Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 1001 posts

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

#681

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

inetknght wrote: post #403

- Google products. - - Gmail intentionally doesn't filter spam or phishing emails. - - Google Voice used to be useful but today is being blocked by more and more services. - - Google Contacts is pervasive and uselessly so. - - Google Calendar also supports tons of spam and phishing. - - I stopped using Chrome because it stopped being a user agent . - Atlassian products. Slow bloated pieces of privacy violating garbag…

> Gmail intentionally doesn't filter spam or phishing emails.

my spam folder is fully of spam and phishing emails. no idea why that doesn't work for you. i see essentially zero spam in my inbox (and i have several extremely public email addresses)

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

#682

Post by hivesaron »

zupa-hu wrote: post #655
busyant wrote: post #404

Sorry, but everything listed here is rank amateur stuff when compared to Blackboard Learn ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn ). First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere. Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift. Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete t…

I was lucky to meet a guy who is running a company that id working on an extremely polished alternative, called Edubase. (I’m not affiliated.) It seems both the students and the teachers love it. And I can see why. He demoed it to me and for example for Math exams it supported equivalent form solutions. That’s definitely not the trivial kind of stuff. And the list went on, both the capabilities were off the chart and…

Thanks! EduBase is both a complete LMS and a pluggable exam/quizzing tool for existing LMSes (like Canvas). EduBase Quiz features automatic scoring, grading and reports with lots of question types, including matrices and mathematical expressions, LaTeX support, easier, centralized content management with access control and cheating prevention tools. This makes it even perfect for STEM subjects (but not limited to them)! Our engine also supports question parameters (always changing numbers in texts and formulas), taking practicing and examining to the next level.

We have a webpage describing the power of EduBase Quiz at https://www.edubasequiz.com/en/ but you can even get started with the EduBase experience for free today on https://www.edubase.net/

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

#683

Post by Rapzid »

nikisweeting wrote: post #513
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…

I like docker-compose so much that I'd use it even if the underlying containerization technology didn't exist. I think it's one of the things they got most right, and I wish there was a bigger ecosystem around managing compose-based projects.

I think it could be better but its features became coupled with swarm. That and the primary maintainer was super hostile to feature requests..

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

#684

Post by mr_toad »

jimnotgym wrote: post #639

OSX/MacOS This should be popular It seems so aimed at the consumer market, with everything set up to help with integrating with Apple services. But what about the enterprise features? It is very common for companies to be running Active Directory networks, why do macs work so hard not to fit in? Why not have some kind of AD support for mapping print queues, network drives that kind of thing? Maybe respecting password…

Hardly surprising, modern Windows is designed for, and sold to, administrators. Users can suck it.

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

#685

Post by imgabe »

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 been forced to use Microsoft Teams recently. After using it once the app decided it's no longer connected to the Internet. Every other program seems to have no problem figuring out that I'm connected to the Internet, but somehow Microsoft Teams is like "Nope"

This is on Windows computer too, like, how do you guys not know how to detect an Internet connection on your own operating system?

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

#686

Post by Rapzid »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #669
d_burfoot wrote: post #148

The Apache big data suite (Hadoop/Spark/Yarn/Hive/HDFS/etc). In several years of big data engineering work, I've believe I've seen only one application that couldn't be refactored into a simple multi-instance framework-free program. People use the big data frameworks as glorified distributed-job management tools, and the resulting systems are more fragile, more complex, more vulnerable to weird version compatibility…

Spark is like my pet-hate. Data Engineering team used it at my old work (in concert with Notebooks) and it resulted in some of the worst code I’ve ever seen, and most inappropriate use of resources: 9 node DataBricks cluster to push 200gb of JSON into an ElasticSearch cluster. This process consisted of: * close to 5 notebooks. * things getting serialised to S3 at every possible opportunity. * a hand-rolled JSON seria…

Spark was the worst when I used it. Unhelpful error messages and failure scenarios. Inscrutable stack traces. Thing felt like the worst kind of black box and figuring out why a node timed out during a step or shuffle was soul crushing.

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

#687

Post by arnath »

The answer is certainly Microsoft Teams but since there's already a large section on that, I'll say Visual Studio.

VS is largely a wonderful piece of software but sometimes just stops working in inexplicable ways. Sometimes I have to build 5 times without changing anything to get it to succeed. Sometimes my build fails but the only error in the error list is about projects that couldn't be loaded (because they failed to compile for some mystery reason). Sometimes it just randomly freezes doing basic tasks. My recent favorite is this endless string of banner errors at the top of the screen saying that there's an error with my projects that I can't dismiss or hide. VS is great, but also sometimes the worst.

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

#688

Post by Rapzid »

ufmace wrote: post #532

Scrolling through the top few dozen posts here, I see a bunch of commonly used development software. IMO, all of those do have some issues, but none are remotely comparable to the horror show that is internal software at medium-large corporations. I've used a bunch of these, actually worked on improving a few, witnessed the development process for others. There's no point in naming them, because people outside the co…

This is spot on. One of the worst internal tools I had to use was actually created for the company by Thoughtworks..

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

#689

Post by bzb3 »

doomrobo wrote: post #388

I hate to say it, but Signal. Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized ( Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and appear in the wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping behavior, opening the chat in iOS causes my audio to stop playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of the chat, copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super slow and search…

I admit I've never used signal for chatting (since no friends of mine have it) but just browsing the menus on Android and iOS left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Everything looked and felt very amateurish.

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

#690

Post by closeparen »

paulgb wrote: post #444
busyant wrote: post #404

Sorry, but everything listed here is rank amateur stuff when compared to Blackboard Learn ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn ). First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere. Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift. Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete t…

There was an enlightening tweetstorm last year from a Princeton prof about the institutional reasons why Blackboard is so widely used despite being so bad: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182637292869115904

IIRC Blackboard is also pretty aggressive about acquiring and/or enforcing patents against competitors.
Post reply on HN