qmail and djbdns by D. J. Bernstein. But don't take my word for it:
Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
141–150 of 262 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#142Well, I think Jonathan Blow's Braid is a beautiful thing. Many in here seem to be talking about the beauty of the source code or something related, but I like a simple well executed idea that is beautiful to look at as well. No corners were cut here - I think it is a work of art.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#143IPFS
Just read through the design, it's very simple and extremely modular. It learns the lessons from previous related systems and applies them in the new system.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#144LuaJIT. It's a cutting-edge JIT with remarkably understandable algorithms and source. Every single piece of it is well thought out. Even the asm interpreters are pretty clean and explain why they work the way they do. Mike Pall is a demigod.
the lua vm to, the code is so small but works so well.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#145LuaJIT. It's a cutting-edge JIT with remarkably understandable algorithms and source. Every single piece of it is well thought out. Even the asm interpreters are pretty clean and explain why they work the way they do. Mike Pall is a demigod.
LuaJIT is, indeed, a genius masterwork, but it's also very intricate and complex. I'm not entirely sure anyone other than Mike Pall could understand it completely.
On the other hand Lua (The Original™) is also a beautiful bit of programming, and much more approachable. If you've ever wondered what it means when people talk about "Stack-based VMs", reading through the Lua source is an excellent way to learn more.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#146"Another World" There's a very interesting write up here: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/ The game itself has an amazingly beautiful vector style. The engine is remarkably tiny, 20kb. I decided years ago if I ever find time to build a game I'd like to architect it like "Another World".
I've thought about writing an "Another World"-style game engine many times myself.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#147The Deepmind Atari Player is only 22KB of source code: https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/ If you haven't seen the video it's remarkable: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ
When he says "the algorithm is given just the pixels", does that mean it's not given any information about the game itself, like the objective? How does it know how to measure it's own success?
There is an objective, but it may not be exactly as you reason about it. There's a great video that made the rounds last year about building a neural net that plays Super Mario World, that may help visualize what's going on - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44
There's also a great snippet in the currently-ongoing AlphaGo videos that explains that when AlphaGo plays in ways that you may not expect, it's because it's strictly worried about _winning_ (even by the slimmest margin) with the greatest probability, and not necessarily by winning handily, like a human might.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#148C: anything by antirez (redis, etc...) Redis is the epitome of well written understandable C. Ruby: anything written by _why (if you can find the source) He once gave a whole presentation on the splat operator and it's bizarre uses that gave me goosebumps. A true artist. The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways. JS: anything written by TJ hollwaychuck (express, mocha, etc...) Express is so simple but po…
Too bad TJ stopped writing JS and started writing Go.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#149C: anything by antirez (redis, etc...) Redis is the epitome of well written understandable C. Ruby: anything written by _why (if you can find the source) He once gave a whole presentation on the splat operator and it's bizarre uses that gave me goosebumps. A true artist. The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways. JS: anything written by TJ hollwaychuck (express, mocha, etc...) Express is so simple but po…
Too bad TJ stopped writing JS and started writing Go.
Yeah, too bad. Apex, his first go thing, is pretty great though.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#150Anything by Zach Tellman:
https://github.com/ztellman/aleph
https://github.com/ztellman/automat
In terms of his ideas, watch "Always be composing":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oQTSP4FngY
And he offers some great thoughts about queues and backpressure in "Everything will flow":