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Comment by artman | Hacker News Reader

Changes go through and synced to everyone on your team in almost realtime. If there's a conflict on the server and your change cannot be applied (almost never happens), your change is rolled back on your client, again, almost in realtime. If servers cannot be reached, we will show you a syncing badge within 4 seconds to tell you that you have made changes that haven't been sent to others yet.

Strange that we can be so be polar opposites on this. You hate it, I would never write an app in any other way, ever again.

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(curious) What if a user closes it before 4 seconds? Ctrl+enter, it optimistically locally updates within 1 second. I close ctrl+w. But my wifi goofed and it didn't reach the server.

I have mysteriously lost comments/descriptions I wrote on issues. I figured it was related to a failed and lost opportunistic update like this, although I suppose it could have been caused by a fixable bug.

The HTTP request is fired off instantly, so chances are that the request is already written to the socket and closing the page won't cancel the request. Should your wifi-router drop it, your client will retain the transaction on disk and retry it the next time you come online.

> next time you come online

Yeah that's the issue isn't it? I see in the UI it's sent. But actually it's sent only the next morning.

To be fair. It's fine for an issue tracker. Anything actually important i'd spend a few seconds going over what I just sent. In which case I'd see it's not synced. And what's not that important it's really fine if in some random wifi edge case it's phantom sent. So makes sense.

That's really gross behaviour; users like it because they don't understand it and don't know to blame it for their issues when weird things happen to them, and weird things to them all the time.

‹giant argument breaks out before people realize a bunch of messages went missing and were posted out of order› “Oh, it's just ‹app› being weird again. I really hate that.”

> If there's a conflict on the server and your change cannot be applied, your change is rolled back on your client

Do you lose your data then? Or are you thrown back into the form after it closed?

As a user, I like when things appear to sync instantly and perfectly, such as in Google Docs.

As a developer, I hated the article and many of the comments I read thus far because:

- Having clients and a server properly sync and not lose data in the event of a network failure amounts to having a consistent distributed system which is not easy to do, and the commenters don't seem to have understood that

- I hate having written a long document and then losing it because the sync code is buggy, so the previous point becomes even more important.

So reading many of the things here has been mildly infuriating.

That being said, none of these people are likely affiliated with Linear, and given the overall quality of the product I'm pretty sure it works properly.

In the case of a partition the client nodes get temporarily out of sync but the system will then synchronise to one state again once the partition is resolved if it’s written correctly.

So no violation of CAP theorem it just prioritises liveness over consistency

Which is to say: in case of partition, it loses data.

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