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

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

#211

Post by CodeGlitch »

t0bia_s wrote: post #202
CodeGlitch wrote: post #81

Android. When holding my phone up to me ear after answering a call, the screen won't switch off and random buttons will then get pressed because you know, I'm holding it against my ear. Can't find any options in the seeing to fix this issue. My wife has exactly the same problem despite using a different make of phone. How can Android fail at the most fundamental task? The alternative of Apple is too expensive for me.…

I never had such issue with Lineage OS. I'm using it over 7 years now. It sounds like HW related problem. Btw price of iPhone is non acceptable for me from two reasons. Device could be easily lost and I do not need powerful HW with terrible battery life for calls and messages.

Well that's another problem with Android that I wanted to touch on: it's not trivial to try out different OS, which I think is more a fault of the phone manufacturers rather than just Google.

The whole smart phone ecosystem is all about walled gardens.

I agree about battery life for iPhone, pretty much everyone who owns one complains about how their battery doesn't even last a day. My Nokia X20 can last 3 days with light usage... Which I suppose makes up for the poor proximity sensor.

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

#212

Post by 64bit_xombie »

chickenimprint wrote: post #183
Trias11 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Stop using word "security" or "end to end" encryption and then enforcing me to disclose my phone number to use your "secure" app. This is scam.

The purpose of using phone numbers in many of todays services, is to shift the work of validating the authenticity of the user to carriers. Of course this has given rise to inumerable vendors of accounts or forged prepaid cards, but it raises the barrier just enough to make mass cheating, boosting, spamming unprofitable.

But the benefit of curbing spam doesnt outweigh the cost of abatement of privacy. Though more of my issue is being forced to have it on a phone, when I only want to use from my laptop.

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

#213

Post by liversage »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #162
thrower123 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thanks for this tip. I usually resolve this by opening Teams in the browser and find the image I need to see. It's very disruptive that an important UI feature randomly (or perhaps reliably) fails.

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

#214

Post by hobofan »

smackeyacky wrote: post #184
nunez wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jira is fucking awesome compared to other corporate ticketing systems (CA rally and servicenow)

As a way if enabling corporate bullies and toxic managenent behaviour, I would agree Jira has no peers. Want to ambush somebody in a meeting? Open your jira tickets in the 5 minutes leading up to it. Even better, create some new, obscure category and pile them into there over a week and ask your target why they aren't done during the bi weekly standup. As a mechanism of abuse of employees it is superb.

What you describe has nothing to do with Jira, but with how people are using it. If someone were to do the same thing in e.g. Linear would Linear be responsible for the bullying?

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

#215

Post by approxim8ion »

signal11 wrote: post #55
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…

> it uses Electron Teams v2 won't use Electron[1]; but for now you can get a small performance boost by just opening Teams using a modern web browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox) at https://teams.microsoft.com/ -- you can even set up a PWA-type app shortcut. You can uninstall the client after that. I think there's maybe one feature (popout chat windows) that the client has which you can't get in the browser. [1] https://t…

as far as I know, the web client doesn't let you control someone else's desktop when they are sharing their screen. which is something I do regularly.

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

#216

Post by closeparen »

hobofan wrote: post #214
smackeyacky wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a way if enabling corporate bullies and toxic managenent behaviour, I would agree Jira has no peers. Want to ambush somebody in a meeting? Open your jira tickets in the 5 minutes leading up to it. Even better, create some new, obscure category and pile them into there over a week and ask your target why they aren't done during the bi weekly standup. As a mechanism of abuse of employees it is superb.

What you describe has nothing to do with Jira, but with how people are using it. If someone were to do the same thing in e.g. Linear would Linear be responsible for the bullying?

Ticketing systems can be communication and tracking tools that serve practitioners, or they can be surveillance and control instruments that serve bean counters and micromanagers. It is possible to configure a JIRA instance either way, but JIRA’s extensive workflow, permissions, and reporting systems target the latter in ways that other ticketing systems just can’t.

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

#217

Post by rg111 »

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…

> Give me some forum instead

That's exactly why Discourse [0] exists. Try it.

[0]: https://discourse.org

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

#218

Post by tomsmeding »

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…

I have this weird issue with Teams that I haven't seen mentioned yet.

Often messages just... don't load. To be precise: in a channel you have posts with replies below them; the default view shows the last two replies if there are more. So far so good. Then I click on the button to show more of them, and zero, one, or two more show up -- of the tens that are there. If I reload the page (back to 2 replies) then click the button again, it works as intended, including loading even more if there are many replies.

Then I switch to a different channel and back to here, and it's broken again. Have to reload and retry.

This happens for many but not all reply threads (haven't figured out that pattern yet). However, either a thread always works or it always works only after a reload. Fully deterministic.

This same issue happens with emoji reactions on posts (sometimes only appear after a reload), and the three-dots more-options button in the hover panel of posts: the three-dots button will just be blank white and not do anything until a reload. There is a slot for the button though. It's funny until you have to deal with it (can't edit!).

This is infuriating since it means that when I'm monitoring some channels as TA for a course, I have to constantly reload the page -- which in turn means that I need at least one browser teams open. This is because:

- In firefox, I cannot video call, only voice call. (Why does every other conferencing software work in firefox but not teams?)

- In chrome, I can video call, but while I screenshare my own camera gets disabled -- deterministically. This is something I see with everyone (their camera turning off when they share their screen), so it's not just a quirk of my setup somehow.

- In electron desktop teams (linux), I can do everything, but I cannot reload because it's not a browser! So I cannot fix the brokenness caused by the not loading of content that I described above.

I've reproduced the content not loading issue on another person's Windows pc in native teams, so it's not a linux quirk -- but even so, it also happens in the browser for me which shouldn't be platform-dependent.

My coworkers have joked that maybe MS is designing for this because people having two instances running at all times, frequently reloading one of them, increases engagement metrics significantly.

Does anyone else have this or is my account just broken?

EDIT: I wanted to report to MS but it's impossible to make a screen recording that doesn't reveal personal information of roughly everyone. And MS says that a recording should not contain personal information.

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

#219

Post by cyberei »

Trias11 wrote: post #155
64bit_xombie wrote: post #76

Signal. I dont like having to tie it to a phone number. I would much rather use email (eg wire) if I need to pick one or the other, but a random session id (eg session, torchat) is much better. I also dont want to be limited to only using it on a mobile device. (Yes I know theres a "desktop client" but it has to be linked to your phone anyway, so it defeats half the point of having a desktop version and it also uses…

Agree. Stop using word "security" or "end to end" encryption and then enforcing me to disclose my phone number to use your "secure" app. This is scam.

Wow, that's interesting. I didn't expect to see Signal listed here.

Disclaimer; Signal is probably my favorite app in in the world. As someone that doesn't use any Facebook owned services, there wouldn't be any other way for me to chat with my friends and family.

But I'd really like to understand what you mean and if I am falling for a scam. How does disclosing my phone number make it insecure and not end-to-end encrypted?

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

#220

Post by adrianmsmith »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #117
hadrien01 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-cloud Jira as a workflow manager is pretty good. It’s intuitive, powerful, quite fast (again, on-premises version only). But my current company uses the cloud version as an agile project management tool, and it’s awful just because it is soooo slow. And they keep changing the UI, sometimes with good ideas, sometimes not, but because it is so slow nobody wants to use it to update their progress. For example I upda…

I have used cloud JIRA and non-cloud JIRA. They both have the same (99%, at least) awful UI and UX. They both routinely lag out performing even the most basic operations. They both crap out on me if I leave a tab open overnight and try to do something in it the next day. They are both miserable to use. On-premises is not some solution.

However at least you (well, someone in your company, maybe not you) has the capability to upgrade the hardware Jira runs on if necessary. (Where I work we use Jira on-prem and it's fine speedwise.)

Also, on-prem means you can decide when to upgrade i.e. you are empowered to prevent the UI from changing daily (in our case at work we haven't upgraded for years).

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