[chrisseaton]

This seems unnecessarily snarky. You can make anything sound silly by reducing its functionality to the most basic level possible, ignoring all aspects of ergonomics and packaging. And you could make this comment about any storage engine. Like the infamous Dropbox comment here.

[markstos]

Fair. The project could do a better job of explaining what benefit is it has over the file system API.

[chrisseaton]

For example sharing a public link to a value.

And syncing between file systems across a network is hard. (Before you say it's easy you can just do X, Y, and Z... remember that infamous Dropbox comment.)

[markstos]

It was easy to share public links to values hosted on the file system in 1995 with Apache. It remains easy today with Nginx and other web servers.

Syncing filesystems across networks with rsync has worked well for years.

If you are considering a personal key value store, you are probably already familiar with web servers and rsync. If not, they are two general purpose tools which are likely to be useful for other projects as well.

I was absent the day of the infamous Dropbox comment.

[chrisseaton]

> It remains easy

You're just parroting the original comment which was proven to be so so wrong in practice. Most people aren't able to / don't want to duck-tape random systems together like this.

I could snakily ask you what's the point of Nginx? Why not just run a dial-in BBS? Don’t you have the skills to do that? Why do you need this fancy Nginx and why did anyone bother writing it? That’s what you sound like.

There's value in building something that is integrated.

[kaoD]

Mostly the "remote" command as seen in the README.

[pydry]

Dropbox explained itself pretty well.

A simple one paragraph why at the top of this project's README wouldnt be amiss.

[chrisseaton]

For example

> Its trivial to set up and operate kvass across multiple devices

> remember the file we stored earlier? Let's get a shareable url for it!

[pydry]

I read it. Im pretty clear on what it does. Im still not feeling the why (or the differentiator from other things that store files and give you URLs).

Remember when Dropbox explained itself by telling you you didnt need to carry around USB sticks in your jean pockets that get washed or lost? I thought that was pretty neat.

[amelius]

> Its trivial to set up and operate kvass across multiple devices

Still, using a distributed file system is so much better, as its API is supported by basically everything else (including Dropbox!).

I feel that a key-value store goes against the Unix philosophy and is solving an imaginary problem.

[vineyardmike]

A distributed file system seems like way more work to set up.

Also not everything has to follow the Unix philosophy. Plenty of very useful things are better off less Unix-y eg ffmpeg. But this doesn’t seem to do a bad job - it’s a very dedicated tool to do one thing, it just doesn’t store everything as files.

[dadoge]

Out of curiosity, what is the infamous Dropbox comment?

[lkschubert8]

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

The gist is the original yc debut of Dropbox had a comment that described a pretty technical way to get the same functionality as drop box. It's commonly referenced when folks on hackernews dismiss a product when they can do the same with 10 unix commands, not realizing they might not be the target customer. Interestingly I think this situation is the exact opposite, Kvass seems to be more complicated for a non technical user than file systems as the top level comment responded with.

[whenlambo]

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

[vbezhenar]

What's wrong with Dropbox comment? I still didn't find any use for this service, but rsync works for me almost every day. IMO Dropbox is useless.

[chrisseaton]

> What's wrong with Dropbox comment? ... IMO Dropbox is useless.

That's just repeating the original ignorant Dropbox comment. Over 15 million paying users don't think Dropbox is useless. And hundreds of millions of non-paying users don't either.

[NoraCodes]

Many people do find it useful, and the people who created it have become very wealthy.

I'm in the same boat as you, but there are more kinds of people and situations in the world than just us.

[shreyshnaccount]

yc and Dropbox realised that people would like to pay for it. in the same logic, a toaster is useless, I can always just heat bread in a pan no?

[shreyshnaccount]

a browser is useless, you can always send a request through curl and read the html.