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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?

#761

Post by slewis »

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…

It's fair to call out Atlassian & Jira here. But I want to give them some credit. They recently rolled out a Jira change that was a huge step in the right direction (navbar at the top that can take you directly to projects and commonly used filters, among other things). It is a HUGE improvement. So it seems they may have finally figured out how to listen and improve UX. This is no small task for software that's used by so many different orgs for as many different purposes.

But really what holds it back still is sluggishness. I'd take a few extra clicks in exchange for instantaneous responses to each click.

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

#762

Post by [deleted] »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #358
pachico wrote: post #316

Jira 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.

[deleted]

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

#763

Post by tssva »

pinky1417 wrote: post #504
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 wonder if Blackboard is any better since 2016 when Bill Ballhaus took over as CEO. I met him when I was an intern at SRA International and was beyond impressed in my brief time there. Besides his obviously impressive technical and management credentials, this was a titan of industry who remembered my name and always initiated conversation whenever I ran into him. We also had the same car (a GMC Yukon), although his…

I worked at SRA for many years and Bill destroyed what was once the best corporate culture I had ever experienced. Among his accomplishments was introducing stacked ranking. Under his management SRA became just another body shop.

I guess I can't blame him too much. That is exactly what Providence Equity brought him in to do.

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

#764

Post by Mekantis »

Probably Linux. I don't understand how people put up with things like PulseAudio. If I use Windows, the audio sinks behave like I expect them to. They use the device I expect them to. They don't mysteriously set the volume to some bizarre level that has nothing to do with anything when I start a new program, or change the video I'm watching on YouTube, or open a new video in VLC. Whenever I use any audio-capable application, it's like I'm rolling dice as to which device it'll choose to use and what volume it thinks I want it to be at, and none of it has anything to do with previous usage or what I want it to do. What is this crap? Also, if you want to configure anything, have fun trying to figure out what magical command-line incantations will do what you want it to do. Because the GUI tools are all utter crap and don't do anything useful.

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

#765

Post by sebbyy »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #671
lvass wrote: post #195

WhatsApp. The desktop version has very few features, requires constant connection to a mobile phone and gets out of sync very often. It's practically irremediable if you're in a crowded wi-fi area and ethernet is the only way to get a good connection. It's also designed so no conversation is ever private despite advertising it's E2E encryption. Everyone you talk to has automatic backups enabled and they're stored une…

The most annoying thing is that you can’t just message a new phone number. You have to create a contact and then add their phone number to that contact, close the contact app to go back to WhatsApp, press “+” again, search for the contact you just made, select it, then start typing. God forbid the phone number is entered wrong and you have to go back into the contact app. Meeting someone in a bar/club (outside the US…

Doesn't completly solve your problem but you can start sending message to a new phone number using an url. [0]

  https://wa.me/{target-number}
https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/chats/how-to-use-click-to-c...

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

#766

Post by sebbyy »

rvz wrote: post #107

Desktop GNU/Linux. Too much of a cost to test for and to set up CIs for the distros I'm targeting. There is little to no paying users there because of the fragmentation. But again, "paid support" will have lots of choices, versions, combinations and edge cases to cover. So I listed it as "unsupported: use at your own risk." Windows and macOS have a much sainer desktop for GUI apps to test against.

> lots of choices, versions, combinations and edge cases to cover

I think Snap[0], Flatpak[1], and AppImage[2] tries to solve this problem.

[0] https://snapcraft.io/build

[1] https://flatpak.org/

[2] https://appimage.org/

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

#767

Post by _-___________-_ »

the8472 wrote: post #533
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…

> It should not require root at all (no setuid either). The only thing that really needs setuid are network namespaces to setup the bridges. Userspace workarounds are clunky and slow. If you can do without network isolation then this would be possible. > The containers should be nest-able to arbitrary depth without performance loss (at least to say, hundreds of nestings deep.) Multiple levels of nesting are ppossible…

> > Also, it wouldn't really be a product at all but just a built-in tool on Linux systems.

> Well, there's systemd-nspawn and machinectl

There's also podman, which is a drop-in replacement for docker, and buildah, which does daemonless container builds. I switched to them from Docker recently and will never look back.

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

#768

Post by dreamcompiler »

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…

Agree with everything in this post except I find stash extremely useful when a pull would disrupt my current working directory. "If I only had a VCS to temporarily hang on to my local changes while I merge the team's."

Stash, pull, stash pop. Done.

(I don't use rebase because I like my history to tell the truth rather than be fictional. Maybe stash is less necessary with rebase; IDK.)

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

#769

Post by _-___________-_ »

heliosfire wrote: post #120
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…

Some good stuff here, however... Strong disagree on compose. I think it’s amazing.

I find people only love compose if it's the first exposure they had to container orchestration. Orchestration is a great concept but basically everything else that solves this problem solves it much better than docker-compose.

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

#770

Post by FVIIIvWF »

I feel the other comments are really first-world problems. As a doctor from a developed country, the worst piece of software would be my hospital's clinical portal. Not only it is painful to use, I believe the inefficiency it causes actually is detrimental to patient's care and the health economy in general.

I happen to know some web development, so here's a few observations from top of my head:

- Slow speed. Simple page changes takes at least 1 seconds, others such as viewing lab results or clinical letter takes around 3-5 seconds, but often needing repeated clicks to actually work.

- No form autosave & inconsistent saving behaviour. I have had to re-write discharge summaries several times because of save failure. This taught me to write on notepad/Word first and then transfer onto the portal.

- Many buttons are deeply nested in a navbar. Sometimes the nested buttons fail to show up at all on very small or large monitors. We have to resize the window size to find the dropdown button.

- Front-end CSS framework is based on YUI (discontinued since 2014). It supports IE quite well, but breaks on current Edge, Firefox and Chrome.

- The app tries to stop clinicians from opening more than one instance of it, but this often results in us unable to open any instance of the web app at all. Fixed with incognito mode.

- From the occasional server crashes, I can tell from the debug callbacks the backend is written in Java. The point here is that the debug trails are shown rather than a 500 error, which is unsettling for a sensitive data platform.

- Fragmented ecosystem, every part of the portal is an iframe from a different provider. Lots of inconsistencies and crashes. Even the sidebar is an iframe.

- Printing is a nightmare. Whatever sent to the printer often doesn't show up, but that's a story for another day.

I'm sure there are bigger ones I've missed. Unfortunately, the system we have is not the worst in comparison (in one rural hospital I worked at shut the web server for 3 days for a database upgrade). This makes using Outlook, Teams and other stuff a breeze in comparison - they are actually snappy and stable.

Do we have anyone in the community that can enlighten me on the root case?

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