alt Hacker NewsI 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?
Replies
> ... 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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.
granted how much did Linus spend on Git? probably well south of $17M and he's not beholden to the likes of a16z
Not to mention the irony that they need $17M to try and recreate/improve what Linus built in a week.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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).
>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?
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.
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.
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
>Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".
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.
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.
you just need pedigree. any kind. where you went to school, where you worked etc.
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.
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).
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.