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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?

#791

Post by invisible »

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.

I’ve done way too much investigation into this. They are fixing these issues finally[0] (I’m mc0 mentioned in the thread). It does absolutely suck and is mostly caused by hacks to support macOS inotify event propagation into the docker VM. They are also working on making a different system for syncing data using Mutagen[1] that should fix this completely. That being said, it is very usable today depending on the workload.

0: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/12#issuecomment-652...

1: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/7

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

#793

Post by c-smile »

Apple's XCode. In particular its configuration (project and environment) features. Yet, making distributions and the whole signature magic is, ummm, something. Seems like it is in principle impossible to generate and build native UI project outside of XCode...

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

#794

Post by sli »

imhoguy wrote: post #377
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…

Company switched to it from Slack recently for cost cuts. Generally a huge downgrade of user experience: channel threads are mess to read after a while of being away; no way to lookup/mention other users in private chats; chats and channels is like two separate apps- constant switching between them; activity feed is not always up to date; messages once red on desktop are still left in notifications on mobile; chats l…

Code snippet editing is awful in Azure for all the same reasons. Inserting code and then going back to normal text is like trying to exit vim for the first time.

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

#795

Post by johnwalkr »

nwatson wrote: post #648
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…

Hmm, I think (Atlassian) Confluence is quite awesome. While you can still replicate the mess you'd naturally have in Google-Docs or OneNote or other places, at least with Confluence if you have a coherent vision for how your organize your information you can create a very useful body of work. I've never seen a Google-Docs, OneNote, SharePoint, or other unstructured-info solution that doesn't devolve into turds-in-gel…

No matter what I’ve tried, nothing beats google docs for me (in a mixed discipline work environment). It has the familiarity of a folder structure, good collaboration features and version history that works well for non technical users. It works well enough that few users fall back on v2_final-edit naming nonsense. Other tools have a slight edge for organizing information, but no good way to keep both files and Documents together. Which means people use files locally and don’t keep them up to date on the system.

It had 3 pain points for me that are resolved recently. First, they got rid of the desktop clients so users can’t move stuff to their desktop without understanding this is removing files for others. Second, team drives resolve the mess that was shared folders. Third, it can now edit office documents directly, avoiding the confusion of google doc copies appearing.

I use confluence a lot and I never trust that files on it are up to date. It doesn’t quite have enough features to make “native” documents, so it ends up with a lot of content stored as attachments, which inevitably get updated and passed around by email. It’s not convenient for storing files so all of the miscellaneous small files never make it there. If you use a lot of addins, it becomes usable to make documents but since it’s atrocious at outputting files, eventually a final version of something needs to be edited in word and now it’s even worse, you have what looks like an up to date document but the latest version is a word file, which is either hidden as an attachment or not even uploaded. I can see it working well in a team of only software engineers, however.

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

#796

Post by cjmcqueen »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #315

Microsoft Outlook - decade after decade the icons change but the suckage does not, its 1987 every day when you use Outlook. Microsoft Teams - drains my battery 1% every two minutes Slack - the original “let’s forget everything we’ve learned about communications and try to discover it again”. From the threads feature nobody wants to the inability to silence bots or plugins, Slack never fails to disappoint. They pitch…

The only thing worse than Outlook is Outlook on Mac. So much wrong and terrible interaction. I've been on it a year at a new role and it baffles me how had it is to use.

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

#799

Post by ben-schaaf »

puranjay wrote: post #324

One of the worst apps I use regularly has to be Google Play Music. The UI is horrible enough, but it also randomly deletes tracks from my library - including my own tracks that I recorded under my own name. And sometimes the tracks will show up again randomly. The worst is when tracks don't show up in my Songs list, but if I put it on shuffle, these tracks will start playing. I don't know what's the status now, but S…

I recently switched to using a self hosted Ampache instance from Google Play music. The UI is pretty bad, but it's quite customisable and dsub works well enough on Android.

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

#800

Post by runT1ME »

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…

Modern Spark is nice enough that I will use it to work with massive excel files locally! If someone can use Pandas they can use Spark, and you get the added benefit of distribution if necessary and more resiliancy.

I think it's likely that some subsection of Spark users are the type to over engineer a project, but I'm also confident they'd over engineer a much simpler framework as well.

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