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Congrats Dropbox

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Re: Congrats Dropbox

#231

Post by debt »

BrandonM wrote: post #156
dhouston wrote: post #90

Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)

It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel…

Your original HN comment perfectly captures the quintessential HN user at the time. I feel like every “Show HN” thread has those types of responses of like trivially explaining away all the hard work with just a few “simple” hacks.

I think the typical HN user has morphed a bit at this point(re: crypto) but it’s great to be able to reference the totally aloof engineer that existed at that time.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#232

Post by umeshunni »

gspetr wrote: post #223
umeshunni wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung isn't privately held. It's listed in the Seoul market as KRX:005930

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non-go... See reference at the bottom: "Samsung is not to be confused with its publicly traded subsidiary Samsung Electronics"

Thanks. I also found this: "the Samsung Group comprised 59 unlisted companies and 19 listed companies"

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#233

Post by TheCoelacanth »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #77
drstewart wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to instead!"

Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.

I think it is a reasonable comment, even in hindsight. It didn't dismiss the idea completely like CmdrTaco did, it just offered three criticisms of the business plan. All three points are real issues that Dropbox faced. They obviously dealt with all of them successfully, but there was no guarantee that any company in the space would deal with those issues successfully.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#234

Post by vampatori »

cvaidya1986 wrote: post #21

Congratulations! What a consistent drama free run. Also, resisted an acquisition offer from Steve Jobs!

Well, not quite drama free.. their security failed resulting in 60+ million customer login details being let into the wild.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#235

Post by ijafri »

Overwhelmingly excited for Dropbox IPO, it’s truly both inspiring and has huge utility.. phuck GoogleDrive and lolwut iCloud Drive. Dropbox also proved regardless of how small you may be, if you do it right in a way humans will like it., you can always stay ahead of the competition.. I meant Google Drive was a pretty rad competition but they didn’t even get the sync icon right .. too ugly for my taste.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#236

Post by yani »

rmason wrote: post #143

What's with the Boston VC's? The minute I saw the original Dropbox video here on HN it looked like a can't miss product. I told all my friends about it. Heck not only did Sequoia invest, but Steve Jobs tried early to buy the entire company. There are some companies where it's easy to see why they were missed. I never saw the point of AirBnB, never would use the service myself. But DropBox had almost universal appeal.

I agree totaly with your comment. I also miss the point with airbnb and dont use it but I know a lot of people who do.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#237

Post by BrandonM »

debt wrote: post #231
BrandonM wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel…

Your original HN comment perfectly captures the quintessential HN user at the time. I feel like every “Show HN” thread has those types of responses of like trivially explaining away all the hard work with just a few “simple” hacks. I think the typical HN user has morphed a bit at this point(re: crypto) but it’s great to be able to reference the totally aloof engineer that existed at that time.

I came to Hacker News through Paul Graham's essays. I learned about Paul Graham because we used ANSI Common Lisp in an elective Common Lisp class. His essays were specifically suggesting that many college-aged techies would benefit from starting a startup instead of going into the traditional workplace.

I bet that describes a lot of the early HN (originally: Startup News) users. I don't think it was really "totally aloof engineers", but instead young geeks without much perspective on the world. Most of us weren't even engineers at that point, by any reasonable definition of the term.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#238

Post by andrewprock »

drstewart wrote: post #61
jl wrote: post #29

Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to instead!"

I recall having the same basic response to http:

"Why would anyone want to keep downloading the same content over and over again when you could just ftp it to your machine?"

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#240

Post by sanbor »

dragonwriter wrote: post #145
alecb wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spearheaded a war that resulted in the deaths of 1+ million Iraqis that was started unilaterally on the pretext of fabricated evidence.

Condoleeza Rice did not spearhead the Iraq War by any reasonable standard. (If you can fairly credit anyone other than President Bush with that, its Vice President Cheney, who was actively pushing for aggressive war with Iraq and arranging for it both before 9/11 in the administration, and even advocating it publicly for many years before joining the administration.) I'm not saying that there might not be some basis…

I'm not familiar enough with the details to deny that she didn't "spearhead" the Iraq War. However I'd like that a person that was involved in the wrong side of decision making for torturing people[1] and defending massive surveillance [2][3] to be as far as posible of a backup company. I suggest to visit http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ and https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/rice.html for more arguments against Rice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Role_in_autho...

[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/18/bush.nsa/

[3] https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/05/14/condoleezza-rice-defe...

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