The pitch simply wasn’t true. Data was not destroyed and was restored hours later.

It's a pitch. The story has obviously been embellished and polished and condensed, ready public consumption. Being pedantic against it is not productive.

Politely disagree. It’s productive because hopefully future teams who launch on HN ask each other, “Is what we’re saying true?” during all those polishing and condensing sessions. If they don’t, the risk is crossing a line that damages the reputation of the team and undermines months if not years of hard work.

If the pitch is dishonest, why would I ever trust them with something as vital as my VCS? (And yes, "embellished" means dishonest)

That's a creative way to defend a dishonest pitch

This is not a pedantic criticism.

For many of us, the story rings true. We have ourselves had horror stories that we did manage to recover from after a few hours of fearfully googling, and we know of other, less capable friends and colleagues who were unable to recover the data and who just accepted the loss.

It's kinda crazy argument, I think data loss is way more likely with a centralised system than a decentralised system.

You think Microsoft losing GitHub repos is more likely than poor bastards trying to make sense of the git command line? You think these guys are going to do a worse job with their centralized service?

People have lost data on GitHub from repositories being copyright striked for example.

At least with git, every developer has a copy of the full history so full data loss is impossible really. What happens if this company folds? You're left with some proprietary repo that you suddenly have to workout how to self host.

It just doesn't make sense when compared to just learning git which is definitely the most fruitful thing a developer could learn at the start of their career.

But that seems like pretty much the equivalent to "rm -R *"? And also just a permission/configuration issue.

Or drop table|database or delete from. To _nearly_ lose data it took multiple clueless engineers and not detecting the issue for months.

I wonder how Diversion handles operations that possibly delete data. Whats their solution?

To put into perspective, that was in 2014 :D There were no branch protections, and git was even harder to use. Plus everyone was new at git, obviously (we started in 2013 with mercurial, which was still a legit thing to do, and switched to git).

Yeah, these days stopping force pushes is a checkbox (default?) in GitHub.