Hacker News's history is littered with dismissals of transformative projects. The platform famously doubted Dropbox's model, with commenters questioning trust and market saturation; it later went public at a $12 billion valuation. GitHub faced skepticism over its Git hosting utility, yet Microsoft acquired it for $7.5 billion, now hosting 100 million developers.

Bitcoin's thread had just three comments and five upvotes, yet it grew into a $2 trillion asset class. DuckDuckGo's name drew ridicule, yet it became a privacy-focused search giant valued at over $600 million. Uber's launch thread warned of regulatory battles, but it IPO'd at over $160 billion, disrupting the taxi industry.

Stripe's API complexity was criticized, yet it processed $1.4 trillion in payments and reached a $106 billion valuation. Instacart's grocery delivery faced doubts about scalability and labor costs, yet it went public at over $12 billion, boosted by COVID-19 demand.