231–240 of 375 posts
Pinboard - https://pinboard.in/ is a one-man developed bookmarking/tagging/archival service that's been a consistent featureset and price for many years now without any delusions of selling out or exponential growth. I love it and use it religiously, I just tracked down an article I remembered reading in 2015 the other day just by searching a keyword.
ColorFORTH deserves a mention, to say the least! Chuck Moore devising his own programming language, which runs bare metal on x86 chips, in which he wrote a VLSI design program, to make chips, which run his programming language: it's safe to say this is the most control over a computing stack which a single human has at this moment in history. Which is not to say GreenArrays is a one-man show, or detract from the hard…
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.
The RAM of a collaborative group can't store a whole story very well. Even a single author has trouble keeping all of the loose ends tied together, but when you have to traipse over everything in a conversation at There is another example of this effect: mathematical proofs typically have just a few contributors, and very often one. But mathematics has an overall consistency that allows different people's proofs to b…
Japan still uses fax machines. No logical reasoning behind why.
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…
> say supposedly because ... ... because they did not write the compiler for their game.
Cave Story, great unique platformer made by one person that accumulated a large community and ended up being put on various consoles
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…
An intern I met a few years back built a Farnsworth fusor while he was in high school. He showed me pictures of it in operation, complete with some really cool shots of the plasma. It occurred to me a few years later that the helium atoms he snapped together will likely survive until they are swallowed up by a black hole or maybe have a front row seat to a supernova or gamma ray burst. So likely hundreds of billions…
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.
The "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
It also has the distinction of being the cheapest way that anyone can verify that human artifacts are on the Moon, by bouncing a laser off one of several retroreflectors left behind by the Apollo missions. You can't quite prove from there that humans were down there as well, but let's say it pushes the balance of evidence in the right direction.