[temphn]

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

[luckydude]

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.

[firebones]

>>>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.)

[luckydude]

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.