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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

cnbc.com

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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#181

Post by sieabahlpark »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #158
swyx wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sad that going viral on social media is the only functional support system for many tech companies. good luck hope you get your mom's stuff.

I was selling a GPU on Facebook marketplace during covid. The description was that the card was good for gaming or “turning dinosaurs into clean money”. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. I sold a rifle legally on an online auction site. The buyer was offered to pay with PayPal they were given the option to use. The buyer took that option, making me break PayPal TOS. Banned permanently and no way to…

[dead]

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#182

Post by resters »

A few years ago Dropbox just stopped working for the basic thing it is supposed to do -- let me access lots of files without taking up tons of local drive space. Since then I have not stopped using/paying, but i have stopped counting on it and I have stopped adding new files to it, sharing files with it, etc.

The constant marketing for "dropbox for business" (which is priced badly and is not something I've ever felt comfortable recommending to any business) was also quite irritating.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#183

Post by hylaride »

matsemann wrote: post #107
hylaride wrote: post #21

Dropbox was an excellent service back in the day. Then they re-wrote their desktop apps (I think in python?) and it never synced cleanly after that. I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.

It was python from the start ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8892 ), but maybe the 2to3 migration, or just a general rewrite you're thinking of?

There was a "major" change in the agent roughly a decade ago. Dropbox went from being a simple folder sync tool to a much more bloated agent that never synced cleanly. I don't know if they just moved away from some modules that were written in C or something, but I gave up on it soon after.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#184

Post by Aaargh20318 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #170
mistersquid wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad. You're cherry-picking your "technicals". The click wheel hardware and software implementation (especially the UI response time) was (and still is) revolutionary. iPod won on the technical merits; just not the ones you're focusing.

The anti-Apple crowd on here loves to crow about how Apple only wins on marketing. Look I find the ads cringe as fuck too, but let's not pretend that the hardware isn't much, much better than average. Better than all? No certainly not, Apple's build quality loses out to plenty of much more premium products. But it generally sits head and shoulders above the average build quality of any given product category, which s…

The thing with Apple products is that they may not be the best at every single spec but they usually have the best overall package.

You can find a laptop that is better in one aspect, but it will be worse in others.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#185

Post by tibbydudeza »

lostlogin wrote: post #88
browningstreet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted a forever backup. I'm going to trust Apple and a hard drive.

Ah yes, the famously reliable Time Machine.

TM was a hack - iCloud is pretty good I reckon - for the millions of devices they have in the market there has been the only odd complaint from somebody on twitter making headlines with a Technorati type of following about user accounts mysterious being deleted or blocked (poor customer support) or some weird syncing issues when moving to a new device and the old device is still in use.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#186

Post by dhouston »

swyx wrote: post #131
joshmn wrote: post #128

If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy): I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is…

sad that going viral on social media is the only functional support system for many tech companies. good luck hope you get your mom's stuff.

Fair criticism. The tricky part though with any scaled service is that for every legitimate case like this, there are many more bad actors trying to hijack accounts through exactly this mechanism -- so account recovery has to be conservative by default, which means legitimate cases sometimes get caught in the friction. Not an excuse, but it's a hard problem at scale and not just e.g. a cost-cutting thing or not giving a shit.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#187

Post by tibbydudeza »

joshmn wrote: post #128

If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy): I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is…

This must be one hell of an edge case - glad to see you are "free" :).

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#188

Post by varun_ch »

jeffbee wrote: post #50
hylaride wrote: post #21

Dropbox was an excellent service back in the day. Then they re-wrote their desktop apps (I think in python?) and it never synced cleanly after that. I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.

The biggest lesson I learned working at Dropbox was how toxic python is. If you have an unmanageable python code base, and hire Guido himself to help you fix it, he'll dig you into an even deeper hole and then quit. Which honestly was an extension of my experience at Google. When I left Google for Dropbox, python at Google was also in crisis. These two companies cemented my "python: not even once" stance.

TIL the creator of Python worked at Dropbox for 6 years.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#189

Post by tyler71 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #108
tyler71 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pcloud with the public folder works well. I've uploaded a few html ebooks with relative routing and it has worked fine.

Where's the public folder? I tried uploading an html file but can't get a direct link to it: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ6NzI5ZoJ0CG3nPXqBF...

https://www.pcloud.com/help/general-help-center/what-is-the-...

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#190

Post by bmurphy1976 »

joshmn wrote: post #128

If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy): I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is…

Oh man, sorry to hear that. I had a secondary Dropbox account I used for a few small but important documents. At some point I somehow lost the 2FA factor, and I don't know how as I've managed to keep the 2FA for every other one of my services across multiple app/os/phone installs.

Anyway, I reached out to their support for help and they were utterly useless. I had a couple weeks of back and forth with them before giving up. I hope I never actually need those docs.

I hope you have a better outcome than I did.

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