What happens when I read this:

File syncing. Superset of backups, which people will pay for. Good. Single founder. Bad. But at least he's looking for more people. Went to MIT, 1600 SAT. Probably fairly smart. Wrote a poker bot. Now I'm starting to get interested; has the right attitude. Description of the software sounds plausible but generic. Maybe it's good, but who can tell. But little sister uses it; that's impressive. Scroll down to what he understands that competitors don't get. Wow: very concise and unequivocal. I'm now basically sold. Scroll through the rest. No red flags. Did not make the usual joke single founders make when asked how long the founders have known one another. Good answer to what might go wrong. A-. (Would be an A with a cofounder.)

I went back and looked at this application in our system, and I did in fact give it an A-.

An A- means "I want to interview." An A means "I want to interview, even if Rtm and Trevor don't."

I only gave 2 As in s2007. (We funded both those companies, and both did badly.)

Do it.

A night or two spent on learning how to use git (and maybe setting up a remote repo) will save you tons of headaches later and produce lots of benefits almost immediately.

I note that this has been mentioned in 5 comments before in the history of Hacker News. Which is approximately once for every terabyte of knitting patterns they have stored. Or once for every 100,000 registered users. Or once for every 700k monthly page views.

Excuse me. Daily page views.

But to look at how much attention they get among technically inclined people, you'd think they were less important than the average URL shortener.

There are a million and one underserved markets in the other half of the population, gentleman, and no one you know has any interest in competing with you if you slice off one of them.

When I discover someone saying "Twitter is a replacement for RSS" what I actually hear is "I'm a bleeding-edge-fanboy who can't be bothered with thinking about actual use-cases". Twitter and RSS are completely different approaches to content distribution and are suited to solving different parts of the problem.

There are some good ideas behind Twitter, but the actual implementation they've chosen is only really good for stream-of-consciousness content. That will never be a replacement for RSS.

You can either do it, or always wish you did. Your choice.

I was actually exaggerating a little bit. My head didn't really explode.

"That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one."

I think that's why he says right at the beginning:

  This device is that cheap because it cuts
  several corners. That's okay for them. But
  for general purpose this creates problems.
  I want to share my concerns just to show you,
  that you can't compare this to a X4540 device.

Ok I must be missing something. Everyone is knocking this backblaze thing because it doesnt do ZFS or because it is not a "super duper high end san replacement" or because the components are not rated for enterprise level work. It seems to me that a company whose product is personal and small business backups does not need any of those things. They have software to do mirroring. Why would they need any fast network filesystems if all data comes and goes via the internet? Will the hard drives see that much data I/O, or will they mostly just fill up and sit idling with the very occasional read for restore (i strongly suspect the later)[1].

Of course on the other hand, there are the poeple touting it as the end all be all, a solution to kill NetApp.

I guess what Im wondering is: how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people? What am I missing?

[1]A huge chunk of this article is about the hard drives and PSUs not being enterprise ready, but for an enterprise load, but I just don't see it. I bet a lot of these boxes run idle a large chunk of the time. I have 10 year old desktop hard drives running just fine in a file server, because it has a similar load: mostly idle most of the time.