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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?

#551

Post by techslave »

podgib wrote: post #528

G-Suite Google Slides makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. Google Docs isn't much better. They're poor web versions of office software from the 90s. Google drive is a disaster of product. Uploading and finding files are both incredibly painful. Google sheets is fine for simple stuff, and I get why people use it, but there's far better alternatives. For anything moderately complex it's a dog. I can't stan…

you are mistakenly judging g suite on the individual product requirements. eg how a spreadsheet should function. that’s not what g suite is.

all features are MVP and the main selling point is being collaborative.

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

#552

Post by darksaints »

Airflow. Hard coupling to their own ecosystem, buggy as hell, and fully tied into Python's terrible dependency management, ensuring you will fail but only after you build an entire ecosystem onto it and will face a massive challenge moving away from it.

Running it in a kubernetes cluster is basically like holding a marathon in a minefield. You know someone's gonna die, you just don't know when.

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

#553

Post by nikisweeting »

atq2119 wrote: post #109

The GitHub web UI. It's. So. Damn. Slow.

Strange, I find it to be significantly faster & lighter than most other webapps I interact with daily. I think historically they've had a huge culture of using as little Javascript as possible, which I really appreciate.

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

#554

Post by walleeee »

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…

There's a bunch, at various levels of abstraction and slightly different primary use cases: Luigi, Dask, Airflow, Celery, Dagster, Prefect, Metaflow, Snakemake, Nextflow, etc

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

#555

Post by retromario »

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…

My biggest annoyance with Teams is its shitty search functionality. You search for a topic you discussed with a colleagues a few weeks ago. It'll show you the direct hits, but there's zero way to jump to that point of the conversation and see the context, the message before or after.

It's so infuriating.

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

#556

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Office 365.

Word processors and spreadsheets shouldn't be rocket science, but the updater seems to have been designed by Satan's "I wrote some Python in school once" nephew [1], and many versions [2] seem to have rather obvious UI bugs.

Word still doesn't do some very basic things it should, and it probably never will now.

[1] Updated recently. Still bad, but not quite as bad. The really hilarious part is that I also have updaters for various music packages from Arturia, NI, and so on, and all of them are far more streamlined and professional.

[2] The number does seem to be decreasing. But it's still higher than it should be.

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

#558

Post by js2 »

Slack. I've got two or three people DM'ing me, threads going in more than one channel, and four other channel's @here'ing me. So I mute all the channels except for when I'm directly @'d, but why isn't that the damn default. I can't view more than one conversation at a time because the stupid client is a single window that doesn't even have tabs.

When I paste a link, I don't want it to attach what's at the link because that takes up like half the window.

Lately the client has tried to auto-format things. Bulleted lists. Code. When I type ''' to start a code block, sometimes Slack automatically terminates the code block for me and sends my message before I'm done and sometimes not. I think you continue bulleted lists with the return key but code blocks with ctrl-return, I can't remember, it seems inconsistent though.

Somehow the Slack client doesn't register for links to my company's slack domain so links to channels end up opening in my default browser then bouncing back to the client.

God I hate Slack so fucking much.

I want my IRC client back.

Jira's not great either but I've never used a bug tracker that didn't suck in one way or another and it doesn't suck any better or worse than others. At least I can open issues in more than one browser window/tab.

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

#559

Post by maxk42 »

rvz wrote: post #107

Desktop GNU/Linux. Too much of a cost to test for and to set up CIs for the distros I'm targeting. There is little to no paying users there because of the fragmentation. But again, "paid support" will have lots of choices, versions, combinations and edge cases to cover. So I listed it as "unsupported: use at your own risk." Windows and macOS have a much sainer desktop for GUI apps to test against.

You should give Cinnamon a shot next time you're looking at Linux GUIs.

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

#560

Post by kingnight »

robin_reala wrote: post #299
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…

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.

There isn't anything that gets me so flustered throughout the day than this.

I would turn these banners off, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to get badges to show up on the icon (only other cue to remind me people want to talk to me) without these banners.

I really wish there was a 3rd party client that was all native that I could use. Teams is definitely the worst part of my software stack.

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