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.
> 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
Hardin's thesis has nothing to do with his character. Please comment on the thesis and try to seperate facts away from the personality of the person saying it. As vile as this sounds, a person being racist does not automatically make all his observations false, it does not mean anything.
Either way, his essay is largely cited in academia from political science to anthropology. A blog post illustrating some factual anomalies (which in turn can also be debatable) does not render the heart of his essay wrong.
It's good to know the background of the author of an essay, but it is bad form and borderline propaganda to use that to discount an insightful observation about the world as we know it.
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."
>Being cited doesn't make anything true, so I'm not sure what that has to do with it being correct or not.
Being cited lends more legitimacy to it being true. Think of it like a vote. One person cited it because he thinks it's true. A vote from academia is worth more than a vote from a popular science magazine.
>"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."
I think you missed the point. No one is saying that humans can't change their behavior. The article is describing a phenomenon that happens when people act rationally in a certain context. Of course with higher level knowledge of higher level contexts like how shared commons can be destroyed with rational individualistic behavior people can change.
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.
Why are you entitled to a refund? You disagree with their hiring policies? You already paid the $99 for 1 year of service. You already bought it. It's done. Your option is to cancel at renewal or not.
That's my take, anyway. I also asked for a refund when Google announced their far cheaper plans for GDrive, and this just a month after I renewed. They told me the same thing -- a policy of no partial refunds. So I asked them to ensure I would not be auto rebilled, and that was that. Why exactly are they morally corrupt for this?
That's not what OP said. The conversion to a free account and then back is not related to the refusal to refund his money. They temporarily took away paid features, but only because they botched his cancellation/refund request. When he pointed out their confusion, they corrected it. He didn't get a refund because they have a no refund policy.
It was neglect for sure, but I think it stemmed from poor communication and not malice. He requested that they cancel his premium service and refund him for the remaining duration. They cancelled the premium service, but neglected to tell him that he wouldn't get a refund. Also, this was during a time when a lot of people were trying to cancel, so I'm sure the customer service team was overloaded with this type of request.
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.
> 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.
I'm not surprised at all that a company doesn't want to refund you because of a political disagreement you have with them.
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.
>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.
The customer service representative you spoke to did not make those rules up. Unless you were speaking to the CEO of Dropbox personally, then yes, there is nothing that person could do. There may not even be a function of their support system that allows refunds. How do you know how simple it is for a CSR to offer you a refund?
So you don't approve of Condoleezza Rice backing the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Okay, I agree with you that the invasion of Iraq was the wrong thing to do.
I don't approve of you attacking Dropbox, and Ms. Rice in her capacity as a Dropbox employee, for actions that have nothing to do with the company.
Would you like it if I wrote to your employer demanding you be fired because of your actions here? No? You would say, wouldn't you, that your posts on HN have nothing to do with your employer and regardless of what I think of your posts, it would be a dick move on my part to drag your employer into it?
How well do you know "Ms. Rice"? Personally? Professionally? Politically? Psychologically?
Ms. Rice, and her associates, were responsible for committing acts of open war on another country and in so doing violated - criminally - much international as well as national law. Charges at the ICC mean something. Such individuals, no matter what, should not be allowed more access to the masses until they have answered for their crimes.
The fact that this is of no consequence to someone who 'publically defends Ms. Rice' may not surprise me. She must answer to crimes against humanity, sir! This is why she should not be associated with the Western worlds growing fascination for documenting itself ..
If only there were a cloud storage provider that took a strong, substantive stand against government surveillance and supported true security and privacy for their users.
As long as we're dreaming, wouldn't it be great if you could use this make-believe product with standard unix tools on the command line, and access over SSH ?
I suppose a fanciful firm like this would offer a deep "HN readers" discount to anyone that asked.
rsync.net aren't really competing with DropBox so I don't see the relevance.
DropBox has multi-platform support on all major mobile and desktop platforms. They also have a GUI application that will "just work" for syncing your files off site.
rsync.net is really UNIX only since the offering doesn't work particularly well when not combined with popular Linux/UNIX tools (e.g. rsync). On Windows you're left using FTP and doing the sync-ing yourself somehow and there is no mobile presence at all.
The software is 1/2 of DropBox's (and Google Drive's) value. rsync.net is certainly inexpensive but not really competing for the same business or customers.
With Macs there are predominantly two "types" of users. Those who use a Mac because they want a UNIX machine that works well as a desktop/has a widely supported GUI, and then there are those who use Macs because they find them easier than Windows (due to the better consistency and less clutter).
I think rsync on OS X will widely appeal to this first group, but not appeal at all to the second group. As far as those people are concerned if it isn't in the store then it doesn't exist, and if it doesn't have a GUI it definitely doesn't exist.
As to Android you guys don't, as far as I know, offer an app? Maybe my information is out-of-date on that one.
I completely respect that you guys want to appeal to a certain demographic and there is something to be said for that. I was just pointing out above that rsync.net is niche and isn't "really" competing 1:1 with DropBox, Google Drive, or to a lesser extent One Drive.
Your prices remain quite impressive and I'm sure you do what you do very well.
I canceled my pro account when Dropbox first hired Rice, and I haven't looked back. It took far too long to get my data out, but it was well worth the effort.
'In the summer of 2014, Sam Altman became president of Y Combinator. Y Combinator also announced a Board of Overseers: Brian Chesky, cofounder of AirBnB, Adora Cheung, cofounder of HomeJoy, Patrick Collison, cofounder of Stripe, Drew Houston, founder of DropBox, Jessica Livingston, David Rusenko, Emmett Shear, and Sam Altman, cofounder of Loopt.'
Y Combinator, and by extension HN, is in cahoots with the people at Dropbox.
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.
Better to just use a separate server, considering they start at less than $10/month. It's a lot simpler to scale, optimize, and contain threats that way.
Docker is still a good solution. I just don't think the problem you're describing absolutely requires something like Docker.
Thanks! Since Upvote is just a theme and some Buddypress files that sit on top of Wordpress, I think you can use something like this: https://github.com/jbfink/docker-wordpress
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.
To learn something well you need to practice it and can't just copy and paste. I think that copying-and-pasting by typing isn't that much better though. It would be better to solve challenges and the like so that you really need to think.
My question is maybe professional programmers aren't as interested in doing 'assigned' challenges and would rather apply what they learn to their own projects. Though I still think there's still a large market for more interactive professional training.
Definitely not the case for me. I started programming with BASIC on my C64and that was just endless copying from books. I assure you I learnt nothing from it - not something to be proud of (I was just starting out), but it goes to show that you can mindlessly copy stuff from a textbook without really reading as you can with copying and pasting.
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.
