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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

#341

Post by justinlardinois »

jloughry wrote: post #306
barsonme wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

I second git and Make, but I'm not sure I agree with the single .bib file thing. That works if you're writing a lot of documents on the same subject that use many of the same sources, but that's a very specific use case.

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

#342

Post by gamache »

anoonmoose wrote: post #314

This might sound nuts, but if you're using LabVIEW to control National Instruments hardware, and you don't write bad code, you've got a surprisingly fast and powerful system available at your hands. You can measure, drive, control, whatever verb for whatever piece of equipment you're using, with surprising speed, accuracy, and reliability. It's a pretty expensive stack for doing some pretty particular weird stuff but…

LabVIEW was my first programming gig, back in high school. For the unfamiliar, it's a data-flow programming environment designed to drive data acquisition hardware. The programming interface is almost entirely graphical, in which you draw something between schematics and a block diagram; the usage interface looks not unlike laboratory equipment.

I always loved how it made such difficult things so easy, while other languages' "simple" matters like loops required mental gymnastics. It's a great tool for its job.

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

#343

Post by Nadya »

netheril96 wrote: post #338
aerovistae wrote: post #322

VLC. There have been so many times I thought "man it would be great if there were this crazy hypothetical feature in my media player" only to find out it's like a stable long-established feature that's a keypress away from activation after a quick google search or glance at a dropdown menu.

I have the opposite experience. Font rendering in Chinese seldom work, and dragging the slider of a large MP4 or MKV video results in noticeable lag. I have since abandoned it.

Not to mention the color balance is noticeably off for Nvidia graphics cards - and no amount of trying to rebalance them ever quite gets it "right". I also prefer my video player to let me know if a video file is corrupted rather than attempt to play it anyways. I find that to be a bug, not a feature.

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

#344

Post by littleweep »

SwellJoe wrote: post #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/V…

git is such a great example for OP. It's become so ingrained in my workflow that I forget it's there. It really is a perfect application.

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

#345

Post by kohanz »

anoonmoose wrote: post #314

This might sound nuts, but if you're using LabVIEW to control National Instruments hardware, and you don't write bad code, you've got a surprisingly fast and powerful system available at your hands. You can measure, drive, control, whatever verb for whatever piece of equipment you're using, with surprising speed, accuracy, and reliability. It's a pretty expensive stack for doing some pretty particular weird stuff but…

My personal experience: yes to the NI hardware, but no to LabView. I used LabView during my graduate work and as someone who came from a traditional programming background, I struggled with it. More recently (almost a decade later) I had the opportunity to migrate a LabView project to Measurement Studio (NI's .NET libraries for interfacing with their H/W) and it was night and day. The NI stack works as it should and it is so much more manageable with C#.

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

#347

Post by [deleted] »

daveloyall wrote: post #279
jeffthespasm wrote: post #11

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...

[deleted]

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

#348

Post by Nadya »

DanBC wrote: post #332
audleman wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or for folks like me: I just want to play my video files no fuss, no muss. Something other major media players seem to have more trouble with than they should. But not VLC! 100% of the time it works every time!

On my low end machine VLC struggles with H265, where KMP doesn't. (But I still strongly prefer VLC for everything else.)

Have you tried MPC-HC? I haven't put it up to the test with KMP, but I do know it beats VLC for H265 playback.

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

#350

Post by justinlardinois »

davidw wrote: post #206

Let's see... stuff I have been using for around 20 years and still use today: * Emacs * Postgres * GCC * Apache web server * Linux - although it's big enough in scope that it does have its issues from time to time.

I definitely don't agree when it comes to GCC. While it does its job well and, importantly, has helpful error messages, its command line arguments are a mess. -Wall enables all warnings right? Yep, except for the ones that you need -Wextra. But don't forget there are more that aren't covered here. And let's not even get into the appropriately-named -pedantic.

Like I said, GCC gets its job done well, and once I've got what I need spelled out in my Makefile I'm good. But it's a headache to work with when you go off the beaten path.

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