2 ms·

You still came up with it independently, and that's something. What is interesting is how someone in 1986 was thinking about the same problem and came to a sim

You still came up with it independently, and that's something. What is interesting is how someone in 1986 was thinking about the same problem and came to a similar conclusion. I used to think my ideas were unique, but then I realised that we're all absorbing similar information, and the likelihood of an idea being 100% unique is rare. But if you thought it up and someone somewhere else had a similar idea, you still thought it up on your own.

dspillett 6y ago
> you still thought it up on your own Back in the very early 2000s I had an idea for efficient backups that was essentially rsync, while tinkering with the thought I hit a block and started looking around for implementations of, or papers about, rolling checksums and such, and found rsync. I wasn't put out that my idea wasn't original - I was glad twofold because not only had someone done it better already (so I could just use it for the task as hand), but it at least confirmed that my thinking was very much on the right track.