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

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

#741

Post by hnick »

ordu wrote: post #295

Android. 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 was going to say Android, but it's hard for me as a user to know which issues are hardware and which are software.

Common problems, for me:

- Camera stops working, it seems some apps take over it and it won't work again until I close all apps

- Can't hang up on phone calls because the proximity detection that locks the screen bugs out and won't unlock until after the other person hangs up

- Occasionally gets stuck in a loop where it unlocks then locks again instantly, and I have to power cycle

- General UI lag on apps that should be simple like the clock

- Sometimes it just seems to get stuck on a black screen but eventually it wakes up after a number of minutes

As for the timer/clock there are two features I'd like, maybe there's a way to get them. 1) Have a small counter running under a timer after it expires, so I can tell at a glance how long it's been since then (useful when setting a follow-up timer for cooking after fussing with stuff) 2) Let me set an alarm for a time on a day without having to select it as a repeat, which means it'll run again the next week if I forget to unset it.

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

#742

Post by asddubs »

cocoa19 wrote: post #288

There's a lot of essential software that I would improve, but I wouldn't replace or rewrite: - Nautilus. Serious usability/UX problems. - Audio in linux. Ubuntu often selects the wrong audio devices (microphone, headphones, speakers) - Linux sleep/hibernation. System hangs are common. - GRUB. The interface is dated, why is it so ugly?

look into caja as a replacement for nautilus, it's basically a maintained fork of nautilus 2 before they made it suck

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

#743

Post by asddubs »

dylan604 wrote: post #158

The internet. I mean, I love the concept of what the internet could have been, but it's currently the most hostile thing I have to deal with on a daily basis. Bad actors are too prevalent, and the amount of BS stuff we've tried to come with GDPR/Cookie banners, Do Not Track, AdBlockers, etc.

i think the problem is capitalism incentivizes bad actors, rather than the internet itself.

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

#744

Post by allarm »

Cisco Contact Center Express. This is a pure disaster, this damn thing is full of hilarious bugs that exist there for many years through many major versions.

One of examples: if you click 2 (or more) links in its web interface and open the links in new tabs, the content of these tabs will be a mix of content from the links you just clicked. It’s not very obvious and it’s very easy to change something in the tab A, thinking that you’re changing the call center configuration for application A, but in fact you’re changing a random piece from site B or C.

Cisco doesn’t care much about it.

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

#745

Post by jahewson »

ashconnor wrote: post #367

1Password. Core of the product hasn't seen any noticeable features in a while. 1PasswordX was launched without the feature set of the desktop version. Dumb stuff that hasn't been fixed in forever like not being able to delete a single item from the trash, password formulae are rigid - words with no digits or symbols or random mess of all characters, no TouchID/FaceID, Apple Watch unlock support, can't selectively syn…

> There should be some open standard data-attribute on password fields so the app can read in the required formula to create the perfect password without me fiddling the settings.

Yes, please! This is a fantastic idea.

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

#746

Post by wlj »

I feel like I should post here as a sort of public service announcement.

If anyone reading this is considering trying or moving to HubSpot, I urge you to take our experience as a warning and seriously reconsider.

We moved to their sales CRM 2 years ago and have been filled with remorse ever since.

It’s hands down the most poorly thought out software package I’ve ever had the misfortune of using.

Aside from our sales performance taking a nosedive, it’s painful to use in a multitude of ways, and everywhere you turn is frustration, inefficiencies and dead ends.

Such was the frequency of our frustration with nearly all aspects of HubSpot, the phrase “fucking HubSpot” even became a meme in our office.

Run. Don’t look back.

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

#747

Post by grumple »

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…

Totally agree with Atlassian/AWS. Two senior devs should not have to pour over dozens of pages of documentation to figure out how to add a role to a user using SAML.

Git and Linux are great though. Git is well understood and, if you don't do bad things in the first place, easy to use. It's explicit. Linux itself works great and is straightforward.

Docker is hit or miss for me.

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

#748

Post by nsilvestri »

GordonS wrote: post #67
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…

+1 for Teams. Video calling actually works great, but gods the UX is appalling! It's just so confusing and inconsistent. As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example. The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess, markdown support is practically non-existent, it's bu…

The desktop wiki feature is awful, but it's awful in the same way that any of the pseudo-markdown for setting in teams is awful. The WYSIWYG editor constantly doesn't recognize backtick monospace formatting, or is overzealous in hijacking the cursor when you are trying to type adjacent to monospace formatting. The enter key seemingly arbitrarily makes either newlines or continues to the next section. I've spent a few hours writing wiki entries this last week and it does not spark joy to the point where I wonder if anybody who works on Teams wiki functionality actually has used it.

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

#749

Post by crispyambulance »

dasil003 wrote: post #391
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…

Disagree strongly on git. On the surface the syntax is ugly, but the data model is brilliant. Once you wrap your mind around what commits, heads and remotes are and learn to rebase you get an incredibly simple and fine-grained control. I never use stash because it's trivial to create a WIP commit and rebase later into the chunks I want to ship to permanent history. Git is like a chef's knife: extremely powerful tool…

> On the surface the syntax is ugly, but the data model is brilliant.

It's beyond ugly, it's needlessly incoherent. I use it because I have to and hate it. I've heard people say "the data model is a work of beauty". And I suppose that's true, but why have such a fucked up and confusing set of commands? Doesn't a "brilliant data model" deserve an equally brilliant command line?

The thing that saves git is that it works, and by some miracle, it is popular. People just memorize what they need to do for their workflows and that's mostly fine. Sometimes there's a screw-up and you blow time googling around or looking up fixes.

People won't publicly admit it but a lot of work gets trashed because finagling git intricacies is more painful than throwing away some work and starting over.

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

#750

Post by gitgud »

cocoa19 wrote: post #288

There's a lot of essential software that I would improve, but I wouldn't replace or rewrite: - Nautilus. Serious usability/UX problems. - Audio in linux. Ubuntu often selects the wrong audio devices (microphone, headphones, speakers) - Linux sleep/hibernation. System hangs are common. - GRUB. The interface is dated, why is it so ugly?

> Nautilus.

A feature I found in Nautilus the other day is (ctrl + L) allows you to edit the current directory path..... Had no idea this was possible, but hugely beneficial.

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