> You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar.

I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.

> The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it.

no. google did not exist until the late 90s.

various forms of internet email sure did, but most popular mtas of the google era shared very little code with predecessors from the 80s and early 90s (maybe sendmail) and google almost certainly wrote their own from scratch.

but your first point. that an archive browser that looks like gmail is not equivalent to a full tilt email service backend is valid.

I mean it is so obvious causing me to find the use of the phrase cloned so weird that I feel it needs to be said.

The UI cloning doesn't feel exactly correct either there are things that are slightly off.

But I just find the "cloned" wrong, because obviously you cannot send an email from this account, you cannot log in to the service as Jeffrey Epstein, you cannot delete emails, create alerts based on searches, do actions on selected emails (create new tag, move under that tag)

there are so many functionalities that are not cloned because obviously they could not be cloned because they would make no sense for what this project is. So just the praise for cloning so quickly makes me sort of mad.

You could theoretically make something like this that allowed log in so you got a personalized epstein mails, and then could do all that, and perhaps get more mails sent in as files get released, and perhaps create Google alerts on epstein in the news etc. that would come as mails and maybe the code could put news that came in, into the appropriate the tags etc.

But until that time "cloned" is just very wrong.

Out of curiosity, would you explain what you mean by that? Google was founded in 1998 and writing a mail client isn't terribly complicated. Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? Is Gmail older than Google?

Why stop there, I'm sure you can trace Gmail all the way back to the Roman aqueducts.

I don't know if I'm just misremembering but it feels like over the last three years or so the technical knowledge on HN has gone down the toilet.

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