Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by basket_horse 69 days ago
No offense, but why should I believe you? The guy is famous because he has a track record of success doing similar projects. Of course that doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d wager it makes it statistically more likely than a random person. Starting a successful company is not all about good engineering.

Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are you just asking rhetorical questions?
1 comments
conartist6 69 days ago
I built a prototype, and then I rebuilt and rebuilt it and rebuilt it, and somewhere in there my understanding of how to think about what I was building completely flipped on its head. Then I rebuilt the version flipped on its head another several times until I finally understood it. You can see that on my Github, it's all public: https://github.com/conartist6 (public devlog on Discord).

It's a pretty serious claim to know what comes after git, and I have a whole array of criteria I evaluate claimants on:

- Will their version control solution fall apart if there are not enough line breaks in the code?

- Can they solve the rename-function/add-usage conflict? Git normally can't surface this conflict at all.

- Can the system maintain authorship attribution at a fine-grained level (per-second resolution)

- Will their solution's performance break down if there is too much code in one file?

- How will the solution handle change notifications? Is the filesystem watcher the de-facto coordinator?

This GitButler thing fails all my tests for a thing that's serious about replacing git; it just seems like they haven't thought about any of that stuff, well, at all.

link
chaos_emergent 69 days ago
The reality is that none of that shit matters if you can build a product that people use and want to pay for. I would back someone who has made a dollar off of a product over someone who has built a great product that no one uses 100% of the time.

The reality is that you can make a successful business with okay engineering and great product insight. It's much more difficult to build a successful business with great engineering and poor product insight. Getting people to use and pay for what you've built gives you the product insight that you need.

link
conartist6 69 days ago
Yeah but that's the advice for 99% of people. The craziest things: things on the scale of digging through 50 years of compounding tech debt, they take time. Have you by any chance seen this talk? https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world
link
basket_horse 69 days ago
Does anyone actually care about the above issues?

If yes, and you’ve solved them, people should be very interested in using what you’ve built. If people are using what you’ve built and are willing to pay for it, VCs will be interested.

If you haven’t solved them, but can validate they are real problems people care about, and have a path towards solving them, this should make a compelling VC pitch.

If they are real engineering problems but no one seems to care much about them, then it’s just a hobby.

link