Signal - 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.
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
101–110 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#102Syncthing, 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.
Syncthing is great software. But it is also great at confusing new users
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#103After 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…
Those damn C preprocessor macros. You have to become a compiler to understand C code. The elegant metaprogramming approach is what Zig does with comptime.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#104Thinkorswim by TDAmeritrade. No one else has figured out how to lay out options (greeks, premium), charts etc. in such an intuitive manner.
thinkorswim, created by thinkorswim and acquired by TDAmeritrade.
In case someone is wondering how a staid brokerage came up with this incredible technology: the trick is, they didn't.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I do all my work with Syncthing in send-only folders, one per machine. Which means that if I make changes across machines then I always get duplicates, but the redundancy feels natural - it's only concerning if the data size becomes absolutely huge.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#106[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#107blender (the finished product, can't comment on the code itself).
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#108TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org), which is a finely crafted document preparation system realizing at the same time both the structured and the WYSIWYG paradigms.
It is vastly superior to all other document preparation systems. In particular it is superior to both TeX (in all its variants) and to Word, under all respects: conceptually, in the power that it affords in manipulating documents, in the ease with which it makes it possible to write, concentrating only on the content and yet having one's document in front of one's eyes.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#109Not sure if games count as software but if they do - Factorio. I don't play much these days but I'm still utterly stunned how a relatively small, humble team of developers can build something so robust and performant. Granted, I've never really tried pushing the limits, but not once have I felt like the game is even breaking a sweat while processing thousands of machines, belts, and bots. It's a miracle to me. Their…
Doubly so that the game is written entirely in native C++ and is fully cross platform compatible (mac/windows/linux) with a tiny binary size. The responsiveness and performance of that game even with thousands of agents onscreen has always impressed me.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#110Things, a todo system for macOS and iOS.