[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the ...
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Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?
What are some single person creation that have stood the test of
time. The creation, at present, may be under the umbrella of some
big corp. But the entire core of it was developed and maintained by
a single person. Like Minecraft. And I am not talking about only
tech project creations. Anything extraordinary that comes to your
mind?
Author : debanjan16
Score : 187 points
Date : 2022-02-28 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
| qporest wrote:
| SSH - originally written by one person - Tatu Ylonen.
| jcims wrote:
| An intern I met a few years back built a Farnsworth fusor while
| he was in high school. He showed me pictures of it in operation,
| complete with some really cool shots of the plasma.
|
| It occurred to me a few years later that the helium atoms he
| snapped together will likely survive until they are swallowed up
| by a black hole or maybe have a front row seat to a supernova or
| gamma ray burst. So likely hundreds of billions if not trillions
| of years.
| justin66 wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| 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.
| tejtm wrote:
| 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 either, but
| smaller than both, plus releasing some energy (yay).
|
| when you get to fusing iron you need a ball about 20 miles
| in diameter and fusing does not give up energy, fusing iron
| needs to take energy from its environment.
|
| good thing it is not in the middle of a star big enough to
| grow a twenty mile ball of iron.
|
| and that kids is where supernova come from once iron fusion
| starts it all goes in moments collapsing the core and the
| star above where the core was "falls" into that space
| gravitationally propelled with enough speed that when it
| hits the opposite side (falling just as fast in the other
| direction) everything fuses into "whatever"
|
| that is about as exciting as it gets in this universe
| jcims wrote:
| I do get that part, but I like your description.
|
| The thing that I was interested in is whether or not a
| helium atom in the Earth's atmosphere has a way to be
| sucked into the fusing layer at some point. It just seems
| from everything that I've learned over the years that
| there's a net outflow of that would likely keep the
| little atom some distance away even if it left Earths
| gravity well.
| tejtm wrote:
| I see, if you are not already part of the "in crowd"
| below the photo-sphere can you get past the solar wind
| bouncers.
|
| I don't know, but think it would be tough for a lone
| atom.
| jancsika wrote:
| What's the ballpark startup cost to get it up to supernova
| volume?
|
| Would scaling up production of Farnsworth fusors help?
| mysterEFrank wrote:
| high capex
| Jcowell wrote:
| Off topic but in a sci fi hypothetical, would there be a way
| to make out sun bigger to go supernova ?
| javajosh wrote:
| Well, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will be merging,
| so there's an infinitesimal chance of a stellar collision
| with our Sun. (The odds of any stellar collision are, ahem,
| astronomically low, but you asked)
| justin66 wrote:
| I could be wrong but I don't believe there's enough mass in
| our solar system for it to be close. Solar systems do merge
| with one another, stars bring other stars into their orbit,
| etc. It would take something like that, I believe.
| mLuby wrote:
| 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.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Not any way that wouldn't just let us move to a star that
| will go supernova, I don't think. I just looked up the mass
| of the solar system, and got the gut-punch answer of 1.0014
| solar masses. Considering that it seems to take 8 or so
| times as much mass as the sun for a star to experience a
| supernova, we could trivially just move all the non-star
| mass in the solar system elsewhere for several fewer orders
| of magnitude of effort.
| [deleted]
| lambda_dn wrote:
| Not a lot of people realise that Windows 1 through to Windows XP
| was written by Bill Gates alone from his bedroom. Wasn't until
| Longhorn that he brought in Steve Ballmer to help out.
| RistrettoMike wrote:
| Pinboard - https://pinboard.in/ is a one-man developed
| bookmarking/tagging/archival service that's been a consistent
| featureset and price for many years now without any delusions of
| selling out or exponential growth.
|
| I love it and use it religiously, I just tracked down an article
| I remembered reading in 2015 the other day just by searching a
| keyword.
| mariodiana wrote:
| That site saved my bookmarks when Delicious went bonkers, and I
| much prefer it anyway -- well worth the small price.
| beauzero wrote:
| Fiddler...now owned by Telerik. Creator Erik Lawrence. Wikipedia
| link
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler_(software)#:~:text=Fid....
| runnerup wrote:
| Curl
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The "Cat's Eye" reflector used on roads was invented by Percy
| Shaw [1] in the 1930s. It's arguably saved miliions of lives and
| is found all around the world. It is a design that's simple,
| passive, robust, cheap and very effective, making it one of the
| all-time great inventions
|
| [1] Richard Hollins Murray contributed to the idea
| ray__ wrote:
| Richard Hollins Murray is somewhere in my ancestry (Murray is a
| family name), probably a very distant relative. God forbid
| someone mentions the cat's eye at a family party, though,
| because all of the great-aunts and great-uncles get up in arms
| about how Murray's idea was "stolen" and how Murray was the
| true inventor of the cat's eye. I don't think any of them
| really know the history (I didn't know his name was Richard
| before I saw his this post) but I'm not going to argue with a
| gang of riled-up octogenearians.
| samatman wrote:
| It also has the distinction of being the cheapest way that
| anyone can verify that human artifacts are on the Moon, by
| bouncing a laser off one of several retroreflectors left behind
| by the Apollo missions.
|
| You can't _quite_ prove from there that humans were down there
| as well, but let 's say it pushes the balance of evidence in
| the right direction.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The lunar reflectors are corner cubes. The original cats eye
| reflectors were glass spheres.
| haveyoubeen wrote:
| toast0 wrote:
| There's a convincing chain of evidence that the
| retroreflectors were placed by humans, but while I can
| probably verify there are good reflectors there now, I can't
| verify there weren't good reflectors there before the
| mission. I didn't have access to lasers back then, when they
| were quite expensive and I wasn't alive.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| You could record where the reflectors are and how many you
| observe today. Then, assuming your progeny hold sufficient
| trust in you and your memory, your children would be able
| to compare your notes with their future notes, by which
| time NASA will have placed additional retroreflectors on
| the moon. The difference would be proof that we've been to
| the moon.
| samatman wrote:
| Alright, granted: there is _at least one_ sheep in
| Scotland, which is black _at least_ on one side.
| emreb wrote:
| Linux
| Timpy wrote:
| Richard Stallman would be very upset if he saw this comment
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This was a single person creation once but it grew so much
| bigger than that.
|
| Also as a single-person creation, Linux is basically the
| implementation of an API which existed before -- not only did
| this bypass a huge amount of work that would go into designing
| a fundamentally new operating system, but it meant Linus's work
| would be useful because lots of existing software would run on
| it.
|
| (I find it depressing that real innovation in operating systems
| seems impossible because everybody wants to run old software...
| Thus all the "bloat" has to get put back into the system.)
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Bayesian statistics?
| [deleted]
| Melatonic wrote:
| Probably everything Nikola Tesla did !
| fieryscribe wrote:
| Zombocom. Anything is possible at Zombocom
| smucfhjufvs wrote:
| dimitar wrote:
| The Clojure programming language was a single person effort in
| the first years and all of the design and implementation was done
| by Rich Hickey in the first version (2 years of work, not
| counting previous experience).
|
| He was burned out from the state of commercial programming around
| the time and funded a sabbatical with his pension savings to work
| on Clojure. He had at least 3 attempts to bridge Common Lisp and
| the JVM or CLR runtimes and he had formed strong opinions on the
| need for Clojure to be hosted.
|
| He kept up doing 90% of the work with the next few versions and
| even today it he calls all the shots on its development, it not
| being a "bazaar" style open source project. Of course it being
| open source anyone is free to write their own patches and make
| forks, but generally contributions are more likely to be accepted
| by the community as libraries, not language changes.
|
| The whole story has been submitted here a few times and is quite
| interesting: https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-
| final.pd...
| closeparen wrote:
| It's also of course in the fundamental nature of Lisp that you
| can change the language by importing stuff rather than actually
| editing the core implementation.
| dimitar wrote:
| Clojure somewhat limits that by not having reader macros
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Clojure has explicitly walked back some of that flexibility
| of "changing the language" by deciding against reader macros
| in return for better interoperability of packages.
| TheRealDevonMcC wrote:
| APL by Ken Iverson, as well as its descendants.
| tpoacher wrote:
| leftpad
| dang wrote:
| Hacker News, including Arc.
| Maursault wrote:
| Although more recently the technology has fallen into obscurity,
| flintknapping has for millions of years stood the test of time,
| far longer than anything yet mentioned here, and whether we're
| aware of it or not, we all owe considerably to whomever came up
| with it, along with the inventor of the wheel, as well as
| whomever developed the ancient and mysterious techniques to
| control, use and even create fire, not to mention, of course,
| whatever unknowable creative geniuses that invented throwing,
| food, sex, clothes, pockets, wiping the nose, wiping other
| things, etc. Come to think of it, there was likely a first
| individual that came up with adding and others for each operator,
| and these inventions must have occurred a very long time ago yet
| many still use calculation even today.
| sjnair96 wrote:
| Oh Alan Adler comes in twice! He's credited for inventing the
| Aeropress coffee brewer and the Aerobie frisbees!
| narenkeshav wrote:
| Chris Latner's LLVM compiler. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM
| avg_dev wrote:
| Wordle
| Dalrymple wrote:
| RT-11 (a real-time, largely foreground/background operating
| system for the PDP-11)
|
| I have heard that the RT-11 OS was a one man effort at DEC, which
| for many years was more popular than Unix on the PDP-11, but I
| don't know the details. Do any DEC experts know more about this?
| type0 wrote:
| Rubik's Cube
| sasasalala wrote:
| blueflow wrote:
| zlib by Mark Adler
| dvdyzag wrote:
| Project page at https://zlib.net/
| karaterobot wrote:
| The first thing that came to mind was the Roud Folk Song Index, a
| database of 250,000 songs all researched and compiled by a former
| librarian in the 70s, as a labor of love (and scholarly
| dedication, I guess).
|
| And then Samuel Johnson's _A Dictionary of the English Language_
| , a dictionary researched and written by a single man. He thought
| it would take three years, ended up taking nine years. All the
| more impressive for the reckless confidence paid off by
| diligence.
|
| The famous anecdote Boswell reported about Dr. Johnson's
| confidence in his own abilities as a scholar:
|
| >ADAMS: But the French Academy, which consists of forty members,
| took forty years to compile their Dictionary.
|
| >JOHNSON: Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see;
| forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen
| hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.
| pklausler wrote:
| Not to take away from Johnson's accomplishment with his
| _Dictionary_ but he did have a half-dozen staff.
|
| https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2009/septemberoctober/feature...
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think the quote you're citing is this, right?
|
| > And Johnson did not write his dictionary alone: He had half
| a dozen assistants, and the history of lexicography tells us
| that assistants influence dictionary-making more than either
| eighteenth-century social hierarchies or the Great Author
| theory behind Johnson's reputation admits.
|
| My understanding was that the work of the assistants was to
| copy down quotations Johnson had researched. I imagine they
| did other things too, but did they write the dictionary, or
| did they _write down_ the dictionary? If there 's a serious
| claim that they had input on the content, then that's one
| thing, otherwise I'll continue hewing to my unreconstructed
| Great Author narrative :)
|
| I had also thought of Shakespeare when this question was
| asked, but then thought "well, I'm fairly certain he wrote
| the plays mostly by himself, but I'm also fairly sure other
| people, unattributed, committed a line here or there, and his
| actors probably made contributions that found their way into
| the folio editions, and so on, so maybe that's not a good
| answer to this question." I think Johnson, being as much an
| arrogant misanthrope as he was a titanic scholar, was
| probably less collaborative than Shakespeare in many ways,
| including his work on the Dictionary.
| mburee wrote:
| ffmpeg and qemu
| mulvya wrote:
| The Q says, "entire core of it was developed and maintained by
| a single person"
|
| which does not describe ffmpeg. FB was pretty active for first
| 4-5 years, but he wasn't the sole dev even then.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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!
| newsbinator wrote:
| A counter to the myth of the 10x developer
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, my very first thought on seeing the question was,
| "Anything by Fabrice Bellard":)
| equalsione wrote:
| justinede wrote:
| Photopea - Free Adobe Photoshop alternative.
| ptm wrote:
| Rock garden in Chandigarh, India.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Garden_of_Chandigarh
| john-doe wrote:
| The World Wide Web comes to mind.
| justinede wrote:
| Photopea - Free Photoshop Alternative
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think of this comic which was done completely by Jack Kirby
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAC_(Buddy_Blank)
|
| which has some delicious irony since it is about a "One Man Army
| Corps".
|
| Kirby worked with Stan Lee and some others at Marvel comics to
| develop the characters and settings that set the foundation for
| Marvel being... Marvel. Kirby was kinda resentful that Stan Lee
| hogged the credits for the work. Particularly Stan Lee had a
| writing credit for all of the books he was involved in, but
| "writing" includes both planning the scenario and choosing
| individual words and the illustrators had a lot of input into the
| scenario.
|
| Looking at OMAC you see Kirby do a really heroic job. The
| scenario planning is excellent and the writing at the sentence
| level is fine, but you can see that Lee had a special touch for
| that which Kirby didn't have.
| egypturnash wrote:
| https://www.comics.org/issue/27707/
|
| Script:Jack Kirby
|
| Pencils:Jack Kirby
|
| Inks:Mike Royer
|
| Colors:Jerry Serpe
|
| Letters:Mike Royer
|
| Serpe colored the whole comic's run. In issue 2, D. Bruce Berry
| took over the inks; in 3 he took over the letters as well. This
| continued until the final issue (8), which was inked and
| lettered by Royer. And the final panel was "rewritten and
| redrawn by someone other than Kirby" due to the series being
| cancelled.
|
| I have seen a lot of Kirby's pencils (even inked over one of
| his pages as an exercise) and most of the comic is there in
| them, but there is a _huge_ difference between them and an
| inked /colored/lettered page.
| rvba wrote:
| There is that guy in India who dug a route through mountains.
|
| There is another guy who is building a castle using mostly
| meieval methods.
| squirrel wrote:
| 1st guy is Dashrath Manjhi.
| falcolas wrote:
| Intermittent windshield wipers. Fantastically useful and co-opted
| by everybody who could (legally or not).
| samstave wrote:
| So, this guy owns the house next to a good friend of mine in
| Auburn California.
|
| It is a vacation home of sorts - but its a very large nice
| house ~7,000+ SF very well kept grounds - but rarely seen
| there.
| RantyDave wrote:
| The Turing machine appears to still be in use.
|
| The web has done alright.
|
| There are hundreds of them.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Mojang was formed relatively early on in the development of
| Minecraft and had a small team (and outsourced dev for other
| platforms) for quite a lot of it's development and obviously now
| is a behemoth.
| l30n4da5 wrote:
| Minecraft was pretty damn polished before it ever released,
| though. He formed Mojang pretty early, but if I recall, there
| were no employees other than Notch for a long while.
|
| Talking about when it was in beta and the only way to play it
| was in the browser.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| The Minecraft Alpha was released in June 2010 and Mojang was
| setup a few months later in September. A little more than a
| year after the first public release. There were four other
| people from the beginning with a few more people joining as
| development to release progressed over the next year. At
| least as I understand things.
|
| Then between 2011 and 2014 when it was sold to MS there were
| a lot more employees, development and outsourcing which is
| arguably when it exploded.
|
| Wasn't the JS release done specifically for the tenth
| anniversary?
| pjlegato wrote:
| 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
| toolslive wrote:
| Isaac Newton: His work on calculus, optics and gravity was all
| done in isolation (the university was closed as a precaution
| against the plague).
| hermitcrab wrote:
| He supposed to have said "If I have seen further than other
| men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." . But
| this may just have been a mean comment at the expenses of his
| small-of-stature rival, Hooke. (Newton was both a genius and
| an arsehole)
| ushakov wrote:
| Python and Ruby
| flamey wrote:
| and Perl for that matter
| trbn wrote:
| I'd vote for Eric Chahi's Another World/Out of this world, Jordan
| Mechner's Prince of Persia and maybe Chris Sawyer's Transport
| Tycoon.
| chdlr wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/
| Beaver117 wrote:
| curl
| gapo wrote:
| https://pinboard.in/ run and built by a single guy
| WCityMike wrote:
| If you are not talking about only tech project creations, then
| certainly many of the great books might fall under this category,
| especially those which birthed new mindsets as part of their
| creation.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Liquid Paper[0]
|
| It may be on its way out, now.
|
| [0] https://www.thoughtco.com/liquid-paper-bette-nesmith-
| graham-...
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Most of the time I've seen people using Wite-Out, they're using
| the tape version because you don't have to wait for it to dry
| utexaspunk wrote:
| The Sistine Chapel?
| drumbaby wrote:
| Schrodinger's cat. Oh, wait. Maybe it didn't survive.
|
| More seriously, 1) some mathematical fields, e.g. Galois groups.
| 2) some specific game strategies: - Bridge has the Stayman
| Convention (and others) - Chess has Alekhine's Defense (and
| others)
| mlcrypto wrote:
| LordHeini wrote:
| What do you mean by test of time?
|
| Is this applicable to Minecraft if there is Michelangelos David,
| or Beethovens 5th Symphony?
|
| Or some random tech stuff like Git if all the math is run on the
| shoulders of the likes of Euklid?
|
| But to add something technical:
|
| Nicolas Appert the guy who did canning before Pasteur could
| explain how it worked.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Forgive the tangent, but this is the first time I've seen
| Euclid written with a "k".
|
| In retrospect that seems like the more obvious Latinization. I
| wonder why Euclid is more common.
| dmurray wrote:
| I suspect the clue is in your phrasing: Latinization.
| European scholars wrote in Latin, where "k" is uncommon and
| "kl" almost unknown, and transliterated Eukleides as
| "Euclidis". Later writers in French and English - but
| probably not in Germanic languages other than English -
| turned this into "Euclid".
|
| If the _Elements_ was discovered now, we 'd probably favour a
| more direct transliteration of the Greek: Eukleidos.
| LordHeini wrote:
| Well i did not think about it, the name is written with k in
| Germany.
|
| The Germans keep a lot of the Greek K in names where in
| general the latinized version with an C is used by others.
| aerique wrote:
| Isn't Minecraft the David or 5th Symphony of our time?
| debanjan16 wrote:
| It applies to everything you mentioned. I didn't ask anyone to
| compare the relative greatness of the creations.
| LanceH wrote:
| I think he's saying one is years old, the other is centuries
| old.
| LordHeini wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Maybe Minecraft will be gone in 5 years because Microsoft
| releases a Minecraft 2.
|
| Then it will not have stood the test of time. while the
| Mona Lisa and canned food is still there.
| danielt3 wrote:
| I'm surprised (or I missed some part of the entire thread) nobody
| mentioned Bittorrent! The entire protocol and the original client
| was designed by one person: Bram Cohen. Think about some of the
| most efficient way to distribute large data over the internet and
| there is one single mind behind it. Of course, there are plenty
| of fancy GUI-powered clients today but the very original idea
| belongs to one person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
| bradly wrote:
| Bingo Card Creator: https://www.bingocardcreator.com/
|
| Exiled Kingdoms: https://www.exiledkingdoms.com/forum/index.php
|
| Stardew Valley: https://www.stardewvalley.net/
|
| Instapaper: https://www.instapaper.com/
|
| MeetWell: https://www.meetwell.app/
| cornedor wrote:
| Rollercoaster Tycoon/Transport Tycoon
| bduerst wrote:
| _Dwarf Fortress_ by Tarn Adams
|
| Also worth noting, Chris Sawyer wrote the original _Roller
| Coaster Tycoon_ code directly in Assembly. It 's probably one
| of the reasons the simulation game worked so well on earlier
| systems.
| otoburb wrote:
| I thought DF was written by both Zach and Tarn Adams, and
| not just Tarn alone.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xypb5/the-dwarf-
| fortress-cr...
| sprucevoid wrote:
| Everything[0], instant NTFS file search on Windows. _The_ thing
| keeping me from using Linux on my main home PC.
|
| [0] https://www.voidtools.com/
| branon wrote:
| That's the only thing? `find / -iname " _hello_ "` doesn't do
| it for ya?
| iso1631 wrote:
| No, find is slow.
|
| Locate, sure.
| sprucevoid wrote:
| 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.
| sprucevoid wrote:
| 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.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| Seen the locate command in Linux?
| tiborsaas wrote:
| General relativity, they haven't found a dent in it yet.
| joe__f wrote:
| General relativity was not produced in isolation, there were a
| number of other big names in mathematics and physics at the
| time trying to find a relativistic theory of gravitation.
| Einstein will have been discussing with the other physicists
| and been familiar with their work.
|
| See for example
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstr%C3%B6m%27s_theory_of...
| tiborsaas wrote:
| In that sense, the vast majority of inventions aren't
| original or created in a vacuum, we all build on the top of
| giants.
| jll29 wrote:
| There are some who claim there is evidence that "Albert
| Einstein" is really a shortcut/brand name for the husband-and-
| wife team comprising Albert and his first wife Mileva Maric; I
| read somewhere that they decided to put only his name on the
| papers to make it more likely that he may get a permanent job.
| His wife and fellow student certainly was intellectually
| involved, and Albert wrote to his wife once: "How happy I am to
| have found in you an equal creature". She was smart yet failed
| her final exams. (He left her for his own cousin.)
| User23 wrote:
| Quantum mechanics certainly provides a dent as it were.
| samstave wrote:
| PGP
|
| Phil Zimmerman
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
| Arkanosis wrote:
| Notepad++, PSPad.
|
| 7-Zip, LZ4, Zstd.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Javascript (created by Brendan Eich in 10 days)
| aerique wrote:
| Using Common Lisp.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| samuelkazeem wrote:
| John Resig's Jquery
| sneak wrote:
| This was probably done by just one crazy obsessive, and will
| likely be around for quite some time:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
| disgu wrote:
| But the Wiki article says that it was built by a company.
| Melatonic wrote:
| 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.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| You really need both a knife and a spoon for complete toenail
| maintenance
| treyfitty wrote:
| I'm surprised Craigslist isn't on the upper end of the comments
| section. It changed the way people bought things, even expensive
| things like cars, found jobs, dating...etc.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I always assumed Craigslist has a team behind it however even
| if it was created by just one guy?
| hkt wrote:
| Surprised nobody has said Denis Ritchie and C.
|
| Also, the architecture of Corbosier. Lots of other examples exist
| in architecture.
|
| Great question, by the way.
| jka wrote:
| Your comment made me think of Hundertwasser's architecture:
| https://www.hundertwasser.com/en/architecture , another
| example.
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| The lines blur between creation/discovery for some of these.
| Additionally, the historic nature makes it impossible to
| determine if these were all the work of a single individual, but
| I'll go with:
|
| Joseph Shivers - Lycra/Spandex
|
| Albert Hoffman - LSD
|
| Anton Kollisch - MDMA (was killed in WW1)
|
| John Pemberton - Coca Cola (significantly different to the modern
| drink)
|
| John Baird Glen - Propofol
|
| Percy Spencer - Microwave Oven
| samatman wrote:
| This is an interesting list because it gestures toward the fact
| that basically any first synthesis of a compound not found in
| nature appears to meet the poster's criterion.
|
| It's vanishingly uncommon for a first synthesis to have been
| undertaken by a true team, although this can get murky recently
| with drug discovery software narrowing search space.
| Nevertheless there is always a moment when (barring alien
| civilization) the compound never existed, then it does: it is
| nearly always one person doing the chemistry, with (at most)
| assistants who are fully supervised extensions of his or her
| will.
|
| Aspirin, for only one example, is the creation of Charles
| Frederic Gerhardt.
| aerique wrote:
| I'd wonder what the original Coca Cola would taste like.
| gutitout wrote:
| Cocaine
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Modern Coca-Cola is still flavored with coca leaves. Coca-
| Cola still imports the leaves and they are processed by a
| pharmaceutical company to extract the cocaine.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Tounge-numbing sensation
| bduerst wrote:
| John Wesley Hyatt - Plastic
|
| The guy was trying to make ivory-free pool balls and discovered
| something that changed the future.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| >The guy was trying to make ivory-free pool balls and
| discovered something that changed the future.
|
| For the better or for worse?
| bduerst wrote:
| Given we can make certain plastics from renewable
| resources, recycle them, or even compost them, I'd lean
| better, but I also think we're on a trajectory to people
| preferring 'micro-plastic free' diets.
| contingencies wrote:
| A story about the value of synthetic polymers. When I
| visited the North Korean border circa 2004 the reverence
| with which the North Koreans treated plastic opened my eyes
| to its utility. Because they have no plumbing, the North
| Koreans at the border are considered "wealthy" because they
| can obtain discarded plastic containers that float across
| the river from China and allow them to easily haul water.
| The alternative is pottery, which is highly inefficient. It
| goes without saying that they had no metal. Another great
| thing: plastic lenses. Much lighter and cheaper than glass.
| Good enough for many uses. An Australian invention, like
| wifi. We are moving away from single-use plastics: someone
| needs sanction the consumer packaged goods industry.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| How about https://oeis.org/ the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer
| Sequences? It seems to have been run by Neil Sloane for maybe 40
| years alone before getting a board of associate editors and
| volunteers, but it's not clear with a quick search exactly how
| long or how alone. He does seem to have been the primary guiding
| force for its 58 years, even with help.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Intege...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numb...
| shartshooter wrote:
| Kenshi[0] is a great example
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenshi_(video_game)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I'm consistently impressed by the stuff I wrote using the golang
| standard lib still running an entire decade later with only
| golang stdlib updates, while the stuff written with dependencies
| is dead
| dc-programmer wrote:
| NGINX
| oceanghost wrote:
| Finnegan's Wake.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| https://www.nirsoft.net/about_nirsoft_freeware.html
|
| Tiny utilities (typically under 100 kb), no ads, available for
| free, and they do exactly what they say very efficiently. The
| site has been around since 2001.
| cm2187 wrote:
| In the same spirit, sysinternals tools.
| [deleted]
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Not only does he offer the gift of extremely well-made, small,
| ad-free tools, but also a blog full of tips for using them:
|
| https://blog.nirsoft.net/
| yread wrote:
| IMAP by Mark Crispin
| jka wrote:
| Excellent thread, thanks! Elasticsearch fits the criteria, I
| think.
| krak12 wrote:
| silisili wrote:
| If guns are your thing - probably most things by John Browning.
| His designs are basically still in use more than 100 years later.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Browning
| petersonh wrote:
| SpinRite - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite
| spoonjim wrote:
| Christianity
| jpgvm wrote:
| TAOCP by Donald Knuth
| samstave wrote:
| Lululemon founder Chip Wilson was the inventor of Board Shorts
| (the shorts for surfers... he then went on to invent several
| other garments - then founded lululemon...
|
| His episode on how I built this is REALLY interesting.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Yeah, but did you ever see this interview in the Vancouver
| magazine the Tyee about how he named the company lululemon so
| he could hear japanese women pronounce it 'rururemon'?
| samstave wrote:
| Yeah he's an egotistical douche, but that tends to be normal
| in such businessmen...
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Bash.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Richard Stallman: Gnu Emacs, GCC, GNU Debugger, GNU make.
|
| They all started as one man projects. Then others started to
| contribute little, then more.
| kreig wrote:
| Nocash set of emulators and debuggers[1], created by Martin Korth
| some decades ago and they'are still widely used as a decent
| debugger, specially when developing gb/gba software.
|
| 1: https://problemkaputt.github.io/
| wslh wrote:
| Like MS-DOS? I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson
| alexashka wrote:
| All math? Almost all science? Almost all art?
| standardUser wrote:
| Banished
|
| https://shiningrocksoftware.com/
|
| One person made an outstanding village-building game that has not
| only stood the test of time (released 8 years ago) but also
| spawned dozens of imitators and a robust modding community. It's
| sold at least 2 million copies (based on outdated info I could
| find) and is frequently referenced in gaming media with the
| reverence of a classic.
| [deleted]
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Bill Joy made ex, vi, C shell and much of early BSD. All of those
| (at least if VIM usage counts as using vi, which counts as using
| ex) are still getting a lot of use.
| ojciecczas wrote:
| https://soldat.pl/en/
| samatman wrote:
| 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 work everyone else involved has done. I've not
| spoken to every one of them, but I can't imagine those I have
| disagreeing with me.
| vitiral wrote:
| 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
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| nealabq wrote:
| The light-bulb - Thomas Edison
| david927 wrote:
| No. His research for a better filament was conducted by a large
| team.
| cosmiccrisp wrote:
| I am forbidden from purchasing them now in a standard size.
| pro_zac wrote:
| Renderdoc is built and maintained by one guy.
| https://renderdoc.org/
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Radio engineer and ham Grote Reber [1] independently pioneered
| radio astronomy back in the late 1930s by building a dish in his
| back yard in Illinois.[2] (Noone else who knew about Jansky's
| results followed up.) Tech in that day wasn't up to working at
| 3.3GHz, so he moved down to 910MHz then 157MHz. In 1939 he
| discovered Cygnus-A. In 1954 he moved to Tasmania to get away
| from man-made interference!
|
| [1][https://public.nrao.edu/news/grote-reber-radio-astronomy-
| pio...] [2][https://web.archive.org/web/20060927053750/https://ww
| w.bigea...] (by John Kraus who ran Ohio's "Big Ear" operation)
| winstongator wrote:
| "Edwin Hubble and Grote Reber -- could there be more than a
| cosmic connection between them, both being astronomers, one
| optical and the other radio? Yes, it turns out, there is.
|
| Around 1900 the Hubble family lived in Wheaton, Illinois, and
| as his 7th and 8th grade teacher young Edwin Hubble had a Miss
| Harriet Grote who later married Schuyler Reber and bore him
| Grote Reber as their first son. She often commented to Grote
| that young Edwin Hubble stood out from other students in his
| class and that she felt he would go far. In later years, when
| Hubble's fame was spreading she took special pride in his
| accomplishments and that she had been his teacher."
|
| WOW
| cableshaft wrote:
| 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 extensive I'm not quite
| sure that really counts for your criteria.
|
| That may be true for some of the others in the list as well, if
| that's the case. Stardew Valley I know was all one person,
| though. Also I really enjoyed Gorogoa, even though it's a smaller
| game, and that was done by a single guy who quit his cushy tech
| job and spent 7 years teaching himself how to draw and make games
| before he released it. It's a super clever interactive comic
| panel puzzle game that was well-received, though. Think it's on
| Xbox Game Pass right now.
| austinthetaco wrote:
| Lucas Pope is for sure a solo dev. He wrote a custom shader for
| Obra Dinn while he was also writing the storyline. It's a
| pretty incredible feat.
| hwers wrote:
| A custom shader is an incredible feat?
| ajkjk wrote:
| Well, no, but arguably _that_ one was:
| https://danielilett.com/2020-02-26-tut3-9-obra-dithering/
|
| (But yes it's a bit weird not to say that the feat was, uh,
| making that whole game).
| lelandfe wrote:
| Here's a pretty wonderful timelapse of Pope getting the
| player's hand working in the game:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IQdpeN_OERM
| throwaway4323r wrote:
| I have no game programming experience. What is a shader and
| what other things needs are required to make a 3d object
| realistic. I think wireframe and then lighting is another.
| Seems shading is yet another which provides skin. Other than
| animation is there anything else?
| [deleted]
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| 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_.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I'm sure there's a bunch if you go back to early arcade days
| or Atari/NES, like you said. But I had a hard time finding
| them with a Google search.
|
| Also if you count Flash/mobile games, there's a bunch there
| too. I would count in that instance. I released several Flash
| games back in the day where I did the code, sometimes art
| (sometimes I collaborated with an artist), sometimes I did
| the music too, and at least some of the sound effects (any
| that couldn't be generated with a synthesizer I purchased).
| And I released one game on iOS/Xbox 360 where I did
| everything as well.
|
| But they were tiny games compared to behemoths like Stardew
| Valley.
| samstave wrote:
| Breakout. Built by Steve Wozniak, solely. Exploited by Steve
| Jobs, Solely. For Atari.
|
| Chuck E Cheeses - Founded by founder of Atari, Solely.
| kennywinker wrote:
| > Chuck E Cheeses - Founded by founder of Atari, Solely.
|
| Really stretching the definition of solely when you have to
| ignore the people who did all the actual work in creating
| chuck e cheeses - i can "create" a restaurant, but without
| cooks, servers, hosts, graphic designers, construction/reno
| people, etc. it's not going to be fun for the whole family
| serf wrote:
| extrapolating that idea into PC video games makes it seem
| ridiculous; the solo-produced video game wouldn't run
| anywhere without the work of hundreds of thousands of
| individuals within the computer field -- but I wouldn't
| consider the people who worked on , for example, SMD
| resistors , to be collaborators with the video game
| production.
|
| in other words ; 'cooks, servers' are generic components of
| a restaurant; the 'fun for the whole family' bit comes in
| as part of a custom set of things _on top of_ the generic
| restaurant experience that were thought of and attributed
| to the people responsible for the concept -- in this case
| the Founder.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Braid shouldn't be on there. While it was done by a single
| programmer, he didn't do the artwork. He was smart enough to
| hire someone with good taste.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > say supposedly because ...
|
| ... because they did not write the compiler for their game.
| iso1631 wrote:
| To make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the
| universe
| NoWizards wrote:
| 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.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| But the expectations rise too.
| Verdex wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like you kind of need similar categories as you
| see in speed running. For example, there are 100% speed runs,
| any% speed runs, no glitch speed runs, etc.
|
| Similarly, building an entire game from nand gates is a
| different kind of impressive than using an existing game
| engine + buying commodity art assets. However, using an
| existing game engine / art assets will probably result in
| something that looks better and can be more ambitious.
| rozab wrote:
| I guess this is a joke because he _is_ writing the compiler
| (and language, Jai) for his new game. I think he has a team
| now though.
| seneca wrote:
| > ... because they did not write the compiler for their game.
|
| That's like saying a painting isn't a single person creation
| because the artist didn't make their own brushes from
| scratch. Maybe true technically, but splitting hairs to the
| point that it makes the conversation about something else
| entirely.
|
| I, pencil is an interesting essay, but it's not what OP is
| asking about, I don't think.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| For sure. "And did you mine the sand and process the
| silicon for that computer? I don't think so."
| asddubs wrote:
| hold on now, don't tell me you were using preexisting
| atoms to facilitate your art? I guess all great artists
| really do steal
| revax wrote:
| If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must
| first invent the universe.
| cableshaft wrote:
| There are quite a few two-person teams for indie games, one
| artist and one developer (more often it's three people, but
| two people is common also). I doubt most people would
| consider those teams a "single person creation".
|
| In Braid's case, it was one developer and he contracted out
| the artwork, just as much artwork as in those two-person
| teams. So is it really a single person creation? It either
| could or it couldn't depending on your criteria (if he made
| all the critical decisions, some might say he is, while
| others care more about people who can both code and do art,
| two different fields that it's rare to find one person that
| can do both of them well). That's all I'm saying.
|
| Also a compiler is a tool, much like a hammer is to a
| carpenter. If you want to get that precise then there's no
| point asking the question, because short of "I found some
| pretty rocks on the ground and stacked them", there wouldn't
| be hardly anything that would count as a single person
| creation.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > In Braid's case, it was one developer and he contracted
| out the artwork, just as much artwork as in those two-
| person teams. So is it really a single person creation?
|
| Exactly, by the same logic Donkey Kong was made by a single
| person. The art and design was by Shigeru Miyamoto and the
| development was outsourced to a team of six.
| marttt wrote:
| An interesting solo game dev is also Jason Rohrer [1, 2]. I'm
| not a gamer, but I found his frugal work and life philosophy
| inspiring.
|
| 1: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/
|
| 2: https://usesthis.com/interviews/jason.rohrer/
| rsync wrote:
| I highly recommend the Braid soundtrack.
| [deleted]
| jll29 wrote:
| Tim Paterson's DOS?
| ajnin wrote:
| What about works of art in general ? Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh,
| Picasso, Escher, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach,
| Haendel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Saint-Saens, Bob Dylan, Mark
| Knopfler, Bob Marley ... And so forth. All artists who created
| works that are still considered masterpieces to this day.
| marttt wrote:
| The FreeDOS operating system [1], started in 1994 by Jim Hall.
| Several critical parts of the system (e.g. the kernel) were
| written by others, but he is still coordinating the project in
| 2022. They released version 1.3 just recently.
|
| Charles Childers' work on the tiny Retro Forth language [2] is
| also worth pointing out. It was started by Tom Novelli, but
| according to interwebs, Childers took over in 2001. Really cool
| language if you like tiny VM-based systems and forth.
|
| Another tiny one-man language is PicoLisp [3]. Created by
| Alexander Burger in around 1988, and he's still the maintainer.
| He has been using it in commercial application development ever
| since.
|
| Today, I'm wishing a long and healthy life to Virgil Dupras'
| Collapse OS! [4]
|
| EDIT:
|
| Another project I really like is Willus.com's k2pdfopt [5], a
| small cross-platform tool that optimizes pdf files for mobile
| readers. Started in around 2011; judging by the website, very
| probably a single-person thing.
|
| One more is, edbrowse, a "command line editor browser" with ed-
| like command language [6]. Originally written in 2002 by Karl
| Dahlke for blind users, but might be interesting to many others
| as well because of its scripting abilites.
|
| Ah, and also mhwaveedit [7], Magnus Hjorth's wave editor,
| developed by him since around 2002. And Mark Tyler's mtpaint [8],
| which was apparently very much inspired by mhwaveedit.
|
| A fascinating single-person made digital audio workstation is Non
| DAW by Jonathan Moore Liles [9], started in around 2006. I've
| used it a lot, great modular design, ran really well on an old
| Thinkpad T42.
|
| Serenity OS [10] has also been in development for 3 years.
| Andreas Kling's amazing effort.
|
| Possibly Dwarf Fortress [11] would also almost count as a two-man
| project, by Tarn and Zach Adams, going on since 2002.
|
| Nils M. Holm's creations also deserve a mention for sure. Scheme
| 9 From Empty Space, Klong array language, several books, etc
| [12]. Really inspiring guy.
|
| Not wishing to turn HN into Wikipedia, so I'll stop here. The
| dedication behind this kind of projects is amazing, really.
|
| 1: https://www.freedos.org/
|
| 2: http://retroforth.org/
|
| 3: https://picolisp.com/
|
| 4: http://collapseos.org/
|
| 5: https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/
|
| 6: http://edbrowse.org/
|
| 7: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit
|
| 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint
|
| 9: http://non.tuxfamily.org/
|
| 10: http://serenityos.org/
|
| 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress
|
| 12: http://t3x.org/s9fes/
| dho wrote:
| Redis
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this is an interesting topic -- I find it socially curious how
| some academic coders can have their name at the top of a project,
| as if it was solo, and then a dozen+ names listed in the "thank
| you" section.. as an academic outsider, I can say that there are
| definitely layers to the academic social norms world, where both
| well-spoken industrious visionary individuals, and harsh
| thankless abusive team leaders, can end up with "sole inventor"
| looking attributes even though in fact, no one does that much
| detailed work completely alone.
| lquist wrote:
| Most great artistic works are the creation of a single human:
| Shakespeare, Mozart, Da Vinci, etc.
| jfk13 wrote:
| 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
| mikeryan wrote:
| Craigslist started as a mailing list managed by Craig.
| ISL wrote:
| The overhand knot?
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Transport Tycoon (Now OpenTTD) - a simulation game where you
| build a transportation company with complex economics, physics
| and other real world elements built in. If I am not this game was
| written by Chris Sawyer in early 90's or late 80's.
|
| The guy is a legend.
| keeptrying wrote:
| SPICE layout tool?
| fit2rule wrote:
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Total Commander - https://www.ghisler.com/
|
| Been around for 27 years now and maintained by Christian Ghisler
| pretty much on his own.
| swlkr wrote:
| pinboard
| hpb42 wrote:
| I believe ImageMagick[0] fits the criteria.
|
| There's even an XKCD[1] about it.
|
| [0] https://imagemagick.org/ [1] https://m.xkcd.com/2347/
| sneak wrote:
| Does TempleOS count? I'm not sure it's been long enough but it's
| definitely unique.
| JimWestergren wrote:
| I built the website builder N.nu myself in 2009. Still popular in
| Sweden today, 13 years later.
| gmuslera wrote:
| As you named a game Stardew Valley was my first idea.
|
| But a lot of essential tech tools, apps and libraries, are mostly
| one man creation (fitting in https://xkcd.com/2347/).
|
| I think that calibre, keepassx (no longer maintained, but living
| as keepassxc) and curl are some examples.
| [deleted]
| mgkimsal wrote:
| The paperclip? That seemed to be multiple 'single person'
| inventors, however.
| brimstedt wrote:
| Are you talking about Clippy? ;-)
| toto444 wrote:
| Anki, the very popular Spaced Repetition System is developped and
| maintained by one person if I'm correct.
| pikrzyszto wrote:
| emacs, a lot of art including books, film, wheel, fire, some
| programming languages (C, Perl, Python)
| nealabq wrote:
| Written laws - Hammurabi
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Remind - https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/
| Gys wrote:
| SQLite by D. Richard Hipp
| diordiderot wrote:
| Underrated answer
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| There are a large number of prolific inventors whose technology
| we still use today in some form or another: There's a lovely
| little book _" Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who
| Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time"_ about
| Harrison's marine chronometer.
|
| Others like Gutenberg's printing press, Franklin's lightning rod,
| Whitney's cotton gin, Jenner's smallpox vaccine, Nobel's
| dynamite, Edison's phonograph, etc. etc. etc. are available in
| lots of lists.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| I'm shocked that noone mentioned Kent Beck and JUnit. JUnit is
| one of the most widely-used libraries out there.
| SpinningCode wrote:
| - PuTTY (Simon Tatham) - Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto, if he's a
| single person) - mIRC (Khaled Mardam-Bey)
| dustractor wrote:
| 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.)
| jjice wrote:
| Software is a pretty incredible industry because it allows a
| single person (or small group) to be responsible for something
| that so many systems are dependent on. Pretty incredible. Look at
| any modern package manager and see how many packages there are
| that enable massive businesses and operations that are written by
| one person and maybe a few contributions here and there.
|
| It's a humbling experience to see people like that.
| binarymax wrote:
| Michelangelo's David :)
| webmaven wrote:
| Multiple monograph examples come to mind, from Tolkien's _Lord of
| the Rings_ , to Gibbon's _History of the Decline and Fall of the
| Roman Empire_ , Alexander's _A Pattern Language_ , and many
| others.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| PuTTY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PuTTY
| syndacks wrote:
| Literature. Pretty much all of the greatest stories ever told
| came from the mind of one person.
| wooptoo wrote:
| Rsync -- Initial release 25 years ago
| TimD1 wrote:
| TeX, the typesetting system developed by Donald Knuth
| nwh5jg56df wrote:
| and his computer science bible: TAOCP!
| jll29 wrote:
| well, it's not finished yet
| scandox wrote:
| Postfix
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postfix_(software)
|
| Seems initially the work of a single person, though I have no
| doubt others contributed greatly also.
| laumars wrote:
| The list is massive. It probably covers most open source projects
| from Linux (which might not be single personal now but it
| certainly was when it started) and git, cURL (still single person
| AFAIK) etc. even GNU started out as a single person project.
| bch wrote:
| > cURL (still single person AFAIK)
|
| That person is Daniel Stenberg. He's been the main driver[0]
| (esp since its been called "curl"), and is still the majority
| committer, but the project has ~1000[1][2] commit authors
| (disclosure, I'm one). I'm in no way trying to diminish
| Daniel's work. It is excellent. Curl has however taken on a
| life of its own to an extent, with a few other heavy lifters
| and lots of occasional contributers. I actually think this
| speaks well to Daniels leadership; he seems to have a loose
| grip that guides the project and keeps things on the rails with
| minimal perturbation. He's still a heavy lifter, but not
| _entirely_ Atlas[3].
|
| [0] https://curl.se/docs/governance.html
|
| [1] https://curl.se/docs/thanks.html
|
| [2] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/01/30/1000-commit-authors/
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)
| nor-and-or-not wrote:
| The Theremin and early Moog synthesizers by Bob Moog.
|
| SID (the sound chip of the Commodore 64) by Bob Yannes.
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| Reminded me of another:
|
| John Chowning - FM Synthesis
| ojciecczas wrote:
| Chopin nocturnes. https://youtu.be/wuL7UC2glJM
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Cave Story, great unique platformer made by one person that
| accumulated a large community and ended up being put on various
| consoles
| jmcgough wrote:
| This was the first thing that came to mind. Still blows me away
| how amazing the art, music, gameplay, everything is. He even
| wrote some of the tools he used to make the game, like pxtone
| which he used for the music.
| avg_dev wrote:
| That was an excellent game.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| TeX
| elliekelly wrote:
| Wasn't lichess developed by one person? I'm not sure how old it
| is but I think it "withstands the test of time" since there are
| few (maybe no) other places on the internet so zealously and
| universally beloved by users.
| valenaut wrote:
| It has a lot of contributors nowadays, but Thibault made the
| original site on his own.
|
| https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/graphs/contributors
| Melatonic wrote:
| For gaming the work of Chris Sawyer on Rollercoaster Tycoon is
| pretty interesting - entirely coded by him in Assembly. As far as
| I remember all of the art was also done by one guy (not Mr
| Sawyer). Extremely optimized programming.
|
| https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-saw...
| kradeelav wrote:
| Unsounded 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/
| nurettin wrote:
| If you like this, you may also like: order of the stick
| ptudan wrote:
| I'd say literature come to mind the most.
|
| A Tale of Two Cities, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf, Pride and
| Prejudice were the first ones that come to mind, though there are
| of course many more. Wish I knew more of the non-western classics
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| 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.
| ptudan wrote:
| As others have said, it's more of a crediting thing than the
| actuality.
|
| Brandon Sanderson, a modern fantasy author, is famous for
| having an entire corporation of editors, storyboarders, and
| researchers. But only his name goes on the book.
|
| I've studied Shakespeare a fair bit, his plays were certainly
| not written truly solo. But as the lead creative, alongside
| with humanity's love of hero worship, only his name stood the
| test of time.
| gwd wrote:
| A counterexample is The Expanse series [1]. Its author is
| listed as "James S. A. Corey", but that's actually a "pen
| name" for two people who work collaboratively [2]. But as you
| say, such examples are the exception.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_S._A._Corey
| Melatonic wrote:
| Seems like there are a good amount of two person writer
| teams though (in other mediums as well such as
| screenwriting). But teams of say 5 do not seem to be
| writing many novels.
|
| Could be down to marketing - we like the idea of an
| "auteur" with a unique voice when we read a novel. Or it
| could be that having a consistent "voice" (or writing style
| I suppose) is a feature most people enjoy having in a
| novel.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| 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. Douglas
| Preston, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and all those romance
| novels... A lot of those are written by someone AND someone
| else. In practice they are written by someone else and they
| slap a big name on it to sell copies. Those books keep the
| literature world running even if they are not great art.
|
| Literature already is team based.
| brimble wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the only reason we don't recognize this,
| while we do with movies, is that there aren't rules
| governing who's credited and what their credit looks like,
| as there are with movies. You don't get "Story by X,
| written by A, B, & C, based on characters by Z", and
| instead one or _maybe_ two names are on there--you do
| sometimes see a writer credit (separate from the more
| prominent "created by") on some of those long-running
| series where the original author stopped somewhere along
| the way, or two listed for outright collaborations between
| known authors.
|
| If book writing operated under the same rules as
| screenwriting, this would all be a lot more visible.
| Melatonic wrote:
| You might be surprised about screenwriting - the rules
| are mainly just about the money. Script doctors could
| potentially be doing anything from some minor
| rearrangements to whole rewrites. A lot depends on how
| much they care that their name is or is not on the piece.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| That makes sense. You see people thanked in books but its
| pretty rare to see any specifics other than an editor or
| publisher.
| jmarchello wrote:
| I think this is how software development should be done as
| well. Software, like literature, requires one to hold all the
| context in order to avoid contradictions and to get things to
| fit together.
|
| I think in most cases the best software is made by one or two
| individuals rather than large teams.
|
| And don't even get me started on how much faster it is. Scrum
| is the mind-killer.
| nesarkvechnep wrote:
| In software, as in writing, you have editors which request
| changes during the review process. Nowadays one person
| can't hold the whole program in his head. Some people lack
| soft-skills and so they pursue the myth of the solo
| developer.
| closeparen wrote:
| When things cost money to produce, funders get more input.
| That said many TV and film projects are the vision of a
| single _auteur_ , when the auteur has the pull to get total
| creative control from funders or else funds his own project.
| It's just that this person is a director or executive
| producer instead of a writer.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It might be profit margins. TV writers make more, and have
| writing teams. Book authors make less, so maybe it's hard to
| split that and still live off of it.
|
| And they do already split some of the work for the text with
| people like editors.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| The most efficient way known to share the idea for a story
| between two minds is to write the story, which obviates the
| need for collaboration.
| scythe wrote:
| 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 <39 bits per second,
| it's very hard.
|
| 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 be simply glued together at the
| "edges", unlike literature where that doesn't work at all.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| >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.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| I think it's fair. Lit has tons of plot holes. It's just
| not talked about as much and less noticeable. Harry
| potter, for example, has tons of plot holes.
| anderiv wrote:
| Tarsnap - https://www.tarsnap.com/
|
| (I cannot recommend this service enough.)
| Tepix wrote:
| It's insanely expensive
| koolba wrote:
| Just about anything created by djb:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein
|
| Daemontools, a whole bunch of ciphers, tons of otero software.
| The man is a living legend.
| [deleted]
| dusted wrote:
| HTOP (Hisham Muhammad)
|
| PCem (Sarah Walker)
| nafey wrote:
| Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single
| week by Linus Torvalds,
| ISL wrote:
| After years of using other architectures and thinking really
| hard about what worked and what didn't.
| schnevets wrote:
| And Notch would obsessively play Dwarf Fortress before
| writing any code for Minecraft. The distinction between
| influence and contribution is a fine line.
|
| It's worth studying so aspirants understand no achievement
| exists in a vacuum, but not a means to divide something
| between solo and collaboration.
| toto444 wrote:
| Does that mean that a less competent developper could write a
| more intuitive alternative in a few months ?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Absolutely. There's nothing fundamentally complicated in Git.
| The most complex things are the merging and diffing
| algorithms (but I presume the week-old git just used GNU diff
| and patch).
| a_e_k wrote:
| Mercurial?
| hanche wrote:
| Or fossil, built on top of SQLite.
| gaetgu wrote:
| Exactly this. I think that git is only popular currently
| because everyone else is using it. (That and GitHub).
| mabbo wrote:
| Intuition is really the problem with git. Most developers
| that use git daily don't actually have a deep understanding
| of the domain model powering it. They don't know why it's
| doing things, or why they need to do things in a certain way.
|
| It's terribly unintuitive.
|
| But it's also so powerful that nearly every use case you
| might have can be done with it.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Probably! I think this space is ripe for exactly that to
| happen.
| pforret wrote:
| Wait, what? One week? How much coffee was necessary for that?
| tuckerpo wrote:
| See Ken Thompson's monologue about creating Unix in 3 weeks:
| https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=1372
|
| Programmers used to be pretty damn productive.
| ramses0 wrote:
| 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 wrote somewhere "I used to wonder if Linus was a
| genius but Git proves it to be true. Anybody could have
| (re-)written a *NIX implementation, but Linus invented Git
| from whole cloth."
|
| https://perl.plover.com/classes/git/samples/slide005.html
|
| https://perl.plover.com/classes/git/samples/slide009.html
| ncmncm wrote:
| But, he didn't.
|
| Linus copied the design from Monotone, by Grayson Hoare
| (who also made the original pre-pre-1.0 Rust).
| ncmncm wrote:
| Graydon. (Damn auto-correct!)
| homarp wrote:
| 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
| hwers wrote:
| I would say every year of quality experience a person has is
| equivalent to X mg of caffeine so at Torvalds level he might
| not have been above a normal level.
| progre wrote:
| Normal finnish consumtion, about 0.2 kg of beans per week.
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| I thought I drank a ton of espresso every day. Then I
| visited Helsinki.
| zaphar wrote:
| 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.
| xigoi wrote:
| Wait, it used to be even harder to use?
| zaphar wrote:
| You have _no_ idea.
| brundolf wrote:
| Where by "porcelain" I assume you mean "easy to mishandle
| and break" ;)
| teeray wrote:
| 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`)
| zaphar wrote:
| I'm certainly one of those people who think git makes
| stupid mistakes a little too easy to do, so I'm on board
| with that definition.
| mahathu wrote:
| Unturned
| kleiba wrote:
| John Sinclair (not the poet) is both the name of a German pulp
| horror series as well as of its main character. New books appear
| every week, and although initially some of them were written by
| others, the whole series is mainly the creation of a single
| author, Jason Dark. Because of his age, the series is now written
| by a team of authors with Dark only contributing one novel per
| months roughly.
|
| The series has been published continuously since the 1970s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sinclair_(German_fiction)
| efficax wrote:
| Coral Castle outside of miami, one weird man's project.
| https://coralcastle.com/
| drooby wrote:
| Similarly, Bishop's Castle in Colorado
| leviathan wrote:
| Also Moussa Castle in Lebanon -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moussa_Castle
| dkarl wrote:
| The Watts Towers in LA
| https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2021-12-24/how-the-watt...
| SahAssar wrote:
| Reminds me of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladonia_(micronation)#/media/F...
| rco8786 wrote:
| git comes to mind
| ConanRus wrote:
| stared wrote:
| Dust: An Elysian Tail - a metroidvania game
|
| "Aside from voice acting, soundtrack, and parts of the story,
| Dust was designed and programmed entirely by Dodrill. A self-
| taught illustrator and animator, he had previously done artwork
| and cinematics on Epic Games' Jazz Jackrabbit 2, and was in the
| process of creating an independent animated film, Elysian
| Tail.[14] He assumed it would take three months to complete the
| game; it actually took over three-and-a-half years. He originally
| envisioned the game as an 8-bit-style platformer, similar to
| earlier entries in the Castlevania series. Inspirations for the
| final game came from such titles as Metroid, Golden Axe, and Ys I
| & II, which Dodrill cites as his favorite games."
| dig1 wrote:
| Gambit Scheme [1]. Marc started it 34 years ago and still is
| going strong. Recent versions has support for generating
| js/php/python/ruby code, but I'm not sure what the current state
| is. One of the most portable and optimizing scheme compilers
| around.
|
| newLISP [2] is still maintained and Lutz is frequent on forum.
|
| Kawa Scheme [3], very good optimizing scheme on JVM, started 24
| years ago. Per Bothner, author, is frequent on forum, although
| he'd like someone to continue developing it.
|
| PicoLisp [4], started 34 years ago. Alexander Burger is still
| maintaining it, latest version was 2 months ago.
|
| LFE [5], started by Robert Virding (one of Erlang authors), 14
| years ago. Still developed.
|
| Calibre [6], started 15 years ago by Kovid Goyal. Still in heavy
| development by Kovid.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambit_(Scheme_implementation)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewLISP
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawa_(Scheme_implementation)
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoLisp
|
| [5] https://lfe.io/
|
| [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)
| treeshateorcs wrote:
| qr codes
| BatmansMom wrote:
| Dwarf Fortress is one person right?
| wainstead wrote:
| Wikipedia gives it as a two-person creation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress#History
| srvmshr wrote:
| The original Linux kernel was entirely Linus Torvald's work. Also
| the same applies for Git. GNU Emacs was Richard Stallman
| entirely. Most Linux tools we use e.g. cURL, wget etc, started
| out as one person effort for a very long time until they caught
| attention.
|
| Another way to look at it: all the tools you use now are team
| efforts after a lone developer perfected it to a usable release,
| where people were largely impressed to pick it up further.
| wrycoder wrote:
| RMS did emacs, gcc, gdb, early libc, and probably the first
| versions of many of the GNU utilities. And, most importantly,
| the GPL.
| pieterhg wrote:
| My sites https://nomadlist.com and https://remoteok.com are
| single person creations. And exist about 8 and 7 years now! :)
| unforeseen9991 wrote:
| I remember you posting years back (5+) about Nomadlist :) Still
| use it to this day.
| james-redwood wrote:
| VLC
| tconfrey wrote:
| I'd put emacs and gcc by Richard Stallman on the list. (Obviously
| they subsequently grew to way more than one persons efforts.)
| riidom wrote:
| and GPL license
| newby wrote:
| Probably not what you had in mind, but the first thing that
| popped into my mind after reading the subtitle of your post was
| Venus of Dolni Vestonice, a little ceramic figurine of a woman
| dated to 29,000-25,000 BCE. Beautiful piece of art in my opinion
| (although beauty standards have changed).
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Doln%C3%AD_V%C4%9Bsto...
| User23 wrote:
| That looks like a pretty accurate representation of an elderly
| multigravida. Given the likelihood that it's a fertility charm
| of some sort, it's not really indicating anything about
| changing beauty standards. I imagine if it is a charm that
| indicating surviving multiple pregnancies was part of the
| significance.
| BatmansMom wrote:
| 6510 wrote:
| Confucius
| adjwilli wrote:
| I've never hired any other developed to work on
| https://pollylingu.al with me, but obviously there other who work
| as tutors and translators
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