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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

#481

Post by BruceEel »

vram22 wrote: post #300
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 distan…

So cool you've met him! I believe he also authored SuperDuper on the Mac, another excellent piece of software I've used in the past.

And yes, the speed and the quality of Brief. Especially the fact it didn't try to malloc the whole size of the file, rare nowadays. Opening a 40MB file on my Win98 PC with 8MB of RAM was, essentially, an instantaneous op. Fast forward to last week and one of the IDE's praised elsewhere in this thread, running on my corporate Lenovo with 12GB of RAM, warned me against trying to open an 8MB XML file. Well, at least it warned me, rather than just crashing...

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

#482

Post by hosh »

blakeyrat wrote: post #310
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?

Yep. vim, git, and spacemacs are among some of the major tools I use and generally enjoy using them.

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

#483

Post by ferbivore »

potatolicious wrote: post #281

I suspect many are already familiar with this: Sketch ( https://www.sketchapp.com/ ) It's hard to imagine what life was like before Sketch. You'd work with a UX designer, who would pass you PNGs and PSDs. There would be designs, and then there would be a whole 'nother set of files for specifying dimensions, colors, typefaces, sizing, kerning, and a whole slew of other stuff. You'd also have to get asset packs from yo…

Is there anything as good for Windows or Linux out there?

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

#484

Post by BruceEel »

greggman wrote: post #320
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...

I was a Brief (by Underware) user and back in 93 when I started using Windows for Workgroups I found Slickedit which has a Brief emulation mode. I'm still using it and still using all the brief key bindings (can't say it's totally stable though)

Thanks, will definitely look into Slickedit. Back in the day, I was really impressed by Codewright's Brief emulation. I'd been trying to convince my boss to buy a team license when Borland bought the product and did it the same thing they did to Brief...

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

#485

Post by donatj »

vblord wrote: post #41

Beyond Compare. An amazing/cheap file comparison tool. - http://www.scootersoftware.com

Came here to say this. It's an amazing tool. Set it as your git difftool and it will change your life. I switched to Mac about 8 years ago and ran it in Wine for a long long time until they finally released a Mac version. Their diff algorithm is so damn perfect no other diff tool compares, and I've tried SOO MANY. It lives up to its name. It's an amazing tool that's crossed platforms with me, and I'd rather give up my left hand.

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

#486

Post by barsonme »

avn2109 wrote: post #473
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.

IMHO the best TeX tutorials on the internet are written by some Helpdesk guy on his blog: http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2010/02/15/lets-le... I'm not affiliated in any way with that site but the pedagogy is very approachable. Also it helps to use a site like WriteLatex.com or ShareLatex.com to do the hard setting up part when you're just starting out. Edit: I see he is no longer a helpdesk guy, and his bl…

That looks great, thank you for sharing!

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

#487

Post by donatj »

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.

We poked RabbitMQ, Gearman, SQS, a few others, and never got the reliability we demanded. To be fair, we're handling in the order of 50 million messages a day.

Ended up just writing a simple file system based queue in Golang and it's working spectacularly. Just let the SSD do the work. Couple hundred loc all told. We rarely crack 10-15% cpu and memory use sits statically at around 30mb.

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

#488

Post by barsonme »

Analemma_ wrote: post #308
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.

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 TeXs…

Yeah, that makes sense. I'll make sure to do that. It was kind of time-consuming typing out the couple tables I did add.

I used latexmk which watches file(s) for changes and rebuilds with pdflatex. It was nice, but made my laptop run real hot, and inotify never really works very well.

Which ST plugin do you use?

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

#489

Post by Semiapies »

sedachv wrote: post #252
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.

+1 for Emacs. eshell is my main command line and interactive shell, and since GNU Emacs 24 I have not touched a terminal emulator other than ansi-term.

I tinker and putter with my emacs setup all the time. It's like a hobby motorcycle that way...but at any moment, it will still be ready to drive across the badlands like some old Land Rover.

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

#490

Post by barsonme »

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…

Oooh, I like the .bib idea. I might steal it and use it for select things---I decided it'd be a good idea to go back (sorta) and finish my BS, so creating one for each class might be a very good idea.

Import as .pdf not .svg? Got it. It was tricky fiddling with percentages and stuff to get the .svg to fit properly (and look decent).

Thanks! I'll look into XeTex.

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