The "viral" point was a good one, and which they solved quite cleverly: as a student I got 10 GB for free, but additional 10 GB for each recruited person. Everyone at campus was on a recruiting spree for a while, to bulk up free storage.

Of course, that doesn't make them money. But millions of users that then had all their files there and kept using it when no longer students (so paying), and recommended it to their places of work etc.

> "less space than a Nomad"

I actually thought that was a valid comment, more so than the Dropbox one. The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

The iPod "won" on account of fashion, style and marketing. Yes, the Slashdot comment was naive in underestimating or ignoring the power of Apple, but objectively it wasn't wrong. Apple released an inferior product and used out-of-band techniques to sell it.

There is probably something here about human psychology where we underestimate the switching costs of things we have already, and are wired to look at things through the lens of the world we have now.

Absolutely no-one is concerned today about what happens when you dip out of connectivity because fast mobile connectivity was not abundant in 2007 (the iPhone was only released that year), which obviates the "this will never replace a USB" criticism. Mobile made a whole new class of businesses possible.

The first Bitcoin thread is great

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

It’s literally: click the paper clip logo in Gmail, tap files, pick your file.

You can also just go into the files app, tap and hold, tap copy, go to Gmail tap and hold in your draft email, tap paste.

There’s other paths that work too, like hitting the “send to” logo in files and then selecting Gmail.

It’s really the exact same patterns I might use on a computer for the most part.

When you get stuck in a task like this, you realize that civilization will collapse with a whimper.

Sharing files between apps and file management in general on iOS is atrocious.

I assumed this was a solved problem before Windows 98 (first desktop OS I used), but Apple cannot get this right 28 years later.

with llms, you'd think we could use email as a passthrough proxy

Which just goes to show how trigger happy people are about labeling things as LLM generated. People forget that LLMs were trained on writing on the internet, so it's going to sound how the average person writes!