How hard is it to do things? Often it turns out to be pretty hard.
There’s an infamous Hacker News thread about Dropbox that crops up whenever there’s a conversation about how difficult it would be to build a replacement for a well-known service. The forum note, which you can read here, comes from back in 2007, when Dropbox was a “YC app” that had a very simple pitch: “Throw away your USB drive.”
The poster argues that what Dropbox built at the time was something potential users could replicate “quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem,” provided they are on Linux. The commenter helpfully included instructions for Windows and Mac as well.
This is my last Exchange for some time. Starting Mo...
