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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

#301

Post by AznHisoka »

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…

We process at least 30 million messages a day with sidekiq and had to start sharding message queues for different purposes. At some point it's not worth trying to optimize the messaging.

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

#303

Post by sanderjd »

Joeri wrote: post #213
BlackjackCF wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big fan of IDEs, but IntelliJ is really good. I just hate how heavy it is.

Use eclipse for a while, you won't think intellij is heavy anymore after that.

Ha, I just had this experience recently. It's amazing how quickly I got fed up with Eclipse, and how much it made me appreciate IntelliJ after I switched.

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

mbreedlove wrote: post #168
mangeletti wrote: post #160

Alfred ( https://www.alfredapp.com ) Alfred is absolutely the most game-changing app I've ever been introduced to. I only use it for finding files, searching, opening a page by direct URL, defining words, calculator, translation (via Google), launching apps, and quickly jumping to apps that are already open. It's probably saved me hundreds of hours in clicking around, etc. I've never purchased the paid version (been…

I've installed Alfred before but just kept using Spotlight. I never saw why it amazes so many people. What does it do that Spotlight can't?

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by yread »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

IntelliJ Idea is head and shoulders better than many other IDEs, particularly Eclipse in the reliability department.

It is nice but I don't think I would call it reliable. There are crashes, it took quite some time for stuff like column editing to stop corrupting the files etc. I think they are even less stable than a recent Visual Studio (ah the good stable days of 2008 are long gone)

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

#306

Post by jloughry »

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.

Use makefiles and git with LaTeX. Use \input{} to structure large documents as a main file that includes smaller ones. Keep all your BibTeX citations in one large .bib file (under git) and symlink it into the current directory for every new document; it makes bibliographies so much easier.

PDFLaTeX makes it incredibly easy to keep all your graphics in PDF files; it makes them so much nicer to deal with. Inkscape is great for making vector graphics for use in LaTex; keep the source code of the graphics in SVG but save as PDF for LaTeX to use (tell Inkscape to export only the drawing to PDF, not the whole page, and you'll never have to crop or resize your graphics ever again).

Finally, use a modern TeX like XeTeX that directly understands Unicode characters and TrueType fonts.

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

#308

Post by Analemma_ »

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.

IME, the most important key to Latex is setting up your environment so you can have a fast turnaround time between writing some markup and seeing what it looks like (essentially, getting a "Latex REPL"). There are a bunch of different ways to do this, you'll have to pick what's best for you. On Macs I tend to use Sublime Text (substitute with your editor of choice) with a macro to invoke pdfTeX; on Windows I use TeXstudio which has live preview support. There are other ways; do whatever's best for you.

The second most important thing I've found for latex is setting up macros. In TextExpander/AHK I have several dozen Latex macros set up, like

  \tbl3 => \begin{tabular}{ l | c | r }
             a & b & c \\
           \end{tabular}
With a bunch of variants for different styles (full borders, etc.), column numbers, etc. Once your macros have become muscle memory, writing Latex speeds up considerably.

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

#309

Post by blakeyrat »

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…

I don't enjoy using software that's difficult to learn or use, which most of your examples seem to be. (I haven't used "Everything", so I might be wrong about that one.)

Notepad++ used to cheese me off in a previous job where I was basically forced to use it because it couldn't even draw drop-down menus correctly. Ugh. Terrible UI.

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

#310

Post by blakeyrat »

repeek wrote: post #208

1Password on Mac - phenomenal UX, all around joy to use Not as pleased with the Windows version, but it's serviceable

Starting from the top, I think you're the first person to mention user experience.

Man, this topic has done nothing but remind me how far I am outside the "software development mainstream". Vim? Git? Are there seriously that many developers who enjoy using such unusable software?

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