

Ask YC: What software makes you happy? - kulkarnic

Do you feel extremely happy when you use some particular software?<p>I'm trying to see if there's a pattern in software which makes users happier (not more efficient, etc.).<p>If there's an application/webapp that is particularly enjoyable to use, comment! Maybe there's a pattern we could uncover, replicate and make life better for everyone around! :)
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rms
I used news.yc to make someone happy the other day. There was a new user that
didn't understand why he was getting downmodded so I told him the reason. It
seemed like karma really meant a lot to him so I upvoted all of his stories
and current comments, giving him an extra 20 karma points. In an economy with
infinite karma, I didn't think it was a big deal to arbitrarily give him more.
I think he was joking a little when he said it "made his month" but hopefully
I made him smile.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125233>

Paul Graham told me via email that up and downarrows aren't for arbitrary
karma operations and then a couple days later he took away my ability to vote
on any comment or story. I upvoted this story to 4 but it didn't count because
I can't vote anymore. I find the whole scenario somewhat bizarre.

~~~
pg
What you don't mention was (a) this wasn't the first time you'd done this, and
(b) that before turning off voting for your account, I tried sending you an
email asking you to stop, and you replied basically telling me to fuck off.

~~~
ingenium
Paul, the thing is, you ARE too full of yourself. At the YC interview, when we
went around the table and shook hands it went "Hi, I'm Jessica. I'm Trevor.
I'm Robert." And then you just smiled, because of course you were Paul. We
were just supposed to KNOW who you were....

Taking away rms's voting rights isn't about improving the discourse of this
site. It's about your own sense of self superiority.

~~~
pg
You're making up an elaborate theory out of randomness. We interview startups
one after another all day long. We don't all say our names every time. Another
iteration and maybe it would be Robert who just smiled and said hello. But
then of course the evidence you'd select would be something else.

As for Rms: he abuses the voting system, I send him an email asking him to
stop, he won't stop. And when I suspend voting for his account after this,
it's out of my own "sense of self superiority?" WTF? Any forum administrator
would do the same under the circumstances.

~~~
rms
I never said I wouldn't stop. I stopped as soon as you told me too. Sorry for
not making that explicitly clear with my email.

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xirium
The responsiveness of contemporary applications has vastly improved. Two
examples would be Photoshop and Firefox.

Photoshop3 didn't have many features but it was the best application in its
field. However, after using Photoshop4 for short period, you looked upon the
previous version as clunky, even though you never noticed the shortfalls when
using it. This cycle of improvement continued for the next two versions.

For web browsing, Mosiac1.0 was a fantastic program. When it was written, it
was the best in its field. However, if you've used a modern web browser then
it would only take about 10 minutes to make you entirely frustrated with
Mosiac. Let's run through some of the features. A single, non-presistent
connection to web server. Caching of previous pages in history only. No
incremental rendering. Awful responsiveness, especially when using multiple
windows. No scripting. No tables. No background images. No font styling. No
text alignment. And on very early versions: no forms. It also crashed
frequently. Regardless, it was an absolutely fantastic program which made
impossible tasks trivial and saved lifetimes of effort.

Important aspects that make me happy in decreasing priority: make it open
source; make one task trivial; make it crash less; make it more responsive;
make the repetitive parts of interaction take decreasing amounts of subjective
time.

~~~
kulkarnic
Echo the last part. Dependability and responsiveness are absolutely top-
importance! In fact, I feel that what's more important than responsiveness is
a uniform response time. Nothing puts me off more than a file-copy among the
same teo disks taking 10s one day and 2 min on the next (for the same
filesize).

Of course that could be just me! :)

------
rms
In games, I always found the design of the Diablo series interesting. Every
action and click is designed to have some kind of reward. So clicking on a
jewel or sword in your inventory makes a pleasant sound. Killing enemies is
even better.

~~~
jcromartie
That principle is what game designers call a "juicy" experience. It is, more
precisely, when every action results in an large amount of feedback
(animation, sound, particle explosion, etc.).

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kulkarnic
A lot of the comments here are really eloquent in their brevity! Still, it'd
be great if you could say _which aspect_ of the software tool makes you most
happy. I know, thoroughly subjective, not statistically projectable, but
interesting nonetheless.

------
jcromartie
Honestly Reddit makes me happy because of one simple fact: you write comments
in plain text using Markdown.

If every site did this the world would be a better place.

~~~
vixen99
How about something not seen until fairly recently? The reply button. In the
UK for instance, there is hardly a single newspaper or online magazine that
provides this in their 'respond to article' facility. You can post a comment
but without a reply button no one can specifically challenge that non-sequitur
or unsupported abuse you've churned out. They can do it indirectly by naming
you but who's going to take the trouble to refer back? Where implemented, I'm
sure this facility has had a positive effect on the way people treat each
other on the net.

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musiciangames
At the moment Squeak Smalltalk is making me pretty happy. I've worked on a
project on and off that was in Java, and decided that development in Java was
never going to be fast enough to keep up with what I need to do.

So I invested some time in learning Squeak, and now I'm starting to get it the
productivity is rising sharply. And as it's relatively such a joy to program,
I find I'm putting in much more solid hours as well.

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pistoriusp
I don't really think it's possible for software to make people happier without
making us more efficient. When a previously complicated task has been
simplified or improved it generally makes people happier to use it than an
alternative.

I tried but couldn't think of any software that I use which made me happier
and was less efficient than something else.

~~~
kulkarnic
Sorry. My bad. I should have said _not necessarily more efficient_!

@pistoiusp: Any that makes you more efficient + happier (not just more
efficient)?

~~~
pistoriusp
OS X, Textmate, Safari and VLC.

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bayareaguy
<http://www.shatters.net/celestia> is a favorite of mine.

~~~
kulkarnic
wow!

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niels
Gmail. There are many great features that combined with ease of use, makes
this a killer app for me.

------
gahahaha
There is other software than Emacs? Interesting...

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kulkarnic
The number and breadth of comments here not just speak about how much software
affects us emotionally; but also of the diversity of this community as a
whole. Most interestingly, they do seem to have a pattern in them. I want to
explore this further, and so have created a form which you could fill out. Go
here: [http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pSljT7jP3pc-
ef3p...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pSljT7jP3pc-
ef3pT3j7hbg&email=true)

Your feedback will be appreciated (and conclusions shared at news.yc, of
course). Thanks!

------
brlewis
Pictures of my wife and kids make me very happy. I like my wifi photo frame,
and I also like piclens. In conjunction with ourdoings.com, of course.

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spydez
The BugMeNot addon for Firefox is one for me. I can get around stupid required
registrations for sites like NYT.

The other thing that made me happy was when I wrote up a bunch of bash/python
scripts to make my day easier at work.

See a theme? Yes, I'm lazy.

Also, Fullscreen Homestar Runner addon for Firefox. Required for happy viewing
of H*R if you use your HD TV as you monitor.

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german
It's an interesting question, I could say Gmail or Twitter but it only makes
me happy when I receive an interesting Email or IM, so in that case is not a
bout the software but the people.

The only software that makes me happier are music players (Exaile, Amarok,
etc) because they let me hear the music that I love in my PC.

------
mixmax
3d studio max

I relax by building stuff in 3ds max. Much cheaper than building stuff in the
real world, and almost as fun. Currently I'm building a yacht. I am even
thinking of actually building it for real when I finish.

------
LogicHoleFlaw
vim makes me happy when it becomes an extension of my fingers, and allows me
to manipulate text like a musical instrument lets me manipulate notes.

The macro programming software for my PC gamepad makes me happy because it
makes playing certain games effortless. I don't worry about the interface. I
just _do_. The software gets out of my way.

My favorite online computer game, Final Fantasy XI, make me happy, but in a
different way. It is the social aspects which keeps me coming back every time.
A more cynical person would say it is the Skinner box effect, but I'm not that
jaded yet.

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abstractbill
Happy isn't quite the right word... I feel _comfortable_ when I'm using Emacs.
And very uncomfortable editing text with anything else.

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suboptimal
vim has my vote. It's my "killer app" for notes, fitness log, recipes, etc.
It's also my favorite IDE, together with Firefox/bug.

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aneesh
I'm a big fan of the 37signals software. Also Jott; Jott makes me feel
productive, which makes me happy.

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Flemlord
Microsoft Word 2007. I love the tab strips and the new formatting options. My
documents look beautiful.

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pinecone
GNU Emacs =)

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tjr
Infocom.

Most especially, the ambassador from Blow'k-bibben-gordo in Planetfall.

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utx00
i don't know about extremely happy but i love using fogbugz ... and emacs

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Hexayurt
Omnigraffle on OS X. It's software to change platforms for.

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kingnothing
Ruby makes me happy. Its code is succinct and beautiful.

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asenchi
OpenBSD

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tjr
Anything that's certified as 100% Pure Java.

~~~
utx00
good one :)

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brent
latex, gvim, firefox, matlab, R.

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edw519
hacker news, craigslist, and google maps, especially hacker news

During long and lonely coding sessions, they remind me that I am not alone.

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eol_of_urnst
Scrivener :-)

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kul
campaign monitor makes me happy

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delano
Winamp 2

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newt0311
Python.

