Ask HN: Labour of love projects
An individual or small enough team of individuals' care and dedication to a project can outshine and outlast better funded/manned projects in the same space, often at the cost of reduced material rewards. Which such projects do you find inspiring?
A few personal favorites:
GPG - Werner Koch (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791)
Tex - Donald Knuth
Fabrice Bellard's projects
49 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 81.1 ms ] threadNot sure if it's inspiring or not, but it's my labor of love. I kept it going after grad school. I work on it a little bit every day, and slowly but surely it's becoming what I originally envisioned as my ultimate parallel programming system.
imho you could stand to distinguish it more clearly from the Raft consensus protocol
Unfortunately anything published at uni's like Stanford has immediate potential for faster dissemination. I'm either going to have to wait out the extinction of the Raft consensus protocol (or at least for something better to come along) or to get a better name. Stream processing systems are also synonymous with "Data-flow." They all have a history of punny names (See StreamC, StreamIt, Brook, WaveScript, FloodGate, RapidMind, even Cuda is a play on barracuda which has it's origins in stream processing from the academic Brook project). So if I were to get a better name, I'd have to find something equally punny (and likely create redirects from about 11/12 academic pubs, journal papers, etc.). If you have any suggestions I'm definitely open :).
GNU bash has been maintained by Chet Ramey for decades (although he isn't the original author.) Most of the GNU projects probably count, although some of them have changed maintainers much more often.
R was started by a couple of stats professors, and I'm sure it wasn't their main line of research (as opposed to Lua, Haskell, and OCaml, which are definitely labors of love, but they are somewhat funded, if you consider an academic salary funding).
Julia seems to be a labor of love, although it has had some amount of funding.
Clojure and D both have or had some commercial element, but you can tell it's mainly the love driving it, not the business.
Java and JavaScript are probably the big exceptions, in that they were started by big companies. As well as C and C++, which both originated at Bell Labs.
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And if you are really looking for single person projects, sqlite is probably one of the best examples. If I recall Richard Hipp has actually paid people to work on sqlite occasionally, but he's written almost all the code, and doesn't really accept patches.
Though I'm not really sure if "not accepting patches" like Knuth, Bellard, or Hipp is something to be admired... I have tend to want to control things too, which is probably a bad tendency.
They do mention the user who contributed the patch instead of actually assigning the commit to him, though. Does that count somehow?
And, you are right - in many cases people will send a drive-by patch but we will rewrite it rather than apply it directly: to make sure we understand it for long-term maintenance, to clean it up, and to avoid licensing problems.
I've had a lot of help from Dan and Joe and Shane and others on SQLite. Stats here: https://www.sqlite.org/src/reports?type=ci&view=byuser
(I attended a Google talk you gave probably 10 years ago, and I remember that you mentioned you had paid people to work on sqlite. I thought that was interesting for open source software!)
1. The Perl Programming Language
https://www.perl.org
https://perl6.org
2. TextMate, a Text Editor for OS X.
https://macromates.com
https://github.com/textmate/textmate
For what it's worth, some of the things that have decreased Perl's popularity have also made me use it less, usually in favor of Go; while similar factors with TextMate make me "test-drive" a new editor every six months of so, but (so far) I always come back to TM.
The two are, to my mind, different kinds of labors, though both clearly labors of love. TextMate was the Mac text editor that embraced the Unix underpinnings of OS X: BBEdit for programmers, if you will. Its balance of Mac and Unix feel is, as far as I can tell, still unique; and I think that's why it's still actively developed despite a rather troubled history.
Perl, on the other hand, is two things: Perl 5, which still powers a lot of software in the quieter realms of commerce and research; and Perl 6, which is absolutely an aspirational, striving new language.
My take is that Perl 5 is developed further because so much depends on it, and because so many people are attached to their software written in it. Perl 6 on the other hand is developed -- by many of the same people -- in the belief or at least hope that a highly expressive, hacker-friendly general-purpose language will find its audience over time, buzz & PR be damned.
https://lwn.net/Articles/696765/
He started in 1979 building this:
http://000fff.org/uploads/ur/IMG_1831.JPG
http://000fff.org/uploads/ur/IMG_1832.JPG
http://000fff.org/uploads/ur/IMG_1833.JPG
http://000fff.org/uploads/ur/IMG_1834.JPG
http://000fff.org/uploads/ur/IMG_1835.JPG
http://000fff.org/uploads/ur/IMG_1836.JPG
Everything is handmade as in everything. One of the gears takes 400 years to rotate around it's own axis.
It's half size of this watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Olsen%27s_World_Clock
Besides that he managed to build a succesful security company, countless digital watches (big and small) and even a freaking small harbour and countless other things. He speaks assembler almost as well as he speaks his native language Danish which is why I feel ok posting about him in this thread :)
Claims that there are no modern day da Vinci does not apply to him.
[Edit: What's with the downvotes? Surely Babel qualifies as an inspirational project of this type, and Sebastian himself is impressive for producing something that has arguably shaped an entire industry at such a young age and, for a considerable time, developing it pretty much all on his own.]
It's pretty well-known around here, but I still find it amazing to think about every time that I see it come up.
Solely developed by one guy for a while but they have since expanded. It's something that was really needed for the English go community.
If anyone wants to play, send me a challenge. I'm Mongorians on there :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dnNqJStsNM
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&...
I do admire the game's lovely intro sequence, though.
Features include extremely fast, extensible via a C-like language, excellent docs, excellent support, tagging/bookmarking, formatting, etc.
I switched to it after first picking up emacs because I found ELisp frustrating to work with and Emacs itself was dog slow on a modern computer. Haven't looked back since.
Only down side is the somewhat steep cost of $250. That said, I firmly believe it is worth the cost.
I finally took the plunge over the long weekend and started writing a PowerShell mode since I've been writing a lot of powershell lately. Next up will be a Haskell mode.
DTrace
illumos.
Now, the last one, illumos, is the perfect example of a labor of love: the original company has been assimilated and subsequently destroyed, the world at large is overwhelmingly using a competing product, Linux, the competition has seemingly endless time and infinite resources, and yet the kernel engineers persist, even though they quit Oracle, and are working at different companies around the world! On top of that, they managed to come up with revolutionary products which now generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue (Delphix comes to mind).
What kind of love does a person feel to keep working and continue against all odds?
(I'm an Opensolaris contributor/enthusiast from some years ago, and worked at Nexenta.)
And if I have seen any further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.
My brothers and sisters in arms are not forgotten; you need no introduction with me, son of UNIX.
Total commander by Christian Ghisler (https://www.ghisler.com/) - it's still commercial/sharware, but existed for years and still doesn't have a proper competition.
Posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432312
For example, the SMW ROM hack Brutal Mario (whatever you may say about the level design quality) is an insane technical achievement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INa41RSwiCc
The fact some random Japanese guy no one knows the identity of spent 10 years turning a single game into a strange crossover title with hundreds of technical gimmicks based on other games (including some uses of mode 7, 3D, etc) is nuts. A team of 20 or more people working full shifts might have trouble replicating a lot of the stuff in this game.
Or how about Project M? Before it was shut down, they basically turned Smash Bros Brawl into a clone of Melee with new mechanics, stages, characters, graphics and music, pretty much everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcJHZCuaG84
Or heck, Mushroom Kingdom Fusion in general. It may be an extremely buggy, often poorly balanced game, but damn it's a crazy ambitious premise with a level of variety not seen in pretty much the entire industry outside of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD7VWxHGU4o
300 levels, around 10 or 20 characters with their own play style and mechanics, about a hundred power ups, thousands of enemies and bosses, even more random gimmicks and level mechanics and a massive amount of graphic and music from everything you can think of. All by what? Less than 20 people in their spare time?
Either way, the fact people can work on stuff like this purely in their free time and ending up dedicating years of their lives to a project that can be on par with a commercial one without any means of making money off of it... that's got to be pretty impressive.
And I haven't even mentioned that guy whose spent so long on his mod that Duke Nukem Forever actually started and finished production while it was still in development. With said project still being ongoing and unlikely to finish within the next few decades.