Right? REPL.it is - unironically - a weekend project, that the founder loves to pretend is a marvel of engineering

I don't know if I'd go that far - I think dev environment set up is a massive pain, especially for newbies and it scares a lot of people away from development because of constant issues.

Solving this would be helpful for teaching and I think it's not trivial to do well. I think there's an argument that being good at troubleshooting and debugging is 90% of programming so the shitty dev environment setup currently is a bit of a filter, but I generally think that's a bad status quo rationalization.

All this is to say - I think there's a market and the product is likely valuable, but I also don't think it's reusable rockets or rebuilding the internet or the 'most ambitious software company in history'. This kind of framing turns me off and when paired with stuff like this post leads me to avoid the company entirely.

Recently repl.it announced they will integrate nix pkgs into their environment. They are simply building a better ux on top of existing open source technology.

> "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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Building a better UX isn't done 'simply' - and the result is often worth billions.

If u are looking at this from a profitable angle then getting ux right is about gaining more users and making them pay. Technical innovation is about creating something which wasn't possible before and not making a start-up wrapper over existing stuff. In today's misaligned businesss models of marketing and advertising, there is less core technical research and more fluff

That depends on where you draw the line of "innovation". Is it an innovation when it's created, or when it changes the status quo?

I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier.

Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?

Right, I get the same impression from Replit. I don't know why I got subscribed to some weird accelerator newsletter they started and the wording is akin to the nigerian prince scam (and as a side note a REPL website creating an accelerator for sure gives me some dotcom bubble vibes).

I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.

Well, these are things that most tech people know, we just don't discuss them because we're polite.

This tweet didn't age well. https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1324100838894305281

Given that his name isn't even Conan, everyone should probably treat this as the baseless hearsay that it seems to be.

I don't know the truth around that either way, but I think Roam is based in Utah at some ranch (even if they're funded by a16z). I wouldn't generalize his behavior to the rest of silicon valley culture.

I think his brother was also the QAnon shaman horn guy (at least he said as much on Twitter - maybe it was a joke?).

I don't think this was his brother - I think it was a joke (imo bad taste at the time). I did some research around it and it seemed that his brother does look alike but that other person had a different legal name.

> I wouldn't generalize his behavior to the rest of silicon valley culture.

I get what you're saying here, but they made an entire TV series lampooning silicon valley culture.

Yeah and I liked it - good tongue-in-cheek satire that exaggerated a lot of things that have some basis in truth. It was ultimately a fictional show though and life in silicon valley is a lot more boring than that the vast majority of the time.

Even in that show nobody was on meth iirc.

They did an amphetamine dependency and an opium dependency.

Isn't equating "victim of drug addiction" and "harms women" out of line? One is something that isn't really his fault and isn't because of his moral failings, and the other is dehumanizing nearly half of the population.