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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?

#441

Post by kevsim »

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…

Fully agree on Jira. Disliked it enough to start a company to compete with it [0].

Also agree on AWS. Their UI is so terrible and confusing that it makes writing CloudFormation yaml files feel alright in comparison. Been using GCP lately and the UI is somewhat better though still confusing and weird at times.

0: https://kitemaker.co

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

#444

Post by paulgb »

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…

There was an enlightening tweetstorm last year from a Princeton prof about the institutional reasons why Blackboard is so widely used despite being so bad: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182637292869115904

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

#445

Post by elviejo »

- GitHub + why do we centralize issues, documents for a distributed version control? + why do we use a a closed source, walled garden to develop free software?

- Git + it's a leaky abstraction. + why do we need to know about the stash? + why is it that changing to a different branch doesn't give any visual clue, even worst it keeps the files I'm working on that are not part of the repository yet.

for an academic treatment of the defects in Git read: What's Wrong with Git? A Conceptual Design Analysis S. Perez De Rosso and D. Jackson. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming & Software (Onward! 2013)

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

#446

Post by kevsim »

dasil003 wrote: post #391
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…

Disagree strongly on git. On the surface the syntax is ugly, but the data model is brilliant. Once you wrap your mind around what commits, heads and remotes are and learn to rebase you get an incredibly simple and fine-grained control. I never use stash because it's trivial to create a WIP commit and rebase later into the chunks I want to ship to permanent history. Git is like a chef's knife: extremely powerful tool…

For me personally I find git to be relatively painless (after years of svn and P4). But working with people in less technical roles (PM/UX) who for whatever reason need to touch git occasion, I’m exposed to how inaccessible it is for the uninitiated. Not saying that’s a good reason to change the tool but maybe there’s room in the market for a more accessible tool.

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

#447

Post by lixtra »

theptip wrote: post #345
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…

> People use the big data frameworks as glorified distributed-job management tools Do you have any tools you like for job management without all the distributed-systems baggage? I've heard folks advocate for Make for this kind of thing, perhaps that or some other orchestration tool that deals with job dependency graphs would be the unix way? (Having a nice way to visualize failed step would of course be a plus; a com…

Have a look at airflow.

However, so far I didn’t switch from rundeck & make.

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

#448

Post by LandR »

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…

I hatE Teams.

Search is broken in it and if you scroll back a few days on a conversation it just stops loading messages...

It's just awful.

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

#450

Post by kevsim »

zwayhowder wrote: post #233
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…

Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads, forcing replies that weren't in thread out of order. A UX that encourages replying out of thread because it's too darn confusing. Unable to quote messages on desktop, but you can on mobile. Unable to be signed into more than one Team. Have they never heard of consultants? At one point last year I had 4 separate Teams I needed to be signed into. Microsoft's soluti…

> Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads

Wait, what? Do threads move when they get replies or something?

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