NwAvguy of ODAC and O2 amp fame...
TLDR: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/nw...
Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
101–110 of 146 posts
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#102Banksy, TISM are both creators of work and use/used anonymity.
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
fire (deliberate control of) was discovered by birds and later copied by humans
Birds? Source?
I'm not sure what the parent was referencing, but at the very least the Polynesian cultures record a story[1] of man learning to make fire from birds. It's possible this oral tradition has its foundations in an actual event from pre-history.
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#104TrueCrypt.
https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind This series was one of the most fascinating reads I've ever enjoyed!
From that series of articles, during Le Roux's court hearing:
> Le Roux admitted that he had created the encryption software E4M but denied that he had developed TrueCrypt, its famous progeny.
Also:
> Hafner and his SecurStar colleagues suspected that Le Roux was part of the TrueCrypt collective but couldn’t prove it. Indeed, even today the question of who launched the software remains unanswered. “The origin of TrueCrypt has always been very mysterious,” says Matthew Green, a computer-science professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute and an expert on TrueCrypt who led a security audit of the software in 2014. “It was written by anonymous folks; it could have been Paul Le Roux writing under an assumed name, or it could have been someone completely different.”
The developers of E4M and of VeraCrypt are known; the developers of TrueCrypt are not fully known.
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#105NwAvguy of ODAC and O2 amp fame... TLDR: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/nw...
Came here to post this. Objective 2 is a headphone amplifier revered in the DIY community. Although, you probably won't name a piece of great engineering an invention, but what puts it aside is that it was maid freely available under Creative Commons license.
Although it was BY-ND type, which lead to some interesting results, mentioned in a link posted by parent. In my opinion some type of copyleft license would suit better, but CCBYND fixes and underlines NwAvGuy's contribution for years to come.
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
fire (deliberate control of) was discovered by birds and later copied by humans
Birds? Source?
Some birds are thought to deliberately spread wildfires to flush prey out of grass (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/wildfires-birds-...) - does this have anything to do with early human fire use? No idea...
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#107The founding fathers published the federalist papers pseudo-anonymously.
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#108Many women published research under pseudonyms in the past, for example Sophie Germain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain So I'd argue that many past inventions that are credited to men might actually have been achieved by women scientists publishing under their husbands / colleagues / friends name as a pseudonym. In Paris I once saw an original print of Marie Curie's book on radioactivity, where her name…
> In Paris I once saw an original print of Marie Curie's book on radioactivity, where her name is given as "Mme Pierre Curie". This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman Nothing to do with publishing difficulties at all. It was simply the way a married French woman would be addressed at the time - as "Madame [husband's full name]", eg Michelle Obama wo…
Your comment only seems to reinforce the point that
> This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman
Or are you suggesting that it was not difficult for a woman to publish under her name, only that it was not customary to do so? Can you point to some supporting examples of this, if so?
> (It's still in use in more formal / old-fashioned contexts.)
formal / old-fashioned / misogynistic contexts.
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of brainpower in that room is incredible. Now think about it this way: probably half of what was available at the time got lost somehow. Makes you wonder where we'd be technologically if we had not systematically repressed one half of the possible scientists. On the positive side: probably a lot of that research got done anyway, with some guy taking credit for it.
It's way more than half. All those people are still white.
Well, they are all Europeans. I am not denying that racism existed at the time, but hardly any non-white person lived in Europe back then. (Even nowadays in most European countries the percentage of non-white people is so low that, in a group of 30, finding none is well within statistical error).
Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In Paris I once saw an original print of Marie Curie's book on radioactivity, where her name is given as "Mme Pierre Curie". This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman Nothing to do with publishing difficulties at all. It was simply the way a married French woman would be addressed at the time - as "Madame [husband's full name]", eg Michelle Obama wo…
Your comment only seems to reinforce the point that > This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman Or are you suggesting that it was not difficult for a woman to publish under her name, only that it was not customary to do so? Can you point to some supporting examples of this, if so? > (It's still in use in more formal / old-fashioned contexts.) formal /…
They said it wasnt an example of it without suggesting anything
You dont need to have an opinion or dissertation on the topic of dis/enfranchisement to make this observation