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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check the price of flash memory again. That $15 card is almost certainly a scam.

At least if bought from Amazon. It will happily accept writing 512 GB to it, but it's not stored anywhere.

Yep that burned me once. Lesson learned.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#113

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,…

> 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...

Yes. Holy crap, you actually found the original.

There was a recording of a presentation Drew gave later on about Dropbox, but it wasn't as good. This is definitely the original.

Thanks for the memories!

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#114
post #85
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Important to note here that Dan has been for years asking people to understand this comment in the context of the time and circumstances it was written. It's not a dunk on Dropbox. It's not the "less space than a Nomad" iPod comment on Slashdot. It was helpful and constructive criticism for Houston's YC application --- very specifically the application itself. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&…

> "less space than a Nomad"

I actually thought that was a valid comment, more so than the Dropbox one. The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

The iPod "won" on account of fashion, style and marketing. Yes, the Slashdot comment was naive in underestimating or ignoring the power of Apple, but objectively it wasn't wrong. Apple released an inferior product and used out-of-band techniques to sell it.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#115
post #106
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which just goes to show how trigger happy people are about labeling things as LLM generated. People forget that LLMs were trained on writing on the internet, so it's going to sound how the average person writes!

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#116

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…

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

But you can just use any cloud blob storage provider (including the big ones) along with the rclone utility. rclone supports many.

I even use rclone to sync photos to OneDrive I can then share with family/friends.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.

Tell me you have no interest in your own data without telling me you have no interest in your own data.

How is a local copy not the best way to store data?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally: click the paper clip logo in Gmail, tap files, pick your file. You can also just go into the files app, tap and hold, tap copy, go to Gmail tap and hold in your draft email, tap paste. There’s other paths that work too, like hitting the “send to” logo in files and then selecting Gmail. It’s really the exact same patterns I might use on a computer for the most part.

Google will often convert it to a gdrive thing instead. So you're not sending the file, just a link to the file uploaded somewhere. I'm not sure what heuristic it uses, but sometimes when mailing photos like half of them are included in the mail and half automagically uploaded to gdrive instead.

That sounds like some kind of weird google interface issue. Maybe try using IMAP or POP or whatever standard they still deign to support.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#119
post #37

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…

It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to g…

The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition.

While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#120

I think I've spent more on dropbox, lifetime, than most other subscriptions (it's also the first service i thought was worth paying a subscription for). I still pay for it. Drew built a great service. On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. All I care about is packrat and good syncing. Is there anybody that loves anything they've built in the last fifteen y…

> All I care about is packrat and good syncing.

That’s also what I care about, but the atrocious client (and the m1 thing) and the constant nagging in the web interface was too much. I cancelled and now use a mixture of icloud, airdrop, and rsync/sftp with remote servers.

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