Hacker News Reader

Comment by Msurrow | Hacker News Reader

Like when dropbox was first presented posted here on HN (before it was called dropbox), and the the top comments were all like “pssch.. no one will ever use that. Just use rsync”. A HN classic

Edit - to op: post it because you find it interesting to work with and ignore all the know-it-alls. Maybe people will care, maybe not, but whatever. Do it because you like it.

View on HN

Just in case you (or others) haven’t seen it, I’d recommend dang’s comment from around a year ago about the Dropbox comment in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27068148

You're right most people are wrong but don't know how wrong they are. It took me 30 years to learn how frequently I am wrong. Just do The Four Agreements from the eponymous book (the book's not worth the read IMO)

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word. 2. Don't Take Anything Personally. (Most people are wrong) 3. Don't Make Assumptions. 4. Always Do Your Best.

This is a tangent but why do you think The Four Agreements is not worth reading. Its been on my reading list for a while.

After you see the four agreements make sense to me, you may not need the mystic nature of the book.

I thought the book was good, but I listened to the audiobook narrated by Peter Coyote which was excellent.

"Hindsight fallacy" seems almost universal. Jerry and I will someday soon be presenting a series of coffee experiments. I told my college roommate one of them, and he said "isn't that the result you'd expect?"

Everyone can say that after the fact. Everyone DOES say that after the fact. It's just barely possible to forget that you know the result and put yourself in the mind of people who don't. I always ask "what things are YOU doing now that will look ridiculous in 40 years?"

In my book I used the novel approach to the Xerox Star, mainly so that the characters would not know how it turns out. I had to be judicious in how I treated Unix, C, and AI, since we really did talk about them back then, but no winking at the reader is allowed.

“No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.”

It's part of timing the market. Dropbox wouldn't have the market fit 5 or 10 years before. As people have become less technical and as devices multiplied and as people became more willing to spend on this category of customer products it became a winner.

Rsync is easy for those who used it. That number (people who knew rsync) declined but less so here. Hn users were not natural customers but even that changed

There were already user-friendly cloud storage services available long before, e.g. integrating as virtual drive on Windows. I believe the only thing Dropbox did differently was marketing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com