151–160 of 181 posts
The secret to success: Trust in yourself, nobody else is going to trust in you.
Another secret to success: have good parenting, DNA, education, friends, and an interest in creating things of value (as opposed to the other million things you can do with your time)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another secret to success: have good parenting, DNA, education, friends, and an interest in creating things of value (as opposed to the other million things you can do with your time)
Those things are harder to control, so generally less worth thinking about.
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 type of response is so typical of an engineer and so out-of-touch. Not to pick on it, but it's just absurd, and shows zero ability to put oneself in the shoes of the layman. And yet these types of responses are all over the tech community. This disconnect is the exact reason someone like Steve Jobs is able to enter product categories very late but still blow away the competition.
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…
Which one of these is actually obscure? curlftpfs is just a remote mount tool, SVN/CVS/FTP - I don't think I have to say anything about them given we are on hacker news. And seriously, setting up a repository on a remotely mounted folder is a challenge?
If I would want to answer your post with as much polemic as you put into yours I'd ask why Windows users always need a specialized malware and adware infused tool just to solve simple tasks such as batch renaming a few hundred images.
Also, you have to remember the context of that comment. Dropbox was just some obscure third party client back then that you couldn't even get from your package manager.
Don't get me wrong, I do see the use case of Dropbox, especially for those without a technical background. But I don't understand the perceived reverence Dropbox gets in this thread.
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…
>> 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. This type of response is so typical of an engineer and so out-of-touch. Not to pick on it, but it's just absurd, and shows zero ability…
I remember being sceptical at the time (lots of people were). The consensus here on HN seemed to be that Dropbox was trying to solve a problem Microsoft had already tried to solve a million times (file-sync) and the fact that Microsoft had never been able to sell it and get a decent user-base for their service was proof that this wasn't something people actually wanted. Funny how a good enough implementation and good…
> I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it. It might be the fact that it's Windows-only. I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems.
I don't understand your point. If you only use Windows what is holding you back from using SkyDrive? (Except that it is US hosted and you must assume all that data is public, but Dropbox is no different there.)
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…
>> 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. This type of response is so typical of an engineer and so out-of-touch. Not to pick on it, but it's just absurd, and shows zero ability…
FTP with curlftpfs and SVN/CVS isn't "trivial" to 99.9% of the population!
It's the same reason that sites like SlashDot were filled with all sorts of reasons why the iPad would never work. Why would you use that?!? You could do the same thing with ______.
Yes, you could. But you won't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it may not be of much comfort to you, but sometimes naysayers are important. Even if they are wrong about the overall trajectory, they may in the process of naysaying point out specific weaknesses that the visionaries might have missed, and, thus, ultimately allow for the success of the product.
Careful! A lot of would be Drew Houston's end up discouraged by naysayers. As a founder, it took me a while to know who to listen to. One of the toughest things about doing a startup is people telling you you're wrong all the time. One of the things YC (and pg in particular) gets right is that they're very encouraging of potential for success.
I think this is one of the more troubling aspects of entrepreneurship. Most of today's really big, wildly successful tech companies sounded like really dumb ideas when they were first launched. I wonder how many Googles/Facebooks were never founded because their founders were discouraged by naysayers??
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…
Anyway, do you realize who uses Dropbox? Many are people in IT related fields and it is simpler and quicker to share files than asking their sysadmin's to setup an FTP or allow file-sharing or use VPN etc. It just works and you don't have to get into all this nonsense of helping your friends configuring FTP clients.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it. It might be the fact that it's Windows-only. I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems.
> I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems. I don't understand your point. If you only use Windows what is holding you back from using SkyDrive? (Except that it is US hosted and you must assume all that data is public, but Dropbox is no different there.)