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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#81
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,…

pcloud with the public folder works well. I've uploaded a few html ebooks with relative routing and it has worked fine.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#82
post #56
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Drive has gotten inexplicably cheap for Workspace users, too.

They've raised prices a lot over the last few years while reducing the storage you get.

The pricing is weird. If you want to buy à la carte storage, it appears to be $40/TB/month for business and $30/TB/month for enterprise:

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/storage/buy-mor...

This is more than S3 charges, but S3 will nickel and dime you aggressively for using that storage depending on your use case.

But $22/month buys an entire Google Workspace seat, which includes 5TB, for an effective $5.50/TB/month, which is quite a good deal. On the other hand, it’s rather lacking in flexibility.

I find this all somewhat confusing. At least one of these offerings does not reflect the underlying cost of the product.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#83

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.)

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.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#85
post #6
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.

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&que...

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#87

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…

I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions. I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard t…

How have you found syncthing's scaling?

I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree changes while that's happening, it gives up and just marks it a conflict to be manually resolved...or silently hangs until I restart it.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wanted a forever backup. I'm going to trust Apple and a hard drive.

Ah yes, the famously reliable Time Machine.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#89

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.)

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.

Thanks. I saw Photos and Drive, and apparently I missed "Attachments".

Still, copy-pasting a file should work. It's unclear what "copy" even does.

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