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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?

#191

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…

Would be very interested in a blog post / further reading about this!

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

#192

Google Drive. I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.

It took me years to realise that GDrive searches by file content by default instead of file name and that I need to prefix my search term with 'title:' to be able to find what I want. Now I just use their API to list all files in the terminal and then I just pipe it to `grep`. This way I can search using regular expressions.

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

#194

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…

Teams is utter shite. Especially if you're forced to use the web version (because linux). This goes for all of Office365.

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

#195
WhatsApp. The desktop version has very few features, requires constant connection to a mobile phone and gets out of sync very often. It's practically irremediable if you're in a crowded wi-fi area and ethernet is the only way to get a good connection. It's also designed so no conversation is ever private despite advertising it's E2E encryption. Everyone you talk to has automatic backups enabled and they're stored unencrypted in Google Drive. And the "two step verification" password is the one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. It must be a 6-digit number that requires you to type it constantly in order to remember it. It basically assumes people are too incompetent to use password managers or simply writing a password down. Passwords you can remember are never safe.

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

#196

Maven, since the dependency hell and that __every__ single project requires the same ugly boilerplate and yak shaving tasks, worsened if the infamous release plugin is used. Jira, because it's too slow and bloated from features you never use anyway. IntelliJ, because it freezes on every 6-7 autosuggestions, on projects of 50-80K LOCs.

Surprised to hear this about IntelliJ, have used it for many years without issue on substantially larger projects. Can't say for sure, but your freezes might be a solvable artifact of your setup.

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

#199
post #78

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 agree about the daemon. Podman is a daemonless alternative, though I've never used it myself. Strongly disagree about Docker Compose though - I actually really like the ability to compose a stack of different containers together with some simple yaml.

I enjoyed docker compose as well (enough to use it for PhotoStructure), but was bit by breaking changes even when I had specified a version in my docker-compose.yml.

It meant that a bunch of my beta users suddenly had broken PhotoStructure configurations because their docker-compose implementation had received a minor update. Why require a version to your configuration file and not increment it on breaking changes?

I ended up tearing out the script that helped people create their own docker-compose.yml file, and replaced the installation instructions with an annotated call to `docker run`.

And don't get me started on how janky it is to update existing containers to new images without docker-compose: there seems to only be one third-party tool to assist with this automatically (lighthouse), but is essentially abandoned. I'd love to be wrong about this, please point me to other solutions if they exist!

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