skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A board member does not decide on features or dig into your account to look for your political preferences. I can think of a dozen reasons why they would have invited her and all of them would be good for the company and good for users:

- advise on security matters
and help keep the NSA out of my files.

- get government business for Dropbox thus maybe reducing bureaucracy for citizens and small business owners alike in this country and others.

- help the company navigate Washington in a lot of ways

My imagination is poor on the subject, but I think if a company gets a politically savvy partner who was chief diplomat in the most powerful country in the world for a while it is for the benefit of the company and it's users.
Not everyone needs that, though. It's still a valid suggestion.
To me, this feels totally different from the Eich case. His political beliefs has nothing to do with Mozilla's product. However, giving someone who approves of wiretaps an important position in a company that people trust with their data, seems like an unbelievably bad idea.

It's not just about whether someone in the company has an opinion I find despicable, it's about whether my own data is still safe.
France makes work beyond 6 p.m. illegal
It is not like you have a perfectly verified identity in the first place. There are no photos or biometrics that could uniquely identify the person in the absence of the things like address or phone. Most websites do not verify identity but the provenance of the user (is it the same person?). Establishing actual identity is just more difficult and mostly unnecessary.
I recommend http://www.wuala.com/

In order to protect your privacy, Wuala encrypts the data on your computer before it is uploaded.
From one evil directly into another.
For most users it is a 5-10 minute job, no sweat.
Mega offers more storage for free, I don't know about ease of use.
That was quick and painless. I was already using gdrive for my work files; downloaded and installed gdrive sync in about 5 minutes, and now I have over 3 times the free space I did with Dropbox. Thanks, Condy!
Depends on the situation and the audience.

"Sorry, our engineers didn't allocate enough resources or our programmers didn't account for your specific inputs, so we can't process your request." sounds reasonable to me.

An error message because of a blank input field should not apologize and should simply say, "Your email address was left blank, please enter a valid email address below." Saying "sorry" would be like saying, "sorry you messed up, dummy".

For a 404 message, it's difficult to tell whether or not the link came from a 3rd party or your own website, so I'd argue that simply saying, "page not found" is sufficient.

"Sorry, our systems are overwhelmed at the moment, please try again later." is better than "Our systems can't handle this much traffic, come back later."

http://imgur.com/asdfasdf

https://github.com/asdfasdfasdfb
I'm in a similar boat as the OP's friend without the degree. I've been working in IT for 15 years but want to change careers to software development. Web development just doesn't excite me that much but that's where most of the jobs I could get are. I've learned what I need to already, I'd just need to hammer out a couple more projects and put 'em on Github.

I really need to know if I just need to suck it up and do that for a few years and then try to change it up or keep learning and try to follow my passions now.

I think the worst part for me is that I know how much I don't know, so I have no confidence in my ability. That said, I've always received compliments from other people about my code. It's a big barrier to overcome.
Any no bullshit European companies that can match the quality of Dropbox software?

I hate that I even have to make decisions like this, what the fuck kind of world are we living in.
But it is the only one described in the article.
Byron trial notes
How so? So it's ok to be a part of the team that was responsible for killing many men, women, and children and not only not answer for it, but move on to be on company boards where you can be a part of some serious collection of money at some point? Wow, ok. We must be living in different realities because those years that she was part of will be looked at (or already are) as some of the worst - if not the worst - in American history.

It's sad that none of that crew will ever answer for what they started and did. Granted, there were a lot of people in that chain that should have stood up and said no and not killed anyone. But they didn't. And if you or I did any of those things not wearing an army uniform, we'd be locked up and/or on death row.

I would never in a million years even acknowledge anyone from that team let alone bring them on the board of my company. We really are in an era where it's all about valuations, elevator pitches, and exits. I'm waiting for some young company to bring Dick Cheney on next.

Pick your battles I guess and I will be looking for an alternative that doesn't welcome war criminals.
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. I don't care whether Bush et. al. lied about Iraq. I'm not here to prosecute them. I have not called them war criminals.

I am disgusted by the way the Iraq war was sold to the American public. I'm disgusted by the legitimizing of torture, both legally and culturally, and I disdain anyone who was a part of that fiasco.

As a non-American living in another country at the time it couldn't have been more apparent how different the "facts" were inside the US reality distortion bubble and outside of it. E.g. in Canada we watch both US and Canadian news shows. Watching the same events reported in both gives an incredible insight into the amount of propaganda that US citizens are subject to.

Look up Knight Ridder's reporting on the run up to the Iraq war if you want to look at some good American coverage at the time.
Any C programmers who have never failed to check their bounds? Anyone? Anyone? Because everyone has done it.

Now would be a nice time for one of the Lint vendors to donate copies of their product to some of the OpenSSL team members, and for them to dedicate some resources into fixing the more important stuff it finds.
More people now watch eSports than the population of France
Your argument is irrelevant since the United States doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ nor the ICC.
You Can't Secure What You Cannot Update: Hardware Edition
"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country." -- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." -- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

Want more?

By the way, Rice never "enabled" for the war because she couldn't vote in Congress. Similar to Al Gore.
Easy. Voting to give someone the authority to go to war, and actually taking the country to war on faulty or fabricated evidence are in entirely different universes. Voting for war authority was likely necessary as a bargaining chip against Iraq to get them to comply with inspections. That Bush took that as a blank check and skipped further diplomatic processes is entirely on his (and his administration's) shoulders.
Will you use your normal account or just conveniently hide behind fake accounts to say things you know are stupid?
Okay lets describe this with satire..

How Many of you Voted for Bush Sr? If you did you are just as guilty as dropbox..

Oh please...
Refcounting unfortunately fails for GC because it can't handle cyclic dependencies, e.g. object A references object B which references object A, now neither object will ever be freed even if nothing else references A or B.
It's not a point release, such compatibility-breaking changes should be expected.
For my personal domain, yes, that's overkill.

For the places where it's really necessary, like fastmail, they should have physical photos of all the principals on hand.

It's expensive, but it's also an extremely precious resource they need to guard at all times.
Sorry, but tempered reasoning like this is not acceptable in the maximalist society we have today. You must be absolutely certain about every issue and realize that those who disagree are evil, intentionally so, full-stop.
I stand corrected on that point, then. But still, I guess it's no surprise that something tailored to look/sound like something else looks/sounds like that something else ;-)
Lucky business has an even more effective system. If you like a company/its product pay for it. If not don't. I'm voting with my wallet.
See my comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566335
"The problem is that GCs are considered harmful to crypto code, though that may be changing with Go."

I'm curious what about Go's GC leads you to say that? Is it that when you get a new chunk of bytes, they've been pre-zeroed? That's not specifically a characteristic of the GC but it's my best guess. Otherwise I don't know what it would be, which is why I ask.
Uh we have all killed indirectly. Do you pay taxes?
https://www.cubby.com/
Fresh news from a LHC experiment
>>There are SO many people involved with private companies that are so much more partisan and support with no hesitation so many terrible things that if you want to go down this rabbit hole, you're going to be down there for a while my friends.

What do think we do then if we find that a decision-maker in a company is highly partisan and maybe bad for privacy?
Limited non-compete agreements have value to startups. It's not unreasonable to want to protect the company's intellectual property, business plans, product roadmap, marketing strategy, etc. from someone who comes in, works for six months, and leaves to start a competitor.

Certainly large companies are abusing these agreements. However, so long as the non-compete is agreed at the time of hiring, is restricted to a year or so, and isn't so broad as to prevent the (ex-)employee from taking any new job, it doesn't make sense for a startup not to ask for one as part of the employment offer.

Of course, like any other part of the employment agreement, non-competes are subject to negotiation.
I feel this is different. With Mozilla I don't think the guys personal opinion (right or wrong) would affect his job. In this case it's different. You're trusting Dropbox with your data and on their board is a woman who was a senior member of an administration that created PRISM. This could effect the product is serious negative ways.
I feel that at this point we might to coin the verb "to eich", meaning "to shitstorm a company into forcing a high-ranking manager to resign".
I'm not American, so this is a little removed for me. In truth I don't really see big enough (non cosmetic) differences between the parties or administrations to justify the partisanship you guys seem to have.

What bother me here is not Condoleezza Rice specifically. Every ranking official of any country (or company) owns a big share of that country's sins and there are no "clean" administrations. Complicity is the price of admission and they all pay.

What does bother me is what this is a symptom of. Lets be honest about why board members are selected. Ex politicians wield political and corporate influence and a board seat is a way of renting that influence. At best its an elite club, at worst it's outright corruption but its always on that scale.

I guess that if pressed they would say that they bring experience and competence. That's as nonsensical as a large corporation justifying their political donations as an innocent, democratic expression of political preference. It's hard to say with a straight face.

Having ex politicians on a board is such a public display of stink. It's like when a politician who spends his entire life as a "civil servant" is obviously and publicly living a billionaire lifestyle with yhahts, mansions & private jets. They don't even bother to launder that dirty money. It's just displayed filth and all.
even better:

"oh, you're not familiar with X? it's actually pretty cool. it has benefits Y in situations like Z, which might be useful to you here because [...] I'll send you some links to the resources I used to learn about it. ”
Maybe you're replying to a reasonable person who continued to use Firefox.
H) Or, you start something like the PNAC and bide your time..
Got it, thanks for the input.
It's not about partisanship, it's about whether your data is safe. Of course maybe data can never be safe in the hands of a US company, but I put significantly less trust in a company that hires someone who supported all the violations by various secret services, than in one that fights those violations.
I've switched to BTsync until a compelling open option appears (hopefully soon).
With 16 rounds of ROT13 encryption for safety?
Can't we just keep software and politics separate? Do we really need to divide ourselves in yet another area because of differences of opinion?
Unity is free to use Mono commercially under the existing open source license, so long as they contribute their changes to the Mono runtime. They can even take advantage of this without making any of their own code open source, because Mono is licensed under the LGPL, not the GPL itself. Xamarin has made it very friendly to use Mono in commercial products without getting paid for it. I don't see what's distasteful in asking people to pay if they want license terms that go above and beyond what the LGPL offers. The commercial party gets the additional licensing features they want, and the money funds further development effort which goes to other users of Mono, both paid and libris/gratis users under the LGPL. Everybody wins.
You might like Wuala: http://wuala.com/en/pricing/
>> advise on security matters and help keep the NSA out of my files

What about her past makes you think she would have this position? I'd argue if the options are "Help protect your data from the NSA" or "Hand over your data to the NSA" that she would be much more in favor of giving your data to the NSA.
Why? I see nothing wrong with it.
This sounds like holding non-profits to higher standards than corporates. That seems a strange and grossly unfair thing to do, ultimately counterproductive to the very purpose of non-profits.

Of course, when it comes to their core values you have to hold non-profits to high standards - e.g. Mozilla on the open web.

But when it comes to things unrelated to their mission... Why should they be any more perfect than a for-profit corporation!

I like people holding organizations to high standards, its fantastic. But please, hold all of them to high standards - both for-profits and non-profits.
She's an independent board member. She does not have the ability, in practice, to do anything other than vote on compensation and various other corporate policies.

And if all it takes to get dropbox execs to turn over data is fiscal threats from a board member who is a former government employee, then they were going to give up long before Condi shows up on the board.

EDIT: and I just want to be clear. If you just don't like the idea of having someone who was involved with the war in Iraq/Afghanistan on the board of a company, you're entitled to your opinion (though I think it's pretty hard to be secretary of state or any other position of power in the govenrment without being involved in something evil).

But I find the idea that somehow Condi's presence on the board an indicator that they'll disclose my data to the government borderline ludicrous.
And DropBox isn't ?
Where is he located? If it's the USA, especially Silicon Valley, then it's too late as he's too old. From what I read and comments from likes of Mark Zuckerberg the illegal practice of age discrimination is rampant.
If he's willing to learn .NET and move to Ireland then all is well as once he gets good experience older developers with technical ability are in big demand. As a 43 yr old .NET programmer said to me the other day (as we watched Ireland beat France in the Rugby) "We are the most employable people in this pub and I've never been in more demand in my life".
Take a look at the instructions: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/whats-new/upgrading...
Say what you want about politics, that lady is sharp as a tack (and a concert pianist too).
As opposed to...Dropbox?!? (Recap: "Dropbox substitute?" "What about BTSync?" "Meh, isn't open")
The bush admin asserted that it could detain anyone without a trial and torture them. You know, they were trying to do good. We should just let that slide.
You think anyone with that much power will ever be proven guilty in our country? Fat chance.
Strangely, nobody's tracking down the nginx developer who inserted the exact same bug into nginx just a few years back (a NUL in a header would cause the header copies, done using strncpy, to abort early and expose uninitialized memory). He must have been an NSA plant too, right?
This is like being in the same boat with someone that caused a massive amount of people's life. Maybe that person has nothing against to you, or harmed you, and she can even be a the perfect captain for the boat.

But personally, If i have the option of another boat to board on, I would rather not be on the same one with her.
I'm not American, and the country where I pay taxes does not wage wars in foreign countries as far as I know.
Yes. Look at stuxnet 0.5 (year: 2005-07)

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/26/symantec-u...

And stuxnet 1.0 (2009-2010)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-real-story-of-...

This kind of stuff takes years and has a life of its own.

Crossing administrations, party lines, and cabinet members. The nexus of the Pentagon, CIA, and State departments...has a lot of moving parts...and they can't fire all the career professionals after every election.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Obviously "stupidity" is way too strong here, but the principle still applies.
You'd think that by now there's be more than enough incentive to use services from non-US companies, and therefore to start such companies outside the US. Where are they?
https://www.dropbox.com/help/41/en
Bitcasa: 1TB/$10 - https://www.bitcasa.com/pricing
Rethinking what we mean by "mobile apps" – why my app dev business was misguided
I did say "fig leaf". But some level of client-side would at least demonstrate good will, or some level of "giving a fsck".

There is a real difference though, which is the difference between code on your client which perhaps you could at least check if you're stubborn enough[1], and plaintext in a datacenter. This can mean the difference between targeted surveillance and mass surveillance.

Dropbox is a separate case - it was always "trust us" (we have your keys) encryption, and not what I would refer to as "client side" at all.

[1] This is a hard problem if you don't trust the OS
My priors on this being deliberate are pretty low, but I'd expect this denial either way so it really isn't evidence against the idea.
Hound is opt-in, it won't ever add itself to your repo and start commenting.
According to an agreed timetable signed by Bush and Iraqi leadership.
You're accusing her of war crimes. The burden of proof is on you to prove that she is a war criminal. Cite admissible evidence only, please (not Wikipedia links). We can try her in court once you give us the evidence. You only have to meet the plausible cause standard.
The Russians, the Chinese and the French, really?
Citing FactCheck links is stupid, now?
The only real alternative is building your own. I have, it was fun and it mostly works.

But suggesting that Box.com, Microsoft or Google are more trustworthy is misleading.
This is rapidly turning very ugly, and I can't stand it. Is being "anti-gay" or "pro-war" or even just "republican" the new Communism? The new witchcraft?
Seems like an extremely odd selection to me as well as politically charged.
I just can't understand why such critical components as OpenSSL just don't use Code Coverage tools like Coverity to find such things as this? Testing, coverage certification, static analysis: this would have been caught if these tools were being used.
You know... you asking that question made me look at it and try to figure out why I don't like it. I think it actually my lack of organization with it. "My Drive" and "Shared with me" section has lots of docs/spreadsheets that I don't need anymore and they clutter the view, I just never thought to remove them to clean it up.

So really, it's my own lack of housekeeping that's bothering me. Time to clean up my Google Drive. Thanks.
You have to pick your battles unless you're prepared to live as a hermit beyond the edge of civilization. We have plenty of choices in cloud storage, browsers, and fast food. With some things, like voting in a two party system and buying gas, you're choosing the less awful of the viable choices. Choosing in most cases is a matter of triage, not preference.
There's a big level of difference (in my mind) of being partisan and being in the crew that set the wheels in motion.
IMHO it doesn't make sense to compare Brendan and Condoleezza. Brendan expressed his vote democratically (different opinions are the base of democracy, right?), while Condoleezza had a charge of power in the State, she was an active executor.
Security consulting. More specifically, I help companies adopt data-driven approaches to collection and analysis + help security companies with their threat intelligence products.
I've been looking for an excuse to finally copy over my stuff from dropbox to google drive, thanks, I was too lazy to bother with it before :)
What about her past makes you think she would have this position?
> You must be absolutely certain about every issue

When was the last time you were absolutely certain about something? Are you always absolutely certain in your day to day life, let alone in the shoes of someone like Rice?
BTsync is not the final solution, but it seems like an improvement over Dropbox. What's your open alternative?
I've been running ownCloud[0] on my server. It has Windows/Linux/Mac/Android/iOS clients and has been working very well for me as a drop in Dropbox replacement. In addition to the clients, you can use webDAV to access your files.

[0] http://www.owncloud.org
How much demand is there for programmers with less experience from abroad? I could suck it up and learn .NET because moving to Ireland would be great.
I was hoping this would be a site that would review and compare cloud storage alternatives.
I call this internet bullying. I'm most def not gonna stop using a product just because I don't agree with the ideas of one person in the team.
This makes me wonder if Google, Microsoft, Box or even Amazon aren't behind this kinda message; y'know trying to make it viral and stuff...
I don't have the power to downvote, but I sure hope you're joking. To the OP, no, your friend is not too old. I would ask him to focus on learning the fundamentals (e.g. how to use a hash table, sorting, and so on.), and also write a couple of projects and put them on GitHub to gain hands-on experience.
But why is she a board member? Who hired her? You make it sound like she was forced on Dropbox by outside forces, and they completely disagree with her. In reality, Dropbox hired her, so they do not completely disagree with her.

It's not just about Rice, it's about what this says about Dropbox.