[TallGuyShort]

Although I think they're overdone, I think "x in y lines" is avery relevant to the hacker community, while "x things about y" isn't always. Doing "x in y lines" generally implies an unusually elegant solution, that could be of great use.

[silentbicycle]

It's such an easy metric to game, though ("The first line is 'import library_that_does_everything'") - It's a proxy for succinctness, at best.

That said, "[something non-trivial] in only 250-500 LOC" is often more interesting than "...in only 5 LOC", because generally anything that small is just gluing together libraries. There are exceptions, of course - I've seen impressive stuff in just a few lines of J/K/APL.

[storborg]

In this case, the tool that he built (RouteFS) is actually a really clever abstraction above two other popular libraries (Routes and FUSE).

I agree it would be neat if he talked more about RouteFS itself, but it is a neat idea, and only about 200 lines.