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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#101

Post by al_borland »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #5
georgel wrote: post #2

The circle is complete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature. Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files,…

> It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.

Is this the video you're thinking of?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#102

Post by mananaysiempre »

watermelon0 wrote: post #35
sillysaurusx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people I know e-mail files to themselves It would be nice if that still worked. My resume exists in an iCloud drive, and I spent ten minutes on my phone trying to figure out how to attach it to a gmail message before giving up. "Copying" a file isn't even a well-defined operation anymore. (Or at least "pasting" doesn't always paste it.)

Sharing files between apps and file management in general on iOS is atrocious. I assumed this was a solved problem before Windows 98 (first desktop OS I used), but Apple cannot get this right 28 years later.

Funnily enough, Windows 98 is the first OS I remember with a sharing menu (“Send To”, which is memorable to me because the official Russian localization of it was suggestive of an obscenity). It seemed so pointless back then.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#103

Post by MiddleEndian »

postalcoder wrote: post #98
MiddleEndian wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. Honestly that's what I love about it. I work on something on my desktop. Then when I go to my laptop, everything is there too. It's great. When I get another computer I can just enable Dropbox, walk away, and all my projects, notes, pictures, etc. will be there. I pay them some amount of money per month and it just w…

I generally have not thought about how Dropbox spent its money until I visited the web interface, which has been redesigned for the tenth time over, and remembered that there’s still no way to see how much space your folders are taking up.

I guess I already know roughly how much space they're taking up since I just check how much space I'm using in my dropbox directory on one of my computers. From my perspective, Dropbox basically has no User Interface, but a fantastic User Experience.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#104

Post by debo_ »

browningstreet wrote: post #10

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to s…

> With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated

Good pun!

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#105

Post by eikenberry »

browningstreet wrote: post #10

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to s…

> Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it [..]

Why not keep using B2? You didn't mention why you were leaving that platform when it seems like a decent solution to your problem.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#106

Post by defen »

jedberg wrote: post #6
gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Edit: Read the comment below, it's information I should have included in the first place. It's important to note that the comment was helpful at the time, and only became a meme later.

If OP hadn't written his reply to 'dhouston 19 years ago I for sure would have flagged it as LLM-generated.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#107

Post by matsemann »

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?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#108

Post by sillysaurusx »

tyler71 wrote: post #81
sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature. Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files,…

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...

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#109

Post by orochimaaru »

gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

I think it’s more of an ease of use issue. When I was in grad school, I used to cycle my work between dev on a MacBook and heavy processing work on a desktop. This was 2011/2012.

Dropbox helped here. They had a Linux client and a Mac client and kept both in sync.

Mine was somewhat of a niche use case. I think every one who cycled between Linux and Mac for their daily work back then thought - yeah I can definitely use those tools but an automatic sync would be nice.

What Dropbox didn’t have was a moat that comes with android or iOS. I use iCloud now since my need to move between different devices doesn’t exist anymore.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#110

Post by BorisMelnik »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #99
gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

Don't forget CVS I still use it for NetSBD source I use FTP mirrors for various source code I use FTP for moving files to and from mobile phones I have never used Dropbox. That company made some people wealthy no doubt but that doesn't help me I also use USB sticks extensively, e.g., primarily for booting computers, but also for data storage I have broken a couple when using them in non-NetBSD OS but never lost one

I am just like you except for the netbsd source part, and I have my own private cloud/nas with virtualization. I also at one point just started using AWS S3 as my personal dropbox on chrome for sharing files with myself, since I backup encrypted snapshots there from my cloud anyway.

but I think there are many people out there that love a gui for storing files in the cloud. i know my parents/parents friends' all use it.

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