The coworking space I was at back in 2013 held regular weekly meetups in the common space. Sometimes cool tech was shown off, but a ton of promo talks was common. I won't say no to free pizza though.
Man HN was a different place back then. People sharing ideas and getting constructive (even if comically wrong) feedback. It reads more like founders and hackers helping each other. The discussions lately are more like folks armchair analyzing or speculating companies that are already incumbent tech giants.
Or maybe I just click those headlines at a higher rate..
It used to be a site for technical founders. I made actual, useful professional connections.
These days, it's mostly just posting addicts having a wank at each other, and arguing using that distinct "I am not technically making a personal argument" style.
It has a style that allows people to _pretend_ they're having substantive conversation, but it's mostly just people blathering in a distinct style without ever listening.
Yes, although unfortunately the only problem with it, there's no way to contribute to older topics in a meaningful way. Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it.
>Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it.
Sometimes I wonder if the format actually helps. I suspect that when you know you can pretend you didn't see a reply to your comment, you feel less likely to need to defend yourself when you realize you might be wrong. You can just close the tab and, since there was no notification, just move on without the ego hit.
> It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations
Yeah I used to learn so much across quite a few forums. Most of those communities are dead, dying, filled with bots or filled with people making shit up/just posting lousy jokes now. A lot of folks have jumped to Discord, which frankly, isn't for me, so feeling a bit lost on where to surf these days
I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature.
Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing).
In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files, since visiting an html page in a browser serves that file and relative links are preserved.
I guess it's a losing value proposition, but it sure would be nice.
It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.
Put <img src="foo.jpg"> into an html file, alongside foo.jpg. In the original Dropbox, if you opened a link to the html file, you'd see a webpage that successfully rendered foo.jpg. So you could use it as a static file host.
> What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing).
That still works for me, when replacing dl=0 with dl=1 at the end of the URL (dl = download).
Unfortunately that downloads the file directly, rather than displaying it in browser, so it's not a very nice way of linking screenshots to someone. The other use case is an html file that contains references to images within the same folder, like <img src="foo.png">. You'd want it to display in the browser, not download the html page as a file.
Ah, I see. But that usage is exactly why they don’t permit it anymore, it’s been abused too much. People were hosting whole sites on Dropbox, that’s not what it’s for.
Point 3 was not "'viral' or income generating" and DBX pioneered one of the most viral campaigns (give-get) and generates almost $1B a year in free cash flows? How is that vindication?
Their roadmap doesn't exist beyond their one-hit-wonder. CEOs are stepping down because there is no future for the company unless you count acquisition by Amazon or Google or Apple, which will result in the entire company being walked to the grave.
This is really a non-answer. If your point is "Dropbox is a struggling company and therefore all criticism of it ever is fully validated no matter the timeline" then any criticism of any company ever will be validated eventually which is absurd.
It is a darn shame, if the major OS providers didn't roll their own cloud storage, Dropbox could have been the default go-to across the board, and any other competitors that would have risen.
I remember even Ubuntu had their own storage offering, which had they kept it going, I might have subscribed to to this day. Shame, would have been an easy way for Ubuntu to fund itself.
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 great 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.
When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.
The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.
* described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
Relatedly, people tend to forget that people who are fully aware that a real person has written a foolish and/or shortsighted comment will direct criticism at said comment. I understand that there exist people who -to oversimplify- have as their creed "Thou shall not directly say anything negative about anyone ever."... but that's a minority of people. That "soft pedal" stuff doesn't work for a notable subset of people, and -for some- generates _way_ more anxiety and stress than a frank and earnest discussion about just how stupid the stupid thing you just did is. [0]
I get that some folks are Care Bears (affectionate, non-derogatory), but not only is that not the only way to be, folks who are like that freak out a not-insignificant subset of the population.
> When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software.
Perhaps. But it looks to me like an eighth or so of the top-level commenters on the OP are talking as if the thing under discussion is application software. Maybe folks consistently abbreviated "YCombinator Funding Application" as "App" and "application software" as "application" at the time, but -if so- that's not made clear to me by reading the commentary.
[0] I'd also object to any characterization that BrandonM's commentary is nitpicking in any regard. Unless you know someone pretty well, you have no idea what their background is, how careful they are, or how diligently they keep their appointments with the rubber duck. Anyone who has been in this business for five, ten+ years has seen people put a lot of work into something, but fail to understand or uncover one or more basic truths that invalidate all the work they've done. Basic sanity checks are useful.
Some of us care. Standing up and saying the product is crap leads to being asked to leave (fired). Or ends up on deaf ears, and the product is hated by people. Been in both situations, it doesn't seem there is a winning position.
It's been around and available as an API to devs since at least 2021 in iOS. The problem was even on the best iPhone at that time, I could never get it past ~0.8x speed and after 15-20 minutes the device would heat up so much the display dimmed.
For context, I was working on a podcast app with on-device transcription, had to park that idea for years before it got to today's performance.
Reddit has always been fake, but it used to be a real person performing creative writing pretending to be a true story. Now it's spammed out slop at scale.
This gave me flashbacks to LonCapa in college when I was in calculus classes circa 2011. A correct answer was marked incorrect automatically because of floating point issues.
I remember it going down semi-regularly in the 2013+ era, and seeing HN posts about it. Especially if you were using a package manager reliant on GitHub like Cocoapods. It seems to me it is more "impactful" on the dev community now that they have gone past just being a centralized Git server for the team, to being the thing that does deploys and all sorts of other things.
reply