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Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

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

#291

Post by sssilver »

lucb1e wrote: 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…

Vim departs from the reliability camp once you start adding a bunch of plugins. But as a raw editor, yes -- it's solid.

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

#292

Post by dbcurtis »

barsonme wrote: post #280
lucb1e wrote: 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.

I've recently discovered Quiver. Mac only, but open file format spec (if you are feeling particularly energetic). But it certainly is the nicest thing I've found for doing LaTeX.

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

#295

Post by juped »

numlocked wrote: post #75
fn1 wrote: post #25

Postgresql. Such a marvel of reliability and good design. All features just logically and consistently work with each other.

Agree with this. I will regularly write queries plugging together all sorts of odd features in odd ways and it'll just run, run fast, and give me the results I want. Totally amazing.

Some bad software is fractally bad and you can't explain why it's bad because every part of it, at every level, is bad.

I find that Postgres is fractally good in a similar way.

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

#296

Post by busterarm »

darkr wrote: post #277
virmundi wrote: post #201

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 see…

Under those high loads I've seen every single MQ fall over like a house of cards. At lighter loads you can get the job done with other tools that scale but with a little bit more pain. Leaves me super skeptical about them on the whole.

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

#297

Post by pigscantfly »

barsonme wrote: post #280
lucb1e wrote: 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.

I would recommend trying www.writelatex.com.

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

#298

Post by nostrademons »

lucb1e wrote: 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…

FWIW, I used to use Notepad++ back around 2005 and it was a piece of crap stability-wise. Frequent crashes, and not-infrequent UI glitches like syntax highlighting just stopping working.

This isn't a reflection on its state now, but I'm trying to make the point that good software takes time. They've had 13 years to clean it up now, and evidently it's gotten a lot better. But that's worth remembering when judging the crap software that's come out in the last couple years.

Linux printing also used to absolutely suck, so much that CUPS was generally synonymous with the hassles you (used to) need to go through to do practical work with a Linux system. Ubuntu has been an absolute godsend in terms of getting a stable, productive Linux desktop working.

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

#299

Post by milcron »

dandelion_lover wrote: post #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

I prefer OpenBSD to Qubes.

Over the past couple years, my approach has changed from blacklisting what’s broken, to whitelisting what’s safe. NoScript in the browser, and I’m working on installing OpenBSD on my Libreboot laptop (tricky because UEFI support is so new).

OpenBSD has my favorite approach. Continual auditing of the codebase, and they’re always implementing new 'seatbelts', such as ASLR, W^X, and now pledge(2). These seatbelts are used liberally – even in programs that you theoretically shouldn’t need protection from, such as the system-provided implementation of cat. They aggressively delete dead code, and probably have the smallest codebase of all modern nix systems. The best code is no code. :)

Theo has some great comments on magical “silver-bullet” thinking about security. In this case, specifically about the security of VMs (2007, so pretty dated now):

    x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full
    of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page
    protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand
    new pile of shit.

    You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide
    collection of software engineers who can’t write operating systems or
    applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write
    virtualization layers without security holes.
Harsh, but not inaccurate. And it’s part of the reason I’d rather use OpenBSD than QubesOS.

Eight years after that comment, a critical vulnerability in Xen affected the security of QubesOS, and the developers were shocked, shocked!

    It is really shocking that such a bug has been lurking in the core of the
    hypervisor for so many years. In our opinion the Xen project should rethink
    their coding guidelines and try to come up with practices and perhaps
    additional mechanisms that would not let similar flaws to plague the hypervisor
    ever again (assert-like mechanisms perhaps?). Otherwise the whole project makes
    no sense, at least to those who would like to use Xen for security-sensitive
    work.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/xen-patches-7-year-o...

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

#300

Post by vram22 »

BruceEel wrote: post #89

Glad to see you folks coming up with many examples. For me it's more like a journey of constant sorrow, i'm hardly put coming up even with one example, but maybe: - übertime on iOS = i hate time tracking, this rock solid app makes it bearable. - Brief (under DOSBox) just to remind myself that good, reliable, general-purpose text editors did exist at some point...

Wow, Brief. I used it, years ago. Very fast [1] and good text editor [2]. A few years back, in Boston, I was introduced to the person who wrote it.

[1] It had all kinds of shortcuts for speed. I think I remember one where, if you pressed an arrow key for a short while, it would move the cursor (up/down/left/right) at some speed. If you held the key down for longer, it would guess that you wanted to move longer distances in the file, and move the cursor faster. May have used low-level assembly language techniques and code for speed.

[2] A free version of it was available recently. I have it on my PC and use it sometimes these days.

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