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I know I'm judging your private beta product by its public face. But statements like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 http://news.ycombinator.c

I know I'm judging your private beta product by its public face. But statements like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 are also worrisome. UI and promotion aren't easy, nor 'easy'. They are hard and a lot of work. (Boy, telling a Putnam winner he doesn't know enough about something makes you choose your words carefully. And then it makes you wonder why you don't always do that.)

cperciva 18y ago
your private beta product Tarsnap is in public beta right now, actually -- you can go to the website, create an account, deposit some money, and start backing up your data within the next five minutes. :-) statements like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 are also worrisome. UI and promotion aren't easy, nor 'easy'. They are hard and a lot of work. If you read that link carefully, you'll note that I didn't say anything about promotion being easy -- and in any case, the scare quotes in "that's all "easy" stuff" should have been a tip-off that I didn't really mean that everything I mentioned would be easy. I was effecting the mathematician's habit of referring to any solved problem as "trivial" -- for all that there's a lot of work involved in creating a GUI, porting software to Windows, et cetera, those are all things which people have done in the past, whereas the core functionality of tarsnap -- secure snapshotted online backup -- required solving entirely new problems.
- herdrick 18y ago
  Oh no, getting a good user interface/experience for tarsnap is a new problem. Only if tarsnap were simply an better implementation of an existing utility would that not be true, and only then if you were happy with that utility's current interface.
- herdrick 18y ago
  I have wondered if I need an OS X backup. I'll check it out, thanks.

cperciva 18y ago

your private beta product Tarsnap is in public beta right now, actually -- you can go to the website, create an account, deposit some money, and start backing up your data within the next five minutes. :-) statements like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360561 are also worrisome. UI and promotion aren't easy, nor 'easy'. They are hard and a lot of work. If you read that link carefully, you'll note that I didn't say anything about promotion being easy -- and in any case, the scare quotes in "that's all "easy" stuff" should have been a tip-off that I didn't really mean that everything I mentioned would be easy. I was effecting the mathematician's habit of referring to any solved problem as "trivial" -- for all that there's a lot of work involved in creating a GUI, porting software to Windows, et cetera, those are all things which people have done in the past, whereas the core functionality of tarsnap -- secure snapshotted online backup -- required solving entirely new problems.

herdrick 18y ago
Oh no, getting a good user interface/experience for tarsnap is a new problem. Only if tarsnap were simply an better implementation of an existing utility would that not be true, and only then if you were happy with that utility's current interface.
herdrick 18y ago
I have wondered if I need an OS X backup. I'll check it out, thanks.