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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?

#821

Post by signaru »

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…

Additionally, it is easily to screw up big with mouse accidents, whether on explorer or dialog boxes. It's so easy to grab the filename of something else while saving, even when most of the time, that is not what you want to do. And I've also experienced accidentally moving files and folders just because of a slip of the mouse.

While, not on Windows alone, and I doubt this will change, I also think that close and maximize buttons on the corner of windows are too close that I had accidentally closed web browser windows many times. Of course we can just use shortcut keys, but I don't think that fixes root of the problem, and I am also now immunized on how window border buttons look that it might look aesthetically unpleasing if we depart from how it is now.

Many other software also suffer from this design quirks where buttons with very opposing outcomes are somewhat too close to each other, that you need to slow down and be careful.

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

#822

Post by jpgvm »

gravypod wrote: post #820

From worst to slightly less worst: Helm, Istio, and everything Atlassian (Jira & confluence). Helm: go templates aren't a robust, or even remotely sensible, way to define the configuration changes someone will need on a day to day basis for deploying applications to multiple environments. Some metaconfig language as used in kubecfg and tanka is the way to go but every single time I work with a team on kube they say s…

If you don't need to use externally supplied Helm charts consider Jsonnet instead. You can roll your own tooling around it and end up a much nicer place customised for your environment and problems.

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

#823

Post by cel1ne »

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…

If you have a mac, look into GitUp. It's a great git-client and it creates a timelined snapshot-backup after every action, so you can undo whatever you did.

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

#826

Post by dhruvrrp »

gravypod wrote: post #820

From worst to slightly less worst: Helm, Istio, and everything Atlassian (Jira & confluence). Helm: go templates aren't a robust, or even remotely sensible, way to define the configuration changes someone will need on a day to day basis for deploying applications to multiple environments. Some metaconfig language as used in kubecfg and tanka is the way to go but every single time I work with a team on kube they say s…

Problem with helm is that it was not created as a deployment tool in mind, but that is the use-case that caught on. Helm was designed to be the apt get for k8s, where there is a specific set of users who create the charts and a different set that just go 'helm install redis'.

They might make improvements in helm 4, but who knows.

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

#827

Post by apexalpha »

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…

"Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift."

That's just poetry. Well written and I can only fully agree on Blackboard. Any usability of this software comes from the consumer remembering how to get to places likes it's a GTA cheat code. Just a random sequence that you can only find if you know.

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

#830

Post by Myrmornis »

mroll wrote: post #802

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 o…

I think I’d say that the state of the art is reading the README, then the comments at the top of the source code for the package, then looking through the defvars. And, maybe that’s OK. I think Emacs should give up on the idea that it’s suitable for mass usage and embrace its identity as an editor for hackers who are at least slightly interested in lisp.
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