All dogs are good dogs.

Of course. You certainly can't fault the dog for the questionable ethics leading up to it's existence.

The authors company isn't a Slack competitor, it's a real-time data platform. Otherwise I imagine they wouldn't be using Slack for their internal messaging.

Slack is chat, its messages are sent and read by humans. Ably is a developer API, its messages are sent and read by machines.

Slack has a shiny user interface and a bunch of nice enterprise features. It's something you'd have everyone in your company sitting on their machine all day.

Ably is something nobody will ever see. It's an API that underlies other people's applications. Hell, Slack could run on top of Ably.

They're absolutely not competing. You're either misreading or deliberately misleading.

...no? Google and Algolia aren't competitors.

So what? Doesn't mean what he says is false. This sort of ad hominem attack on the author and not the argument is a logical fallacy.

That's insane. And despite losing the suit, they continue to do the exact same thing.

Well, if that's all they're going to get as punishment, why wouldn't they? The legal system just taught them that what they're doing is OK.

That might be okay for a software engineer who can likely find a different offer somewhere else without much trouble, but that's not going to be realistic for everybody.

It looks like they've kept the D-Pad in so it can double as the A/B/X/Y buttons in that situation, which I think is a really clever way to alleviate some of that issue. I think the type of games where this use case makes sense probably don't need a large number of buttons anyways, though.

Not that I believe the rape allegations against him are necessarily true, but just because she consented before doesn't mean she consented then. That's a dangerous assumption to make in any situation.

>if you knew enough, you could get them going (orinoco cards for the win)

I think that right there was the problem.

That was life in the FreeBSD/Linux world, regardless, for the desktop circa early 2000s.

On the other hand you could use static typing to avoid writing a lot of tests. Maybe it's a bit of preference thing, I don't mind either approach personally.

I wish I had taken your advice...

So it's a networked file system, just implemented better? That was my takeaway from the post.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640 and marked it off-topic.

Sad to see so many replies assuming bad intent. GP pretty clearly meant "to the operating system, it works just like a network filesystem". That's an interesting technical detail, not the start of a flamewar.

"Just implemented better"? "Just"?

If it were as simple as you imply it is then surely we'd see this change made trivially to SMB, NFS, WebDAV, or SSHFS.

I agree with you that in hindsight this is an obvious feature, but they actually decided to implement it, and I bet it wasn't entirely trivial.

I think the problem with making this change to more generic networked protocols is several aspects become a lot trickier then you can't impose limitations on the filesystem.

The biggest problem, as usual, is invalidating the local cache. For Dropbox, who own and implement the authority on the shared drive state, it is a _very_ (relatively speaking) simple problem.

Other protocols like SSHFS have to deal with filesystems of all kinds. Many of those do not support anything like inotify, and polling over huge directories would be horrible experience or performance wise (long delay or slowing down the whole host machine).

It's a long time coming to end-user products, and it's extremely hard to give it the right semantics for all use-cases.

I first had a good look at caching distributed filesystems (and tried to build one) in my undergraduate thesis in 1999.

> I agree with you that in hindsight this is an obvious feature

In hindsight? It's about time! I've been waiting for this for years...

Poor word choice on my part, I wasn't intending to downplay the significance.

Yeah, it's also just 0s and 1s in various arrangements over electrical wires, nothing special.

That was my read too. But Dropbox itself is just 'rsync, but with a better user experience'. In that case the significant improvement of user experience made for a whole new way of operating. The same could be true with this.