep on keeping on brother.
thank you.
or using branches.
oh svn had branches. people just didn't know that they wanted a distributed cvs.
for me atomic commit or was that committing a bunch of files with 1 command was important. and cvs wouldnt let me do it. perforce did. but it was proprietary software, though i think they offered a free version for solo developers or something like that. and when svn came out i jumped ship.
> i am actually fine with how svn works.
I came here to say precisely that. I was on svn before git was a thing, and I've never moved off it for any projects where I get to decide such things.
To a first approximation, one could say that distributed version control is a problem nobody ever had, and nobody ever intends to have. (GitHub is the world's centralized monorepo.)
Yet, distributed version control is the majority of the reason why git's mental model is so overcomplicated.
Well, one person did: git exactly replicated the patch email system that Linus Torvalds was using.
> To a first approximation, one could say that distributed version control is a problem nobody ever had, and nobody ever intends to have.
The distributed aspect is important because it let me separate how I’d like to control changes vs how it’s done in the canonical repo. I sync when I want to.
Don't do that. Don't buy into the bullshit.
I for one can't wait for open Ai to buy them and reroute every git commit to chatgpt.
17M isn't a lot of money. It is for a person sure. Retire. Cessna. etc. But not to build a butler!
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Your kids need to learn how to clean up after themselves.
All you need is a camera pointing at the floor with image detection... when there's legos on the floor it triggers a video playing that explains how the kids need to pick up the legos. /s
Actually, a camera that scores the clean up progress, together with some virtual gold coins and real loot boxes for a week of good compliance might really do the trick.
Yes, you may be fine with git, but can you say the same thing about AI agents? /s
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Tbf, git is very much a problem that needs solving. It only works well for text data, the fact that it is decentralized adds a lot of complexity but doesn't matter for 99% of users since they use a centralized git forge like Github or Gitlab, and the UX is pretty much non-existent.
It works exacly as it was designed to work.. GIT as VCS.. Version Control System.. for text code sniplets. It can handle small binary blobs just fine.
If you need (D)VFS aka Distributed Versioned Filesystem, grab right tool. Or write one.
This is exacly way I wrote DOT (Distributed Object Tracker). Its pure DVFS repo manager, to handle binary blobs and that it.. Nothing more.
People complaining about GIT not working well w/ big data just handling GIT wrong. Linus said it from the begining, its NOT tool for such datasets. Just move along.
But do you really think $17M is going to give us that alternative, or will it come from some brilliant guy going on a caffeine-fueled weeklong side quest (like how Git was invented)?
There are some things that need to come from a place of manic self-motivated genius. It's not something that you can buy with money. The money is really just there to help you shove a mediocre solution down everyone's throats (which is exactly what's going on here).
I think they are going to give us _something_. Devs probably won't pick it up though.
Yeah probably right :)
if you don't understand git you shouldn't be coding, full stop. The exact same skill set needed to write good code is required to use git in quick and efficient matter.
Then again, it is used for non-coding tasks, but any and all of it's UI problems are not from the method of storage (pretty much any modern VCS uses same "tree of linked snapshots of filesystem) so making one while still making it git compatible just with better ui (like Jujutsu) is very much possible
You didn't click the link. Who are you to say that they aren't solving actual problems? You might not be their target. The whole article is dedicated to explaining why they're building their product.
The article does a bad job at that, because it remains rather vague and doesn’t explain the concrete problems they are trying to solve, that aren’t either already solved by Git-linked issue trackers, or would be better solved by improving support in Git itself (like for stacked branches).
Building UI and auxiliary features on top of Git is a crowded space, it’s not clear what compelling innovation they are bringing to the table.
You can think that because you've read the article.
> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
Let me just state the obvious. Of all the major problems of society, sorting legos isn't one. If you disagree, try emerging from the cellar.
Completely unnecessary retort. At no point did anyone in this thread state that sorting legos was a major problem of society.
Rather, the GP merely implied that some parents would love to have a robot to sort their kids legos, and that (ironically) even that unimportant "need" is more important than replacing git.
Maybe you're not a parent. To me, this sounds like arguing against the existence of the dishwasher by saying "of all the major problems of society, washing dishes by hand isn't one."
What a ridiculous statement from an obviously over-privleged phony. You are actually doubling-down on being completely isolated.
Kids face a lot of new problems these days. They also face some old one, like sorting their legos.
Sometimes you put the kids to bed before they've cleaned up the legos, because it's getting late.
Then you step on a lego.
Replacing git is?
Successfully would be big business, because everyone and everyone and the F1000 uses git. Or at least it could more of a feature than a product, and gets merged into some other VC company, or some Jira feature or etc.
Who really wants cheap lego vacuums? Basement-dwellers who are getting yelled at by their mom? Not a good market.