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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

#611

Post by pzone »

ams6110 wrote: post #478
pzone wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge fan of emacs, but even though I use it constantly, I do not consider it exceptionally reliable. A modern experience really does rely on a huge number of powerful and excellent but sometimes glitchy packages. (helm, org, haskell-mode/python-mode/etc.) I also find it crash prone on Windows, which is not totally surprising given Emacs' ownership, but disappointing.

I've had emacs go out to lunch on rare occasions, but I find it to be far more stable than Firefox or Chrome. I have had emacsserver sessions run for months without issue, and I do all my email as well as coding and org-mode task tracking in Emacs.

I use Spacemacs on Windows so I'm pushing Emacs a bit past its limits. ;)

Actually I was going to compare Emacs stability to Chrome stability. Though for me Emacs gets terminal segfaults more often, Chrome has more random failures that require restarting.

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

#612

Post by Nadya »

astrange wrote: post #576
Nadya wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should run the same in theory - but they don't in practice. It is typically more noticeable on older hardware, on my current rig I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Maybe that's changed in more recent versions, but I no longer have my older rig to do comparison tests. Also what gcb0 said is true as well - but not everyone needs subtitles for their videos. My 'expertise' in media player selection…

This definitely falls under "bugs in the rendering path". In this case the question isn't which one looks better, but which one the media author intended. Your two culprits are that someone's YUV->RGB math forgot that Y needs to be expanded from 16-235 to 0-255 - possible but really surprising! - or that one player implements gamma correction and the other doesn't. Gamma correction might look nice, but it can't be ca…

>In this case the question isn't which one looks better, but which one the media author intended.

That's typically my argument, but others simply "don't care" how the author intended, they want what looks better to them. Which is fine - as long as I'm not watching it with them. Because I actually do care how the author intended something to be seen.

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

#613

Post by taserian »

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.

Adding to the list of editors: LyX is a great cross-platform editor that I've used. https://www.lyx.org/

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

#614

Post by stevekemp »

donatj wrote: post #487
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.

I've gone through a few things too, eventually settled on Redis.

Would be interested in seeing your queue, if it were public?

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

#615

Post by stevekemp »

agentultra wrote: post #5

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.

gawk & awk are often underrated, I use them frequently especially in contrast to my colleagues who insist upon using "cut" to split command-output.

Of course for larger jobs there is perl, but using gawk/awk in a one-liner always feels nice.

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

#616

Post by stevekemp »

majewsky wrote: post #536
paxunix wrote: post #411

/bin/true Without fail, it has always done exactly what I wanted it to do. Simple. Solid. Reliable.

Also /bin/false. Its manpage describes too many of my weekends: false - do nothing, unsuccessfully

I have a shell-script in my sysadmin-tools repository called `maybe` which sometimes is /bin/true, and sometimes is /bin/false.

Keeps me on my toes ;)

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

#617

Post by lode »

Can’t live without: 1Password - First install on any system I use. I only know 2 passwords by heart: my login password and my 1Password vault pw. Also supports TOTP 2 factor authentication.

Dropbox - It’s a folder, it syncs, and does this very well. Syncs my 1Password vault as well.

GrandPerspective - Visualise where your disk space is going. Every time I fire this up I find stuff I’ve forgotten about that takes up a lot of space, or something that is using disk space it shouldn’t. (Once a WiFi log hadn’t rolled over and was using 8GB of space.) - http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

Synology - It took some investment, but now I finally have a place where all my data is, safer than on one or two external drives. But that’s not all, Synology also is a fantastic home/office server with an “app store” where I can run applications, run a VPN endpoint, run Docker containers, ...

Crashplan - Not the fantastic lightweight native Mac & Linux tool I’d want, but rather a somewhat heavy Java tool. But the business model for me is great. Free replication between endpoints, ie. all my family and my NAS and unlimited replication to their datacenters for my own devices for $5/month (Crashplan Family) - http://www.crashplan.com

Plex - For me it’s always been super reliable. Server runs flawlessly on my Synology. - http://www.plex.tv

Pinboard.in - Proudly non-free, stable and boring. The author’s presentations and twitter feeds are insightful and hilarious, I’m glad to support his work.

Superduper - I use it less often than before, since I now have a proper NAS and backup solution (see above), but Superduper has helped me so much in the past it deserves a mention. Always provides a safety net when I do a migration between hdd and sdd, between systems, ... I even bought two licenses as I lost my previous one, spending another $28 on it was a no brainer. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...

Coda - Still my html/css/php/… editor of choice. - http://www.panic.com/coda/

Waze on my phone: best navigation I’ve ever used

youtube-dl

wget & curl - they have slightly other use cases, and I love them both. I use both of them at least weekly, mostly daily

VMware Fusion & vSphere/ESXi: still rock solid after all those years. (Disclaimer: I work there)

Other software I particularly love: Sketch (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) and Affinity Designer. I like Illustrator, but as a non-professional it’s way too expensive for me.

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

#618

Post by stuxnet79 »

donatj wrote: post #497
benologist wrote: post #289

All that 'yak shaving' makes me feel like Windows and OS X are poised to become legacy desktop operating systems. Every other popular consumer operating system today avoids that stuff somewhat successfully and none of us wish devops would disappear so we can manually do that stuff again. Security around traditional desktop operating systems is getting unfunny very fast too. Some of the software we like is so wasteful…

I bark to people all the time about how environmentally unconscious it is to do something on a million client machines which could have been done once on the server and cached. Namely client side JavaScript based document composition. If everyone is going to do the exact same thing, it's just a huge waste of cycles.

Being environmentally unconscious does not increase the average tech company's bottom-line. But reducing load on their servers does. So from that angle it makes sense. Interesting perspective though - I've never considered servers deferring compute tasks to clients to be undesirable. When I first came across the idea it seemed pretty revolutionary and sensible to me (maybe JS hype contributed to my viewpoint).

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

#619

Post by rsync »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #410
rsync wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic." Does it play DVD ISO files ? Can you use the menus, etc. ? Just curious ... XBMC back in 2004 could do this (navigate and use DVD menus in a DVD ISO) but then that feature actually went away in the following years, never to return ...

antisthenes notwithstanding, VLC does play DVD .iso files and you can use the menus.

Wow - that's fantastic. Thanks.

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

#620

Post by 3minus1 »

warpech wrote: post #9

OneNote. Works for me so much better than Evernote. Excellent cross-platform sync

OneNote is nice. I'm always bugged though by the fact I can't double click a word and drag the cursor to highlight more words. Such a small thing, but it annoys me endlessly.
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