For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

For those who don't get it, this is a reference to the greatest HN comment of all time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863.

I don't think it's an argument against Dixon's point, but I found this funny because I remember being so impressed with demo of Dropbox at the time. I remember knowing nothing about who Drew was, seeing this on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 and thinking something along the lines of, "that's brilliant, I hope he gets funded so I can use it."

$4bn for an easily replaceable service that is little more than Microsoft Paint duct taped to a disposable camera?

Oh please!

Sure you can recreate the app pretty easily which, you can also do for most services (this does not mean scaling to the users they serve) but that is not the value of the service.

It's also why 'hackers' typically don't make great investors see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Hindsight is 20/20 [1].

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Here's the original Dropbox thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I really enjoy reading Hacker News from time to time. It really reminds me how far removed we are from the actual customers.

It's easy to be a critic.

Dropbox is a prime example of this effect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Honestly, hackers/HN may be the wrong audience to ask this rhetorical question to (not that Sam was specifically asking it to us). The biggest difference of the last 10 years isn't so much the incredible new technology or protocols being built, it's how accessible those are to the everyday person, and how much easier they are to use.

Look at the original HN submission for Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863). The response from a lot of hackers was negative. Why? "We already have rsync." "We have FTP mounted locally with curlftpfs, with SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem + open source tools." That problem was already solved for hackers. But for the 99% of people who aren't hackers, seamlessly sharing files across computers (with backups and a sort of version control built in) was incredible.

There are certainly technologies I love and adore that didn't exist 10 years ago (Twitter, everything being mobile, Uber/Lyft). But what I can do is largely unchanged. For someone who doesn't build things or understand github or use a terminal, however, the world has been revolutionized.

Chris Dixon has pointed out that a lot of the great companies of today are Unix commands made accessible to the everyday person. (Grep->Google, rsync->Dropbox, man->stack overflow, cron->IFTTT). Some are a bit of a stretch (Google != Grep), but an interesting way to think about starting big companies is to think of something really cool or useful that only hackers can do right now.

So, going back to Sam's question, "What was I doing 10 years ago?" It was pretty close to the same. I use almost all of the technologies he mentions, but could probably get by without them. For me, it's much more interesting to consider the question, "What was your mom doing 10 years ago?"

This is a strangely familiar tone of Hacker News...

Remember Dropbox? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306 with these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625818

It's always interesting to look at old predictions– there was that Newsweek article that predicted the Internet was never going to be a big deal [1] (amusing because now Newsweek is online-only), and there were all the negative comments on the launch of the iPhone. [2] Also I believe Drew Houston's "Show HN: Dropbox" thread has a famous "Why would anybody need this, I can do the same with <complicated procedure>" [3].

It's tempting to think, "Ah, people! So terrible at predicting things." I think it's interesting to think about why that is.

The main problem, I think, isn't that people make wrong predictions altogether. It's that it's very hard to see how things will change and evolve over time, and how the ecosystem will change with it. The "One Laptop Per Child" idea [4] sounds a little dated and silly now.

I suppose if we just remember that progress is continuous rather than discrete, and that a lot of seeming limitations can be overcome with currently-unlikely innovations, then a lot of predictions will be forced to be a lot more precise.

Perhaps the Newsweek prediction might've been amended to, "In its present form, the Internet is unlikely to change the world."

The problem with predictions is– things rarely stay in their present forms, and the world around them rarely stays the same, either.

I think pg addresses this in his most recent essay, "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" [5] In his words– "they practically all seemed lame at first."

So we have to learn to live in a world where our initially valid assessments of a thing might become rapidly invalid because of change. And this is where Nassim Taleb's work about the problem of prediction [6] comes into play. Rather than trying to predict a particular outcome, it makes much more sense to focus on evaluating robustness and antifragility– "How will this thing respond to change? What are the potential upsides, what are the potential downsides? What will kill it? What will give it more utility?"

Even if the odds are really low that something might come around, if the payoff is high enough, it might be worth betting on. I think that's the whole point of things like YC.

___

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070116071424/http://www.engadg...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

[5] http://paulgraham.com/altair.html

[6] http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incer...

Back in the day, HN's reaction to Dropbox was also extremely negative [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Neither does, making Dropbox itself, "trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software." [1] :)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I mean, immersive gameplay is a pretty big use case. To me personally, as someone who loves FPS games, that's a huge win. It's worth it to me.

When it comes to making predictions, i'd remind you of this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I agree that it can be interesting and useful to discuss flaws, but potential solutions are what make the discussion worthwhile. Saying "This will never work for X, Y, and Z reasons" creates a much less interesting debate than "This has flaw X, but I think it could be solved by this change. What do you think?"

It frequently appears that people react negatively on HN purely based on instinct, without doing any research. The response to Dropbox's launch is particularly illuminating: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 (I think that every Dropbox user can point out half a dozen ways it is better than FTP or a USB stick)

All of the criticism on the Dropbox post is addressable, but the discussion would have been a lot more interesting if the original commenters pointed out solutions themselves. That shifts the discussion from a feeling of "This will never work" to "Cool idea! Here's how you can make it better." The latter, and not the former, is important to the culture of HN.

This reminds me of the infamous Dropbox comment

(See the second comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 )

In case people miss the reference, see the oft-quoted non sarcastic comment about Dropbox's launch here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> Isn't this hackernews??

This level of negativity is typical for HN. Look at what happened when dhouston announced Dropbox- the second comment was about how any Linux user can trivially replace it for themselves:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I'm not so sure negative criticism is always useful.

First Dropbox attempt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

"The only problem is that you have to install something."

I don't think these things really inhibited Dropbox from taking off.

Dropbox was criticized when it first came up on Show HN. People said that they could create their own and that nobody would adopt installing something.

You can view the original post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Edit: it only had 71 comments and 111 points, and if I'm not mistaken, that's not much by today's standards.

> This quote is so overused it's basically a tech trope.

OK, how about "The only problem is that you have to install something. See, it's not the same as USB drive.", the top comment in response to the Dropbox announcement on HN, 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

It's a cliche because we techies are particularly bad at recognizing the mass-market appeal of products. What seems easy to us can be an unsurmountable hurdle for the target market, and what we may perceive as an unnecessary flourish can turn out to be an essential quality-of-life feature. It's a cliche because we keep doing it.

This comment reminds me of the response Dropbox received when being introduced to ycombinator.

    "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

You are making the same mistake that a lot of programmers make. The value of a product to the user base is almost completely unrelated to the tech they use.

I'm somewhat reminded of when Drew Houston launched Dropbox and showed it to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 The comments are somewhat dismissive.

here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

my favorite comment is definitely this one:

  1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system 
  yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting 
  it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the 
  mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account 
  could be accessed through built-in software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 is a great example (spoiler alert: DropBox)

>Responding to feedback from the ‘wrong’ customers kills so many products/startups.

That's something I wonder about with Show HN. Aren't many of us on HN inherently the 'wrong' customer for any product or service that aspires to be mainstream?

Famously, for example, 10 years back, some of the comments when @dhouston submitted "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive" [1] pretty strongly indicated 'wrong' customer.

I won't pull out the comments, because: 1. I don't want to make it personal & 2. It's with the benefit of hindsight.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> It hit the homepage, but many comments were "I would never trust my data in the cloud" or "Why doesn't everyone use Python/Pandas/SQL".

That's classic HN/slashdot. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Always a good time for linking the Show HN for Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Comments like this is why us developers can't have good things. Just like we hated dropbox because it's oh so trivial to replicate the functionality [1]. ABP took ab blocking mainstream to the level where many non-technical friends started adding ABP as the first addon when they installed Firefox/Chrome, and that's saying a lot.

Is uBlock better? Yes, but uBlock probably wouldn't exist if ABP had not established the market and highlighted the need for ad blocking extensions.

Happy uBlock user (and happy former ABP user).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Don't forget the most famous one, "Why use this [Dropbox]? It's the same as FTP or email"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

In case anyone else was curious:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

That isn't true, the most famous example of HN negativity is Show HN: Dropbox which has been reposted quite a few times on HN since dropbox became dropbox.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306

I don't disagree with everything you said, but if this thing gets traction, this is the HN DropBox thread of the future :)

( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 )

Reference for the uninitiated:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Your comment reminds me to the classic when Dropbox was first shown here

>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

It's the simplicity. That's all. Making things easier and more accessible. I don't know how can I explain it more because that's the whole point of Github Pages, like on their site "Websites for you and your projects". And that's it.

your comment reminds me of the commentary on Drew Houston's announcement of a product called dropbox (you might have heard of it...) here on HN 10 years ago. (1)

"This is nothing new", "I could build this myself", "you have to install something, nobody does that", etc. etc.

The key to a successful company is not being first, not (only) having a great technical solution, and not having tech noone else does.

The key is an umbrella of technology, business sense, marketing ability, salesmanship and much more. Andreeses/Horowwitz probably see a whole umbrella, and not only the tech.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I'm not an ActivityPub user, but this post remindeds me of the initial comments to "Show HN: Dropbox" [1].

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I think this is 2018's version of "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

This led me to find another loosely related but very entertaining piece of dropbox history. The original "Show HN" post: [1]. It's funny to see so much skepticism knowing now what the company became.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Not really the same, but this reminds me of the top comment of the Dropbox announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> Yikes, when did HN become so full of haters?

Since at least 2007. I'm sure we all remember the warm reception the Dropbox Show HN[0] got?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863