15 ms·

He’s probably responsible for more wealth creation than anybody in the last hundred years just from those two projects.

cerberusss 7y ago
And besides that, the total sum of intellectual development. I remember in my student years, first learning GNU userland, and then compiling a custom kernel, and finally pouring over kernel module code. There must be hundreds of thousands of me, hungry to try to understand what makes an OS tick.
- naringas 7y ago
  Agreed 100%. I don't think I would work as a software professional if growing up I had to buy (or somehow finagle) computer manuals for closed-source systems in order to learn. Maybe I didn't read the code, but I learned so much by compiling it. Knowledge I wouldn't have bothered with had I just downloaded a binary blob.
xamuel 7y ago
It's really astonishing to see all the recent drama around GitHub/GitLab. Hard to believe those are multibillion dollar companies when their entire existence can be summed up as "Filling in some gaps in git". Like, if Linus Torvalds would just dedicate a few months and build that functionality directly into git, both those companies' value propositions would fall off the face of the earth. Edit: I mean, their value propositions to internal teams would disappear. They would still have value as social networks and as centralized hosting.
- excalibur 7y ago
  GitHub is like half social network and half hosting service. I don't see these as features that should or could be built into git itself.
- np_tedious 7y ago
  Idk if "gaps" is fair. Building a web UI into git would go quite against the "do one thing well" unix philosophy. And even then, hosting services would still be a thing
  - phonethrowaway 7y ago
    But git already has a built in webserver... https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb
    - obituary_latte 7y ago
      TIL! Thanks! Interesting, though, that it doesn't appear to work with MacOS built-in apache (webrick works fine though).
      - tinix 7y ago
        Can you run it with python's built in http server? That's native on all OSX installs. I believe OSX ships with Python2 by default, right? https://docs.python.org/2/library/cgihttpserver.html https://docs.python.org/2/library/cgihttpserver.html Hmm...
        obituary_latte 7y ago
        Yup MacOS ships with python. I didn’t try a python server since the ruby webrick server worked fine I just found it curious Apache didn’t work since it also ships in the OS.
    - rkuykendall-com 7y ago
      The fact that this is news to people here is confirmation that it was a mistake.
      - recursive 7y ago
        Are all HN stories about mistakes?
- sneak 7y ago
  Social networks are not popular because of their tech stacks or their codebase being written. There are already several open source git frontends, GitLab included. Social networks are popular because of their userbase and the ease of discovering other users and code. There is nothing you can build into a piece of client software that enables that.
  - cma 7y ago
    p2p and trust networks, but it has never been pulled off
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I’m not sure. Git has proven that however good its core model might be, it’s pretty bad at putting a UI over it.
- naringas 7y ago
  > both those companies' value propositions would fall off the face of the earth. what do you think are their value propositions? I think they biggest part of their value proposition has to do with a centralized git repository as a service. The centralized part is really important for most companies. To the point that many git users don't really understand it's decentralized nature.
  - xamuel 7y ago
    To me, the primary value propositions are: issues, merge requests, comments on issues and merge requests, related stuff like tags/milestones/etc., and the ability to expose this stuff in a friendly way to project managers who don't use the commandline. I guess since my team uses a self-hosted instance of GitLab, I'm biased and don't put any value on the social network aspect or the hosting aspect.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      You could get these things by running a Phabricator istance - not much reason to pay for GitLab self-hosted version unless you really care about the support aspect and some of tgeir enterprise-focused niche features.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  What an odd suggestion. Git follows the Unix philosophy of being designed to do one thing and do it well (concurrent version control). Building an issue tracker and more directly into it just doesn't make sense.
  - woodrowbarlow 7y ago
    perhaps, but building a suite of tools that work together (but can still work individually) would not go against that philosophy.
- hos234 7y ago
  Nothing happens in few months with one guy. Even if it's Linus Torvolds. There are 1300 contributors to the project - https://github.com/git/git https://github.com/git/git
- kerng 7y ago
  I think you are misrepresenting what Github actually is.
wbl 7y ago
Linux in part won because the Regents were getting sued at a critical time. Without linux we would run BSD and it would be fine. Git is good in some ways, terrible in others. I've used it for years and still don't feel really comfortable with it, but I've never had something as multiheaded as the linux repo.
- qorrect 7y ago
  > but I've never had something as multiheaded as the linux repo. Git is overkill for so many projects, I hate being forced into for everything.
  - growlist 7y ago
    Definitely. I find SVN so much easier. But we must all use Git because cargo cultism is cool, or something.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - majewsky 7y ago
      We use Git because GitHub happened to be the first non-shitty code repository website.
      - growlist 7y ago
        I'm talking about internal repos.
        soraminazuki 7y ago
        I know people like to complain about git's interface, but is it so lacking to the point that it justifies the time spent on learning multiple version control systems?
        7y ago
mempko 7y ago
I would like to pose a question to you, what if our culture, the tech culture, is a pop culture? Often times technologies become popular at the expense of others. If the technology that got popular wasn't the best technology but got popular for other reasons like, let's say creator was popular, then it's clear that technology might have actually destroyed a lot of potential wealth that otherwise would have occurred! And empirically hasn't this been the case in our history in tech? Windows being popular over Mac, IE being more popular than netscape, etc etc.
DanCarvajal 7y ago
Norman Borlaug man.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
  - username90 7y ago
    > He played a major role in developing leaded gasoline (Tetraethyllead) and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), better known by its brand name Freon Some would argue that his impact wasn't even net-positive. He might have done it in good faith, but it didn't really work out well.
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      > Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny" indeed
golergka 7y ago
Not sure if Linux and git beat spreadsheets and Stack Overflow. But if we're measuing individual contributors and not products - then he's still probably ahead of everyone else.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Gravityloss 7y ago
And interviewers ask him "are you a socialist?"
commandlinefan 7y ago
> more wealth creation Back in the 90’s, my sister asked what “Linux” was and I explained it to her as a free replacement for Windows (I know, I know, but that was the right description for her). She asked why it was free while Windows was expensive enough to make Bill Gates the richest man in the world. I told her that the guy who wrote it gave it away for free. She said, “wow, I’ll bet that guy feels really stupid now.”
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  I've had almost the exact same experience with some of my friends, when they asked about Linux.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I've always thought that open source developers devalue their work by giving it away for free.
- cryptica 7y ago
  If he had not given it away for free, today, nobody would even know what Linux is. It's all about network effects. He was severely disadvantaged because of a late start and no industry connections. There were plenty of competing commercial operating systems at that time. In fact, there were plenty of competing free operating systems too (e.g. MINIX). Gaining user attention at a global scale is always extremely competitive, even if you give it all away for free. Some people like Bill Gates got extremely lucky thanks to excellent social connections but others like Linus who were not so lucky had to go to extreme lengths to break through all the social and economic obstacles imposed on them by the incumbents.
  - laumars 7y ago
    > In fact, there were plenty of competing free operating systems too (e.g. MINIX). I don't think there were many (any?) free UNIX or UNIX-like OSs at that time. MINIX wasn't albeit Tanenbaum wanted it accessible to as many students as possible so teh licence fee was relatively cheap compared to other UNIXes of the time. 386BSD (the precursor to FreeBSD and NetBSD) wasn't released until around a year after Linux albeit they started quite a bit before. I guess there was lots of free OS's in the hobbyist sense but nothing that actually competed with MINIX.
username90 7y ago
Not the inventors of solid-state transistors in 1947? 100 years is a long time and solid state transistors was the last piece of basic research needed for the digital age to begin.
_Microft 7y ago
Haber and Bosch would like to have a word with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Cause_of_population_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Cause_of_populat...
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
  That's just barely over 100 years ago. Maybe Norman Borlaug as having the most wealth creation?
  - _Microft 7y ago
    Not sure how large the contributions of Norman Borlaug are but the work of Fritz Haber (also was unfortunately also responsible for weaponizing chemistry) and Carl Bosch enabled mass-production of artifical (nitrogen) fertilizer. About 50% of the world population depend on crops produced with artificial fertilizers. They enabled billions of people to live at all. In my opinion they are setting the bar quite high.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
      "Then, in 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber successfully fixed atmospheric nitrogen in a laboratory.[6][7] This success had extremely attractive military, industrial and agricultural applications. In 1913, barely five years later, a research team from BASF, led by Carl Bosch, developed the first industrial-scale application of the Haber process, sometimes called the Haber-Bosch process.[8][9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process First extraction was 110 years ago, then it was industrialized 106 years ago. That means they are out for "anybody in the last hundred years" just barely. It's amazing to think of how much change they enabled in the last 103 years. Roughly as I understand it Haber-Bosh process enabled us to get to the billions (e.g. 1B & 2B). Norm Borlaug, & the green revolution which he helped start, built on top of fertilizer & enabled the next couple billions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution Norm Borlaug is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation & famine.
rambojazz 7y ago
You are completely diminishing the efforts of thousands of people who contributed to the project.

And besides that, the total sum of intellectual development. I remember in my student years, first learning GNU userland, and then compiling a custom kernel, and finally pouring over kernel module code. There must be hundreds of thousands of me, hungry to try to understand what makes an OS tick.

naringas 7y ago
Agreed 100%. I don't think I would work as a software professional if growing up I had to buy (or somehow finagle) computer manuals for closed-source systems in order to learn. Maybe I didn't read the code, but I learned so much by compiling it. Knowledge I wouldn't have bothered with had I just downloaded a binary blob.

xamuel 7y ago

It's really astonishing to see all the recent drama around GitHub/GitLab. Hard to believe those are multibillion dollar companies when their entire existence can be summed up as "Filling in some gaps in git". Like, if Linus Torvalds would just dedicate a few months and build that functionality directly into git, both those companies' value propositions would fall off the face of the earth. Edit: I mean, their value propositions to internal teams would disappear. They would still have value as social networks and as centralized hosting.

excalibur 7y ago
GitHub is like half social network and half hosting service. I don't see these as features that should or could be built into git itself.
np_tedious 7y ago
Idk if "gaps" is fair. Building a web UI into git would go quite against the "do one thing well" unix philosophy. And even then, hosting services would still be a thing
- phonethrowaway 7y ago
  But git already has a built in webserver... https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb
  - obituary_latte 7y ago
    TIL! Thanks! Interesting, though, that it doesn't appear to work with MacOS built-in apache (webrick works fine though).
    - tinix 7y ago
      Can you run it with python's built in http server? That's native on all OSX installs. I believe OSX ships with Python2 by default, right? https://docs.python.org/2/library/cgihttpserver.html https://docs.python.org/2/library/cgihttpserver.html Hmm...
      - obituary_latte 7y ago
        Yup MacOS ships with python. I didn’t try a python server since the ruby webrick server worked fine I just found it curious Apache didn’t work since it also ships in the OS.
  - rkuykendall-com 7y ago
    The fact that this is news to people here is confirmation that it was a mistake.
    - recursive 7y ago
      Are all HN stories about mistakes?
sneak 7y ago
Social networks are not popular because of their tech stacks or their codebase being written. There are already several open source git frontends, GitLab included. Social networks are popular because of their userbase and the ease of discovering other users and code. There is nothing you can build into a piece of client software that enables that.
- cma 7y ago
  p2p and trust networks, but it has never been pulled off
saagarjha 7y ago
I’m not sure. Git has proven that however good its core model might be, it’s pretty bad at putting a UI over it.
naringas 7y ago
> both those companies' value propositions would fall off the face of the earth. what do you think are their value propositions? I think they biggest part of their value proposition has to do with a centralized git repository as a service. The centralized part is really important for most companies. To the point that many git users don't really understand it's decentralized nature.
- xamuel 7y ago
  To me, the primary value propositions are: issues, merge requests, comments on issues and merge requests, related stuff like tags/milestones/etc., and the ability to expose this stuff in a friendly way to project managers who don't use the commandline. I guess since my team uses a self-hosted instance of GitLab, I'm biased and don't put any value on the social network aspect or the hosting aspect.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    You could get these things by running a Phabricator istance - not much reason to pay for GitLab self-hosted version unless you really care about the support aspect and some of tgeir enterprise-focused niche features.
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
What an odd suggestion. Git follows the Unix philosophy of being designed to do one thing and do it well (concurrent version control). Building an issue tracker and more directly into it just doesn't make sense.
- woodrowbarlow 7y ago
  perhaps, but building a suite of tools that work together (but can still work individually) would not go against that philosophy.
hos234 7y ago
Nothing happens in few months with one guy. Even if it's Linus Torvolds. There are 1300 contributors to the project - https://github.com/git/git https://github.com/git/git
kerng 7y ago
I think you are misrepresenting what Github actually is.

wbl 7y ago

Linux in part won because the Regents were getting sued at a critical time. Without linux we would run BSD and it would be fine. Git is good in some ways, terrible in others. I've used it for years and still don't feel really comfortable with it, but I've never had something as multiheaded as the linux repo.

qorrect 7y ago
> but I've never had something as multiheaded as the linux repo. Git is overkill for so many projects, I hate being forced into for everything.
- growlist 7y ago
  Definitely. I find SVN so much easier. But we must all use Git because cargo cultism is cool, or something.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - majewsky 7y ago
    We use Git because GitHub happened to be the first non-shitty code repository website.
    - growlist 7y ago
      I'm talking about internal repos.
      - soraminazuki 7y ago
        I know people like to complain about git's interface, but is it so lacking to the point that it justifies the time spent on learning multiple version control systems?
        7y ago

mempko 7y ago

I would like to pose a question to you, what if our culture, the tech culture, is a pop culture? Often times technologies become popular at the expense of others. If the technology that got popular wasn't the best technology but got popular for other reasons like, let's say creator was popular, then it's clear that technology might have actually destroyed a lot of potential wealth that otherwise would have occurred! And empirically hasn't this been the case in our history in tech? Windows being popular over Mac, IE being more popular than netscape, etc etc.

DanCarvajal 7y ago

Norman Borlaug man.

agumonkey 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
- username90 7y ago
  > He played a major role in developing leaded gasoline (Tetraethyllead) and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), better known by its brand name Freon Some would argue that his impact wasn't even net-positive. He might have done it in good faith, but it didn't really work out well.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    > Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny" indeed

golergka 7y ago

Not sure if Linux and git beat spreadsheets and Stack Overflow. But if we're measuing individual contributors and not products - then he's still probably ahead of everyone else.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Gravityloss 7y ago

And interviewers ask him "are you a socialist?"

commandlinefan 7y ago

> more wealth creation Back in the 90’s, my sister asked what “Linux” was and I explained it to her as a free replacement for Windows (I know, I know, but that was the right description for her). She asked why it was free while Windows was expensive enough to make Bill Gates the richest man in the world. I told her that the guy who wrote it gave it away for free. She said, “wow, I’ll bet that guy feels really stupid now.”

claudiawerner 7y ago
I've had almost the exact same experience with some of my friends, when they asked about Linux.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
I've always thought that open source developers devalue their work by giving it away for free.
cryptica 7y ago
If he had not given it away for free, today, nobody would even know what Linux is. It's all about network effects. He was severely disadvantaged because of a late start and no industry connections. There were plenty of competing commercial operating systems at that time. In fact, there were plenty of competing free operating systems too (e.g. MINIX). Gaining user attention at a global scale is always extremely competitive, even if you give it all away for free. Some people like Bill Gates got extremely lucky thanks to excellent social connections but others like Linus who were not so lucky had to go to extreme lengths to break through all the social and economic obstacles imposed on them by the incumbents.
- laumars 7y ago
  > In fact, there were plenty of competing free operating systems too (e.g. MINIX). I don't think there were many (any?) free UNIX or UNIX-like OSs at that time. MINIX wasn't albeit Tanenbaum wanted it accessible to as many students as possible so teh licence fee was relatively cheap compared to other UNIXes of the time. 386BSD (the precursor to FreeBSD and NetBSD) wasn't released until around a year after Linux albeit they started quite a bit before. I guess there was lots of free OS's in the hobbyist sense but nothing that actually competed with MINIX.

username90 7y ago

Not the inventors of solid-state transistors in 1947? 100 years is a long time and solid state transistors was the last piece of basic research needed for the digital age to begin.

_Microft 7y ago

Haber and Bosch would like to have a word with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Cause_of_population_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Cause_of_populat...

X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
That's just barely over 100 years ago. Maybe Norman Borlaug as having the most wealth creation?
- _Microft 7y ago
  Not sure how large the contributions of Norman Borlaug are but the work of Fritz Haber (also was unfortunately also responsible for weaponizing chemistry) and Carl Bosch enabled mass-production of artifical (nitrogen) fertilizer. About 50% of the world population depend on crops produced with artificial fertilizers. They enabled billions of people to live at all. In my opinion they are setting the bar quite high.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
    "Then, in 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber successfully fixed atmospheric nitrogen in a laboratory.[6][7] This success had extremely attractive military, industrial and agricultural applications. In 1913, barely five years later, a research team from BASF, led by Carl Bosch, developed the first industrial-scale application of the Haber process, sometimes called the Haber-Bosch process.[8][9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process First extraction was 110 years ago, then it was industrialized 106 years ago. That means they are out for "anybody in the last hundred years" just barely. It's amazing to think of how much change they enabled in the last 103 years. Roughly as I understand it Haber-Bosh process enabled us to get to the billions (e.g. 1B & 2B). Norm Borlaug, & the green revolution which he helped start, built on top of fertilizer & enabled the next couple billions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution Norm Borlaug is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation & famine.

rambojazz 7y ago

You are completely diminishing the efforts of thousands of people who contributed to the project.