Comment by luckydude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luckydude | Hacker News Reader

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I'm plenty confident, in fact, too much perhaps. After all, I founded a company that has lasted 19 years (and technically still exists, we have some money in the bank).

That company changed the world. No, we didn't win, but all the distributed source management systems came after us, we were first, they are copies of our model. We invented that space, clone/pull/push/commit are our verbs. We invented, in effect [1], the concept of a changeset. Before us, there was CVS. No binding of a set of related files in a commit. I'm good with that, we changed the world for the better. If you are a programmer your world is better on a daily basis because of us.

As for "my problem being much deeper", not sure where you get that from. I'm retired, I'm fine. Do I have some regrets? You bet.

- I wish Git, since it won, was a pure clone of our stuff, we have a much better architecture, both for accuracy and for performance (try running Git on NFS, then try our stuff. Try running Git with a 4GB repo and then try our stuff.)

- I wish I had made enough money that my team could also retire.

Other than that, I'm good. I've got 4 dogs that I love, live in the Santa Cruz mountains with an awesome family that I also love, I've got nothing to complain about. Well, maybe some health stuff but I'm old so that is par for the course.

[1] One of my guys, Rick Smith, knows way more about this stuff than I do, and he tells me that Aide-de-camp had some sort of changeset concept. So perhaps we were not first. But nobody knew about it. Back when dejanews was a thing you could search usenet in a time range. I remember searching going backwards from the time that we introduced the changeset concept, there either 6 or 9 hits in over 2 decades of Usenet posts. The fact that everyone knows what a changeset is traceable to us far more than Aide-de-camp.

Edit: formatting

Hi Larry,

I for one thank you for your contribution. Hacker News can be a bunch of jackasses at times.

You are absolutely right: distributed version control led to git, which completely changed programming. And though Satoshi didn't cite it by name it was almost certainly also part of the inspiration for Bitcoin and the blockchain, which has led to another $30B in collective market cap.

If you want a suggestion for what to do next, or what to advise, you can probably have a lot of impact (and make money) by getting involved in some of these new distributed ledger/ICO projects. You have the technical ability and it's now possible to monetize at the protocol level. Here are some links if you're interested:

https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/

https://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crow...

http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols

Hacker news hasn't cornered the market on jackasses, my opinion is that this place has one of the least amounts of jackasses. But yeah, I get your point.

I'm pretty retired but I'll check out your links. I kinda feel like a useless dinosaur but if there are places where I can help move things forward I'm 100% up for that. I just don't feel like I have that much value to add at this point.

Edit: one thing I really wish would happen, and if I could help with this I'm in, is /etc and any other config file is under version control. 3-way merge/3-way diff and merge is way way better than 2 way.

For that matter, I wish drop box was versioned. Same reason. It's always blown my mind that nobody has done a file system that was versioned so you could merge stuff. Maybe that's because BitKeeper merges so much better that the others. It's possible to automerge a lot more if you have the history.

>>>For that matter, I wish drop box was versioned. Same reason. It's always blown my mind that nobody has done a file system that was versioned so you could merge stuff. Maybe that's because BitKeeper merges so much better that the others. It's possible to automerge a lot more if you have the history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11

(A little facetious here...no merging, but come on, it was the 1980s.)

VMS style versioning is not at all what I meant. What I meant is the OS implements the inode just like a versioned file in an SCM.

Consider the /etc stuff. You wack apache's config, so does debian, you do an apt-get upgrade and it either automerges or you get presented with the 3 way merge in $EDITOR or our graphical file merge.

In many cases, the system can just automerge it (BitKeeper has a pretty sophisticated way of doing, it's better than other answers in a lot of cases) and when it can't you get access to the full DAG and can use all the SCM tools to merge.

I meant more from the investors angle. I definitely don't get any sense of confidence from the business point of view but I can see there is little doubt in your technical execution.

But there lies the problem. You are deeply attached with your ideas and product. You said yourself, you spent 19 years changing the world in this area but not satisfied. It makes sense why you would point to marketing as being the fault. I hope you can see it from a passerby's point of view and not take offense at what is being said like the other guy below reacted.

When I spent a good chunk of my 20s writing software that I thought would change the world, I was defensive, had a huge ego ("My idea changed the industry and I feel like others with VC money have stolen the lime light"), and just refused to let things fail.

I admire that you've found happiness in life. There's more to life then just running a business and making money. I think it's definitely ignored in our world.

So we did pretty well on the business side. We were first, or very darn close to first, to realize that leasing software is smarter than selling it. That was me, that's my confidence.

I did all the sales for the first ~8 years, 16 hours a day on the phone. During that time I ran what I called "Larry's dating service" which was when I was talking to someone crazy smart I would go "Do you know ...." and then hook them up. It's not Tinder but I made a pile of really smart people get to know each other. That's confidence. I think.

Etc. I get that you are trying to tell me something but I'm not sure what it is. If I've come off as not confident that's sort of a mistake, there was a time when I was in my groove and I felt like Steve Jobs, I knew what the world wanted before they knew it. I had to push to get that stuff done, everyone said they didn't want that stuff and then they did. That takes a shitload of ego to keep going.

I'm just not sure where if I were more confident we would have been better. I suspect if I had been less confident we might be better. So I am not arguing with you or trying to disrespect you, I just don't get the not confident thing.

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