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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?

#391

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…

Disagree strongly on git. On the surface the syntax is ugly, but the data model is brilliant.

Once you wrap your mind around what commits, heads and remotes are and learn to rebase you get an incredibly simple and fine-grained control. I never use stash because it's trivial to create a WIP commit and rebase later into the chunks I want to ship to permanent history.

Git is like a chef's knife: extremely powerful tool that's dangerous in untrained hands.

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

#394

Anything which requires me to use a Google captcha or hcaptcha. I generally don't get annoyed very easily but spotting fire hydrants and traffic lights just to login into a site to which you are a paying customer is plain nonsense. I've actually decided to move my entire infrastructure from Digital ocean to AWS because of this captcha before login nonsense (thankfully DO reverted it just in time)

Completely agree, but I must hand it to whoever came up with this idea. Absolutely brilliant. "Folks, we need an absolutely massive data set to train our text recognition algorithms. We need people on the internet volunteering this data." "Impossible! What could we possibly offer them?"

It may not surprise you to learn that his Ph.D. was on "on Games With A Purpose, which are games played by humans that produce useful computation as a side effect" and is same person behind Duolingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_von_Ahn

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

#395

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…

> AWS. ... apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understand just to be able to change roles I strongly agree with the rest of your characterization of the AWS console, but that one isn't true: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles_us... -- we use IAM Roles extensively at $DAYJOB and have not yet experienced anything that would require a Chr…

My personal issue right now is that I have multiple accounts with MFA and there’s no easy way to differentiate them besides this generated account ID in the auth app. This means I have to create some type of mapping table between the ID and the account, or try to remember what’s available

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

#398
I recall reading the Subversion architectural chapter in Beautiful Code. In fact it's probably the only chapter that stuck with me (there's another IIRC but I can't recall which. My brain didn't make an association to the book).

One of my design mental exercises is to try to figure out if you could tweak the svn architecture into a DVCS, preserving the superior subtree support. I think it could have been, it's just that theory and execution diverged.

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

#400
Cmsynergy

The worst version control software known to man.

It is a bloated IBM tool from the 90s, takes 10 minutes copy a repo that would take git 5 seconds. It has a lock modify unlock paradigm, so if your coworker forgets about a file they were working on and they get promoted, you can forget about working on your project ever again.

The paradigms are backwards. The project doesn’t branch, the files do. You make your commits before you do any work.

It’s slowly being phased out at my company, but it can’t seem to die fast enough. A lot of people have built their careers on this tool so it’s hard to kill.

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