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Ask HN: What project/person is vastly underrated?
Every once in a while, I stumble across a name or project I have never heard about before, only to subsequently notice a few highly talented/prolific/influential people have off-handedly reffered to it/them. I think of this as the tech/science equivalent of a "musician's musician".
This made me curios: Who or what project do you think is at that point today?
- s1k3s 4y agoThis guy explains https://ciechanow.ski/ https://ciechanow.ski/
- surprisetalk 4y agoI'm surprised how many software engineers have never heard of Douglas Engelbart and The Mother of All Demos: The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying concepts and technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
- aaron695 4y agoKovid Goyal - Calibre - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software) He's brought books to millions of people. It's software that increased the rate of information access to people. It's what very very few people achieve in a lifetime. And it's a purely technical solutio, where as Gottfrid Svartholm/Fredrik Neij/Peter Sunde or Alexandra Elbakyan are also very much activists. Interviews with him don't get upvotes on HN. Bitchy claims do, but also good people defend him. He puts a lot of effort helping the average user, when he should be in god mode only interreacting which high end user who've done the filtering for him.
- yesenadam 4y agoGenuine question - I read the wiki page, not knowing anything much about it. It's an ebook reader? How is it true that he brought books to millions? I can't tell from your comment or the wiki page. Thanks.
- kubanczyk 4y agoCalibre is primarily a sideloader for Kindle and other popular readers, and only secondarily an ebook reader by itself. By "sideloader" I mean that one can manage and upload a collection of ("pirated") literature onto your device. Sometimes it involves non-trivial conversion, so it can be harder than it sounds.
- yesenadam 4y agoOhh ok thank you very much! Perfect explanation.
- bjourne 4y agoFredrik Effbot Lundh. Was, sadly.