[HN Gopher] Replit.com (YC W18) raises $80M Series B
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Replit.com (YC W18) raises $80M Series B
Author : plondon514
Score : 70 points
Date : 2021-12-09 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.replit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.replit.com)
| poyu wrote:
| Replit used to be good. I can open up a page and start writing
| code. But now it requires an account, and the UI feels less
| responsive than before.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > But now it requires an account
|
| Considering how costly it is to run the service, requiring a
| free account feels pretty fair.
| paulgb wrote:
| Especially since if you offer generic compute without any
| form of registration, you're basically inviting people to
| mine crypto with your AWS bills, which is something they've
| experienced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26682237
| williamstein wrote:
| At https://CoCalc.com we offer generic compute without any
| form of registration required (see
| https://cocalc.com/auth/try). And indeed, crypto mining is
| a periodic headache for us. I think Replit used to have a
| model that made it much easier for them to offer something
| without registration, because they supported client side
| Python, etc., via Emscripten. However, they eventually seem
| to have moved away from that.
| komuher wrote:
| Is this the same company that CEO bullied intern to drop his open
| source project and was exposed like 7 months ago?
| cloogshicer wrote:
| What really bugged me about this was actually how he handled
| the backlash - he initially doubled down, saying he was doing
| the right thing. Only as the whole thing escalated more, he
| back-paddled.
|
| Made me feel like he only did it to avoid bad publicity and
| stuff like this will keep happening.
|
| Ever since, the way Replit represents itself (as the
| "revolutionary" new platform) is quite off-putting for me and
| I've stopped using/suggesting them.
| miki123211 wrote:
| They're doing the exact same thing when accessibility is
| concerned.
|
| In my few interactions with them, they either claimed that
| they had it figured out (which is not true), or they promised
| that it will get fixed really soon. I've reached out to them
| about it a couple years ago, and little has been done to
| address the issue since then.
|
| Their accessibility is weird, all the modals, menus and so on
| are perfectly accessible, you can see that somebody put a lot
| of thought into them, but core components of their platform
| (like the terminal) don't have any accessibility at all, even
| though flipping one switch in the library they use would get
| them 90% of the way there.
|
| Considering they're deep in the education space, this is a
| really big issue. People might fail their classes because of
| this, and it might even possibly be illegal in some
| jurisdictions. If there's one sector where you really need to
| do accessibility right, it's education.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _[Amjad Masad] initially doubled down, saying he was doing
| the right thing. Only as the whole thing escalated more, he
| back-paddled._
|
| Folks should be allowed to change their mind. How is that a
| bad thing? Given more input / data, it only makes sense a
| rational person changes their opinion / outlook.
|
| > _Ever since, the way Replit represents itself (as the
| "revolutionary" new platform) is quite off-putting for me and
| I've stopped using/suggesting them._
|
| For better or worse, they're going after the next wave of
| developers. Not you and I:
|
| " _Replit wants to build the future, and to build the future,
| you don 't rebuild the old thing for the old customers. You
| build something new that starts out looking like a toy, and
| you build for the underserved, not just for moral reasons,
| but for strategic ones. It's disruptive innovation meets the
| compounding power of young users._"
|
| ...
|
| " _For example, it means not targeting experienced developers
| to start, even though they 're the more valuable users today.
| If they've already written their first line of code
| elsewhere, they definitionally can't write their first line
| of code in Replit._"
|
| https://archive.is/JC3Ux
| woah wrote:
| Didn't the CEO have some incredibly megalomaniacal tweet
| where he claimed that Replit was going to replace all
| software?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Funny how the mind works. I have a bad memory normally, but I
| am yeah "heard of this company on HN before and it was
| something not too awesome. I didn't remember the details but
| the flag "something bad about X" stuck.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
| flunhat wrote:
| The most concerning part about that whole interaction was this
| small detail (here's the full post:
| https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/):
|
| In the earlier emails, Amjad Masad (the CEO) offered to hire
| the intern, was pleasant, etc. And then just a few threads
| later, when things turned sour, he insulted the former intern,
| calling him the "most demanding intern we've ever had."
|
| It's deeply telling about a person's character when they pull
| this kind of move -- kind & understanding one moment, negging &
| insulting the next, even if it contradicts their earlier
| kindness.
| anm89 wrote:
| Replit was recently in the news when the CEO used expensive
| company lawyers to attack a an individual contributor on an open
| source project to force the project to close even though they had
| done nothing wrong just because it was impossible to pay the
| legal fees.
|
| Don't support them.
| plesiv wrote:
| Not saying replit wasn't wrong in this (CEO apologized), but
| from my point of view the story is not that clear-cut.
| leaded_syrinx wrote:
| Apologies don't undo a history of a mal-intent towards
| employees who helped build the company.
| 0des wrote:
| Link?
| williamstein wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
| arcastroe wrote:
| My go-to for random code snippets has always been glot.io, mostly
| for the clean and immediate UI experience (no sign-in, etc)
|
| If I'm going to use repl.it and jump through several pages to
| even get started, I might as well open an IDE instead.
| b20000 wrote:
| ok, so another tool to find cheap coder talent and create more
| code monkeys so the cost of engineering can be brought down at
| large companies.
| lionfish323 wrote:
| Does anyone have any thoughts on the blog post [0] linked at the
| end of the announcement? Is this actually how venture capitalists
| evaluate these sorts of things? That post feels like it
| approaches "conspiracy theory" levels of leaps [1] about the
| evolution of the product and its potential impacts from a company
| whose product offering doesn't really seem to have changed or
| expanded much in the past few years, and which feels from an
| outsider's perspective like it's generally being left in the dust
| by more modern competitors like GH's Codespaces.
|
| [0] https://www.notboring.co/p/replit-remix-the-internet
|
| [1] e.g., the CEO making vague tweets about "web3" = "Replit will
| be a vortex for talent, creativity, and economic activity online.
| It might become the operating system for the 21st Century, the
| platform on top of which much of the internet is built, remixed
| and monetized."
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I used Replit to build a Python battlesnake for
| https://play.battlesnake.com/. It was nice and easy to get
| started with. Unfortunately the latency/performance isn't
| reliable enough for my battlesnake - my snake moves between about
| 50 and 150 in the global league just depending on the Replit
| server performance.
| robbles wrote:
| Are you using the default Battlesnake region? Depending on your
| location and where your replit ends up hosted, switching
| regions might reduce your latency a bit.
| brunoqc wrote:
| Does replit work well on normal phone screen?
| devmunchies wrote:
| They're switching from Monaco to codemirror if they haven't
| already.
| airocker wrote:
| Is not Jupiter already on codemirror?
| williamstein wrote:
| Yes, Jupyter notebook has used CodeMirror for nearly a
| decade. The official Jupyter notebook has never used
| Monaco, but the Google version (colab) uses Monaco in order
| to very nicely leverage LSP support (similar to VS Code).
| There is preliminary work under way right now to switch
| from CodeMirror 5 to CodeMirror 6 in the official Jupyter
| project, but that's going to be significant work (see
| https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/11638).
|
| It doesn't seem like there is much overlap between Replit
| and Jupyter notebooks right now, as far as I can tell...
| williamstein wrote:
| They still using Monaco by default (I just signed in and
| checked). For what it is worth, Monaco used to have zero
| support for mobile, but recently got much better:
| https://github.com/microsoft/monaco-
| editor/issues/246#issuec... I tested out Code Server (vscode
| via the web) on an ipad recently, and it worked surprisingly
| well.
| ltazmin wrote:
| Yes, Replit runs on phones and tablets. You can code & run any
| repl, share repls & edit with other people. We recently started
| rolling out CodeMirror as the backbone of the editor and we'll
| be making a ton more enhancements there.
| spullara wrote:
| There may be a way for you to test this.
| garbagetime wrote:
| How?
| dang wrote:
| Please don't be snarky in HN comments.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| I just tried it out of curiosity. Yes, it works pretty well on
| my iPhone XR.
| mlazos wrote:
| I love it for just being able to run a quick snippet. I'm not
| sure if the one minute interaction I give to it can be monetized.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| If Repl.it comes out with a way to sync an offline mode to their
| cloud offerings I will jump for joy, become a paying user, and
| maybe even apply to work there.
|
| But cloud only is kind of a show stopper for me.
| jcrites wrote:
| https://github.com/features/codespaces
| fxtentacle wrote:
| "Replit (YC W18) Is Hiring to Bring the Next Billion Software
| Creators Online"
|
| Yeah right, the main problem stopping people from writing python
| scripts is that the one-click installer isn't convenient enough
| ;) Or is it all those software developers who refuse to use a
| keyboard and insist on using a smart phone touchscreen?
|
| Their product is a code snippet repl console. And it's not even
| the best, first, fastest, or cheapest one.
|
| Their self-presentation to me seems so over the top that I feel
| like they will turn out to be a scam.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| These kinds of things are sometime useful if you need to
| quickly hack on a language you don't normally use. If you don't
| normally use that language then you are not used to the
| install, the package system, the environment variables and
| hacks you need to get it to work properly, the troubleshooting
| decision trees, etc.
|
| I agree if python is your main bread and butter language doing
| REPL locally (or debugging with VS Code) would be much nicer.
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(page generated 2021-12-09 23:00 UTC)