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Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017

daniel.haxx.se

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017

#11
Did not know much about curl until I saw this. I have seen a few curl something.sh | sh instructions online that I always skip and wget the script for inspection. I guess it took a prestigious swedish award to the author to add it to my afternoon reading :-)

Judging from the respect in all the comments, it looks like a very well deserved honour. Congratulations and thanks for your work! I will appreciate even more after my reading.

Re: Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017

#13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That story went by me. Was there a rationale for banning him?

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/06/28/denied-entry/ I can't see any follow-up on why he was denied entry though.

We were never able to get any answers as to why I was denied - in spite of some real efforts in finding out. It will remain an unanswered mystery.

I will make a renewed attempt to travel to the US at a later time. Hopefully it was just some mess-up, a human error or whatever.

/ Daniel

Re: Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017

#14

Did not know much about curl until I saw this. I have seen a few curl something.sh | sh instructions online that I always skip and wget the script for inspection. I guess it took a prestigious swedish award to the author to add it to my afternoon reading :-) Judging from the respect in all the comments, it looks like a very well deserved honour. Congratulations and thanks for your work! I will appreciate even more af…

From my experience both wget and curl deserve respect. Both are fantastic tools, similar in some ways but covering much ground in other directions. I find wget ideal as a spider (checking broken linnks, making local backups of webpages and similar) while curl is much easier to use for quick inspection of web pages (including headers and https certificates).

Congratulations to author for the prize! And NZ is a great destination, hope they enjoy it. :)

Re: Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017

#15
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/06/28/denied-entry/ I can't see any follow-up on why he was denied entry though.

We were never able to get any answers as to why I was denied - in spite of some real efforts in finding out. It will remain an unanswered mystery. I will make a renewed attempt to travel to the US at a later time. Hopefully it was just some mess-up, a human error or whatever. / Daniel

My guess is that it's similar to the reason curl (and wget) sometimes get identified as malware by virus checkers.

Someone in US Immigration Googled 'curl' with your name and found a bunch of malware hits.

Re: Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017

#16

Did not know much about curl until I saw this. I have seen a few curl something.sh | sh instructions online that I always skip and wget the script for inspection. I guess it took a prestigious swedish award to the author to add it to my afternoon reading :-) Judging from the respect in all the comments, it looks like a very well deserved honour. Congratulations and thanks for your work! I will appreciate even more af…

From my experience both wget and curl deserve respect. Both are fantastic tools, similar in some ways but covering much ground in other directions. I find wget ideal as a spider (checking broken linnks, making local backups of webpages and similar) while curl is much easier to use for quick inspection of web pages (including headers and https certificates). Congratulations to author for the prize! And NZ is a great d…

And i think that is exactly how they differ.

Wget is first and foremost aimed at being a file downloader/spider. If used with no switches it will grab the first file behind the url and save it locally.

Curl on the other hand it more of a HTTP client lib with a cli interface. Unless fed a specific switch, it will send the file behind the url to stdout. Meaning that it is more at home at one end of a pipe.

Re: Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017

#17
post #4

If I remember correctly, Daniel has been working on curl for at least 2 hours a day for ~20 years. I hope he and his family have a well deserved vacation. Thanks Daniel for your hard work.

Agreed. The prize money is 250k SEK ($30k). That should buy a pretty sleek vacation. Even if the prize money is taxed (I'm unsure of that. My thinking is it counts sort of as a scholarship or grant, tax-wise, and should thus be exempt of taxation in this case.).

It seems prizes where the winner is awarded without competing or without giving a presentation are tax exempt [0].

[0] http://www.privataaffarer.se/fragor/ar-nobelpriset-skattepli...

Re: Creator of cURL wins Polhem Prize 2017

#20
Curl (as well as many other tools) are crucial to me everyday. Thanks to Daniel (and all the other contributors of all the projects and libraries)! Enjoy your holiday. Aotearoa (Maori name for NZ) is a beautiful place.

Full disclosure: I'm kiwi, so might be somewhat biased ;-)

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