Not anymore but until 2012, it was Lotus Notes at my work. Hands down the worst piece of garbage I have worked with.
I consult to a company that uses Notes to this day. It pains me every time in see it opened up.
Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#492Docker. I use it and love it every day in both dev and prod, but I also really kind of hate it. I'll keep my complaints short. There should not be a system-wide daemon. (Or any daemon). It should not require root at all (no setuid either). From outside the container, the container and its processes should be a single process (with threads). (Like glueing a bunch of processes together.) The containers should be nest-a…
You might want to check out Flockport: https://thenewstack.io/flockport-time-to-start-all-over-agai...
They're trying to use built-in Linux LXC container features.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#493Anything 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…
I used to think I hated Jira until I had to use WorkFront. God awful.
We switched from Jira to Rally about a year ago. Our company just did a survey about which tool they'd rather use and Jira won by over 95%. We actually joked about having a party for using Jira.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#494Slack: their web UI is ridiculously slow, and I hate how it creates this expectation that I’m online 24/7. GitHub: we mainly use phabricator now at my day job (which I love love love), but I don’t really derive any joy from using this product anymore. I think great tools are also fun to use, perhaps controversially. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I find GitHub sort of a drag for some reason. NodeJS: I absolut…
> Slack: their web UI is ridiculously slow, and I hate how it creates this expectation that I’m online 24/7.
Or 'little' annoyances like it being impossible to mute notifications on one device (say, your phone) and not another (say, your web browser).
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#495Jira is my daily nightmare. I guess the "no CTO was ever fired for choosing SAP" applies to Jira too. It just does the opposite of that it tries to do, which is making development tracking easy (not to mention those silly ideas coming from agile coaches to use Jira to measure wrong things, which makes of it a horrible combo).
So what is like Jira but good? I use jira at work and I like it. But our use case is maybe more limited/liberal. For us it is: 1) list tasks to do and how tasks are linked 2) archive discussion about issues and integrates with butbucket (so in commit it will link to ticket to read about why something was done; similarly from issue discussion I can see the relevant commits; this also goes well with history either by l…
In my experience, you can do all that on github directly, with the benefit that everything's closer to the code. I presume Bitbucket has comparable functionality. Jira is just another tool on top that doesn't add anything unless you're doing the perf tracking bit outside the team.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#496Dropbox. 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 main reason I use Dropbox is to just have a cloud backup of all my files so I don't lose anything. It doesn't look like Syncthing serves the same purpose, and syncing files to AWS S3 is also a lot more expensive than Dropbox. (2TB costs $46.99 on AWS S3, vs $11.99/mo for Dropbox.)
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#497Anything 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…
I use git a lot, and I like the speed and decentralized nature. But I do think there's much to be improved.
Named branches don't really exist in git: there's only a moving target name that refers to a leaf node. This means there's no "history" associated to a branch except for the parent commits. But in merge commits with several parents all parents are considered equal, and the system does not contain info about which commit belonged to the "main branch" and which was imported in. This information can be valuable in some cases. This leads to a lot of rebasing just to keep the commit log clean, but this actually rewrites history and destroys information.
Also, there's no support for keeping two parallel views of the same repository (for example, an internal view with lots of subcommits, and a cleaner public view with more detailed messages, and perhaps fewer privacy-compromising names/timestamps).
Finally, handling merge conflicts is still a PITA, especially on LaTeX documents.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#498Apple CarPlay is an absolute piece of garbage. It always hangs on the “connecting to iPhone” screen. I just want to see my nav. Infuriating.
The Android one completely disables my phone. The car never acknowledges that anything is happening. The worst is when it does this when I just want to charge the phone in a car.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#499Microsoft 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…
Can someone explain why Teams is so totally unable to interoperate with anything else, to the point where you can’t save messages, you can’t export chats, and you can’t even print them! The lock-in is intense.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
#500Toggl the time tracker somehow went to complete shit in terms of performance. Its workflow is great, the Mac app worked splendidly until the redesign of a couple years ago. The redesign changed nothing drastically, pretty much only polished things, but somehow everything became much slower and gets slower still. Doing any single change requires you to wait. It feels like they do synchronous network requests on every action (which they quite possibly do, judging by the interaction with the mobile client). Sometimes CPU usage spins up too, for good measure. Even completion in text-dropdowns is hella laggy. Just switching to the app is often ‘app is not responding’ territory.
It's productivity software that I need to touch every half-hour or so. Productivity software has to be snappy. Toggl is the opposite of snappy now.
On top of that, the app forcibly updates itself and has no option to disable that—while I'm using Homebrew for all other updates. The Android app is also half-baked compared to the Mac one, which is no surprise by this point.
Toggl's workflow fit me almost like a glove: no automagic guesswork, just manual entry and tracking of me being AFK. No alternative app has that same model, from what I've seen, and/or the interfaces are meh.
Somewhat ironically, Toggl's client apps are open-source and I've cloned the desktop one right after seeing the redesign. But fiddling with them would likely require coming up with my own storage method. I might as well redo the app in Lua with Qt or whatnot, as Lua is hella fast—but the state of GUI libs for non-native languages fills me with endless dread.