Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Tue, Mar 15, 2016, 12:06 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #45

c_lebesgue wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the complexity of the problem actually speaks in favour of Varnish. The Unix philosophy of writing software is based on the principle of doing one, possibly small thing very well. And that's exactly what Varnish does: it is a reverse-proxy cache that can optionally do a bit of preprocessing on the incoming HTTP requests. Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.

> Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache. Certainly true. I guess that for me "beautiful code" invents some abstractions that transform a problem that initially seems dauntingly difficult into something that is easy to reason about. A proxy cache does not, for me, satisfy the first part of this premise, although I can imagine that the details of such a project take a lot of effort (hence "no…

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Tue, Mar 15, 2016, 12:17 PM UTC

slpsys wrote: post #147

BigJono wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Tue, Mar 15, 2016, 12:26 PM UTC

sklogic wrote: post #232

kpil wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a really clean abstraction of a computing environment, which is as well defined and predicatable that is possible. I tend to prefer that to performance cludges, arcane architectural hand waving, and undefined behaviour. Some people thinks it's useless, since they do no see the benefits, as there are costs. (There are some obvious UX-flaws, especially on the desktop, where it takes a bit to start up, and clearly…

> It's a really clean abstraction of a computing environment No, it's a clumsy and leaky abstraction which was not well thought out. P-codes are a nice abstraction. AS/400 is a nice abstrction. Dozens of other, better VMs are a nice abstraction. But not a JVM, which is broken by design. I'd never chose it as an underlying VM for anything important.

Post by kakwa_ » Tue, Mar 15, 2016, 7:53 PM UTC

tbrock wrote: post #101

C: 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…

Post by trentnelson » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 4:29 AM UTC

joshuata wrote: post #81

My vote is for SQLite. It is very well written, incredibly well tested, and one of the simplest and most flexible tools out there. My favorite part is the extensive documentation explaining the architecture decisions they made.