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Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

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Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

#71

Post by evanb »

herodotus wrote: post #62

The invention that impresses me is the differential gear. The National Museum of Scotland, when I lived there, had a cut-away exhibit taken from a car. I played with it, and for the first time, understood how it worked. Two days later, I could not reconstruct it in my mind! Unclear who invented it. Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_(mechanical_devic... Mind you, this ma…

There's a great old-timey video explaining the differential in a car works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI

Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

#72

Post by pavel_lishin »

bartread wrote: post #41
mtnGoat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stairs also fall into this category.

Also, lots of simple tools and weapons: knives (and blades in general), hammers, bows, hand drills. Candles are almost unbelievably useful when you have no electricity, which leads nicely onto the various methods and tools for firestarting.

A knife might fall under a discovery, rather than an invention; a piece of flint that fell and chipped just the right way was likely the first knife.

Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

#73

Post by api »

WaxProlix wrote: post #52
ddingus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link? That is super interesting to me.

Google yields this http://virus.wikidot.com/dark-avenger-mutation-engine But it sounds a bit more prosaic than OP made it out to be (maybe it's incomplete?)

Maybe I'm confusing DAME with later mutation engines that had more elaborate ways of transforming the decryptor and payload code. I know there were some pretty sophisticated JIT-type things in the latter part of the DOS virus era.

Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

#74

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
kristopolous wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1911 Solvay Conference photo illustrates just how exceptional a woman scientist was then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference she's there at the table with Henri Poincaré.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

#76

Post by amineazariz »

davidw wrote: post #50
bartread wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The original question makes no mention of this, not to mention that it might be cool to think about a bunch of inventions that have been with us for so long that we entirely take them for granted.

Because the spirit of the question about an inventor choosing to remain anonymous, rather than being 'anonymous' because it was 5000 years ago.

Exactly, this how I meant it to be understood. Sorry if my original question wasn't precise enough.

Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

#77

Post by cosmic_ape »

anonlurking wrote: post #54
cosmic_ape wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Describing this as 25 year old math problem is a bit misleading. There might have been two or three otherwise not noted mathematicians that have looked at the problem a couple of times after dinner during the last 25 years -- is a better description.

Can you explain how you know that?

I read the article. I see how much published work on the problem is mentioned, and where is it published. In this case, not much. If a mathematical problem is really hard, and really important, of the type to reasonably qualify as a "25 year old problem", you will see a lot of partial results, many different approaches, connections to other ares of mathematics, a lot of work by many people. Nothing like that happened here.

Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

#78

Post by amineazariz »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #42

Many 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…

Didn't knew about her... Fascinating.

Re: Ask HN: Famous anonymous inventions other than Bitcoin?

#80

Post by hcs »

_underflow_ wrote: post #61
nerdponx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a few sections of both the Hebrew bible and the New Testament have scholarly consensus on authorship.

"Scholarly consensus" != authorship. Everyone had a scribe actually do the writing in that day anyway is my understanding. Is there a symbol for the squiggly equals sign?

≈ U+2248

≠ U+2260

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