Wow, those comments are awesome.

"For a Linux user, 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. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

I wonder how many other ten-figure business models can be developed from comments that begin "For any Linux user, this is totally trivial," or "Um, have you looked at the pricing for Amazon S3?" or "LOL, this problem was solved 20 years ago by XXXX at YYYY."

This is such a classy HN comment. "For 0.01% of the population, this is trivial to do by X, which is extremely complicated, and does not work at all, and evidently even the commenter himself had never done that"

It should be noted that HN in 2008 was a lot different than it is now.

Nah. Just the other day there was a big thread on how easy it is to run your own VPN on AWS and why should one ever pay for a glorified web proxy? :facepalm:

it's a weird metric.

Obviously a TOTALLY different league, but I have a small text editor plugin that got < 10 upvotes, and how has 500,000 installs. don't think I ever posted.it anywhere else.

My gut says low number of upvotes are probably indicative of a "thing people don't know they need" opportunity.

Can't imagine there are too many 100+ upvote use cases that don't already have substantial competition.

So 10-100 is probably a sweet spot in terms of "people are interested" and "there's an unfulfilled opportunity."