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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?
#292cmd.exe on Windows - trully horrible shell. bash on *nix - less horrible then cmd.exe but still trurlly horrible anyway. I want to kill myself any time I enter any of those. PowerShell cross platform made all my cells rejoice.
Agreed on Bash. It was awesome when I first started using it, but the quirky syntax and pain to configure for anything complex really annoyed me. xonsh is a lot nicer, albeit not as featureful.
Did not know Powershell was now cross platform. Never learned it, but everyone I know who knows both Powershell and the usual UNIX shells prefers Powershell.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#293Apple CarPlay is an absolute piece of garbage. It always hangs on the “connecting to iPhone” screen. I just want to see my nav. Infuriating.
In case this helps, my Android Auto went through an infuriating phase where it refused to connect, and my cars screen would continue to say exactly what yours said. For about two weeks I was incredibly frustrated, until I discovered that I just had to clean out my phones charging port with a toothpick and it immediately began working again. The dust and debris from repeated connection and disconnection had piled up and prevented certain data pins from connecting, but once removed, it worked like brand new. I now clean out my phone’s charging port every month and haven’t run into the issue again. I was relieved that the issue was this simple to fix, and hope yours is too.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#294Dropbox. I've used it for a decade, but now it's slow, bloated, and takes over CPU and memory like there isn't a single other program I need to run... and I was paying $20 for the privilege. But a few weeks ago I switched to Syncthing[0], and it's the best software transition I've ever made. Opposite of everything Dropbox is now: fast, simple, and I don't even notice it running in the background. Seamless setup, and…
The problem with Syncthing for me is that there is no bi-directional syncing on Android if your files are stored on an SD card. You need to resort to rooting your phone or messing with a bunch of hacks to overcome this issue.
Otherwise, its great.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#295Android. 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 calendar" after each call. I do not know why it needs an access to calendar, I'm not going to give it one, so just stop pecking me. But it will never stop, it seems.
And a lots of useless stuff I cannot delete. I stopped it from popping up with stupid messages, but I cannot delete them. It seems that I will be forced to replace Android with PostmarketOS.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#296Microsoft 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…
I actually like the UX of Teams' chat more than the other common chat services. Main reasons:
1. There is whitespace between messages
2. My replies are a different color and right justified
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#297Probably no one will say Stadia. And it's not because it's good.
I’m definitely disappointed as well. I want to love it, but too often it undercuts it’s own value proposition by being pixilated, jaggy and slow. And we have a gigabit connection plus Google WiFi, so there’s not much excuse.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#298Either Adobe Target or VWO. Both have their upsides sure, but both are also an absolute quagmire of terrible design decisions that aren't consistent in the slightest, and that are prone to break an A/B test if you even look at them wrong.
In Target's case, this means stuff like 'install a browser extension when our software doesn't work, so it can load the code that browser security settings will often block', and 'log in via an Incognito window if the editor doesn't work properly, since some setting is now incompatible with your current API version and the interface to disable said setting breaks along with the entire editor'.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#299Microsoft 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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#300At a previous company, I used Google Hangouts Chat daily. This is a business-focussed chat app that takes seconds to load any change to the UI (e.g. changing the channel you are viewing). If you are atmentioned in a channel, there's no way to find out what message thread you were atmentioned in except by scrolling up until you see the highlighted text. Every message sent to a channel other than a reply to a thread creates a new thread, and threads are displayed sorted by most recently bumped, except that your messages do not bump threads on your UI. If you wanted to avoid all these things, you could use the API to make your own client, except that you can't, because there's no API. (Technically there is an API, but because it is designed only for making bots it is not allowed to do things like read messages from a channel you are in that do not atmention you)
If I recall correctly, one of the company's public incident reports explicitly mentioned Google Hangouts Chat as a reason that the incident was not fixed much more quickly. I could not find this incident report when searching just now though.
Edit: This product is apparently now called "Google Chat"