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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?

#801

Post by johnwalkr »

etimberg wrote: post #654
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…

Jira is such a pain to work with. For example, there seem to be two different ways to create a new issue. If you get to the one that uses a modal, the text input is in Textile format. Whereas the other page uses Markdown. It's insane that anyone thought that was a good idea

Is that what it is? I thought it was our own misconfiguration because it’s so hard to configure screens / easy to misconfigure them.

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

#802

Post by mroll »

Emacs.

I'm responding to the prompt in the OP, not the title.

> What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?

Emacs is the most essential piece of software in my workflow. It's probably not the worst, but it's the one where I see the most room for improvement. I lean heavily on org-mode for tracking what I'm working on, it's like my command center. I keep two emacs frames open at all times, one dedicated to org-mode.

Supported by an assortment of magical packages like helm, projectile and magit, I write code and anything else more efficiently than any other editor I've used. I was a vim user for ~5 years, and now use evil mode for modal editing in emacs.

So yeah, my opinion is that emacs is the best editor out there. But honestly it takes too much time to configure and maintain. I spend that time, because I don't feel like taking the productivity hit that I would by switching to another editor, but I wish I didn't have to.

I have a vision for a SaaS app that hosts my emacs config and provides me a nice graphical, discoverable interface for managing my configuration. It would have simple, intuitive flows for setting up the essential packages. Like maybe I could scroll through a list of the most popular packages (helm, projectile, hydra, magit, etc), and click to install.

The current state of the art in managing emacs config is googling the name of the package you are trying to configure, and trying to find someone's blog or github from which to copy/paste code from. There has to be a better way.

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

#804

Post by johnwalkr »

robin_reala wrote: post #299
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…

The worst thing about Teams is that for no reason they’ve decided to roll their own notifications framework on macOS that doesn’t respect Do Not Disturb settings. That’s the absolute minimum a notifications system should do: stop appearing when told to.

Recently switched to Teams and Outlook. When sharing my screen, I instinctively dismiss notifications. It took me a week to realize that the single button on Outlook notifications (MacOS) is not “dismiss” but “delete”!

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

#805

Post by sli »

1ris wrote: post #637

Windows. Not windows applications, but windows itself. Completly incoherent user interface. Impossible to find anything. The wifi dialog in the systray, the new windows 10 wifi control and the old style network interfaces dialog often show conflicting information. Neither of them works. Have trouble with bluetooth (of course you have, it never works)? Windows is kind enough to hide anything bluetooth related so you h…

In my experience, I frequently launch the Visual Studio Installer instead Visual Studio itself because of the bizarre way the start menu does searches.

Meanwhile it finds my portable Postman install no problem, even before I'd ever run it. I don't get it.

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

#806

Post by keeganpoppen »

btilly wrote: post #227
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…

If you want more complaints, and well informed ones at that, read https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/containers-future-ian-eyberg/ . I particularly love the quote, The kernel developers view of the docker community is that in the rare case they can actually formulate the question correctly they usually don't understand the answer. There is only so much that you can say to clarify things to someone who is thinking about e…

oh man, the replies to that post are absolute cancer, though. it makes youtube and reddit look like a Parisian salon...

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

#807

Post by jachee »

fmpwizard wrote: post #333
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…

Like many others, we were also forced to use it at work, hard to pick the worse part of Teams but a big one is how slow it is from the time I click the "reply" link until I can actually type a message. So many times I click, start typing and then I notice it missed about 4 to 5 letters, and I don't even consider myself fast at typing. Oh, and how you upload a file/image, need to wait until it is fully uploaded but af…

How about when you [alt/cmd]-tab to it, it shows you a blinking cursor in an input field, but no matter what key you hit, you can't type in that field without clicking on it?

Infuriating.

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

#808

Post by johnwalkr »

fmpwizard wrote: post #333
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…

Like many others, we were also forced to use it at work, hard to pick the worse part of Teams but a big one is how slow it is from the time I click the "reply" link until I can actually type a message. So many times I click, start typing and then I notice it missed about 4 to 5 letters, and I don't even consider myself fast at typing. Oh, and how you upload a file/image, need to wait until it is fully uploaded but af…

I always forget this. And then if you send the same file to someone else it overwrites the file but the first file and the first person can no longer access it? And then you realize it’s not just a file but a share point link? Yeah that will surely work next year when you need to Go back and double check something.

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

#809

Post by zamalek »

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 [...] Git

Try TFS (especially TFSVC) for a few hours. At least Atlassian fails at attempts to write software for developers/engineers. TFS is written for managers: to hell with your productivity.

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