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Comment by tmountain | Hacker News Reader

It makes me really appreciate tools that DO work. Things like: the Linux kernel, Vim, PostgreSQL, the Golang compiler, etc. Interestingly, the aforementioned tools come from different ecosystems, and levels of financial backing, but all of them have been reliable tools for me for many years, all are complex, and yes... they all have bugs, but of acceptable severity and manageability.

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For me the most interesting case is HeidiSQL. I find it easily the most useful SQL GUI client, but it crashes pretty frequently, but not frequently enough for me to stop using it over the alternatives.

I often wondered how to strike the balance right on these things, since apparently all options can lead to success.

Might depend on the quality of crashes. Losing hours or days of work would quickly sour me. HP RGS crashes, twice or thrice daily are just 'meh' - reconnect and nothing - but 15 seconds and typing auth tokens - is lost - maybe 'flow' but I've become resilient there.

Are you actually applying some objective standard for "works" here? Or are you just deciding that the bugs in things you like are "of acceptable severity and manageability" and the bugs in things you don't like aren't?

Sure, using all the aforementioned tools for over a decade without any bugs that prevented me from completing a task.

More directly, I have never encountered a bug with any of these apps, aside from Linux kernel panics due to buggy drivers, which was almost always with long tail hardware back in the 90s.

Right, but which bugs prevent you from completing a task is probably a function of how much you like those tools and/or how useful you find their capabilities. Generally people get used to large classes of bugs in their tools and work around them without even consciously thinking about it.

I have thought many times about building a shrine to Postgres in my apartment.

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