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

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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

ravi-delia wrote: post #219
Jcowell wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic but in a sci fi hypothetical, would there be a way to make out sun bigger to go supernova ?

Not any way that wouldn't just let us move to a star that will go supernova, I don't think. I just looked up the mass of the solar system, and got the gut-punch answer of 1.0014 solar masses. Considering that it seems to take 8 or so times as much mass as the sun for a star to experience a supernova, we could trivially just move all the non-star mass in the solar system elsewhere for several fewer orders of magnitude…

[deleted]

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

#223

Post by jonny_eh »

cableshaft wrote: post #131
Archelaos wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> say supposedly because ... ... because they did not write the compiler for their game.

There are quite a few two-person teams for indie games, one artist and one developer (more often it's three people, but two people is common also). I doubt most people would consider those teams a "single person creation". In Braid's case, it was one developer and he contracted out the artwork, just as much artwork as in those two-person teams. So is it really a single person creation? It either could or it couldn't…

> In Braid's case, it was one developer and he contracted out the artwork, just as much artwork as in those two-person teams. So is it really a single person creation?

Exactly, by the same logic Donkey Kong was made by a single person. The art and design was by Shigeru Miyamoto and the development was outsourced to a team of six.

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

#224

Post by javajosh »

Jcowell wrote: post #213
justin66 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be a bit of an anti-climax, compared to some of that stuff. Those helium atoms are likely to be fuel for our sun somewhere along the line when it's burning down and becoming a white dwarf. Our star isn't big enough to do the supernova thing.

Off topic but in a sci fi hypothetical, would there be a way to make out sun bigger to go supernova ?

Well, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will be merging, so there's an infinitesimal chance of a stellar collision with our Sun. (The odds of any stellar collision are, ahem, astronomically low, but you asked)

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

#225

Post by IshKebab »

toto444 wrote: post #161
nafey wrote: post #26

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

Does that mean that a less competent developper could write a more intuitive alternative in a few months ?

Absolutely. There's nothing fundamentally complicated in Git. The most complex things are the merging and diffing algorithms (but I presume the week-old git just used GNU diff and patch).

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

#226

Post by bduerst »

cornedor wrote: post #113
bradly wrote: post #61

Bingo Card Creator: https://www.bingocardcreator.com/ Exiled Kingdoms: https://www.exiledkingdoms.com/forum/index.php Stardew Valley: https://www.stardewvalley.net/ Instapaper: https://www.instapaper.com/ MeetWell: https://www.meetwell.app/

Rollercoaster Tycoon/Transport Tycoon

Dwarf Fortress by Tarn Adams

Also worth noting, Chris Sawyer wrote the original Roller Coaster Tycoon code directly in Assembly. It's probably one of the reasons the simulation game worked so well on earlier systems.

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

#229

Post by brimble »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #172
dghlsakjg wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a fascinating observation to me. Why has literature largely resisted team based creation? Writing teams exist for other mediums, but literature is almost exclusively written by a single creator who then loops others in after the work is completed.

I guess it depends on how you view this. Almost all books are edited by someone professionally. So it's not the sole work of the author. They are also published and marketed and yada yada. If you say okay all that stuff and even editing doesnt count you still have huge best sellers that are team based works. All those book for sale at your grocery store? They sell massive copies and are not written by the author. Dou…

I'm pretty sure the only reason we don't recognize this, while we do with movies, is that there aren't rules governing who's credited and what their credit looks like, as there are with movies. You don't get "Story by X, written by A, B, & C, based on characters by Z", and instead one or maybe two names are on there—you do sometimes see a writer credit (separate from the more prominent "created by") on some of those long-running series where the original author stopped somewhere along the way, or two listed for outright collaborations between known authors.

If book writing operated under the same rules as screenwriting, this would all be a lot more visible.

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

#230

Post by bduerst »

LaserDiscMan wrote: post #50

The lines blur between creation/discovery for some of these. Additionally, the historic nature makes it impossible to determine if these were all the work of a single individual, but I'll go with: Joseph Shivers - Lycra/Spandex Albert Hoffman - LSD Anton Köllisch - MDMA (was killed in WW1) John Pemberton - Coca Cola (significantly different to the modern drink) John Baird Glen - Propofol Percy Spencer - Microwave Ove…

John Wesley Hyatt - Plastic

The guy was trying to make ivory-free pool balls and discovered something that changed the future.

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