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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?

#701
post #169

Anything which requires me to use a Google captcha or hcaptcha. I generally don't get annoyed very easily but spotting fire hydrants and traffic lights just to login into a site to which you are a paying customer is plain nonsense. I've actually decided to move my entire infrastructure from Digital ocean to AWS because of this captcha before login nonsense (thankfully DO reverted it just in time)

I've started intentionally making my answers subtly wrong. E.g., if something might look like a fire hydrant, but isn't, I mark it positive. I usually have to do it a few times anyway, and it makes me feel better to think Google's AI datasets are inaccurate.

I never understood the mindset that finds joy in throwing off the datasets being trained on these kinds of captchas. Is it related more to the "rush" of cheating on a test in school (i.e. figuring out a way to "cheat" on the captcha), or rooted more in rebellion against Google/whoever?

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

#702
post #227

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…

If you want more complaints, and well informed ones at that, read https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/containers-future-ian-eyberg/ . I particularly love the quote, The kernel developers view of the docker community is that in the rare case they can actually formulate the question correctly they usually don't understand the answer. There is only so much that you can say to clarify things to someone who is thinking about e…

I don't know the author, or Denis, but Denis in the comments is right. This is exactly the kind of pseudo-intellectual, inflammatory contrarian opinion that I'm unsurprised to see upvoted.

This article completely conflates containers, orchestrators and schedulers in every aspect of discussion. Something will schedule and orchestrate these microVMs. Something with orchestrate secret manifestation inside those VMs. Something with operate on the host to supervise the VMs (which necessarily will have access to the guests).

So far, every microVM platform with any adoption uses Kubernetes to orchestrate. I don't know, maybe someone is running Kata on Nomad or something, but I've not heard of it. And so far, most (all?) microVM implementation utilizes namespaces and cgroups either inside/outside the VM or both. This includes Chromium's use of OCI in Crostini (their Linux-VM-on-ChromeOS).

Whatever comes along and replaces Kubernetes will push the envelope and will reduce the default blast-radius, will undoubtedly entirely rethink how authorization and namespacing work. The core would be much more minimal. And thousands of lines of generated Go would be replaced with . And progress will have happened.

I get it. Hating k8s is cool. I hate it too, for a whole myriad of reasons. But it's actually frustrating how bombastic and off the mark that article manages to be. And it's too bad, if it had just stuck with "Kubernetes isn't the future, and actually understood the problems with it, it could've been a decent rant. As-is, I think it does a pretty poor job of justifying the title. (And so far, microVM workloads look to be worse for "image" security than Docker, as the tooling (outside of Nix|Guix) is somehow even worse.)

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

#703

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 lack of a common 'chats' list shows that nobody who used it has ever used another communications tool.

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

#704
post #602

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…

You are so right about Atlassian tools. I cannot stand Jira. Very often, it's easier and faster to fix a bug, then to update the status in Jira. It's clutterware.

Why is JIRA so slow?

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

#705
post #227

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…

If you want more complaints, and well informed ones at that, read https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/containers-future-ian-eyberg/ . I particularly love the quote, The kernel developers view of the docker community is that in the rare case they can actually formulate the question correctly they usually don't understand the answer. There is only so much that you can say to clarify things to someone who is thinking about e…

Thanks - it is good. Tangential - in a thread about bad software, having a link to LinkedIn is quite funny. It’s taken about 10 years but I think I’ve finally detached from their bs.

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

#706

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…

As a recent Teams user, I don't know if Teams is bad on its own merits, or if the conception is just enough different from Slack that I can never quite figure out whether a feature exists and where it's hidden. Generally I don't have much time to mutter about Teams because some Atlassian monstrosity is busting my balls.

It's both.

Everything from WhatsApp to SMS to Slack has a unified list of chats. Teams does not.

Teams is wrong.

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

#707
(Question for OP)

Just curious:

Were you inspired to ask this question by the recent CoRecursive Podcast interview with Jim Blandy (https://corecursive.com/054-software-that-doesnt-suck/) in which he talks about how the motivation to design a CVS replacement come from the question "What's the worst software that you use every day?"

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

#708
post #489

GnuPG I'm surprised that it hasn't come up, yet. But it's CLI interface as well as it's data model are truly archaic. It's near impossible to properly invoke from other programs or scripts and most users don't even understand half of it's "web of trust" concepts. This is especially bad since small mistakes can easily break your security model. I don't want to rewrite GnuPG, I want a fresh start without all the cruft.

Love their baffling new client/daemon model making it super hard to run in a serverless pipeline..

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

#710

Jira 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).

If you think Jira is bad you should see Remedy.

I still have flashbacks to the year I spent with Remedy.

And then my current company picked up SalesForce.... It's like relieving the horror.

JIRA is terrible to manage and it's permissions system is rubbish but it does issue management okay.

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