Hacker News Reader

Comment by malchow | Hacker News Reader

"5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free"

Stuff like this strikes me as a bit sclerotic and shortsighted. Sort of the techno-utopian flip side of the Malthusians of the 70s[1] arguing that food will run out on Earth.

The direction of the cost of storage (down) is predictable. But human behavior is not. And the impact of future innovation on human behavior is also not predictable. That's why oil could drop 50% in the last 60 days. It's why Paul Ehrlich and John Malthus were wrong. And why Dropbox could end up being a truly great company.

When we're filming 1 TB/s holograms of our kids playing baseball, Dropbox's free 500 PB tier just isn't going to cut it!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

View on HN

It has an air of truth. Dropbox is bar none the best sync client. Almost unbelievably so.

But they were in 2010 too. And if you time travelled from 2010 to 2015, you wouldn't really notice anything materially different between Dropbox then and now.

Does it need to be? Dropbox has suited my needs perfectly from the getgo.

I imagine they have been changing on the enterprise side. I'm just a small business account.

I don't get it either, they have so many competitors and no one seems to actually bother to compete with Dropbox in the client space. I want to like Google Drive just because it's cheaper and integrates with Gmail and all the other Google services I use, but there's still no Linux client and it's just not as simple as Dropbox. Dropbox is just solid and available everywhere.

Perhaps it's harder to make something like Dropbox work? I wouldn't know; just wondering. Having Guido Van Rossum on board either means that they're doing hard stuff, or they like hiring overqualified people...

> When we're filming 1 TB/s holograms of our kids playing baseball, Dropbox's free 500 PB tier just isn't going to cut it!

I agree, this is a kind of stupid mistake people keep making given that everything around us proves an opposite point - that resource usage always rises up to the limits. We will invent new ways to waste^H^H^H^H^Huse storage, just like we invented new ways to use up surplus bandwidth (video streaming) or electricity (well, everything now). Random potential use - with petabyte disks it starts to make sense to run full-HD surveillance all the time. Or to have even more bloated web frameworks that download half of the Internet as their dependencies.

What is your assessment of BitTorrent Sync?

That's what I was wondering. I switched from Dropbox to btsync a few months ago, when I filled up my Dropbox (and Dropbox became inaccessible in China). The sole disadvantage (which is a direct and logical result of all the advantages), is that the syncing computers need to be online concurrently. In every other way I've found it superior to Dropbox.

Of course, what's going to happen to btsync as a "product", I don't have a clue. But given the fact that you can host a private tracker and essentially run the whole ecosystem yourself means that the worst that could happen is it might become abandonware.

Yep. We basically have an always-on Raspberry Pi in the closet to have a peer available all the time.

Though reading about their future attempts to monetize BTSync, I am not too hopeful about its future.

People will scream Syncthing, but that's often not a solution since you need to do port forwarding, which may not always be possible (e.g. if you are IPv4-connected via DS-Lite).

> monetize BTSync

That's a little depressing. Not that they shouldn't make money from their work but... it seems like there's so little to the actual code. Here's hoping that they keep it to an open source project I can donate funds to.

My problem with BTSync was that it was too resource-intensive, especially compared to Dropbox. It's been a few months though: has this improved?

Ok.

My point wasn't that they don't have a good product or that people won't use their service.

My point is their product is too expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com