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Comment by gigatree | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.)

When you get stuck in a task like this, you realize that civilization will collapse with a whimper.

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.

email providers have limits for size. Modern files are huge.

Yeah but it's the silent conversion that irks me. My email is no longer self contained or archivable. When I find it again in the future, the files might be gone.

Anything over 25mb goes out via gdrive if memory serves. That’s at least how it used to be.

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.

Sharing files between apps and file management in general on iOS is atrocious.

I assumed this was a solved problem before Windows 98 (first desktop OS I used), but Apple cannot get this right 28 years later.

At least there is a Files app these days, and many iOS apps interoperate a little bit with “Files”.

Funnily enough, Windows 98 is the first OS I remember with a sharing menu (“Send To”, which is memorable to me because the official Russian localization of it was suggestive of an obscenity). It seemed so pointless back then.

with llms, you'd think we could use email as a passthrough proxy

Tangential to the theme, here is the HN post about the (AFAIK) first public success of deep learning techniques with SuperVision's AlexNet. You can read what their prognosis on the future success of deep learning was (hint: same prognosis as Dropbox)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830

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...

The "viral" point was a good one, and which they solved quite cleverly: as a student I got 10 GB for free, but additional 10 GB for each recruited person. Everyone at campus was on a recruiting spree for a while, to bulk up free storage.

Of course, that doesn't make them money. But millions of users that then had all their files there and kept using it when no longer students (so paying), and recommended it to their places of work etc.

> "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.

It's a category error to compare the two comments at all.

You literally compared them in your comment.

Yes, by pointing out that they are not similar conceptually.

TBF, iPod design was very neat and the nano's were very thin for the time.

> The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

You're cherry-picking your "technicals". The click wheel hardware and software implementation (especially the UI response time) was (and still is) revolutionary.

iPod won on the technical merits; just not the ones you're focusing.

The anti-Apple crowd on here loves to crow about how Apple only wins on marketing. Look I find the ads cringe as fuck too, but let's not pretend that the hardware isn't much, much better than average.

Better than all? No certainly not, Apple's build quality loses out to plenty of much more premium products. But it generally sits head and shoulders above the average build quality of any given product category, which seems to be the niche they most aim for: "the upmarket version of the common offering." That ones that immediately come to mind are Macbooks and iPads.

The thing with Apple products is that they may not be the best at every single spec but they usually have the best overall package.

You can find a laptop that is better in one aspect, but it will be worse in others.

You have to mention the music store. Prior to that, there were few legal ways to get music to put onto the devices.

The first Bitcoin thread is great

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

The lesson I learn repeatedly on the internet is that most people don’t have a single clue what they are talking about.

There is probably something here about human psychology where we underestimate the switching costs of things we have already, and are wired to look at things through the lens of the world we have now.

Absolutely no-one is concerned today about what happens when you dip out of connectivity because fast mobile connectivity was not abundant in 2007 (the iPhone was only released that year), which obviates the "this will never replace a USB" criticism. Mobile made a whole new class of businesses possible.

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!

IMO the only solution is to just upvote things if they’re interesting or useful and downvote them if they’re not

It's already 19 years old? But it's still so fun seeing the same joke in every thread. Again and again. Any time someone can be even hypothetically accused of underestimating complexity of a sleek replacement for a hack system, or the topic can be tied to file sharing apps. It's a lot of fun to be reminded of that comment again and again from a clever bunch on a website with a good sense of humor.

Story time.

Around 2005, I was hired by a company that was building software for USB drives, to build a porn site.

Turns out, they wanted me to build a poc for an authentication solution: some USB drives would have a fingerprint reader and they wanted to build this auth system based on that.

So I built that, but "perplexingly", they didn't get any finance or enough prospect customers, so the project got shelved.

Then, I was handed another project they had on the back burner, a sort of firewall for devices, meant to prevent exfiltration of company documents on unapproved USB drives.

I built the single user version, eg you had to be admin to allow devices and the product sold quite well, even winning some prizes iirc.

We started getting requests to have a centralized admin interface and a way to allow/disallow copying some file types. I started working on the centralized admin and the company hired a very talented engineer to build the file filtering thing. This last thing was based on a windows API that allowed for virtual file systems. Things were ticking along nicely and the company even hired a business manager to try to come up with other products we can build with our existing tech.

One afternoon, over a bunch of cold beers, to link with the hell on earth that happens right now in London, me and this person came up with a cunning plan! What if you sell an 1GB USB drive with an extra 1GB of space?

The plan was simple: plug in the device, you get a drive that's the regular USB drive, but also another drive, backed by the virtual file system thing and a version of my http auth thing, and you would read/write from a server on the Internet.

Big boss liked the idea and I started researching how to get servers and the like, while a third engineer was tasked to build the desktop app needed.

It all came crashing down, days later, when this engineer declared that is not possible to have a windows app minimize to sys tray and the project got cancelled. I left the company not long after that .

This was the story on how a small German-Romanian company could have beat Dropbox.

If it makes them feel any better, I told people in the 90s that the WWW didn't make sense because we already have telnet, archie, gopher, veronica, and ftp. What can WWW give me when I already have those tools to connect with...

In 1993 that was true. In 1998 it was starkly different, due to the advent of DOM, and JavaScript to manipulate it.

I said this either in late 93 or early 94. I was in a class when someone demo'ed Lynx to me, and I tore into it and the WWW. Looking at the timeline it seems that Mosaic came out right after Lynx, but my memory of it has Mosaic coming out way after Lynx. And it seemed like Navigator years after that, but the real history is super compressed. By the time I'd seen Mosaic, I was then pretty convinced of its utility.

In this case, Gopher was a ticking time bomb, as the University of Minnesota was looking to charge money for the server implementation. Tim Berners-Lee was adamant about keeping WWW open and got CERN to agree to release it as public domain. Dropbox has a similar advantage, at least for me: it's not tied to a particular OS vendor or office suite. I can run it on basically anything and have first-class access to all of my files.

Don't forget CVS

I still use it for NetSBD source

I use FTP mirrors for various source code

I use FTP for moving files to and from mobile phones

I have never used Dropbox. That company made some people wealthy no doubt but that doesn't help me

I also use USB sticks extensively, e.g., primarily for booting computers, but also for data storage

I have broken a couple when using them in non-NetBSD OS but never lost one

I am just like you except for the netbsd source part, and I have my own private cloud/nas with virtualization. I also at one point just started using AWS S3 as my personal dropbox on chrome for sharing files with myself, since I backup encrypted snapshots there from my cloud anyway.

but I think there are many people out there that love a gui for storing files in the cloud. i know my parents/parents friends' all use it.

it was a moment in time, but at a past company I implemented svn on top of Dropbox for the team to share code remotely. and it worked just fine

Maybe this is sarcasm and I just didn't catch it, but I think Dropbox made a mark, and a good one at that.

The tool strangely still has a certain something that I reach for from time to time. Cross-platform(cross-era even, I just used it to move something off an ancient Windows 10 install), painless sync, painless auth, painless sharing(or not), painless updates, simple billing that isn't so high I have to factor it into my plans, and the app doesn't try to ramp my price based on how many devices I access my data from. It's just a good piece of software at a good price.

Commercially they did just fine as well according to the article: $6B in market cap, $2B/yr rev and $2B personally for Drew. Maybe not the top of YC leaderboard, but well above average.

I want more services like this one, and will keep paying for my modest storage amount until they tell me to go.

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

The crazy part is, you pretty much can just do this yourself now, simply by pasting the famous HN comment into a good agentic AI.

While I understand and respect DanG's perspective as well as the original poster's, that comment is never not going to be funny and I'm unwilling to pretend otherwise. That said, everybody who revisits the Dropbox comment thread for a laugh really should take some time to read the rest of it. It represents a high-water mark in HN comment quality, as well as an interesting harbinger of future star power in the startup community. Some other people participating in that thread ultimately did good work and made a name for themselves, not just Drew.

My tools are syncthing + samba: Mac Mini running Syncthing to sync the iCloud folder to my local linux server which is also running Syncthing. Linux folder synced is exposed as SMB share so I can access it from other systems.

I think it’s more of an ease of use issue. When I was in grad school, I used to cycle my work between dev on a MacBook and heavy processing work on a desktop. This was 2011/2012.

Dropbox helped here. They had a Linux client and a Mac client and kept both in sync.

Mine was somewhat of a niche use case. I think every one who cycled between Linux and Mac for their daily work back then thought - yeah I can definitely use those tools but an automatic sync would be nice.

What Dropbox didn’t have was a moat that comes with android or iOS. I use iCloud now since my need to move between different devices doesn’t exist anymore.

Only took 19 years!

or, run your own Hotline server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

The upcoming Claude Brandon release will make Dropbox obsolete.

It has become true now though!

I have a subscription which I want to cancel but can’t because there are other users. Basic features require upgrading.

Finally realized what Steve Jobs said was true: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

Or maybe he did

"...building a net worth of more than $2 billion..." - congrats Drew and team! For all the critics, from day 1, the founders are billionaires / early employees at least in the 10s if not 100s of millions -- and so much value created for people syncing files around the world -- while hackers are still saying "...but rsync"

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