5 ms·
Dunno. 5 years later and this pair of comments in that thread seems more interesting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095 http://news.ycombinator.com/ite
by temphn 14y ago
Dunno. 5 years later and this pair of comments in that thread seems more interesting:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35103 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35103
Dropbox is a huge business, with real revenue, which has helped millions of people. Tarsnap, despite cperciva's obvious talents, has not achieved anything like that level of success. dhouston wasn't flaming people in the thread, cperciva was.
Part of a really good comeback is substance. cperciva had the snappy retort. He really had won the Putnam. And on a much smaller scale, he won a comments thread on Hacker News. But the 20 posts there didn't create real world value. dhouston did. Maybe that's the real lesson of Hacker News. The best thread is the one you don't participate in, because you're working.
- philwelch 14y agoTarsnap offers better security, and functions as more of a backup and less of a synchronization service. It's not really a head-on competitor to Dropbox, and doesn't especially favor non-technical users the way Dropbox does.
- cperciva 14y agomore of a backup and less of a synchronization service I would say entirely a backup and not at all a synchronization service. If you're using Tarsnap for file synchronization, you're probably doing something wrong. Tarsnap aims to be "good unix software" in the truest sense of the phrase: Pick one thing and do it well.
- 6ren 14y agoIs another difference that dhouston is building a huge corporation (with many employees etc), while you're building something you can run yourself? (Not a criticism - it's my aim too.)
- cperciva 14y agoNo, I don't want Tarsnap to be something I run by myself. I want Tarsnap to be something which runs itself. I just spent two weeks at conferences and didn't log into any of the Tarsnap servers even once -- and when I spent 36 hours travelling from one to the other (Ottawa to Brisbane -- 23 hours in the air!) I was worried about whether my suitcase would make all the connections, not whether Tarsnap would break while I lacking internet connectivity. But getting to what I think you were really trying to ask: Yes, Tarsnap is much smaller than Dropbox, and I'm happy that I haven't taken money from VCs (or any investors for that matter) who would push for faster growth. I'd rather have better product than more product; I will probably hire other people to help with Tarsnap at some point, but the question I'll have to answer is not "can this person do useful work" or even "can this person do task X better than I'm currently doing it"; rather, the question will be "can this person do task X sufficiently better to overcome the cost of my no longer understanding it". Tarsnap is first and foremost about security. Security is about getting details right. And getting details right... well, that requires a level of understanding of how all the different pieces fit together which simply wouldn't be possible if I were hiring dozens of people and throwing them into teams to churn out new features every week.
- philwelch 14y agoDamn, you've caught my flair for understatement!
- tikhonj 14y agoThat would only work if dhouston wasn't also following and commenting on the thread :).
- Alex3917 14y ago"But the 20 posts there didn't create real world value. dhouston did." Do you believe that blog comments can create value in general?