Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

news.ycombinator.com

141–150 of 375 posts

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#141
post #88
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? One week? How much coffee was necessary for that?

The core of Git isn't that complicated. A merkle tree backed by a content-addressable store. That's very much in the realm of possible within a week. It wasn't very easy to use in it's first iteration. All of the porcelain that has been built around it is where 90% of the development has gone.

Wait, it used to be even harder to use?

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#142

List of video games supposedly developed by just one person: https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/the-14-best-games-developed... I say supposedly because I know Jonathan Blow paid someone to do all the art for Braid, and licensed all the music (I even saw him demo Braid before release with his programmer art at GDC back in 2008, it did not look anywhere near as pretty, so he made the right choice). But the artwork was so…

Breakout. Built by Steve Wozniak, solely. Exploited by Steve Jobs, Solely. For Atari. Chuck E Cheeses - Founded by founder of Atari, Solely.

> Chuck E Cheeses - Founded by founder of Atari, Solely.

Really stretching the definition of solely when you have to ignore the people who did all the actual work in creating chuck e cheeses - i can “create” a restaurant, but without cooks, servers, hosts, graphic designers, construction/reno people, etc. it’s not going to be fun for the whole family

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#143

List of video games supposedly developed by just one person: https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/the-14-best-games-developed... I say supposedly because I know Jonathan Blow paid someone to do all the art for Braid, and licensed all the music (I even saw him demo Braid before release with his programmer art at GDC back in 2008, it did not look anywhere near as pretty, so he made the right choice). But the artwork was so…

Lucas Pope is for sure a solo dev. He wrote a custom shader for Obra Dinn while he was also writing the storyline. It's a pretty incredible feat.

A custom shader is an incredible feat?

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#144

https://www.nirsoft.net/about_nirsoft_freeware.html Tiny utilities (typically under 100 kb), no ads, available for free, and they do exactly what they say very efficiently. The site has been around since 2001.

In the same spirit, sysinternals tools.

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#148
post #69
post #26

Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single week by Linus Torvalds,

Wait, what? One week? How much coffee was necessary for that?

See Ken Thompson's monologue about creating Unix in 3 weeks: https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=1372

Programmers used to be pretty damn productive.

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#149
post #69
post #26

Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single week by Linus Torvalds,

Wait, what? One week? How much coffee was necessary for that?

It was amazing that within ~24hrs of Linus releasing `.git` there were corresponding implementations of the backing data store within ~1 week for all the other "major" competing version control systems (eg: hg, svn, darcs) and written in just about every possible language.

The core of git is brutally simple and efficient, and maps incredibly well to "a linked list (and hash) of files serialized to disk".

Someone wrote somewhere "I used to wonder if Linus was a genius but Git proves it to be true. Anybody could have (re-)written a *NIX implementation, but Linus invented Git from whole cloth."

https://perl.plover.com/classes/git/samples/slide005.html

https://perl.plover.com/classes/git/samples/slide009.html

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#150
post #69
post #26

Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single week by Linus Torvalds,

Wait, what? One week? How much coffee was necessary for that?

I would say every year of quality experience a person has is equivalent to X mg of caffeine so at Torvalds level he might not have been above a normal level.
Post reply on HN