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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?

#781

Post by Zak »

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

You'd think more people in leadership positions would try getting end-users involved in acquisition decisions. There seems to be a significant bias against doing that sort of thing in large organizations.

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

#784

Post by pmontra »

The software I run every day on my laptop is ok (Firefox, thunderbird, emacs, terminal, Ubuntu in general) so it must be something on my phone. Probably the OS because the phone is as good as my previous laptop but Google limits what it can do, more and more with each release. And yet any alternative I can think about is worse. Example: iOS is even more locked up and a Linux phone won't run some apps I must have so I'll end up with two phones.

Aha! I was about to submit the comment and it came to me that my laptop's nvidia proprietary device + linux kernel combo is (let's be kind) under optimal (still better than the open source driver.) The main point: 40 Hz refresh rate with Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. It was 60 Hz with 16.04 and earlier.

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

#786

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

regularfry wrote: post #480
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…

I was thinking through how you might do this, and my brain dredged up User-Mode Linux. A UML wrapper around those docker containers would behave almost exactly like you describe. You should (if I remember correctly) be able to nest them, too. I'm pretty sure this is doable today. It's a monstrous hack, and I've got no idea what the performance overheads would look like, but as a way of hiding a mess behind a clean fa…

Nowadays, it seems like gVisor is doing something fairly similar to UML but a good deal more lightweight.

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

#787

Post by saurik »

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…

You aren't really supposed to be using the AWS Console... the whole point of AWS is automation, not bespoke one-off configuration via a GUI: when they launched it it didn't even have a UI, and the command line tooling was more of a demo set of wrappers for the API to help you debug calls and do some simple shell script automation.

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

#789

Post by patrickserrano »

pachico wrote: post #517
pachico wrote: post #316

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).

Not to mention how horrible Confluence is, which is a product I can't believe how strongly it's advertised as a life saver. Any editor I've tried is way better. (Every time I have to "insert macro > other macros > code > choose title > choose syntax highlighter" just to document some code it just makes my life more miserable.)

I agree Confluence is a pain to use, and pages with a lot of info or a lot of macros can been nearly impossible to edit because of how slow they are.

On your point about inserting code blocks you should be able to type `/code` and hit enter. If you’re not using the newer version or a page with the new editor, I think you type `{` instead of `/` but it’s been a while since I’ve used that one.

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