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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?

#351

Post by thorin »

mabbo wrote: post #344
pjlegato wrote: post #38

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.

Is this the basis for Danny Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl?

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

#352

Post by Beldin »

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…

> Literature already is team based.

Don't forget editors. Maybe in some cases their impact is limited, but in other cases whole story lines are excised thanks to them. That's basically their job: to smoothen the narrative.

Most written works probably would look very different if not for the editor.

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

#353

Post by ncmncm »

homarp wrote: post #325
ncmncm wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, he didn't. Linus copied the design from Monotone, by Grayson Hoare (who also made the original pre-pre-1.0 Rust).

https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/6/121 "PS. Don't bother telling me about subversion. If you must, start reading up on "monotone". That seems to be the most viable alternative, but don't pester the developers so much that they don't get any work done. They are already aware of my problems ;)" time for monotone to be rewritten in Rust

Time for Git using SQLite for back-end storage.

Git has corrupted its own store too many times for me ever to trust it anymore. Almost ready to switch to Fossil.

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

#354

Post by aerique »

samatman wrote: post #176
aerique wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Common Lisp.

I would love some references on this, as it's the first I've heard of it! I know Brendan Eich was hired to embed Scheme in Navigator, and always presumed that he whipped up the Java-flavored prototype language we all know and, have feelings about, by using Scheme in both senses: that is, as the VM/semantic basis and as the development language.

So, I can't for the life of me find any references while I'm pretty sure in the past having read what I claimed.

Maybe this helps?: https://twitter.com/aerique/status/1498684767696523271

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

#355

Post by BrendanEich »

aerique wrote: post #354
samatman wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love some references on this, as it's the first I've heard of it! I know Brendan Eich was hired to embed Scheme in Navigator, and always presumed that he whipped up the Java-flavored prototype language we all know and, have feelings about, by using Scheme in both senses: that is, as the VM/semantic basis and as the development language.

So, I can't for the life of me find any references while I'm pretty sure in the past having read what I claimed. Maybe this helps?: https://twitter.com/aerique/status/1498684767696523271

https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/1498718012597170181?s...

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

#356

Post by aerique »

BrendanEich wrote: post #355
aerique wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I can't for the life of me find any references while I'm pretty sure in the past having read what I claimed. Maybe this helps?: https://twitter.com/aerique/status/1498684767696523271

https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/1498718012597170181?s...

Thanks again.

Apologies for the initial claim.

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

#357

Post by tejtm »

semireg wrote: post #342
tejtm wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

thanks for the short story

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

#358

Post by wander_homer »

sprucevoid wrote: post #262
iso1631 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Author of FSearch here, is there anything in particular you're missing? But yes, there's a huge gap and it's probably never going away. There are many reasons for that. For one, Everything has been in development for quite some time now, and some things just can't be done on Linux. For example there's no MFT on Linux we could parse to quickly get a list of all files or an USN journal to keep track of modified files, hence building and maintaining the database will always be slower.

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

#359

Post by yencabulator »

nafey wrote: post #26

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

I think it's worth noting that Linus was influential in BitKeeper's design previously, and if you know both systems, git feels like a cleaned-up BitKeeper that uses from-scratch formats instead of trying to ride on top of SCCS.
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