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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, this is cool... on the other hand, I'll never use it (sorry).

I email stuff to myself on gmail because I can have thousands of things in there that I can instantly find via powerful search. And I'm fairly confident that 5 years from now they'll still be in there and just as easily discoverable.

While Hopper's UI is certainly better than email attachments in gmail currently are, I suspect Google will rectify that on their side much faster than Hopper will rectify my previously mentioned primary two concerns about the data I'm storing.

As others have already mentioned, seamless integration into email would go a long way toward getting me to use this at all. Augment instead of trying to replace is a much better strategy here.

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No problem, Hopper might not be for you. However, I've gotten a lot of requests re: emailing updates, so I will consider it!

Let me say, though, that I absolutely respect your privacy and have no intention of looking at your data. It's as private as you want it to be. I'm also happy to put this in the TOS.

Exporting is another story as its easier said than done. Emailing you the pastes periodically (optionally), however, may alleviate that problem.

> Let me say, though, that I absolutely respect your privacy and have no intention of looking at your data. It's as private as you want it to be. I'm also happy to put this in the TOS.

OP's issue wasn't so much privacy as it was permanency, as I read it. So using Gmail, I can rest assured that in five year's time my documents will still be around, just as they are today. Whereas with a new service, who's to say what lies in store for it? What if you pivot? What if you're acquired? Unfortunately a service like Gmail wins in this context.

I used to think that about email services, too. Then one after another they changed their terms when I wasn't looking, and deleted data I thought was safely stored.

What ever happened to 'your own hard drive'? Is there some reason people can't use that for storage? I have a VPS that I use as a file intermediary. I'm highly confident that, and my backups, will be there in 5 years.

For most users, "your own hard drive" is a terrrible solution. They do not have a VPS that they use as a file intermediary (they don't even know what a VPS is), and they don't know how to keep backups, and if they did the backups would probably be corrupted or out of date.

This is the miracle of web hosted software for most users. It's also what makes Dropbox so special.

I know plenty of people who use portable hard drives, flash drives and writable optic media as a backup... I don't see many downsides in that, barring catastrophic loss (which can happen to second party storage as well, though they do tend to be more professional about being careful).

Of course, a burned DVD isn't going to let me access my file from the office and at home unless I take it with me, so there are drawbacks.

Exactly, and this IMO is the problem with /any/ new service that aims to do this. It's a known problem. Solutions have been tried before. I wish this company the best of luck, but I don't have high hopes for this getting popular.

IMO, Dropbox and similar services are the first real viable replacement for e-mailing files to yourself.

I opened the site with Opera, and JavaScript turned off. It went into a loop of redirecting me between the root and /you.

Opera && javascript turned off == I don't care about this "web" thing.

So, I, for one, don't exactly care about what happened in your tin-foil crazy edge case.

Wow.. Wasn't expecting that kind of response.

To be frank, I also expected to mainly get downvotes from my spur of the moment response.

But the gist of what I was trying to convey is:

It's 2011. The web is inherently tied with javascript.

(The "progressive enhancement" thing in respect to lack of javascript doesn't hold after Ajax and the so-called "Web 2.0", ie since 2005).

Turning js off AND using a left-field browser, is probably pushing it too far, and you don't really get to complain about broken functionality after that.

Look, I'm not counting on web developers providing me with a site that's fully functional without JavaScript. That would be stupid. I have no trouble enabling JavaScript for specific sites that need it.

Opera is a great browser and has good support for HTML5 and CSS3. In fact, since I refuse to live without snappy Mouse Gestures, I don't even really have a choice in my primary browser.

Also, redirecting a browser somewhere without using JavaScript (since it was disabled) should be a reasonably simple operation.

And finally.. Tinfoil? All in all, there was absolutely no reason for that personal attack of yours. So yeah, try to behave.

Well, re: tinfoil, you'll have to admit that turning js off is a little on the tinfoil side...

What's the supposed benefit of breaking 80% of the modern web?

Using lower resources?

Sites not "tracking" you with cookies?

Better security?

I second that, this service looks good.. but atleast for now I'wont be using it.

Reason being: - Lot of believe in GMail that they will be there for years to come, and service will be available when we need it. - It not only contains notes / passwords which I send, it also have passwords / login info sent by various services. So anyways, I'll have to use it. - Gmail is a default tab always opened, why would I need another tab for a subset of task.

Anyways I think there will be many takers once seamless integration into email is done.

You might also like Google Docs, which is searchable, permanent, and lets you share what you upload. (And, if you buy more storage for it, you can also your extra space for Gmail.)

Big fan of google docs, gmail.

However, I would like to see google docs make my email a subset of my document collections. At end of the day an email is a document (with more documents, attachments).

You might like my bookmarklet, cctome.com

> via powerful search

I do the same but google mail's search is not really useful as it does not let you match substrings so it can be really, really frustrating unless you meticulously manage your inbox with tags.

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