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April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

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Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#121

Post by ReverendBayes »

yen223 wrote: post #12
bstar77 wrote: post #3

Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product. Judging by the comments, leaving it to HNers as a group would have just resulted in a faster usb drive.

Representative quote: "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. "

I almost choked on my lunch laughing after re-reading that. I remember reading the original thread and actually agreeing with him, without the slightest chuckle. Im amazed at how most people still find it hard to find pictures in their filesystems on their pcs. But think about it, how many people carry .jpg, .jpeg, .png etc file associations in their heads? Hilarious.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#122

Post by Osiris »

unavoidable wrote: post #118
Osiris wrote: post #117

I loved this comment: > 1. 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. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. Trivially use three different systems to simulate some type of not quite automatic syncing. Why do Linux users ofte…

I suppose you have to come at it from the mindset of those actually using Linux. That is, if it already exists and can be glued together using open tools (as opposed to having to code it yourself), it is "trivial", since it has already been done before.

Trivial: of little worth or importance; relating to or being the mathematically simplest case

Trivial means the simplest case. Dropbox is clearly, in this case, the simplest case when compared to other possible solutions.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#123

Post by Geee »

Osiris wrote: post #117

I loved this comment: > 1. 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. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. Trivially use three different systems to simulate some type of not quite automatic syncing. Why do Linux users ofte…

Well, I have noticed that Linux users tend to approach problems selfishly, i.e. "How can I solve this problem for myself?" and the solution is trivial in such case.

However, the question is actually "How can this problem be solved for all people, including my mom?", and when posed as such, the solution needs to be much simpler.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#124

Post by yid »

swalsh wrote: post #119

Read the comments there. Now come back. This is why you don't ask engineers for business advice. I can't tell you how many times I've come up with an idea I think is great, go to work, and talk to my buddies in firmware. The first thing almost all the time out of their mouth is basically "why don't use solution x, in addition to y, which will basically give you the same thing" where x and y are great technologies, bu…

Sounds like your engineer friends just gave you a way to implement your business idea, why aren't you selling it?

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#125

Post by alecdbrooks »

fit2rule wrote: post #36
bstar77 wrote: post #3

Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product. Judging by the comments, leaving it to HNers as a group would have just resulted in a faster usb drive.

I think a far more insidious fact is that Dropbox fills in a gap left wide open by incompetent OS developers. Its the 21st Century - the OS should be providing such features inherently, without requiring a third party involvement. Maybe HN'ers, at that time, were somehow conscious of this fact, and thus declined to 'see the revolution' that was headed their way. Either way, since there was no other option, Dropbox wa…

Apple has started to do that with iCloud [0] and to a lesser extent, AirDrop [1]. But aside from Apple hardware, iCloud only supports Windows laptops and desktops — no official Linux, Android, or Blackberry support.

[0]: https://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

[1]: http://www.macworld.com/article/2048737/get-to-know-ios-7-ai...

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#126

Post by throwaway15 »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #39

Honestly, I still think the idea of dropbox is ludicrous. There are many ways to share files, and sending them to a third party to host for you is the worst one of them all. Aside from the few people that really need to multiply their bandwith by many orders of magnitude, a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine. Besides, dropbox was just yet another iteration of on…

"a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine"

For your own sake, I hope you get more real-world experience before making investment decisions or building technology to sell. To you, somehow the existence of a massively profitable, multi-billion dollar company must be evidence of people's irrationality and not an unmet need.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#128

Post by jervisfm »

singular wrote: post #74

Though they have been very successful, it's a pity that in my experience they have turned into something of a big co in the way they deal with customers and quite sneakily hide important technical limitations from hackers who might want to use them. After a year or two of happy premium-paying use, I noticed dropbox was using 100% of my CPU. Some googling suggested this was due to having too many files. Ok, fair enoug…

Not to dismiss the problems you have encountered, but I too use dropbox heavily with 100k+ files. Not as much as you do but still quite a bit more than the average user.

I had tried out other common services (Google Drive, Skydrive) and they all choked with that large of a file collection. Skydrive would just crash and exit whereas Google drive had issues with file uploads. And both of these had terrible CPU usage (it was basically at 100%) which is not good for a laptop. This was a couple of months ago, so may be their syncing client have improved since then to deal with large file collections.

Dropbox on the other hand was the only one able to handle my humongous file collection with no sweat. But as you point out it too has its limits. It's good to know that once one gets past/at 300k+ files, there are likely to be issues. I agree with you it will be good for Dropbox to publicly acknowledge the true limits they have in their service.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#129

Post by Osiris »

thecoffman wrote: post #116

Straight from Drew himeself: data's stored on s3, and encrypted before storage -- there'll be another option to enter in an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer (kind of like what mozy does.) It is sad to me that this never came to pass. I guess the desire to offer a web interface overrode the idea of encrypting the files before they left…

It's possible that encryption would have caused problems with their deduplication code since a single file is deduped across multiple accounts.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#130

Post by swamp40 »

swalsh wrote: post #119

Read the comments there. Now come back. This is why you don't ask engineers for business advice. I can't tell you how many times I've come up with an idea I think is great, go to work, and talk to my buddies in firmware. The first thing almost all the time out of their mouth is basically "why don't use solution x, in addition to y, which will basically give you the same thing" where x and y are great technologies, bu…

> This is why you don't ask engineers for business advice.

Too funny! And true.

"Show HN" is brutal.

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