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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Compared to my mindset a decade ago I've become so cynical about the whole SV tech scene. There's value there, of course: Dropbox was a fantastic service when it first came out. But these companies are incentivized to keep expanding until they occupy the entire universe. Now Dropbox wants to be my word processor. Next it wants to use AI to touch up my photos or whatever the hell because AI is the New Hot Thing tech companies must do to please Wall Street. I'm tired of closing modal boxes promoting a service I never asked for.

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You aren't cynical enough. This incentive structure is what keeps us employed and our salaries going up and you should encourage it (assuming you're a laborer). If companies weren't doing this they'd hire to build a product with a minimal feature set and then layoff at a much larger rate once it was done.

In other words, encourage this mindset wherever possible, it's going to be what causes the next wave and spike in demand for SWEs.

Honestly there are just to many SWE then. FAANG just paid moonsalarys and lot of bad SWE joined the space who ofcourse never get to FAANG or only for 1 axed project but still are in the space not needed at all with I worked FAANG on cv. We can't all be SWE. The skilled will survive it no doubt.

Agreed. The field has become flooded w/ bad talent. I in large part blame leetcode hiring. Folks that are used to "cram cultures" just cram for that test but have zero idea how to engineer and architect good software and systems.

Totally agree… I wish I could buy Dropbox’s minimal feature set: syncing files. And that they’d improve that feature rather than adding features I don’t use or want.

What if I told you you could replicate all of that with proven battle tested technology… for free.

"you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It’s a testament to the Unix philosophy that after all these years, Dropbox has grown and morphed into something that people no longer enjoy, and yet if you simply followed that advice years ago, you would still have a system today that works exactly as you intended, and in 50 years when Dropbox is long gone as a company, that system will still be working as built, and even after you die, that system can be inherited by your children and grandchildren and still work as well as it did on day one. This is the timeless way of building.

I wish I shared your optimism that any kind of server I set up in 2007 would still be fully functional today without any kind of maintenance, let alone that it will still be around to serve my grandchildren.

An FTP server already wouldn't serve my needs given that there's no such thing as mobile sync to an FTP server.

That's a fair criticism of the approach but I also think it's one of the strengths - protocols never change. So today with new requirements you'd need to figure out a new way to do it, but the old way still works, even if it doesn't meet your needs.

The irritating thing with a lot of software is that they start out like a hammer and in 10 years it's a multi-dimensional VR rangefinder with email. Well that's super cool but I want my hammer back.

And the iPod will fail because it doesn’t have wireless and has less space than the Nomad…

https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026

what if i told you i know that, but i don't want to do the work or ongoing management of that myself. i just want somebody else to do it for me. for money that i pay them, and not for money that some VC or data broker pays them

Then I’d tell you I have a very particular set of skills, skills that could keep your files stored safely for a very long time. For money you would pay directly to me, in perpetuity.

I'll happily recommend https://syncthing.net/, it's open source, end to end encrypted, and peer to peer (your machines send files directly to each other).

I can’t recommend it enough. Install your own directory servers, and you’ll have true invisible infrastructure.

Searched for the iOS client, first hit answer by the maintainer

>I remain unconvinced of the usefulness of the Syncthing sync model on iOS

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/syncthing-for-ios/16045/4

So basically it's not an alternative at all to Dropbox

well to those of us, not using iPhone it is*

And to be honest, most of the files I sync, I never access on a phone anyway. So it would still be useful even without Android support.

Not sure how common my setup is, But I have desktop both at home and at work. And I use git and synching, to sync most of the stuff seamlessly. That said I mostly work from home nowadays, so I mostly use my work comp to speed up compilation, or run tests, dockers, databases, etc.

* Not trying to be an asshole. There are plenty of iPhone only app, that I sometimes** wish I could use, so I know how you feel.

** But not too much, otherwise I would switch by now :))

Syncthing is not end-to-end encrypted. It's peer to peer TLS encrypted.

With end-to-end encryption you can transfer data with an untrusted server as intermediary, which syncthing doesn't support.

Syncthing supports transferring data via untrusted relays (used when two nodes cannot communicate directly) and also supports storing data encrypted on untrusted nodes (those nodes cannot decrypt the data)

I prefer seafile because it actually scans immediately and has a functioning android client.

I actually want a central server, because the main thing I'm worried about is a fire or flood taking out both my computers at once, in which case the sync to a central server works as a backup.

(I don't have proper backups beyond Dropbox, because I'm pretty happy for stuff I've actually deleted to stay deleted. Just, in case of a hard drive failure or something similar, I can sync back from Dropbox. That's all I feel I need. Maybe there's something better?)

Second this. I De-Googled/De-Dropboxed my life about 15 months ago with the help of Syncthing, and a third-party cloud backup provider (the '1' in my 3-2-1) strategy, and I haven't looked back.

iCloud

iCloud is perfect if all your machines are made by Apple.

That’s a small sacrifice to make.

It really isn’t.

The time macOS changed my default to having all my files in the cloud rather than local was a truely scarring experience.

The price is high and ‘family sharing’ is a minefield.

They are now

There's always rsync, you know...

As long as we stick with the economic incentives we have in quarterly stakeholder capitalism, it will forever be this way. You can’t fix it by appealing to people’s sense of bettering the world.

You’re not the target customer. A lot of people do use those tools, although most of them are outside of the tech world.

You’d probably be better off using a different service if it bothers you so much.

We’ll I just realised I can use iCloud or Google drive for like 1/10th the cost of Dropbox ?

I stopped using Dropbox a long time ago (though switching cloud storage services is not trivial!). My point is a more general one, that today's tech companies can't just be, they must expand and expand.

To butcher a quote from Grandpa Simpson:

“I used to be ‘the target customer’, but then they changed what ‘the target customer’ was. Now I’m not ‘the target customer’ anymore and ‘the target customer’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!

> today's tech companies can't just be, they must expand and expand.

Isn't it in the nature of tech industry though? If a company "just is", it doesn't need to do any R&D work, so it's not a tech company any more.

The key to attracting a Dropbox is to follow Rule 1 or Rule 2:

Rule 1: Be an enterprise account that uses the "Call us for a quote" option, and does not complain about feature changes or removals

Rule 2: Don't break Rule 1

Yes, I’m also not their target customer for all those add on features that I don’t want… I would be using a different service if there was one with similar or better syncing capabilities that works as well as Dropbox…

Customers want a dumb pipe. PublicCo can't go up the value chain as a dumb pipe and starts adding bells and whistles. It's a story as old as Web 1.0

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