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Interesting! I hadn't seen this work before. Honestly this seems exactly like the kind of service that would get heckled on HN in the classic Dropbox-Show-HN st

Interesting! I hadn't seen this work before. Honestly this seems exactly like the kind of service that would get heckled on HN in the classic Dropbox-Show-HN style. So much so that a couple of my friends and I tried to build something like this a few years ago, essentially outsourcing the end-to-end-encrypted transport of sensitive information via a user-friendly service. We thought a user should be able to designate data for transport, and then click a button, and it gets moved off the machine until some conditions are met at a later time (once you're through the border or whatever) when the data gets moved back onto the machine. Super user-friendly and built for plausible deniability. Our effort sort of trailed off into nothingness in the face of so many other random cool project ideas, in that particular way which probably most of you reading this know quite well. Though as much as people like to joke and cajole about this, it's actually a pretty interesting problem and an excellent thought experiment. If you shed your expectations, it'll send you down some pretty cool rabbit holes. PS: We sometimes use "Seems like a great Dropbox Show HN idea" as a kind of funny emphatic for project ideas when they go on the whiteboard.

tjoff 8y ago
I don't see the connection with "HN+dropbox". Dropbox was/is easy to do by yourself as a techie depending on your usecase. This is not easy/possible at all and the closest I can think of, which has long ways to go in pursuit of this (and they aren't pursuing this directly (I think)), is something like NixOS - which seems to be quite popular on HN.
- fapjacks 8y ago
  That's the joke [0]. But otherwise this is what I meant by "shed your expectations". Even if it were possible to prove something was not possible, how would you build it? There might be some free money in there somewhere. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
  - tjoff 8y ago
    I know(? it feels like I'm missing something). It is just that I feel the opposite. This is exactly the type of project that HN would like. And not heckle, because there are no similarities with the Dropbox case.
    - fapjacks 8y ago
      I mean, at the time of my posting this, literally every other top-level comment but two are kind of heckling the idea. I agree that a (working) project would be very interesting to the HN crowd. But it definitely also is an idea that many of those same people would have doubts about, very much like the Dropbox Show HN comment.
- fit2rule 8y ago
  > Dropbox was/is easy to do by yourself as a techie depending on your usecase. Dropbox should have come from the OS vendors. It didn't, because we don't have OS vendors any more - we have ad agencies.

tjoff 8y ago

I don't see the connection with "HN+dropbox". Dropbox was/is easy to do by yourself as a techie depending on your usecase. This is not easy/possible at all and the closest I can think of, which has long ways to go in pursuit of this (and they aren't pursuing this directly (I think)), is something like NixOS - which seems to be quite popular on HN.

fapjacks 8y ago
That's the joke [0]. But otherwise this is what I meant by "shed your expectations". Even if it were possible to prove something was not possible, how would you build it? There might be some free money in there somewhere. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- tjoff 8y ago
  I know(? it feels like I'm missing something). It is just that I feel the opposite. This is exactly the type of project that HN would like. And not heckle, because there are no similarities with the Dropbox case.
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    I mean, at the time of my posting this, literally every other top-level comment but two are kind of heckling the idea. I agree that a (working) project would be very interesting to the HN crowd. But it definitely also is an idea that many of those same people would have doubts about, very much like the Dropbox Show HN comment.
fit2rule 8y ago
> Dropbox was/is easy to do by yourself as a techie depending on your usecase. Dropbox should have come from the OS vendors. It didn't, because we don't have OS vendors any more - we have ad agencies.