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Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
91–100 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#92Syncthing, by a mile. As someone who very much enjoys tinkering with Linux and such, but also likes trying to onboard other people who aren't as techy, Syncthing is such a killer example. It's almost depressing because I want other free and open source stuff to be this good, though I know the economics (and proprietary interference, perhaps?) make that tough.
I use syncthing and appreciate that it exists. It's way too easy to accidentally all your data, though! I've been dragging my feet migrating a hard drive from my old desktop to my new one for 1.5 years. This past weekend I finally got motivated to power the old one up and wait for syncthing to give positive indication that it's in sync with my server. The reason that was even a concern of mine is that the last time I…
I've managed to delete a folder with GBs of important data because Syncthing has non-obvious ways of handling data. Thankfully, I have tons of backups of everything, so it wasn't a big deal, but since then I've been extremely paranoid when using Syncthing to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#93Stockfish -- https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish
Some of the best C++ code written. Extremely clear and concise. Chess-AI is a bit complicated but the source-code + comments seems to inform the programmer where all the problems are.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#94mIRC feels elegant by today's standards. A full-featured IRC client for Windows that includes an entire scripting language and yet it consumes less RAM than calc.exe.
Hah, mIRC was a long time ago! I'm a bit nostalgic. :)
But is it really true that vanilla mIRC consumes less RAM than calc.exe...?
That'd be impressive, if I could believed that!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#95Thinkorswim by TDAmeritrade. No one else has figured out how to lay out options (greeks, premium), charts etc. in such an intuitive manner.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#96Things! The todo list app. It's the most elegant app I've ever used. feels like it just works, and I can rely on it 100%.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#97The original QSpy protocol, which then became the GameSpy protocol, and later still made way for Valve's Master Server protocol.
I'm not sure what other protocols exist today for tracking a list of servers, providing information on them, and are as up to date as the frequency of the heartbeats from those servers, but I suspect there are similar protocols out there, and I'm just not familiar with them.
Unfortunately despite how elegant the QSpy protocol is, most modern video games no longer provide server browsers as first-class features, eschewing them in favor of matchmaking services or publisher provided dedicated servers.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#98Thinkorswim by TDAmeritrade. No one else has figured out how to lay out options (greeks, premium), charts etc. in such an intuitive manner.
Uhhh well I would argue Tastyworks does it even better. But that was built by the same team so maybe its cheating?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#99I'd say Linux Mint. It combines everything that's good about Ubuntu while removing things like snap. Also the design is so much better but I feel that's a personal choice. But everything in linux just works so well now.
I run 4 monitors on 2560 resolution on two separate amd cards and everything runs flawlessly. I have all the software for free and most OSS is just as good if not better for my work (except games and Photoshop but photopea is a good alternative for that, and it can be easily my second nomination for this thread).
I know linux has evolved a lot and it's the effort of millions of volunteers which has made Linux what it is today, but for me personally Linux Mint really combines all the great things about linux into an amazingly elegant software.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#100After 50 years it doesn't seem like it, but C has managed to survive this long because it's a solid all-round player from the bare metal to web servers. It's simple enough that you could probably implement a fairly capable C compiler in assembler.
C has managed to survive this long because of: - Unix and its inertia - Licensing of Unix allowing it to proliferate to the masses and being used for education - because it is simple enough that a compiler can be quickly brought up for any new ISA that appears, as long as it looks enough like a 70's-80's CPU architecture enough for pointers to work. Elegant? No. - Making pointers and arrays synonymous is elegant only…
> - Bool - how hard is it to get true and false right?
I think this is actually much more complicated than it seems at first thought. There are a lot of different ways to represent booleans, each with their own advantages, and then the hardware has it's own ideas that might need to be considered. I'm not sure that there's any way to do bool that doesn't lead to pain somewhere.