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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?

#241

Post by NoWizards »

Archelaos wrote: post #60
cableshaft wrote: post #45

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.

Every day is less impressive to create an entire product by one self, the ammount of tools created to simplify or automate common tasks give us a lot of work done.

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

#242

Post by samatman »

vitiral wrote: post #232
samatman wrote: post #183

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…

Forth itself is far more amazing considering the time period it was made. Chuck created self hosting OS's on KiB of ram, allowing an iterative development cycle when most OS's ran on computers the size of a refrigerator

Forth, and Chuck, and SVFIG, have all had a profound effect on my journey as a programmer. I strongly recommend A Problem-Oriented Language to anyone seeking a better understanding of the history and philosophy of computer programming.

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

#243

Post by mLuby »

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 ?

Throwing out some undercooked ideas for supernova-ing a star, from possible to impossible:

1. Throw more mass into it, ideally 1+ stars under their own power via Shkavov thruster.

2. Compress it physically with mirrors and particle/photon beams (see inertial confinement fusion)

3. Compress it magnetically with incredulously powerful magnetic fields (see tokamak fusion).

4. Compress it gravitationally by putting a black hole in its center.

5. Make it more explodey by converting half of its mass into antimatter.

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

#245

Post by gaetgu »

a_e_k wrote: post #228
toto444 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mercurial?

Exactly this. I think that git is only popular currently because everyone else is using it. (That and GitHub).

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

#246

Post by dustractor »

Not entirely on topic here but the first thing I thought of: Years after his music program called Impulse Tracker had had it's heyday, some music magazine did a roundup of various resampling algorithms and Jeffrey Lim's resampling algorithm was included for posterity and to round things out so that it wasn't all only big-money players. Names like Kurzweil, Alesis, Akai, Roland, Yamaha, Sony, Pioneer, Philips, Tascam ... but there on that list at NUMBER ONE was the resampling algorithm from a little shareware program made by a hobbyist for making beep boop techno.

(For those interested in the technical aspects of how to compare resampling algorithms, you take a sound, graph it, speed it up then slow it down, graph it again. Comparison of the two graphs would ideally be identical but in practice that's nearly impossible. Mainly you're looking for where frequencies got created that were not originally there.)

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

#247

Post by unfocussed_mike »

cableshaft wrote: post #45

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…

This does not go back very far does it. Must have been a fair number of iconic games written by a single developer in the eight-bit era.

Lords Of Midnight by Mike Singleton springs to mind, as does Sandy White's astonishing Ant Attack.

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

#248

Post by jfk13 »

lquist wrote: post #244

Most great artistic works are the creation of a single human: Shakespeare, Mozart, Da Vinci, etc.

In one sense, yes. In another, though, most great artistic works draw inspiration from other earlier works, and so are arguably not a "creation" by a single human; more like an evolution, a synthesis, a derivation, a continuation...

Would Shakespeare have written Romeo and Juliet if there hadn't previously been Pyramus and Thisbe, or many other sources?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet#Sources

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

#249

Post by Melatonic »

Tech stuff? This japanese developer that has been regularly updating his stuff for years and years. Simple. Efficient. Runs on anything. Although not super well known:

https://shirouzu.jp/

Non tech stuff? The standard design nail clipper is something probably most of take for granted. Invented by David Gestetner and used all over the world. I feel like this is the kind of thing that people might end up missing in a real dystopian mad max style world (assuming they become hard to come by). If I have to use a toe knife like the great Frank Reynolds I will not be pleased.

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