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Comment by gritzko | Hacker News Reader

We contacted Evernote in 2012, 13, 14 begging them to try CRDT based synchronisation.

First, it might have fixed their sync glitches. Second, that would make the client a full copy of the data, very much like a git repo. You can't lose data that way. Third, that would be a step towards collaborative features.

We got brushed off. We used personal connections as well as official channels. In 2014 we annoyed them so much, we're got a very confident response: sync is not a problem. Ironically, in a couple of months that "bug ridden elephant" post was out with all the reputational consequences.

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CRDTs are objects that can be updated without expensive synchronization/consensus and they are guaranteed to converge eventually if all concurrent updates are commutative (see below) and if all updates are executed by each replica eventually.

https://medium.com/@istanbul_techie/a-look-at-conflict-free-...

So it has been 5 years since 2019 and they still haven't fixed the synch problem (in my experience). That doesn't bode well for the product as a whole I would think.

Who is "we"?

Me and the other guy. I am Victor Grishchenko, PhD. At the time, we had a CRDT based sync engine which we white-labelled to Yandex. We had been eager to work with Evernote cause all their sync issues have been very clear to us.

These days, even Apple Notes syncs with CRDTs... at the time, it was cutting-edge.

P.S. Please never let me feel that my response is more polite than necessary.

I'm intrigued by your P.S. Mind expanding on why?

Not OP but I think that may be a way of saying, in effect, if one person is being more polite than the other, then they might feel like they are being "more polite than necessary". So his P.S. is saying "please match my politeness level", or, possibly, "You are being impolite, compared to me. Fix that" in an oblique manner.

the wording is quite weird, since people can't really control other people's feelings so how am I to know that I've made them feel a certain way?

Continuing to play devil's advocate, I think implicit is the expectation that all parties know good manners when they see them, which could be yet another way of putting people down in that statement.

The people who are rude won't care.

Based on the guy's name and the fact that he worked with Yandex, he's probably Eastern European, perhaps Russian.

In other words, English is probably not his native language.

So let's not overthink this.

Why is your response so polite?

It's interesting, because I didn't find anything in the OP's response to be particularly polite. Sure, it wasn't impolite either.

With the exception of that postscript though. If it's as passive aggressive as it sounds then I'd consider it rather impolite.

It's like Foucault has risen from the dead, this thread.

> These days, even Apple Notes syncs with CRDTs... at the time, it was cutting-edge.

This might be a way out for people with Evernote syncing issues. Apple Notes can import Evernote data.

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