Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

news.ycombinator.com

271–280 of 666 posts

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#271
git is so reliable that I forget that reliability used to be a problem in version control (I've had to reconstruct CVS and Subversion repositories that got corrupted via various bugs and quirks of the system). It's also pretty fast.

SQLite is an automatic, and easy, answer. It almost goes without saying at this point, I guess.

vim is everywhere. I like knowing I can always run it no matter where I am or what server/VM I'm logged into. That knowledge provides comfort.

go. I don't actually love the language, but the solidity of it and it's ecosystem is really nice. Everything around go has a patina of workmanship about it; not in a corporate "professional" sense, but more like a well-made wood plane or something.

Perl. Again, I don't entirely love the language, but the incredible backward compatibility (we have ~20 year old code that still runs unmodified!), the rarity of bugs (especially given how big the surface area of a huge language like Perl is), and the overall culture of testing, leads to a pretty nice experience. I feel like I can count on it, even if I might get grumpy at some of the quirks.

Python, for different reasons from Perl. I can come back to Python after years away and find that it's maybe even a simpler (but not less powerful) Python than I used a decade ago. I just poked at Python 3 for the first time a few weeks ago, and found it immediately readable and intuitive. The language is more reliably "Pythonic" every year.

OpenSSH. Always works. Always trustworthy.

Google Inbox. I want to host my own mail (and do, for my business), but nothing is as good as Inbox.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#272
Qubes OS¹, the only reliable OS of our time.

See also "The Linux Security Circus: On GUI Isolation (2011)" by Joanna Rutkowska².

¹ https://www.qubes-os.org/

² https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-securit..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11229517

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#274

awk, grep, sed, and these days I add jq to my standard tool belt. I also really enjoy fish as my shell language of choice. Languages, runtimes, etc come and go but these programs remain as useful as they were 19 years ago when I first learned about them.

I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command. Felt like a badass. The email to the product owner was more work than the "coding".

> I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command.

Great, I sometimes do that, too. Downside is that your patience level for "enterprise architecture" goes way down.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#275

MOC. Music on Console. I've been using it forever with no issues of any kind. It's immediate, it's lightweight, it never fails, it works with my files in my hierarchies, it has all the important functions mapped to individual keys. It's brilliant. My wife calls it "nerd mode," which obviously makes it even more appealing.

I've been using cmus for a while, which I've been pretty happy with. Anything I'm missing with moc?

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#277

RabbitMQ. It just works. We're operating with in the normal use case for it. We turn it on, transfer 50k or so messages a day, then forget about. The memory is fairly low, CPU is low and constant. The connections for month or year long clients stay open.

I'm actually a fan of rabbitMQ generally, but I'm not sure I'd put it in the category of notoriously reliable software. It can throw away acknowledged writes (afaik https://aphyr.com/posts/315-jepsen-rabbitmq has still not been fully fixed).

50k messages/day is pretty low throughout and under that load it should plod through just fine.

Under much higher loads than that (10's - 100's millions of messages day) I've seen it die in a pretty ungraceful manner. At that scale, Kafka is a good candidate.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#279

Great thread. Important to keep perspective. So far the responses seem desktop-centric, but I'm going to throw out a few web apps that I have a lot of respect for: - Instapaper - Trello - Google Inbox And, on the desktop side I have to give credit to Garageband and Logic, which I honestly can't recall having crashed or let me down in recent memory. YMMV.

What is Logic? I'm having trouble performing a websearch on that one...

Re: Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

#280
post #242

Windows: "Everything" (that's the name). A lightweight, fast and advanced (if you want it) file search engine. Linux: Most tools of course, as they are made with the Unix philosophy, but these days I'm most surprised by print drivers for Linux. Where in Windows the printer is always magically offline or slow, from Linux I can print and scan very reliably. Vim is also worth learning, it makes editing much more... rela…

If you've any latex pointers I'd appreciate it :)

I used latex to write a paper for the first time last week, and while i thoroughly enjoyed it, i'm fairly confident there were lots of things I could've done better.

Post reply on HN