Amazon Alexa and the FireTV. Been around for some time now, several iterations except that the UX hasn’t changed, quality isn’t any better than couple years ago and painful/buggy 3rd party app integrations.
Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
371–380 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#372JIRA. The most complex simple system I used. Simple in theory (Project Management) but complex in implementation.
JIRA is heavyweight, but I've never been remotely satisfied with any of the competitors. If your team is more than 5 people or you have multiple teams, you're absolute going to need all that sophistication from JIRA. If you ask me what's the worst piece of software I use every day today, it's Asana.
> If your team is more than 5 people or you have multiple teams, you're absolute going to need all that sophistication from JIRA.
Can you give more detail? I've been on larger, successful teams without JIRA, and every time JIRA was introduced it was a net-negative for real productivity.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#373Docker. I use it and love it every day in both dev and prod, but I also really kind of hate it. I'll keep my complaints short. There should not be a system-wide daemon. (Or any daemon). It should not require root at all (no setuid either). From outside the container, the container and its processes should be a single process (with threads). (Like glueing a bunch of processes together.) The containers should be nest-a…
I feel like the Dockerfile format was very tight and simple to use, and the tools somewhat usable, but over time they keep bolting things onto it by committee. It is better than git, but that's pretty faint praise.
When I'm staring at the worst of it (unsticking myself or worse, trying to explain why it's like this to a coworker who is stuck), I keep thinking that there's a standard for making these containers, won't someone get around to rewriting the user-facing bits with the modern requirements designed in from the start?
But it's good enough, so we are probably stuck with it until someone comes up with a better idea to base application compartmentalization upon. Like an OS that actually does what I was promised 25 years ago and am still waiting for.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#374Atlassian's Jira and Confluence. Why? Their search capability is just bad. To find something requires a lot of tries and tricks. I don't want to waste cognition because they re-invented the flat tire. Their inbrowser text editors are also just bad. On the level of WordPress three years ago. Markdown? no. Cut and paste from other apps? OK, if you remember to "Paste as Plain Text.
Confluence... I was floored when I realized it can't support duplicate page names in separate page heirarchies.
eg. You can't have a page called Engineering > Electrical > Test Procedure and another page called Engineering > Mechanical > Test Procedure, because the two "Test Procedure" pages are considered as occupying the same namespace.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#375Jira is my daily nightmare. I guess the "no CTO was ever fired for choosing SAP" applies to Jira too. It just does the opposite of that it tries to do, which is making development tracking easy (not to mention those silly ideas coming from agile coaches to use Jira to measure wrong things, which makes of it a horrible combo).
IME, Jira makes development tracking easy, at first. But then, when software developers realize how much Jira gets in their way, the good ones do their best to avoid using it. Which results in Jira being a great tool for middle-managers to query a very stale database.
Or it becomes a performance piece that mostly says what the developers want to say, rather than the truth.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#376I've still havent't figure it out how to open an email in a new tab with just a single click when inside GMail. It. used to be possible, of course, like all HTML links (by clicking the middle button on my mouse, for example), but since 3 or 4 years (at least) that feature disappeared. I'm still upset about it and that is why I consider GMail "the worst" piece of software I use everyday (it's also because I don't use…
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Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#377Microsoft Teams. I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc). Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer…
Company switched to it from Slack recently for cost cuts. Generally a huge downgrade of user experience:
channel threads are mess to read after a while of being away; no way to lookup/mention other users in private chats; chats and channels is like two separate apps- constant switching between them; activity feed is not always up to date; messages once red on desktop are still left in notifications on mobile; chats list is dynamic - very easy to choose wrong chat by mistake; code snippet editing is unintuitive.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#378Skype for Business. Everyone I've spoken to in my company has had connection, audio, or screen-sharing issues. Personally, I consistantly have issues with what I've listed plus instances where Skype just flat out refuses to launch, or it crashes, or messages are randomly dropped or fail to send, or file/image transfers that just do not work. It is truly baffling.
I noticed another comment thread about Microsoft Teams, but for me, Teams is a godsend compared to Skype for Business.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#379Android. Truly horrible platform where I cannot even find a clock app that just works. I mean there is one shipped with a phone, but it has inconvenient timer and I do not like how time selection is done -- a lots of movements to scroll numbers to find one I need, -- but I cannot configure it to my convenience and I cannot find another clock app that works. And all this "Google phone wants to have an access to calend…
> I do not like how time selection is done -- a lots of movements to scroll numbers to find one I need One of the worst things about iOS is the time picker. The numbers spin like a slot machine. I think Android nailed it in this specific app widget.
I believe this has been redesigned in iOS 14.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#380Atlassian's Jira and Confluence. Why? Their search capability is just bad. To find something requires a lot of tries and tricks. I don't want to waste cognition because they re-invented the flat tire. Their inbrowser text editors are also just bad. On the level of WordPress three years ago. Markdown? no. Cut and paste from other apps? OK, if you remember to "Paste as Plain Text.
I worked on a Trac-based project long ago and I thought for sure when I moved on it would be to greener pastures. But it was simple and if you used it certain ways you could get a hell of a lot out of very little.
Its biggest problem was that the parse and display code were entangled (same problem I had with AngularJS), and it made writing addons an exercise in re-implementing features of the parser over and over again. But I heard they fixed that quite a while ago.