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rakoo

Who would have thought a simple FTP-on-some-server would have been so complicated. Thanks for the post!

I'm eagerly waiting for the blog post about how bazel and torrents are used.

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Who describes Dropbox as the same as FTP?

Cynical HN commenters from a decade ago. It's pretty hilarious in retrospect.

Oh, right, I'd forgotten about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 It's definitely comical in retrospect for not even understanding the state of the technology at the time.

I know the comment is today taken as the high of HN negativity, but to me the comment seems very reasonable.

- Back then there were FTP clients that automatically kept server and client in sync, which is the main feature of Dropbox. Dropbox adds a website, but Windows Explorer already supports FTP nativly. Of course easily creating shared links turned out to be a major thing, but I don't think we can blame people for not predicting that (especially since public folders are a feature of FTP servers, so it's not a new feature, just a lot more convinience). And of course Dropbox makes all that convinient and approachable, but that's easily overlooked by the technical user.

- The comment points out that contrary to the headline Dropbox will not replace USB drives. And here we are, a decade later, and Dropbox indeed didn't replace USB drives.

Of course in hindsight it's clear that Dropbox was a great idea with great execution, but that wasn't obvious at the time at all.

I was just thinking that having used various FTP/SFTP-as-a-filesystem, not to mention NFS and SMB, over a decade or so before Dropbox arrived made the sales pitch immediately obvious: do you want everything to be slow and unreliable, with frequent jank even on fast networks, or not?

Well, SMB worked a decade ago and still does. Main difference is that it works better on local networks.

“Works” in the sense that the experience is acceptable but anyone who's used it knows that while things have gotten a little better over the years there are still a wide range of programs which handle latency by blocking. If you use a network home directory, you just get used to Outlook, Word, etc. sporadically hanging for a few seconds before the UI paints, etc.

That's going to be worse as a function of latency and packet loss so it's far more tolerable in an enterprise environment using wired networks with tons of bandwidth and, at least theoretically, a professional support team. Over WiFi or consumer-grade internet (i.e. probably a strong majority of Dropbox's customers) the gap in experience is going to be more substantial.

I am not sure if SMB is used over the Internet by "customers".

It's heavily used over VPNs. I have seen SMB over the internet by [ill-advised] companies but the various waves of exploits have probably put an end to that.

The main point was just that something like SMB or NFS is not a good fit for a network which is not extremely fast and highly reliable because too many programs do blocking I/O. Dropbox works really well in that situation because it's asynchronous and that advantage was huge when they came out because everything was even worse back in 2007.

I wrote "customers", not in the sense of "companies". With the later ones I get paid to wait if I have to use SMB.

To be fair: FTP makes it pretty easy to see if a file is uploaded. With Dropbox you always have to double check ...

How frequently do you find their UI badging to be inaccurate? I’m not sure I ever have caught it reporting the wrong state.

I'm also curious how torrents are used and why.

I would guess that they do something similar to Facebook.

Ars covered what Facebook do about 6 years ago, and even then I think they'd been using it for a few years:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/04/exclu...

I believe Twitter does something similar too.

MSN Hotmail and Messenger used torrents to distribute binaries in 2006. It's not new nor novel.

And I'm sure someone did it before they did.

What binaries did MSN Hotmail have? It was the earlier web mail incarnation of outlook.com?

The Hotmail front-end ran as an ISAPI filter inside IIS.

Messenger had lots of standalone binaries for different functions: CS, SB, DP, etc.

BitTorrent is used in Dropbox, Twitter, MSN, etc to distribute binaries throughout the server platform, not to end users.

Twitter dis use BitTorrent for deploying, in a project called murder: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/murder-fas...

Not sure they're still using this

This has to be HN at its worst. Reducing a complicated file sharing and collaboration tool to an insecure and highly technical protocol.

Dropbox: I can upload a file super easily and share a simple & secure link with someone who just has a web browser.

FTP: I can upload a file to an FTP server I've either configured on my server or rented online. I'll then provide an FTP url to friend with instructions on how they should login and what FTP client they should use on their chosen device.

EDIT: This could be sarcasm, if I didn't pick up on then feel free to downvote me to hell.

EDIT 2: Thanks to the comments, this is sarcasm. I messed up. Sorry rakoo.

This is a parody. From the original Dropbox announcement on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Unfortunately, similar parodies are posted as a reaction to many Dropbox-related posts, so gets a bit repetitive.

It does indeed, but I feel like it's an important part of HN (some people arrive here allthc time) and retrospecting about it is something all engineers should do, so I felt the need to point at I again.

For completion sake and closer on the story, here's the same account 11 years later reflecting on himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661824

It's probably in reference to a HN comment on Dropbox's original announcement post that said the product was a glorified version of Rsync. To be fair to that commenter, he congratualted the company in it's IPO post.

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