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Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

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Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#291

Post by muzani »

gaws wrote: post #274
muzani wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually prefer IRC over Discord. I'm not sure why. Discord feels a bit excessive in its features. I don't like the bots. It doesn't handle multiple channels well, not as well as Slack, and yet something about it makes people do so many, unlike IRC. There's the mess of roles/self roles. There's just something about it that encourages overcommunication. You have announcement channels that people just tell you to mut…

The problem with IRC is people can't find active networks. Which ones are you on?

That's not really a problem. Like a phone number, you just want the other person's number, not the server provider.

I still get on DALnet but it's less active now.

In Malaysia, #kampung on KampungChat is popular, often around 1000 people on at any one time. Many of them who used to hang out on IRC during school days.

However, thanks to the magic of internet anonymity, it's full of 40 year olds jacking off now. You have to control the conversation, similar to Omegle. I've had some nice conversations on books and especially chess on there. It appears that the kind of people who join IRC are also nerds in some form.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#292

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #288

Zoom, Chrome. Zoom is a resource hog and has a terrible UX, but I struggle to find anything better that works well on all OSes. Chrome breaks privacy in many ways, but I can't find a decent alternative, similarly secure, blink based and with Chrome extensions support that doesn't have similar problems (Brave, Vivaldi).

If it breaks privacy then it is NOT secure.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#293

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

kortex wrote: post #164

Awscli. It's not just the complexity or inconsistency; that kinda comes with the territory. It's just not discoverable. Constantly have to be googling stuff. Boto is in a similar vein. Stupid capital letter arguments. No type information, no autocomplete.

The underlying API is similarly inconsistent and undiscoverable. I thought I could write a simple client for it but I was defeated by the sheer complexity that 100,000 code monkeys can generate.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#294

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

oalae5niMiel7qu wrote: post #292
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #288

Zoom, Chrome. Zoom is a resource hog and has a terrible UX, but I struggle to find anything better that works well on all OSes. Chrome breaks privacy in many ways, but I can't find a decent alternative, similarly secure, blink based and with Chrome extensions support that doesn't have similar problems (Brave, Vivaldi).

If it breaks privacy then it is NOT secure.

Privacy means my data is private. I don't know if security implies privacy, in my mind I'm referring specifically to protection from direct threats to my device that aim to access resources that my browser doesn't expose (filesystem, elevated privileges and that kind of things).

That being said, my statement still stands. In that case, I can just summarize it as "I can't find a browser as secure as Chrome" (implying that yes, Brave and Vivaldi do the same, they are just less open about that)

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#295

Post by josephcsible »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #288

Zoom, Chrome. Zoom is a resource hog and has a terrible UX, but I struggle to find anything better that works well on all OSes. Chrome breaks privacy in many ways, but I can't find a decent alternative, similarly secure, blink based and with Chrome extensions support that doesn't have similar problems (Brave, Vivaldi).

Why is "blink based" something you're looking for? Isn't the Blink monoculture a bad thing?

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#296

Post by Irongirl1 »

64bit_xombie wrote: post #212
chickenimprint wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of using phone numbers in many of todays services, is to shift the work of validating the authenticity of the user to carriers. Of course this has given rise to inumerable vendors of accounts or forged prepaid cards, but it raises the barrier just enough to make mass cheating, boosting, spamming unprofitable.

But the benefit of curbing spam doesnt outweigh the cost of abatement of privacy. Though more of my issue is being forced to have it on a phone, when I only want to use from my laptop.

And I'm assuming that if you don't have a phone (like me) that you can't use it at all? No phone, no phone number...or would a burner number work?

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#297

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

reach_tim wrote: post #110

QUICKBOOKS. A complete non-integrated poop show. But if you will ever need an accountant, you'll be using it.

Accountants HATE Quickbooks. I wish I remembered which software the last accountant I talked to thought was better. I'd never heard of it, but apparently most accountants thought it was the best. It doesn't come up in search engines anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#298

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

octobus2021 wrote: post #100

Quicken (tracking personal finances). Has all the functionality I need, viewing individual transactions, reports (spending by category/account), tracking investments etc., and is local. When I bought it in 2008 it supported integration with financial institutions (e.g., I could download transactions for my credit card/bank account into Quicken installed on my local). Then they forced customers to pay for this feature…

I wrote an OFX client for this purpose. That's the same protocol that Quicken uses. It pulls transactions from my bank and puts them into MySQL. It runs a couple of queries on that data but doesn't do much more than that.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#299

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

josephcsible wrote: post #295
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #288

Zoom, Chrome. Zoom is a resource hog and has a terrible UX, but I struggle to find anything better that works well on all OSes. Chrome breaks privacy in many ways, but I can't find a decent alternative, similarly secure, blink based and with Chrome extensions support that doesn't have similar problems (Brave, Vivaldi).

Why is "blink based" something you're looking for? Isn't the Blink monoculture a bad thing?

No, an open source browser engine from my perspective it's not bad, especially if it has multiple contributors. I see that as an opportunity. It's possible to fork and be up-to-date with it and it would still be less work than writing a different engine.

What's bad in Chrome is not necessary bad in Blink. Blink happens to work well and be very wide-spread, and also being open source. Usually I look for these 3 things together when choosing open source software.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#300

Post by nunez »

smackeyacky wrote: post #184
nunez wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jira is fucking awesome compared to other corporate ticketing systems (CA rally and servicenow)

As a way if enabling corporate bullies and toxic managenent behaviour, I would agree Jira has no peers. Want to ambush somebody in a meeting? Open your jira tickets in the 5 minutes leading up to it. Even better, create some new, obscure category and pile them into there over a week and ask your target why they aren't done during the bi weekly standup. As a mechanism of abuse of employees it is superb.

Counterpoint. Want to automate reporting the amount of toil on a team based on ticket assignment with pretty much any language that can talk HTTP? Want to create super-easy dashboards that are easy to read and use, and then export that into code? Is your company trying capital-A-Agile and wants to experiment between using scrum, kanban, fragilefall, whatever? Jira can do all of these things, and it can do them easily.

What you're describing is a people problem IMO.

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