jamesbritt

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/

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

https://pinboard.in/faq/

    What does it cost?

    Pinboard costs $11/year.

    Archiving accounts cost $25/year.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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