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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?

#261

Post by AdrianB1 »

caffeine wrote: post #191
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…

Would be very interested in a blog post / further reading about this!

It would be an instant hit. Can't wait to read more.

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

#262

Post by vlahmot »

jacekm wrote: post #192
djinnandtonic wrote: post #105

Google Drive. I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.

It took me years to realise that GDrive searches by file content by default instead of file name and that I need to prefix my search term with 'title:' to be able to find what I want. Now I just use their API to list all files in the terminal and then I just pipe it to `grep`. This way I can search using regular expressions.

You probably just saved me a good 15min/week! Never knew you could toss “title:” in there.

Thank you!

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

#264

Post by jhot »

huseyinkeles wrote: post #228

Home Assistant. Don’t get me wrong, I still love it and it makes my life easier but it just breaks all the time, especially when I update it.

Home Assistant is amazing but you really have to read the release notes for every release to make sure something you're using isn't going to break. I appreciate the improvements it has seen over the years but it's definitely not something you can just update and assume all is well.

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

#265

Post by jamesvandyne »

benjaminsuch wrote: post #179

macOS I have a very bad UX. It's small annoying issues, like minimizing a window. If you don't explicitly minimize the window and open another program, the other window is hidden. Where is it? How can I open it? Yes by minimizing every window until I have found mine. For applications, this is not that bad, since you have the dock and just click on the icon to reopen your window, but what happens if you have several w…

While the UI UX in macOS has degraded a bit, minimizing windows you’re not using as the main way to manage a desktop is, I think, a Windows habit.

macOS works much better if you manage windows with hiding, rather than minimizing. Once you get the hang of it, with cmd-h (hide), cmd-tab (switch applications), and cmd-‘ (iterate windows of an application) I (almost) never leave the keyboard and can get right to the window I need quickly.

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

#266

Post by gimboland »

thinkingkong wrote: post #60

There's this software that one of my customers use called SAP Fieldglass. Fieldglass was a separate company and sold for $1B and it might be - and I'm not exaggerating - the worst software I've ever used, pretty much ever. But the reason is interesting. It's designed as enterprise compliance software and nobody enjoys using it. The enterprise managers hate it. The vendors hate it. The contractors hate it. The finance…

Oh god yeah — fuck Fieldglass.

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

#267

Post by usui »

di4na wrote: post #164

Git. The UX and design is broken af, nothing work, noone get it. AWS. I don't know where to begin. Nothing make sense. Nothing works. Docker. This thing is basically backward at every step. We should have never packaged different things on linux as a single "container". It does not work that way and that has created more pain than solve anything. K8s: same Go: same Venv. Goddamnit this never worked well and same as g…

This is a hit list against many major modern technologies. Yes, they they might not be working for you and it does not make sense without the time investment. Can you really say they are the worst software you use among the many other software you use very day?

I consider my worst pieces of software to be the ones where I cannot, for the life of me, understand even a tiny amount of why things were designed that way, or why things fail, or why I continue to subject myself to such torture. For the technologies above, I run into many issues with them, but I frequently feel that is on me, not on the software. They have also solved many real problems as well as exacerbate some others.

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

#268

Post by zwayhowder »

jacekm wrote: post #192
djinnandtonic wrote: post #105

Google Drive. I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.

It took me years to realise that GDrive searches by file content by default instead of file name and that I need to prefix my search term with 'title:' to be able to find what I want. Now I just use their API to list all files in the terminal and then I just pipe it to `grep`. This way I can search using regular expressions.

TIL. Thank you!

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

#269

Post by XCSme »

Android on my TV: (keeps crashing, internet sometimes not working, sound volume usually is wrong, etc.)

Nvidia GeForce Experience: I don't actually use it daily, because it doesn't work. I have not been able to start it for the last 6 months without getting a startup error. I contacted Nvidia support, reinstalled, downgraded, updated, problem is still there. The tray icon always shows when there's a new update, but I have to manually download it.

Google Chrome: Whenever I ALT+TAB back to Chrome it freezes for 1 second. It could be one of the extensions I use, but never found the cause. Google's own note-taking app, Google Keep, was crashing the browser on Google Chrome: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/9482426?hl=en

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

#270

Post by haolez »

OneDrive for Business. You can't move folders with more than 5000 files in it (including subfolders). This is by design. The Windows 10 app is atrocious. It fails more often that not. It's built on top of SharePoint, which brings a lot of confusing features and configurations that makes no sense to someone just looking for a way to store the company's files.
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