Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 1001 posts

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

#321

Post by whack »

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…

Are there any good articles or blog posts that describe a "multi-instance framework-free" design that would replace a Spark application? I'm having some trouble conceptualizing your suggested alternative, but am very interested in learning.

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

#322

Post by oneplane »

_____s wrote: post #157

Mail.app on macOS. Some macOS apps are really great (Notes or Safari for example), but the average quality is poor. Mail, for example, is slow, search almost never works, etc.

I'm also using Mail.app on my macs and while I never had those problems I do see people complaining about those things a lot and I'm curious what would cause that. Apple's radar/bugreport/feedback stuff is hidden so that's somewhat sad (but understandable) but maybe it turns out most people have the same problem due to similar context (account setup, data in use or something...).

The most heavily loaded Mail.app I seem to have is one with two MS Exchange accounts, iCloud, a couple of IMAP accounts and a single POP account. I generally archive everything older than ~10 months out of my inbox leaving a combined 43k messages in that virtual inbox 'group'. Maybe people with larger message stores trigger some programming fault?

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

#323

Post by harrisonjackson »

All of my "worst" softwares that I use daily have alternatives that are equally as bad if not worse IMO or will be a huge pain to switch to, so I still "love" them by comparison.

Lastpass + Authy - main frustration is helping wife use them - her usage is less frequent so she needs help each time. Also they don't sync reliably so adding new accounts can be painful.

Anything that starts automatically on boot by default, slow to launch, or has a separate "installer/updater" that is constantly annoying me (looking at you Adobe everything)

Alexa - only listens to me; doesn't cutoff quickly enough when someone tries to issue a new/improved command or dismiss a response

So many posts on here about X not working on Y system where Y is not a money maker for X. Yes, you are an afterthought.

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

#324

Post by puranjay »

One of the worst apps I use regularly has to be Google Play Music. The UI is horrible enough, but it also randomly deletes tracks from my library - including my own tracks that I recorded under my own name. And sometimes the tracks will show up again randomly. The worst is when tracks don't show up in my Songs list, but if I put it on shuffle, these tracks will start playing.

I don't know what's the status now, but Spotify India had too small a library when it was first launched. Otherwise I would have made the switch

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

#325

Post by riku_iki »

Aperocky wrote: post #312
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…

I had prior industry experience. Eventually it was realized that getting a larger box and just spend sometime to think about cleaning the data is enough. But that didn't sound as good.

You can also think about two layers infra: have large big-data storage, have simple logic of extraction of aggregated/filtered data from it, and do complex work on your large box within single process.

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

#326

Post by sheinsheish »

puranjay wrote: post #324

One of the worst apps I use regularly has to be Google Play Music. The UI is horrible enough, but it also randomly deletes tracks from my library - including my own tracks that I recorded under my own name. And sometimes the tracks will show up again randomly. The worst is when tracks don't show up in my Songs list, but if I put it on shuffle, these tracks will start playing. I don't know what's the status now, but S…

oh man and the recommandations are so bad

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

#327

Post by m01 »

cocoa19 wrote: post #288

There's a lot of essential software that I would improve, but I wouldn't replace or rewrite: - Nautilus. Serious usability/UX problems. - Audio in linux. Ubuntu often selects the wrong audio devices (microphone, headphones, speakers) - Linux sleep/hibernation. System hangs are common. - GRUB. The interface is dated, why is it so ugly?

Re: GRUB: Have you looked at rEFInd, assuming you can use UEFI? http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind has a screenshot and docs, although you may also wish to refer to your distro's docs (e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/REFInd)

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

#329

Post by regularfry »

tootie wrote: post #142
westoque wrote: post #42

JIRA. The most complex simple system I used. Simple in theory (Project Management) but complex in implementation.

JIRA is heavyweight, but I've never been remotely satisfied with any of the competitors. If your team is more than 5 people or you have multiple teams, you're absolute going to need all that sophistication from JIRA. If you ask me what's the worst piece of software I use every day today, it's Asana.

This just isn't true. We have a bunch of teams, all on Jira, and none of the inter-team coordination happens via Jira, mostly because One Size Fits Nobody. We're not using much that's Jira-specific for the intra-team stuff either.

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

#330

Post by nishs »

puranjay wrote: post #324

One of the worst apps I use regularly has to be Google Play Music. The UI is horrible enough, but it also randomly deletes tracks from my library - including my own tracks that I recorded under my own name. And sometimes the tracks will show up again randomly. The worst is when tracks don't show up in my Songs list, but if I put it on shuffle, these tracks will start playing. I don't know what's the status now, but S…

Also try Apple Music.
Post reply on HN