Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#541

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

baoyu wrote: post #536

Spotify on Mac. It’s Chromium-based, so, of course, it’s slow. Specifically, search is excruciatingly slow, removing an album from your library redraws the whole page, and—most frustratingly— as soon as you lose internet connection, your perfectly nice and readable page get replaced with “Artist pages are not available offline”. It’s a list of tracks and albums which is updated (at most, on average) several times a y…

I think you have a problem with your Spotify installation. Maybe try removing it and re-installing it?

I use Spotify all the time on my 2016 normal-powered Macbook Pro and I don't experience any of your performance problems. Everything's lightning fast including search, and I've got 10,000's of tracks saved in 100's of playlists.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#542

Post by nikisweeting » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #141

gmail, by so many orders of magnitude.. Email interface designed by people who seemingly have never tried to read email. Threading is completely broken, filtering is broken, compose screen is unusable. At previous companies I've had to use gmail but was able to use a sane email client via IMAP so it was almost ok (although still somewhat broken as gmail doesn't handle IMAP correctly). At current work they disable all…

I actually love Gmail's UI, I find the tagging, filterting, important/not-important, different colored starts, etc. all to be extremely powerful.

Anytime I try to switch to another client I find myself missing those features and end up going back.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#543

Post by literallycancer » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

odiroot wrote: post #202

That would be German mobile banking apps (websites are just slightly better). My current bank just wrapped a mobile website in Android app. Logging-in with a fingerprint, though supported, takes 3 or 4 attempts. The app is also very slow and fails miserably on slow mobile connection (very common in Germany). Finally the app doesn't do the 2FA feature, it's offered by another, even worse app from the same bank. They'r…

SMS leaks info to anyone who cares to listen.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#544

Post by walleeee » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

alhirzel wrote: post #204

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #63

Docker. 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…

Give Singularity a look

Yep. Doesn't have a daemon or require root.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#545

Post by mastazi » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

ColanR wrote: post #169

superasn wrote: post #52

Anything which requires me to use a Google captcha or hcaptcha. I generally don't get annoyed very easily but spotting fire hydrants and traffic lights just to login into a site to which you are a paying customer is plain nonsense. I've actually decided to move my entire infrastructure from Digital ocean to AWS because of this captcha before login nonsense (thankfully DO reverted it just in time)

I've started intentionally making my answers subtly wrong. E.g., if something might look like a fire hydrant, but isn't, I mark it positive. I usually have to do it a few times anyway, and it makes me feel better to think Google's AI datasets are inaccurate.

In my experience, when I do it slightly wrong it actually takes less steps to get through. I guess in the age of Yolo v4 and such, doing it “too well” actually makes you look like a robot?

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#546

Post by prepend » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

ack210 wrote: post #453

Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Microsoft 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…

I've never felt that anything has captured the essence of what it's like to use Microsoft's software better than the URLs Teams generates for meetings scheduled via Outlook. Why use something like Zoom's 9 digit meeting numbers when you can have a 250+ character url complete with long seemingly random strings and a url-encoded JSON object? The plugin will try to hide this behind a "Join Teams Meeting" hyperlink, but…

It’s weird how OneDrive does the same thing. Why not use the Dropbox and gdrive method of some uid? Obviously a super long url with paths and query string variables is better, right?

Microsoft is pretty cool with training though. During the training they said this wasn’t an issue because the url gets converted to the file name on display. And we’d only ever want to paste urls into outlook or teams, nowhere else.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#547

Post by BusterStatus » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

Atlassian does not seem to have an interest in listening to their users. My workflow would be so much better if they implemented browser or desktop notifications, but they only support email or extensions/add-ons if you self-host. Our company uses cloud though, so despite all the countless threads asking for native functionality, they insist it is not important for users.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#548

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

djinnandtonic wrote: post #105

Google Drive. I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.

Curious why?

I rely almost exclusively on search within Drive and it works pretty flawlessly. What's the use case for you that's failing?

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#549

Post by nateroling » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

What’s wrong with Confluence? We have a recently-acquired team at work that uses it for everything, and loves it. I’ve used it a bit, and I think it looks awesome, and the pricing is super reasonable.

Confluence looks better than everything else I’ve tried/used as a doc platform: Notion, Nuclino, Coda, Sharepoint, OneNote, Azure DevOps wiki, Microsoft Teams wiki...

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#550

Post by nikisweeting » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

di4na wrote: post #164

Git. The UX and design is broken af, nothing work, noone get it. AWS. I don't know where to begin. Nothing make sense. Nothing works. Docker. This thing is basically backward at every step. We should have never packaged different things on linux as a single "container". It does not work that way and that has created more pain than solve anything. K8s: same Go: same Venv. Goddamnit this never worked well and same as g…

FWIW using `python3 -m venv` gets rid of most of the virtualenv headaches of the last decade. They finally built it into the language, and using -m forces it to always install with the same version of python you're actually running, instead of borking your system.