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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?

#611

Post by znpy »

baddox wrote: post #183
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #63

Docker. 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…

Docker is also essentially completely broken on MacOS and has been for years. The performance penalty on anything doing I/O is like 5x, and it tends to completely hammer my CPU. There are tons of internet discussions, so it appears to not be just me.

That's MacOS' fault, in fairness. MacOS does not support containers or the Linux abi in general so you're forced to run docker containers in a Linux VM, with all the CPU and I/O penalties.

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

#612

Post by jabroni_salad »

Managed Workplace. It is an RMM tool so it does monitoring, automation, and facilitates remote access to client environments.

- Loading up the client list takes forever ~15 seconds

- Loading up the asset list for a given client takes even longer.

- Remote access is hidden behind a 2 layer context menu

- All URLs are dynamic so you cannot bookmark your favorite assets / jump boxes. I use a selenium script to automate the page navigation because it can take ~5 minutes to get to an asset by name due to a combination of needing too many page loads and not being able to just start from the search page.

- Terminal experience is way worse than putty. Output formatting is always jacked up and a command takes ~5 seconds to return output.

- RDP all goes through a relay and your connections will just die occasionally.

- 90% of my work interacts with it in some way.

BUT it makes pretty reports for management so we are stuck with it. I demo'd some alternatives like apache guacamole or remote desktop services but the consensus was that we didn't want to take on the risk + we are already paying for a product that "works".

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

#615

Post by zarify »

GordonS wrote: post #67
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…

+1 for Teams. Video calling actually works great, but gods the UX is appalling! It's just so confusing and inconsistent. As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example. The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess, markdown support is practically non-existent, it's bu…

The screen sharing one has bitten me a couple of times. I record live classes for students, and we've had occasions when someone who was away goes back to the video and it's a black screen with me nattering away as if they can see it :/

That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.

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

#617

Post by RedRoverRunner »

I worked at a company that made financial planning software called Xplan. What a user could see on screen for their client was a combination of over 1k user capability controls users group membership, which was hierarchical so you used your parent group settings of your primary group unless they were overridden (primary group.. yes you could be in any and all groups, all with their own settings throughout) clients group membership page settings, with every page AND field showing controlled by conditional rules that could be based on any of the thousands of fields of the current user or client country set for user module allowed product lists that could be applied at user, group or global level, and group hierarchy applied

Client portal could display information using the above rules, and more rules

Thousands of site settings were in an admin area which was grouped by major module, or just placed on which page the developer picked at the time (some pages dedicated to a couple of settings, other general ones full of unrelated random settings)

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

#619

Post by joeraut »

paulgb wrote: post #444
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

Link to the start of the thread: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776

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

#620

Post by maliker »

Microsoft office. Unavoidable in a business context. Slow. Hangs. Crashes. Menu options hard to find in the constantly shape-shifting ribbon.

I actually have fond memories of office circa 1995 when it was a single platform app. Now it’s some cross-platform monstrosity with horrible performance.

So many features have been piled on top of each other that I suspect it’s impossible to debug now. Image inserted in a shape in a table and commented on? Good luck figuring out why that pauses scrolling for 5 seconds when it’s encountered. Or explaining to someone non-technical why they shouldn’t do it.

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