61–70 of 169 posts
We now have almost 2 million users and a small team working on it full-time. I definitely originally thought it would only be a side project...
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Amazing. This comment must compare to the famous Slashdot takedown of the iPod. "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. " (Not meant as criticism; we're all horribly naive in hindsight.)
It's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and creating artificial buzz played big role in their success.
Dropbox is a success because millions of people don't know the meaning of the words you just wrote. This is even hinted at int he application itself: "Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them "just work" for the average individual or team."
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Amazing. This comment must compare to the famous Slashdot takedown of the iPod. "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. " (Not meant as criticism; we're all horribly naive in hindsight.)
It's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and creating artificial buzz played big role in their success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and creating artificial buzz played big role in their success.
Maybe you can't, and that's fine. For me, being able to work on stuff on one machine, then jump over to another one of my machines and it's just there is hugely valuable. The backup element is kinda secondary but nice to have.
Having files on all of my devices without the effort is why I pay them whatever their monthly fee is.
Amazing how time passes. It's been more than 10 years since I started, and it is still my side project and not big by HN standards. But it is making now many times over what I make in my day job as an engineer in Cambridge, and it's been featured in The Guardian Christmas gift list this year.
Someone posted it on the front page soon after: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843
Now it's a book published by No Starch, has sold 25,000 copies, and has been translated into German, Korean, and Chinese: https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/
I doubt I would have finished as soon as I did without that initial attention to spur me on, and wouldn't have been able to wrangle up as much attention without that chance post on HN blowing up and bringing me visitors. (It ended up posted on Boing Boing, Metafilter, and various other places too.)
Now I'm a year or two from finishing a PhD in statistics and wondering if there's another book I need to write, or perhaps a second edition -- doing actual statistical work with real scientists makes the points in my book even more clear to me, and the need even clearer.
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Google photos is better for that.
I don't fully understand the underlying cause, so take this with a pinch of salt... but my girlfriend's father's photo collection almost got wiped out by Google Photos. After being locked out of his Samsung tablet (supposedly it set itself a lockscreen out of the blue), I checked whether it had backed his photos up on Google Photos, but nothing there... After resetting it (it seems Samsung removed the ability to rese…
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I get that many techies can live without Dropbox and it's ilk (myself included), but NOBODY should ever be advocating FTP. It's insure (no encryption - unless you're talking about FTP(E)S, but that introduces it's own issues), it's broken by design (no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS), output specs depend on the host OS (eg directory l…
FTP needs no defending -- it was really useful in 1979, but times have changed (e.g. I suspect every machine on the Internet uses an 8-bit byte). One point you wrote surprised me though: > no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS) Really, crocks like NAT and stateful firewalls should die. Layers 4 and below are inherently peer-peer -- the ne…
I remember what the internet was like when ADSL/cable models first came along. Everyone was getting pwned none stop. Any RCE could easily be applied by scanning a consumers DSL/cable IP pool and you'd be able to hit a very high %age of them.
NAT totally stopped this.
Moqups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222992 We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.