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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a first-class HN contributor, and has been for many years.

> I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

The full comment by dang has more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281

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Furthermore, he was only wrong on point #3.

People make fun of this post on account of Dropbox having been a commercial success, but the first points are still valid (and even more true today, with modern tooling) that FOSS self-hosted solutions are far better, more flexible, and serve as a learning/building opportunity - something the 2022 world of vendor lock-in, dumbed-down "user friendly" solutions, and vast data collection sorely needs more of.

They were also very right about one critical point:

> without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Dropbox was initially pitched as a free service, which was absolutely not sustainable, and someone would have been right to be very skeptical about the underlying business model. People might not have been quite as enthusiastic if they'd said from the beginning "oh, and it'll be $100/year for the rest of your life, or until you get your shit together and move your data elsewhere".

It was generally an in good faith comment specifically about the application.

The relevant bit to this is the “quite trivially” do X, Y, and Z non trivial thing.

Technical people often underestimate the value of good UX, generally there’s a lot of demand for it. That’s also where a lot of the value is in making something good. He also acknowledges as much in his reply to Drew.

In this case the “main benefit” of the flipper being ease of use, software, and hardware vs. some random components off of Ali express just reminds me of that.

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