jamesbritt

Extra irony: I went to try Dogpile, but got redirected to some anti-something site (seems to not like my VPN IP) that wants me to do a Google Recaptcha.

People reference the essay, and in so doing they are referencing the whole essay, including the nasty parts.

People doing this need to be aware of that; I suspect many are not.

Being cited doesn't make anything true, so I'm not sure what that has to do with it being correct or not.

There does exist scholarly work disputing Hardin's conjecture. For example, the work of Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University.

"Ostrom received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her groundbreaking research demonstrating that ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources. She shared the prize with Oliver Williamson, a University of California economist."

http://elinorostrom.indiana.edu/

More about Hardin's essay:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t...

The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong

But even if they were working on Pinboard, it's still a free service

https://pinboard.in/faq/

    What does it cost?

    Pinboard costs $11/year.

    Archiving accounts cost $25/year.

How do you know how simple it is for a CSR to offer you a refund?

I don't. So I asked the CSR to please pass my request on to someone higher up.

The response?

Nothing.

Zilch.

Not even the decency to tell me, "No."

I gather then that once Dropbox decides you're not a potential revenue source they can't be bother with even basic consideration.

You already bought it. It's done. Your option is to cancel at renewal or not.

This is technically true.

In the bigger picture we should judge people and companies by what they choose to do, not by what they have to do.

Had Drobox even replied that they understood my complaint but decided that it did not warrant their making an exception to their ToS I might be less disgusted. At least it would show some sort of backbone. Instead they pretend their hands are tied. That's dishonest.

According to OP, he was knocked down to free tier but not issued a refund. That is incredibly odd, given that he already paid for the service

To be clear: The knocked me back to the lower free tier and quota, and only restored the quota a few days later when I saw no refund and complained.

I'm not surprised at all that a company doesn't want to refund you because of a political disagreement you have with them.

What's important here is how they handled this. A company can issue a refund anytime it likes, the ToS notwithstanding. Those are rules they made up.

Telling me that it is impossible to issue a refund is just lying. It's not impossible; it's very doable.

If they (or any company) deliberately choose not to issue a refund they should state it like that, in plain language, not pretend that they have no choice in the matter.

Likewise with botching my account downgrade; only after I pointed out there error did they restore the quota but then acted like it never happened.

It isn't simply the lack of a refund, it's the bogus way they did it. Actions like this reveal the character of a company.

Dropbox is morally corrupt and support for them by HN users is disappointing.

I wrote to Dropbox and said I wanted to cancel my account and get a pro-rated refund because of their hiring of Condoleezza Rice. Her involvement in the Iraq war and the mass surveillance of Americans is deplorable.

A few days after my request my account was converted to the free version, with the limitations of the free version. I could no longer sync any files. When I saw this I assumed I was going to get the refund.

Days passed. I asked about the refund. The support email included disturbingly fawning about Ms. Rice and how amazing she was, and insisted that the Dropbox ToS made it flat-out impossible for them to issue any refunds. My account was changed back to allow the 100 GB of storage and Dropbox acted like it never botched my request.

It almost funny that they would not even respect differing opinion on their hiring of Ms. Rice and graciously offer a refund to those offended by such a move. Hiding behind their own ToS just shows how deaf they are to the matter. They basically don't give a fuck, and they don't have to because they have enough people who are more concerned with convenience than principles as amply shown on HN.

There are very good alternatives to Dropbox. Both SpiderOak and ownCloud work great on Windows, OSX, and Linux. You can get managed ownCloud hosting if you don't want to set up your own: https://owner.io.

It's puzzling that anyone would trust them with their data given their behavior.

Absolutely. The support for Dropbox here is disheartening.

Oh, very cool. Thank you.

Very cool. Props to you.

I've a question that's not specific to this app but related to Web apps in general: When I think about installing a PHP (or Rails, for that matter) Web app I get a bit antsy abut security.

I keep thinking that a near-ideal solution might be to have these things encapsulated in a Docker container.

How hard would it be to craft a Docker script that would spin up an instance of Upvote (for example) so that it is isolated from the rest of the server?

It also seems like it would make for a nice way to try something without having to do a "real" installation. If you like it, keep it and change the settings. If not, delete the docker container.

Previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227198

Wouldn't it make sense to create more interactive content so readers/users can try out the code as they go along?

One upside to the days of paper-only was that I was forced to hand-enter a lot of code to see it in action. It made me pay more attention to the code than if I had just cut-n-pasted or loaded up a file.

Often the code would fail the first time I tried to run it. Then I needed to figure out where the error was. It was quite instructional.

RFDL (run-fail-debug-loop) is a very useful approach to learning.

Do they let you carry that own or do they hold that until you get off the plane? The latter was my experience some years ago.

I tend to upvote helpful comments, especially if it's in response to something I said or asked.

I like to also post a "Thank you" reply but I seems to recall some push-back on that because such comments don't (supposedly) add much to the overall conversation.

I can see the point there but I also think some basic social niceties go a long way in encouraging helpful participation.

Side topic: how is the hn dupe-detector not catching this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8183230

Seems we a lot of people coming here from Canada. Not sure if they're permanent residents, or just snowbirds. Ontario plates are pretty common (as are Illinois).

Is this necessarily?

    1.	Camoji lets you tap your iPhone to record reaction GIFs (thenextweb.com)
    1 point by JGuo 2 minutes ago | flag | discuss
    2.	Camoji Brings Your Texts To Life By Making It Easy To Send Moving GIFs (fastcompany.com)
    1 point by JGuo 3 minutes ago | flag | discuss
    3.	Camoji lets you create and text animated gifs via imessage (techcrunch.com)
    1 point by JGuo 3 minutes ago | flag | discuss
    4.	Camoji – text animated gifs from your camera (camoji.com)
    1 point by JGuo 4 minutes ago | flag | discuss

Making it too good. Sounds silly, but as a self-funded indie developer there was no one to tell us to stop, or not to add that feature. You get caught in a loop of “if I add this feature it will be more awesome, and more awesome games sell”.

I learned this the hard way. My business partner at the time summed it up as, "Every feature is a support call."

More stuff, even if you think it good, is more stuff that can go wrong, or introduce a subtle bug, or just not work correctly for someone, somewhere,

A large part of the issue comes down to funding, and a lack of resources to do the kinds of studies that would help answer some of our most pressing questions. Our insistence on making recommendations — without having the proper research to back them up — has unintended, harmful effects.

This seems sort of crazy. Properly understanding what makes for a healthy diet would go a long way in reducing health issues.

I imagine that nutrition research just isn't as sexy as, say, mapping the human brain.

To clarify: These are from 19th-century medical books, not anyone's current medical records.

Nowadays that would probably mean a blue sky.

That may have been what Gibson actually intended it to mean.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/05/negative-creativity/#co...

Vernor Vinge's True Names should be on that list as well.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1280983.True_Names

I really liked Mirrorshades, if for no other reason that it showcased a variety of styles. It's been a while since I read it but I recall thinking it pretty good. It might have been what got me to read Rudy Rucker's stuff.

You can read all of Rucker's short stories (which I find to be better than his novels) here:

http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/

There are more comments on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156303

I just got mine. What seemed odd to me is that the From name was Kindle Direct Publishing, and it is an amazon.com address, but the site is called "Readers United."

I appreciate Amazon's position here. There have been some other posts on HN where a few folks have made strong points in favor of Amazon. But I don't like how this site is presented as a readers effort with that name.

First: This is pretty sweet, Jeremy. Glad to see this.

Second: How well does it scale for developing large sites (for whatever value of "large" seems useful for discussion).

One of the things I really like about Ramaze is that I can start with basically a Rack app, spin it off to a simple Ramaze app, and keep expanding and refactoring it as requirements call for.

Is there some app size or level of app complexity beyond which Roda would not be a sensible choice? You say it has a plugin system; is it really battle-ready? (I'm going to guess Yes because of who wrote it, but I'd like to hear any additional thoughts on it.)

I get the impression that Roda lends itself to building large sites that are a collection of sub-sites or services; you're never really building a single big monolithic app.

Side note: For fast syntax highlighting you could use embedded gists.

https://github.com/blairvanderhoof/gist-embed

[R]emember that you can get SSL certs from $9 (e.g. from NameCheap).

NameCheap provrides a wide range of certs. I'm sure this is true of other SSL-cert offerings.

Are they all at least adequate for Google's SEO purposes?

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8137815