Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 328 posts

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#161

Post by twalichiewicz »

I noticed most of the replies in this thread refer to mobile / desktop software, but nothing compares to the hell that is car infotainment system for me.

Using the Audi MMI is painfully clunky, inconsistent, and riddled with subscription-locked features. At this point I just immediately wait for CarPlay and avoid touching anything in the car’s native OS.

Honestly they could probably just save a lot of development time by just having a dumb monitor / audio setup that you’re plugging into.

EDIT: Oh, and the Messages.app on macOS makes me pine for the days of iChat.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#162

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

thrower123 wrote: post #138
JCWasmx86 wrote: post #7

MS Teams: What makes it bad: First of all, it uses Electron, thus it is laggy and wastes too much resources. Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate , if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG. Another factor is the proprietary nature of MS Teams. If it was open, there would probably be some other client/some way to have a real native client. My preferred alternat…

The thing that drives me up a wall with Teams is that when someone shares a screenshot with me, I can only expand the thumbnail in the chat to the full-size image maybe 5% of the time successfully. Most of the time I just go into a blank tab that never renders anything. I think part of this is the fucked up way that Teams handles storing content, because it uses a mishmash of SharePoint sometimes for real file attach…

Damn I thought I was alone! I get this about half the time too, although now I think I've identified a pattern: the second time I maximize in a given conversation always breaks down. The "fix" is to click on another conversation and then come back.

It really doesn't make sense to me how such a simple common functionality would break in such a major product. Do they not use Teams... at Microsoft? Did they not notice?

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#163

Post by kortex »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #67

Every website with cookie tracking. Which is every website. Anything electron: massive hog of resources and will never be rewritten on a nonbloated platform. Every single package manager and scheme still seems fundamentally broken and are bad compromises. But there's no money in fixing it so it will always be broken. I salute people doing the thankless work of packaging OSS and language libraries. You are fighting th…

Two tips: use brew or the dedicated installers promoted by the developers for awscli. Don't use python, pip, pipx, or conda to install awscli.

Use pipx to install any python "tools" (cli executables and the like). keeps each package in its own venv, so they don't clash.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#164

Post by kortex »

Awscli. It's not just the complexity or inconsistency; that kinda comes with the territory. It's just not discoverable. Constantly have to be googling stuff.

Boto is in a similar vein. Stupid capital letter arguments. No type information, no autocomplete.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#165

Post by gjvc »

castillar76 wrote: post #136
geocrasher wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I detest Jira, I find Confluence to be quite good for writing documentation. It's full featured and mostly just works. For our customer facing documentation at work we use Zendesk and while it's good it's nowhere near as good as Confluence.

We're having this struggle right now trying to replace Confluence thanks to Atlassian's "no more Server licenses" foot-gun. The other wiki software that's out there just hasn't impressed me so far. This one is painful to set up and keep running, that one is awful to edit anything in (especially if you're non-technical), most of them don't support collaborative editing or inclusion of Office doc content on pages, and…

The fact that collaborative document preparation is as troublesome as this in 2022 is a damning indictment on the computer industry. (It's become very good at advertising though.)

Douglas Englebart must be rolling in his grave at a comment like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#166

Post by _zllx »

riidom wrote: post #123

Discord. I basically don't use it, avery few months I'd say, but I still hate it, because it drains all the good Q&A's from the internet and puts it into its chatlogs, with a mediocre search ontop. Discord for gaming ramblings and chitchat may be okay, but I hate when software projects misuse it as a support channel. Give me some forum instead, I know many ppl here on HN dislike discourse, I don't get it though, for…

I recall this is the exact purpose of Spectrum.chat, though it can't interoperate with Discord, it's a new chat network. It allows making conversation threads available publicly and indexed on search engines. I've seen it in Google results a couple of times, but it doesn't look like it has caught on much, likely because of the network effect required to make a closed chat software popular.

Oops... looks like it's been shut down.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#167

Post by Stevvo »

PaulHoule wrote: post #3

C programming language for arduino. I could switch to AVR8 assembly but I want a better macro assembly plus the code would not be portable to more capable boards. I guess I could run a soft AVR8 on an fpga board and offload the heavy lifting to the fpga but talk about frying pan to the fire.

Did you know it's actually C++?

You would never guess from the Arduino docs/examples; it's all written for kids so it can feel like you are actually writing some super simplified C like scripting language like PAWN.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#168

Post by Stevvo »

3DS Max. It has bugs that have been unfixed for 20 years... I make models for Microsoft Flight Simulator where it is the only software that can export models correctly; there is an unsupported Blender exporter, but I'm not enthusiastic about learning that product from scratch; it has many of its own idiosyncrasies.

Re: Ask HN: Software you hate but can't replace?

#170

Post by da39a3ee »

rchaves wrote: post #25

Jira, for sure, and it seems hard to run away from, almost everyone use it It seems like the only alternative is to fund my own startup, with me as a sole shareholder, just to forbid Jira forever

The only reason Jira hasn't been voted up to the top of this thread is that the people who have to use it have become too depressed to vote.
Post reply on HN