Probably everything Nikola Tesla did !
Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
261–270 of 375 posts
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the only thing? `find / -iname " hello "` doesn't do it for ya?
No, find is slow. Locate, sure.
Both speed and GUI matters (to me). ANGRYsearch and FSearch come closest on Linux, but they're still far off and the upcoming Everything 1.5 (in alpha) widens the gap.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Where by "porcelain" I assume you mean "easy to mishandle and break" ;)
Heh, an unintentional consequence of word choice :) “Porcelain” is used in contrast to “plumbing.” Both terms are used in the gut documentation to differentiate the more complex, user-facing features of Git (e.g. `git commit`) from the raw features used by other tool authors (e.g. `git for-each-ref`)
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wrot…
But, he didn't. Linus copied the design from Monotone, by Grayson Hoare (who also made the original pre-pre-1.0 Rust).
Graydon. (Damn auto-correct!)
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#265Everything[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?
Not only, but single biggest. find won't do, but I'd be happy if either ANGRYsearch or FSearch one day reached feature parity with Everything.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#266ffmpeg and qemu
Both by Fabrice Bellard, whose website: https://bellard.org/ is a list of projects where any one item - even the small ones, much less ffmpeg and qemu - would be at the top of anyone else's resume....quite impressive!
Yeah, my very first thought on seeing the question was, "Anything by Fabrice Bellard":)
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#267I believe ImageMagick[0] fits the criteria.
There's even an XKCD[1] about it.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The writing for shows is team based. Its just not this way for lit. I think it's just a cultural habitual thing. No real logic behind why. Japan still uses fax machines. No logical reasoning behind why.
>The writing for shows is team based.
Your typical TV show has more plot holes than cheesecloth, though. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#269Unsounded is a phenomenally nuanced and gorgeous webcomic created by a solo writer/artist. It's the only active webcomic I follow. http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/
Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
#270Linux
Richard Stallman would be very upset if he saw this comment
GNU contributed, but if they didn't exist Linux would either grow its own userspace or possibly borrow from *BSD. In the meantime, Linux did what GNU for some reason couldn't... although today HURD is actually nearly usable (in a VM) and Linux doesn't need GNU components (Alpine proves that musl/busybox can cover userspace, and with clang AFAIK you can make a completely GNU-free self-hosting system), which makes the whole thing a bit funnier to reason about.