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Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
291–300 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#292I'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…
Hmm. I was kicking the wheels on cinnamon the other day - but because it's not on Wayland it won't do mixed resolution displays out of the box, so it's not really viable for me. A pity, as I dislike snaps and the generally dumbed down direction of recent Gnome, so it would otherwise have been a good fit for me. For now I'm (still) on Ubuntu though.
It's possible I am misunderstanding something, but you can do mixed monitor resolutions on Linux Mint Cinnamon. I usually have two monitors hooked up to my desktop, a 1440p resolution monitor and a 1080p monitor. The 1440p monitor is running at 144hz with the 1080p monitor running at 60.
It is a bummer that it's not on Wayland, and seemingly they have no current plans on migrating.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#293Emacs - although there's a lot of accumulated cruft in the form of whacky APIs and elisp functions, the design of Emacs is stunningly effective. The way that minor modes and keymaps are composed to customize the interaction mode for each individual buffer is clever and beautiful, to name just one thing out of many. And, as janky as elisp is, it's one of the few extension languages that's actually good at its job, and…
I use emacs, but would love to see a from scratch modern rebuild which deals with rough edges like threading and performance.
Emacs is quite popular and has some of the most skilled programmers I know using it. I'm really surprised that there hasn't been a neovim-equivalent project for emacs. Or maybe it's out there and I just don't know about it?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#294Not a specific piece of software, but a characteristic of a limited percentage of anonymous internal systems--one of the most beautiful things to witness in the realm of design is a system undergoing catastrophic stress when the designers anticipated and planned for such events, and in usually a very short period of time you see the results of extensive planning spool out, design features hidden from view and unappre…
any examples?
Nortel DMS-10 telephony switch springs to mind. They run in landline phone company switching offices amd date back to the early 1970s. Those things are indestructible in the face of all kinds of disasters.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just popped open Task Manager... calculator.exe is at 74 MB working set, 24 MB Memory (private set), 50 MB Memory (shared working set), 48 MB commit size. mIRC.exe is at 31 MB working set, 13 MB Memory (private set), 18 MB Memory (shared working set), 38 MB commit size. Doesn't matter which value you use for "How much memory does this program use?". mIRC is smaller in all of them.
That's not `calc.exe`. I think windows doesn't ship with calc.exe anymore. The fair comparison would be the last version of mIRC that was current when the last version of calc.exe was shipped. I don't believe that mIRC would use less RAM than that... Certainly not when you were actually USING it! (including reconfiguring the size of your scrollback, for example..)
The OG calc.exe still ships with the LTS[B,C] versions of Windows 10.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#296The things app https://culturedcode.com/things/ , even though it's just an elegant TODO app something drove me to buy the iPhone and Mac versions. Some time ago I spent a good amount of time looking for a development stack that allowed me to just build stuff. I ended up trying and deciding on Laravel Jetstream with InertiaJS https://jetstream.laravel.com/2.x/stacks/inertia.html . Laravel was easy enough already to ju…
I love Things, and for a long time used it every day. I just can't get behind their pricing model though, the desktop version in Australia is $80 which is outrageously expensive for a TODO app that can largely be replaced with the slightly inferior but free Reminders app.
Not only that, but even if I pay that price, I can't share lists with my wife? I would really love to use it, but that just seems ridiculous in this day and age.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#297As other mentioned algorithms I found that ideas behind Bloom filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter) and Geohash (not to be confused with geohashing or geo caching, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash and Z-order curves) are extremely elegant and inspiring.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Kitty Could you elaborate on what do you feel is better or makes you more comfortable using kitty against any other random terminal? I also vouch for KDE Connect. Painless to use after installing. Very convinient for file transfer
I love Kitty because it does the things I think are important really well.. It's well-maintained, extremely fast, always responsive, easy to configure, supports ligatures and IBus.
And emoji -- I know, not everybody's cup of tea, but if I'm using my terminal to exchange messages and emails, I want to see those emoji!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#299Not a specific piece of software, but a characteristic of a limited percentage of anonymous internal systems--one of the most beautiful things to witness in the realm of design is a system undergoing catastrophic stress when the designers anticipated and planned for such events, and in usually a very short period of time you see the results of extensive planning spool out, design features hidden from view and unappre…
any examples?
Mercedes has a system on the S-class that uses the sensors to detect a potential impact (e.g. an rapidly approaching vehicle while the car is stationary) and uses the active suspension to "jump" raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury.
Many cars and especially planes & spaceships are have tons of systems like this.
I worked on a system that did things like in response to a primary datasource being offline would switch the queries it used to a different database to include substitute data and pass this back to be used instead until the primary store came back online. Three years after it was put in production this happened on one of the company's biggest and most important days of the year, and our SREs were sitting there calmly trying to solve the issue, ended up waiting until late at night to deploy a fix. It would have been reasonable for this service to just rely on the primary source, but we would have been offline for hours if this little trick hadn't been put in place.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#300Signal - The elegance here is the "Privacy-first Design". Every feature and code for Signal messenger is designed on collecting as little (or no) data as possible and it is an essential tool for folks like me who are tired of having tracking and ads nonsense in their most-used apps.
yes! they take donations too at https://www.signal.org/donate/