Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 80 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#11

Post by psychphysic »

mikeodds wrote: post #4

TempleOS RIP Terry A. David https://templeos.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

Quote from Terry A. David

> I asked God about racism? He said, "sports".[0]

He's an interesting case in the balance between autonomy and bad decisions.

Apparently his schizophrenia was easily controlled but he didn't want to give up what he felt was a direct line to God.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#12

Post by 2rsf »

Calibre developed by Kovid Goyal it's a one stop shop for eBook management. His reply to the issue

"Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3."

was

"No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase.

status wontfix"

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#13

Post by mcluck »

2rsf wrote: post #12

Calibre developed by Kovid Goyal it's a one stop shop for eBook management. His reply to the issue "Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3." was "No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase. status wontfix" [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

TIL that my favorite terminal[1] was written by the author of Calibre.

[1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#16

Post by hahamrfunnyguy »

There are so many. MIDIBox by Thorsten Klose is great. Open source hardware and software. There are a ton of projects based on it. I am not sure what the level of other contributors are now, but it was mostly or all Thorsten back when I was looking at it 10-15 years ago.

http://midibox.org/

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#19

Post by kkirsche »

2rsf wrote: post #12

Calibre developed by Kovid Goyal it's a one stop shop for eBook management. His reply to the issue "Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3." was "No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase. status wontfix" [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

You had me until the anecdote. I understand the sentiment and intent of what’s being said, but as a security professional it just paints themselves, their applications, and their user base as targets. Knowing it’s a won’t fix means it’s also easier to sell exploits if not disclosing as it’s clear he doesn’t intend to upgrade to a maintained and supported version of Python, so it should work for longer than most exploits.

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#20

Post by 2rsf »

kkirsche wrote: post #19
2rsf wrote: post #12

Calibre developed by Kovid Goyal it's a one stop shop for eBook management. His reply to the issue "Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3." was "No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase. status wontfix" [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

You had me until the anecdote. I understand the sentiment and intent of what’s being said, but as a security professional it just paints themselves, their applications, and their user base as targets. Knowing it’s a won’t fix means it’s also easier to sell exploits if not disclosing as it’s clear he doesn’t intend to upgrade to a maintained and supported version of Python, so it should work for longer than most explo…

On a second look I see that they did moved to Python 3 with Calibre 5 on Sep 2020
Post reply on HN