[felipap]

Reminded me of the top comment on the "Show HN" of Dropbox, back in 2007: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

[nothrabannosir]

Instead of as a disparagement of the product, you could see this as a no-judgement PSA for anyone interested in and capable of running such an alternative.

Incidentally I am precisely looking for something like this so for me that’s valuable :)

[DoreenMichele]

I didn't "hear" it as suggesting it was a disparagement of the product, more like a "LOL, sure, that's so easy!" sarcasm. "You, too, can do this -- if you are a former astronaut and billionaire. No big!"

A lot of advice that "You can easily do it yourself" presumes a fairly high level of skill and knowledgeable in sometimes multiple domains. That presumption isn't crazy talk for the HN audience. Plenty of people will have the requisite background knowledge to jump on a comment suggesting a DIY alternative.

But that in no way means there isn't a market for the product. Plenty of people may need or want X and not have the capacity to do it themselves, even with some instruction.

[saghm]

I don't see anything in the comment claiming that it's "easy" to do yourself, just "possible". I don't think they'd bother saying "Happy to answer any questions" if they thought that it was trivial to do without help.

[1123581321]

I don’t read any of that sarcasm in the comment. And it’s perfectly fine to link a couple Github libraries in a forum full of programmers.

Further down someone has linked a couple other alternatives that are as easy to use as Stein, using a similarly neutral tone.

[close04]

I think the idea is solid but the reliance on Google (or other provider) might be the weak point. The cloud may be great but still a gamble if you're totally at the whim of a provider that at any point can make changes that leave you out in the rain. And Google is no stranger to this kind of thing.

Dropbox came at a time when people were seeing the downsides of private solutions and the cloud was there to mitigate them. These days people are starting to see the downsides of relying on the cloud and are moving to private solutions.

The main difference is today's "private solution" is likely to be a self-hosted "cloud". So it's not that we're going back in time a decade, it's just choosing a combination of "private" and "cloud" that maximizes the advantages and minimizes the disadvantages.

[RhodesianHunter]

> These days people are starting to see the downsides of relying on the cloud and are moving to private solutions.

All available evidence is contrary to this point.

[close04]

I see more and more people noticing the massive privacy (just an example) implications that many of these solutions bring and they're trying to regain control of their data. This is why I said "people are starting to see". Of course I can't see into the future but there's no reason to believe the trend isn't there at all.

But going back to OP's comment above and the link to the Dropbox topic, a decade ago many were not seeing the move to the cloud as anything more than a gimmick compared to the established private solution, not seeing the trend.

P.S. Just to be clear, by "private solution" I don't mean hosting in your own basement. It's retaining control over your solution even if it is hosted in someone's datacenter.

[TeMPOraL]

While this is not a good predictor of business success, it's still a viable alternative for some. Arguably, self-hosting is today more important than ever, given the unreliability and shady practices of many cloud solution vendors.

[miopa]

I'm totally expecting from Google to discontinue, restrict or change the API for Google Sheets at one point. It will likely be in the moment when it's hardest for you to timely update your app.

[Spooky23]

The difference is that your operating system vendor is unlikely to change the file system API to prevent a simple function such as writing files. With GSuite? Who knows.

[quickthrower2]

Well the advantage of free is not just cost but freedom to modify the code, hack it and also privacy advantages. Same goes for Dropbox vs rsync.

[Nullabillity]

Yup, and these days Dropbox seems to be doing their best to show people that they should have just gone with sshfs after all.

[Zaheer]

Lol I was thinking of that comment and was hoping mine wouldn't sound it like it. I'm actually happy Stein exists and think it'll be useful to a lot of people. Part of the reason I used Google sheets was because it was a 'free' DB and so I was just highlighting the free alternative.

[felipap]

I couldn't help but point out the similarity – but I can see where you were coming from as well!

[projectramo]

One huge difference: Dropbox was a mass market product while this is (presumably) for developers who want to iterate fast.