I’ve never hired any other developed to work on https://pollylingu.al with me, but obviously there other who work as tutors and translators
Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
191–200 of 375 posts
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#192I think of this comic which was done completely by Jack Kirby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAC_(Buddy_Blank) which has some delicious irony since it is about a "One Man Army Corps". Kirby worked with Stan Lee and some others at Marvel comics to develop the characters and settings that set the foundation for Marvel being... Marvel. Kirby was kinda resentful that Stan Lee hogged the credits for the work. Particularly…
https://www.comics.org/issue/27707/
Script:Jack Kirby
Pencils:Jack Kirby
Inks:Mike Royer
Colors:Jerry Serpe
Letters:Mike Royer
Serpe colored the whole comic’s run. In issue 2, D. Bruce Berry took over the inks; in 3 he took over the letters as well. This continued until the final issue (8), which was inked and lettered by Royer. And the final panel was “rewritten and redrawn by someone other than Kirby” due to the series being cancelled.
I have seen a lot of Kirby’s pencils (even inked over one of his pages as an exercise) and most of the comic is there in them, but there is a huge difference between them and an inked/colored/lettered page.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#193The Clojure programming language was a single person effort in the first years and all of the design and implementation was done by Rich Hickey in the first version (2 years of work, not counting previous experience).
He was burned out from the state of commercial programming around the time and funded a sabbatical with his pension savings to work on Clojure. He had at least 3 attempts to bridge Common Lisp and the JVM or CLR runtimes and he had formed strong opinions on the need for Clojure to be hosted.
He kept up doing 90% of the work with the next few versions and even today it he calls all the shots on its development, it not being a "bazaar" style open source project. Of course it being open source anyone is free to write their own patches and make forks, but generally contributions are more likely to be accepted by the community as libraries, not language changes.
The whole story has been submitted here a few times and is quite interesting: https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-final.pd...
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#194The list is massive. It probably covers most open source projects from Linux (which might not be single personal now but it certainly was when it started) and git, cURL (still single person AFAIK) etc. even GNU started out as a single person project.
> cURL (still single person AFAIK)
That person is Daniel Stenberg. He's been the main driver[0] (esp since its been called "curl"), and is still the majority committer, but the project has ~1000[1][2] commit authors (disclosure, I'm one). I'm in no way trying to diminish Daniel's work. It is excellent. Curl has however taken on a life of its own to an extent, with a few other heavy lifters and lots of occasional contributers. I actually think this speaks well to Daniels leadership; he seems to have a loose grip that guides the project and keeps things on the rails with minimal perturbation. He's still a heavy lifter, but not entirely Atlas[3].
[0] https://curl.se/docs/governance.html
[1] https://curl.se/docs/thanks.html
[2] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/01/30/1000-commit-authors/
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#195Chris Latner's LLVM compiler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#196The modern theory and application of logarithms are largely the work of one mathematician working in isolation (which is highly unusual): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logarithms * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Napier
Isaac Newton: His work on calculus, optics and gravity was all done in isolation (the university was closed as a precaution against the plague).
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#197Everything[0], instant NTFS file search on Windows. The thing keeping me from using Linux on my main home PC. [0] https://www.voidtools.com/
That's the only thing? `find / -iname "hello"` doesn't do it for ya?
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#198The "Cat's Eye" reflector used on roads was invented by Percy Shaw [1] in the 1930s. It's arguably saved miliions of lives and is found all around the world. It is a design that's simple, passive, robust, cheap and very effective, making it one of the all-time great inventions [1] Richard Hollins Murray contributed to the idea
Richard Hollins Murray is somewhere in my ancestry (Murray is a family name), probably a very distant relative. God forbid someone mentions the cat's eye at a family party, though, because all of the great-aunts and great-uncles get up in arms about how Murray's idea was "stolen" and how Murray was the true inventor of the cat's eye. I don't think any of them really know the history (I didn't know his name was Richard before I saw his this post) but I'm not going to argue with a gang of riled-up octogenearians.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#199The Sistine Chapel?
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#200I’m surprised Craigslist isn’t on the upper end of the comments section. It changed the way people bought things, even expensive things like cars, found jobs, dating…etc.