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Just in case anyone doesn't recognize this quote, it is from the 2007 hacker news post about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.yco

Just in case anyone doesn't recognize this quote, it is from the 2007 hacker news post about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

antoineMoPa 8y ago
Are you telling me that I could build a startup with 3 lines of bash? (EDIT: and a fancy easy windows version)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Zak 8y ago
  A great many successful tech companies can be described in terms of more consumer-friendly Unix tools. Slack has the better part of a billion dollars in funding for what's essentially resource-hungry IRC with pictures. Dropbox does little you couldn't accomplish with a server and rsync. What I'm really eager to see is git for everyone else.
  - exikyut 8y ago
    What would "everyone else" do with Git? It's a Rube Goldberg solution implementing a highly specific set of ways to do file versioning. Most cloud storage providers offer rudimentary versioning; are you referring to the idea of promoting commits to being first-class? It would need to be baked into Word, Excel and similar, and those tools already have builtin version tracking, as horrible(?) as it is, so... :/
    - Zak 8y ago
      People I know who definitely have this problem tend to work in creative fields - especially musicians and (digital) visual artists. They almost universally have a bunch of files with names like project_final2_revised_reallyfinal3_with_edits_from_sally.psd. Of course, a solution that works well with all the different binary file formats people in those fields use wouldn't be easy.
      - exikyut 8y ago
        Ah, that. Yes, absolutely I'd love for a solution that fixes that. It would definitely need to work with large files though, which categorically precludes Git. The first point, I think, would be building a delta engine with case-specific code for the most common ubiquitous file formats, like docx, xlsx, psd, etc. Of course it wouldn't be able to be perfect with everything but it would certainly be better than eg just recompressing each version or something equally naive. The UX would be the next major hurdle. Time Machine is a good example of the kind of simplicity that would be needed, but it would need to be a have a bit more surface area to be applicable and useful to all scenarios. One other feature that comes to mind, which would be incredibly difficult to get right but probably critical, would be useful version diffing. I think keeping this simple and just building something that can do $anything->SVG (with maybe cheats where bunches of the SVG is mostly just a bitmap in certain cases) and then doing something fast on the SVG (and/or its bitmap contents...) would probably be the most viable target.
        Zak 8y ago
        It think it does need branching and collaboration. There needs to be a way for Sally to contribute those edits, and they might not actually make it in to the final result. No doubt there would be a learning curve. I think that's OK. The target market here is serious users who already dedicate time to learning professional tools like Photoshop.
        exikyut 8y ago
        Oh no. Now you need full file format parsing so that you can resolve merge conflicts. :( That would take years to get anywhere with ._. The diffing idea I suggested above is just manageable, a la macOS Preview, with hacks. Branching requires folding-back-in, and that's not just a case of "A or B", it's a case of "A, B and C conflict with D and E, while F G and H are okay," where I could then say "save B and E but drop F". If B is a layer, E is an imported asset and F is a custom filter... you get the picture. You need a reimplementation of Photoshop (halting problem). :/ Sad that everyone hates GIMP. But... hmm, this could get folded into Blender, and then make the rest of the industry jealous.......
  - nlawalker 8y ago
    >> git for everyone else When you simplify and generalize git to the point where "everyone else" can use it, you get Apple's Time Machine and Windows' File History. I'm not that familiar with Time Machine, but if File History had a more visible interface that you could use to easily "checkpoint" individual documents or directories on demand, you'd pretty much be there. Branching is too complicated for most people to work with and overkill for most scenarios.
  - antoineMoPa 8y ago
    What about grep/sed/find for everyone else? Also, to get more ideas: echo "Make a startup with "$(ls /bin /usr/bin | sort -R | head -n 3)
api 8y ago
It really sums up nerds' lack of comprehension of the importance of user experience. It's like the UX version of the apocryphal "640k is all anyone will ever need."
- pjc50 8y ago
  The other famous one of those is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
  - vxNsr 8y ago
    I like it. iTunes, for those that haven't used a Mac, is REALLY slick. This has aged gloriously, thank you!
    - OskarS 8y ago
      Back in the day, it was pretty slick!
    - leemailll 8y ago
      Back in the day, iTunes is the best music manager. Now it still is a great one.
      - omegote 8y ago
        Lol what.
      - binomialxenon 8y ago
        I used iTunes from about 2007 through 2014 and it was trash throughout that period. I doubt it's gotten any better.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    The first iPod was terrible though and sold poorly. The 3G was the first good model, and they didn’t start taking off until the 4G. History only proves that his analysis was completely correct.
rayiner 8y ago
It’s a really great example of worse is better.[1] We went from sophisticated network file system to a daemon that destroys your battery life (at least on Mac) watching for file changes in a directory. [1] https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
- mi_lk 8y ago
  Don't know what you're talking about. Dropbox doesn't ruin my battery on my Mac.
- laumars 8y ago
  FTP is neither sophisticated nor a network file system. Frankly I'd take Dropbox over FTP any day of the week - FTP needs to die. Thankfully your options are not limited to either Dropbox or FTP. Thus people who want simplicity can have Dropbox (or similar) and people who want control can have sshfs or any number of other tools out there that require some assembly but also don't suffer from the numerous problems that pre-TCP/IP protocols like FTP suffer from.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    I’m not talking about FTP, which isn’t a network file system. I’m talking about NFS, AFS, and sucessors in that line of development. E.g. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system. I’m literally talking about the theory of the paper by Richard Gabriel (https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html) which is that worse solutions often win because it takes too much time to bring a good solution to market. If you were trying to make a “good” solution to the problem addressed by Drop Box, it probably would not look like Drop Box. For example, you’d do a real network file system that wouldn’t need to do a binary diff of the file each time to see what changed, because it would have access to the block level changes at the file system layer.[1] You'd have file locking in the protocol (like CFS), and could sync data from a locked file instead of waiting for the lock to be released.[1] It also probably wouldn’t have made Houston a billionaire because who is going to install a kernel driver off the internet? But on the flip side, Dropbox almost certainly killed much of the interest in real network file systems, because it is good enough. Which is why we’re all using an internet powered by Javascript, Electron apps on the desktop, etc. Worse is better. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/upload-entire-file https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/upload-entire-f... [2] https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/stuck-syncing https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/stuck-syncing
techopoly 8y ago
I thought it sounded familiar!
test6554 8y ago
The dhouston on that YC post is this guy now: Andrew W. Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur who is best known for being the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, an online backup and storage service. According to Forbes magazine, his net worth is ~$3 billion.

Just in case anyone doesn't recognize this quote, it is from the 2007 hacker news post about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

antoineMoPa 8y ago

Are you telling me that I could build a startup with 3 lines of bash? (EDIT: and a fancy easy windows version)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Zak 8y ago
A great many successful tech companies can be described in terms of more consumer-friendly Unix tools. Slack has the better part of a billion dollars in funding for what's essentially resource-hungry IRC with pictures. Dropbox does little you couldn't accomplish with a server and rsync. What I'm really eager to see is git for everyone else.
- exikyut 8y ago
  What would "everyone else" do with Git? It's a Rube Goldberg solution implementing a highly specific set of ways to do file versioning. Most cloud storage providers offer rudimentary versioning; are you referring to the idea of promoting commits to being first-class? It would need to be baked into Word, Excel and similar, and those tools already have builtin version tracking, as horrible(?) as it is, so... :/
  - Zak 8y ago
    People I know who definitely have this problem tend to work in creative fields - especially musicians and (digital) visual artists. They almost universally have a bunch of files with names like project_final2_revised_reallyfinal3_with_edits_from_sally.psd. Of course, a solution that works well with all the different binary file formats people in those fields use wouldn't be easy.
    - exikyut 8y ago
      Ah, that. Yes, absolutely I'd love for a solution that fixes that. It would definitely need to work with large files though, which categorically precludes Git. The first point, I think, would be building a delta engine with case-specific code for the most common ubiquitous file formats, like docx, xlsx, psd, etc. Of course it wouldn't be able to be perfect with everything but it would certainly be better than eg just recompressing each version or something equally naive. The UX would be the next major hurdle. Time Machine is a good example of the kind of simplicity that would be needed, but it would need to be a have a bit more surface area to be applicable and useful to all scenarios. One other feature that comes to mind, which would be incredibly difficult to get right but probably critical, would be useful version diffing. I think keeping this simple and just building something that can do $anything->SVG (with maybe cheats where bunches of the SVG is mostly just a bitmap in certain cases) and then doing something fast on the SVG (and/or its bitmap contents...) would probably be the most viable target.
      - Zak 8y ago
        It think it does need branching and collaboration. There needs to be a way for Sally to contribute those edits, and they might not actually make it in to the final result. No doubt there would be a learning curve. I think that's OK. The target market here is serious users who already dedicate time to learning professional tools like Photoshop.
        exikyut 8y ago
        Oh no. Now you need full file format parsing so that you can resolve merge conflicts. :( That would take years to get anywhere with ._. The diffing idea I suggested above is just manageable, a la macOS Preview, with hacks. Branching requires folding-back-in, and that's not just a case of "A or B", it's a case of "A, B and C conflict with D and E, while F G and H are okay," where I could then say "save B and E but drop F". If B is a layer, E is an imported asset and F is a custom filter... you get the picture. You need a reimplementation of Photoshop (halting problem). :/ Sad that everyone hates GIMP. But... hmm, this could get folded into Blender, and then make the rest of the industry jealous.......
- nlawalker 8y ago
  >> git for everyone else When you simplify and generalize git to the point where "everyone else" can use it, you get Apple's Time Machine and Windows' File History. I'm not that familiar with Time Machine, but if File History had a more visible interface that you could use to easily "checkpoint" individual documents or directories on demand, you'd pretty much be there. Branching is too complicated for most people to work with and overkill for most scenarios.
- antoineMoPa 8y ago
  What about grep/sed/find for everyone else? Also, to get more ideas: echo "Make a startup with "$(ls /bin /usr/bin | sort -R | head -n 3)

api 8y ago

It really sums up nerds' lack of comprehension of the importance of user experience. It's like the UX version of the apocryphal "640k is all anyone will ever need."

pjc50 8y ago
The other famous one of those is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
- vxNsr 8y ago
  I like it. iTunes, for those that haven't used a Mac, is REALLY slick. This has aged gloriously, thank you!
  - OskarS 8y ago
    Back in the day, it was pretty slick!
  - leemailll 8y ago
    Back in the day, iTunes is the best music manager. Now it still is a great one.
    - omegote 8y ago
      Lol what.
    - binomialxenon 8y ago
      I used iTunes from about 2007 through 2014 and it was trash throughout that period. I doubt it's gotten any better.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  The first iPod was terrible though and sold poorly. The 3G was the first good model, and they didn’t start taking off until the 4G. History only proves that his analysis was completely correct.

rayiner 8y ago

It’s a really great example of worse is better.[1] We went from sophisticated network file system to a daemon that destroys your battery life (at least on Mac) watching for file changes in a directory. [1] https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

mi_lk 8y ago
Don't know what you're talking about. Dropbox doesn't ruin my battery on my Mac.
laumars 8y ago
FTP is neither sophisticated nor a network file system. Frankly I'd take Dropbox over FTP any day of the week - FTP needs to die. Thankfully your options are not limited to either Dropbox or FTP. Thus people who want simplicity can have Dropbox (or similar) and people who want control can have sshfs or any number of other tools out there that require some assembly but also don't suffer from the numerous problems that pre-TCP/IP protocols like FTP suffer from.
- rayiner 8y ago
  I’m not talking about FTP, which isn’t a network file system. I’m talking about NFS, AFS, and sucessors in that line of development. E.g. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system. I’m literally talking about the theory of the paper by Richard Gabriel (https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html) which is that worse solutions often win because it takes too much time to bring a good solution to market. If you were trying to make a “good” solution to the problem addressed by Drop Box, it probably would not look like Drop Box. For example, you’d do a real network file system that wouldn’t need to do a binary diff of the file each time to see what changed, because it would have access to the block level changes at the file system layer.[1] You'd have file locking in the protocol (like CFS), and could sync data from a locked file instead of waiting for the lock to be released.[1] It also probably wouldn’t have made Houston a billionaire because who is going to install a kernel driver off the internet? But on the flip side, Dropbox almost certainly killed much of the interest in real network file systems, because it is good enough. Which is why we’re all using an internet powered by Javascript, Electron apps on the desktop, etc. Worse is better. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/upload-entire-file https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/upload-entire-f... [2] https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/stuck-syncing https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/stuck-syncing

techopoly 8y ago

I thought it sounded familiar!

test6554 8y ago

The dhouston on that YC post is this guy now: Andrew W. Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur who is best known for being the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, an online backup and storage service. According to Forbes magazine, his net worth is ~$3 billion.