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Congrats Dropbox

blog.ycombinator.com

181–190 of 285 posts

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.

> Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good. Well... https://syncthing.net/

No iOS support that I can discern. A deal breaker for me.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#182

Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)

It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel…

Well put.

Also, one thing I think people ignore is that BrandonM's comment was notable because it was voted to the top.

Which means that the people reading and voting on the thread, at the time, thought it was the best reply. But no one will ever point a finger at them, because they're anonymous. They also have less chance for self-reflection - who remembers an upvote?

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good. Well... https://syncthing.net/

No iOS support that I can discern. A deal breaker for me.

ownCloud is also similar and has an iOS client.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#184
post #48

By the way Jessica, you told me that year that if one of us went public you'd do a keg stand. Just let me know in advance when that's going to happen so I can book a flight :)

Oh shit.

Please livestream it! Here's the man page... [1]

[1] https://m.wikihow.com/Do-a-Keg-Stand

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good. Well... https://syncthing.net/

No iOS support that I can discern. A deal breaker for me.

:(

https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#186
post #115

dhouston, what ever happened to the option of "an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889

Spideroak is what you're looking for, I use it and I'm happy with it.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.

I think there's another point to be learned from both the Dropbox comment and CmdrTaco's original infamous iPod take. And that's the importance of a really well-designed product that's simple and easy to use. Both Dropbox and the iPod weren't the first to try to solve the problems they were addressing, but they were the most elegant, intuitive solution. Both implementations effectively got out of the way of their use…

There was nothing intuitive about the iPod click-wheel interface; in casual use of other people's iPods I never did determine how to use it before it was superseded by touchscreens.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#188

Congratulations! What a consistent drama free run. Also, resisted an acquisition offer from Steve Jobs!

When I read that Drew rejected Jobs' offer I couldn't believe it. Big props for backing yourself and growing it larger than the offer.

If Jobs did succeed in acquiring Dropbox, it would have been shuttered and the tech would have been absorbed by the iCloud borg, depriving us from the Dropbox product.

Thanks for that!

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#189

Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)

It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel…

It seems funny now looking at retrospective that neither Drew or Brandon said anything about syncing on Mobile. Congrats Dropbox!

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#190
post #57
post #20

This is nice from a business-perspective. But, stepping back ... I'm sure that a lot of the folks here would agree that something as basic as file-sync should be a standard part of any OS, and follow a non-proprietary protocol. So whereas they have turned something that should have been a commodity into a profitable business, I'm not sure what we have achieved here.

Drew and Arash went to MIT, where their everyday computing environment was UNIX systems with home directories on AFS. For those who haven't used it, AFS is a networked filesystem sort of like NFS, except with a better authentication model and the ability to support failover on the server side. AFS, NFS, Coda, 9P, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, FTP, Windows roaming profiles, AFP, etc. were all around and (to varying levels) built…

Live-synchronization became a thing when the use-model of the internet shifted from always-connected to sometimes-connected. I don't think that nobody ever thought of this synchronization model before. I mean, it's pretty close to rsync or git.
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