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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?

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Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? That's interesting. I guess for some reason I had never considered that the sun would be taking in fresh fuel from is atmosphere. That is a little less exciting, but only a little bit.

maybe think of it as "ash" the newly fused element is more massive than the ones it came from and sinks to the bottom (core) When enough "ash" is accumulated (and the star is still big enough) the previous ash begins fusing into some new heavier "ash" rinse and repeat until you get to iron "ash" but no further. the reason is; every fusion lighter than iron is exothermic two atoms fuse into something bigger than eithe…

Atom X by Leopold is a good short story similar to this idea of a single atom’s travels. https://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-1942/from-archives...

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

#343
post #306

Does TempleOS count? I'm not sure it's been long enough but it's definitely unique.

I genuinely think it’s going to be an important teaching tool.

Sort of: this is the computer in its most raw and pure form, not for work but for play!

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

#344

The 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

John Napier seems to have been an absolute gem of a person.

> Another act which Napier is reported to have done, which may have seemed mystical to the locals, was when Napier removed the pigeons from his estate, since they were eating his grain. Napier caught the pigeons by strewing grain laced with alcohol throughout the field, and then capturing the pigeons once they were too drunk to fly away.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the ballpark startup cost to get it up to supernova volume? Would scaling up production of Farnsworth fusors help?

high capex

Leaseback. Think of the writedown! There's a _lot_ of money desperate for any kind of return. No, no, hear me out. You've got a couple of billion burning a hole in your pocket, right? And nothing that really looks unicorn material right now. So... we create this fund. It can't lose... it's got rocket science, so we grab all the Space X FOMOs. It's really really complicated to do, got ML stamped all over it. It's green. We'll peg it to a crypto; that'll get the speculators, and give us liquidity when the unicorn does come around... but you won't want to pull out.. I'm telling you, this is the biggest exit you'll ever see. It's a supernova!

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

#346
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post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mercurial?

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

Isn’t it also because Linux itself is controlled by Git?

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

#348

I'd put emacs and gcc by Richard Stallman on the list. (Obviously they subsequently grew to way more than one persons efforts.)

The Emacs you know today was written by James Gosling (of Java fame), which had its copyright and license headers stripped off and the GPL slapped on it with Stallman's name added. Gosling had quite a bit of help from others, as was the habit in the Emacs Commune.

To this day, Gosling is a little perturbed, from what I know. Stallman hasn't made major contributions to the project in well over a decade, and basically anything high level makes him confused. [0]

GCC has a long and storied history, and most of the code written by Stallman originally has been replaced with something better. Similarly, I don't believe he hasn't made major technical contributions in at least 20 years or so.

[0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

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