Comment by narnianal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by narnianal | Hacker News Reader

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Social connections and physical health are also such multipliers, just as vim or git or lisp. If you have been asocial and unhealthy in the past and now were able to change you will also experience this increase in output, e.g. because you can suddenly ask others for help and can focus for longer periods of time. Maybe you will even come into less situations where you use git and vim and programming languages, because others also value your ability to focus and your connections more than your ability to produce code. Then it paid of even more to focus on these multipliers. Great.

That doesn't mean either of the other multipliers are not multipliers though. They are just more topic-focussed instead of generally applicable.

And no, mercurial can't do more than 5% of what git can. That's just a fact. Just like you probably wouldn't waste time explaining a flat earther why the earth is round I won't explain this to you. If you are smart (and I assume so from your comment) you will go out and fact check that by yourself from the assumption that you just might be mistaken and maybe this random dude on the net might've been correct.

Hope I'm right in that assumption. Then you'll have an awesome time of a lot of WOWs ahead of you. Enjoy it.

And if not, there's not much lost. Some humans will fly to Mars even if some others believe the Earth is a disk.

One thing that life tought me is that you can be the best dev in the company but still your boss is going to give the promotion to one of his buddies he likes.

Personal connections and social engineering is 10times as important as your actual skills.

Its unfortunate looking at current state of the world, but thats how it simply is. And I understand some may not agree with it, but please look around yourself and tell me Im wrong..

While it's nice you're agreeing with me, I did not suggest it as a way to improve your career, and my advice stands even if it has no chance of helping your career.

>If you are smart (and I assume so from your comment) you will go out and fact check that

Exactly how do I fact check this? Most Google searches give two types of results: Either pro git or meh they're mostly the same. Virtually every pro git page has basic facts wrong about mercurial and are criticizing the mercurial of a decade or longer ago(0) The very few exceptions cover use cases that really do fall into the 5% category.

And I assume you meant 95% and not 5% that you wrote. If you really did mean the latter I suspect you know little of mercurial.

(0) Branches are a classic example. Although I do think git has slightly better branch handling pretty much most pages criticizing mercurial branches expose their ignorance of beaching in mercurial

I'd argue they got it right: when 95% of projects use Git, then why learn anything else? I think the last time I used Mercurial was almost a decade ago at this point, and I don't know of any major project that uses it (outside of Mozilla, who has most of their newer projects are on GitHub, and OpenJDK, which maintains a GitHub mirror).

After Googling, it's pretty dire actually: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ProjectsUsingMercurial Many of these are dead links or links to repos that haven't been updated in years.

>when 95% of projects use Git, then why learn anything else?

I remember my University days: "I don't know anyone else who doesn't use Windows. Why do you use Linux?"

That is ignoring my point with a deflection. This isn’t 1999 with Linux as a (relative) newcomer and on the upswing, the adoption rate has clearly dropped over time. I did miss the fact that Facebook uses Mercurial internally, but their public-facing repos are all on Github (including, ironically, their re-implementation of Mercurial, Mononoke). Open Source software doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it needs a community to support it and use it.

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