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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?

#341

Finder on Macs. I've used a Mac for over 5 years and it still amazes me how unintuitive it is for basic tasks like copying and pasting files, creating new directories, etc.

This. It’s easier to swap to a terminal and mkdir than figure out where in hell the new directory button is. I constantly paste files into the wrong directory because I’m actually ‘focused’ on a dir that’s one above or below where I think I am. The noise it makes when you paste sounds like an error noise. It seems to take delight in re-ordering my files in random ways every time I open the window. I still haven’t figured out how to simply order the list in date order when I’m trying to upload a file. The whole thing drives me insane.

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

#342

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.

The worst thing about maven is that you actually have to use it. The Maven Central website is so bad that I still haven’t difured our how to actually find a package, and building/packaging or even just launching JVM manually is so verbose I never want to do it. There are alternatives but they suck even more (sbt => Scala => additional bloated dependency that’s slow as hell, gradle => need to include the executable in every project + worst backwards compatibility ever ... once I spent an hour hacking gradle versions trying to install & run a project before giving up)

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

#343
Surprised not to see this here, but doing data engineering against any Adobe product in creative cloud.

Specifically: AEM, AAM, Omniture, among others. My favorite is AAM’s “only Adobe could come up with such a stupid data integration” file format: https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/audience-manager/user...

The omniture S3 feed comes as a 1004 column TSV. And for fields that capture user inputs, they don’t escape backslashes. But the escape backslashes everywhere else. I filed a ticket on this over a year ago but still no fix.

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

#344
post #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 une…

That’s weird, I use WhatsApp almost exclusively (in the browser) and the desktop version is a joy. Never had syncing issues - in fact it syncs instantly for me.

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

#345

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…

> People use the big data frameworks as glorified distributed-job management tools

Do you have any tools you like for job management without all the distributed-systems baggage?

I've heard folks advocate for Make for this kind of thing, perhaps that or some other orchestration tool that deals with job dependency graphs would be the unix way? (Having a nice way to visualize failed step would of course be a plus; a common use-case is "re-run the intermediate pipeline, and everything downstream".)

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

#348

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…

And why the hell is it not native

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

#349

Evernote, Spotify, Netflix I am gradually migrating to Notion instead of Evernote but I am stuck with the other two.

I switched from Evernote to Notion 6 months ago. Their block-based editing system drives me up the wall. But, they really nailed their media integration in a way nobody else has, so I continue to use it.

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

#350

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.

There is desktop version for Linux. It is still web app, probably wrapped as Electron app, but it integrates a bit better than plain web tab.
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