

Ask HN: which obscure Github projects have you found useful? - mcgyver

There is a lot of great stuff on Github but it's hard to know where to start looking. I'm wondering if HN had any recommendations for useful tool suites or other noteworthy projects.
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mojombo
Just in case you missed it, we have an "Explore GitHub" page that should get
you started with some repos that you may not have heard of before:

<https://github.com/explore>

~~~
mcgyver
The explore page offers a great snapshot. The search page is totally awesome
too (seriously, it works really well) but only when you are looking for
something in particular. It feels like there is a mind-boggling amount of
potentially useful things sitting there that no one ever knows to play with
because the people behind the projects aren't very good at PR or aren't
looking for high usage of their product. I guess the main barrier to testing
out projects/apps is the difficulty of installation. You have to know you want
the product a lot to go through with the effort to get it up and going. I
guess that's why recommendations can be a good guide to making sure it's worth
the effort.

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evanrmurphy
Not sure how obscure these would be here (I first learned about them on Hacker
News), but I've found Backbone.js and Underscore.js to be extraordinary
projects.

Links:

<http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/>

<http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/>

~~~
jashkenas
For a bit more information -- Backbone.js and Underscore.js are open source
components of DocumentCloud, funded by the Knight Foundation's News Challenge,
and are used to build this:

<http://cl.ly/3N0Z>

... and this:

<http://documents.latimes.com/la-county-plastic-bag-ban/>

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hecticjeff
<http://thechangelog.com/> is a great blog to follow for interesting GitHub
projects, it also powers parts of the "Explore GitHub" page that @mojombo
mentioned.

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mikey_p
I've really enjoyed skimming through other users 'dotfiles' or similarly named
repos. It's a great way to find some small tips or shortcuts to make my day to
day work more efficient, etc, without reading a long blog post about why some
technique is the 'only sane, correct, right, proper way' and you'd have to be
crazy to try anything else. I.e. great tips without the commentary.

~~~
darkhelmetlive
Lol I found a bug in Ryan Tomayko's dotfiles when he put them up.
[https://github.com/rtomayko/dotfiles/commit/d462da485294b516...](https://github.com/rtomayko/dotfiles/commit/d462da485294b5168687b20518881a50dea0b209)

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jwpage
The latest one I discovered is Slidedown: a simple tool to generate HTML
slides (with syntax highlighting) from a markdown document.

Came in handy when I had to whip up a presentation for a recent meetup.

------
kilian
I'm a big fan of zen coding, it's a way of writing HTML and CSS by shortcuts
and expanding them, cross-IDE: <https://github.com/sergeche/zen-coding> it has
sped up my html writing considerably.

If you're using Django with a MySQL heavy application, consider django-stored-
procedures (written by a colleague of mine)
<https://github.com/jeroeng/stored-procedures>

------
woodall
Gordon; An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript

EXAMPLE: <http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/> GIT:
<https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon>

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alanh
qlmarkdown. It enables OS X to show (pretty/formatted) Markdown documents in
Quick Look.

I also forked something called Add-Another for replicating parts of web forms
(when you need to collect 0-n things from a user, e.g. emergency contacts,
images, etc.)

------
amanuel
AppSales-Mobile to an amazing and well supported find to track your iOS app
sales. <https://github.com/omz/AppSales-Mobile>

On the Mac Brotherbard's Gitx fork is very cool.
<https://github.com/brotherbard/gitx>

GitFlow - takes your Git skills to the next level.
<https://github.com/nvie/gitflow>

------
stevewilhelm
Wukong, a Ruby-based Hadoop streaming framework.
<http://mrflip.github.com/wukong>

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icco
I found isaac to be pretty cool. I had to fork it and add features because
it's not maintained too well, but a neat idea.

<https://github.com/ichverstehe/isaac>

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z0rk
<http://github.com/rohityadav/cmakeqt> a qt-cmake example, with features like
cross compiling, packaging, translations etc.

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thomaz
Vim-inspired file manager for the console

<https://github.com/hut/ranger>

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Jach
Lots of goodies here: <https://github.com/MarcWeber>

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sr3d
self-plug: GithubFinder <http://sr3d.github.com/GithubFinder>

Much better code/repo browsing for Github repos, especially with the
bookmarklet or the Userscript plugin.

------
endgame
libtelnet: A nifty little library that makes it easy to speak proper telnet.

<https://github.com/elanthis/libtelnet>

------
bmelton
What.js

<https://github.com/entmike/What> \-- I've been playing with this, written by
a buddy of mine. It's a Node.js-based application server, complete with an
HttpServlet implementation.

