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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

That sounds like some kind of weird google interface issue. Maybe try using IMAP or POP or whatever standard they still deign to support.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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