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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?

#471

Post by andrewstuart »

sershe wrote: post #260

I thankfully don't use it everyday, but Mac and literally everything on Mac (even the terminal started crashing on resize towards the end of the time I used it every day). Over time, I started keeping a note where I put every bug, missing feature, malicious feature, performance issue, driver issue I had with my 2 different MacBooks day to day, and it's loooong. I'll probably never organize it unless I'm forced to use…

I've heard many people complain about OSX in similar ways but in 15 years of intensive usage I've experienced only a handful of annoyances.

Compared to Windows it's an absolute dream. I left Windows because it was a mess and applications constantly crashed and also the OS crashed and the multitasking is thoroughly crap. I have a Windows machine and every now and then I think "maybe it's all better now", and I give it a try and instantly the same crashy problems and really bad multitasking.

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

#474

Post by klancaster »

busyant wrote: post #404

Sorry, but everything listed here is rank amateur stuff when compared to Blackboard Learn ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn ). First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere. Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift. Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete t…

I just moved to a new university that uses Canvas, and while it is not perfect, it actually does not cause physical pain when entering data.

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

#475

Post by quicklime »

ColanR wrote: post #169
superasn wrote: post #52

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)

I've started intentionally making my answers subtly wrong. E.g., if something might look like a fire hydrant, but isn't, I mark it positive. I usually have to do it a few times anyway, and it makes me feel better to think Google's AI datasets are inaccurate.

Hah nice, I thought I was the only one who did this!

I've noticed that in the more extreme edge cases, it lets me through anyway. Maybe other people aren't paying enough attention to notice that there's actually a difficult-to-see street sign in that particular square.

Sometimes I feel bad that one day, a Waymo car is going to miss a stop sign because of me. But then, I also resent being used as a free mechanical turk, and they should know better than to rely on random people from the internet to build safety-critical systems.

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

#476

Post by ivalm »

pachico wrote: post #316

Jira is my daily nightmare. I guess the "no CTO was ever fired for choosing SAP" applies to Jira too. It just does the opposite of that it tries to do, which is making development tracking easy (not to mention those silly ideas coming from agile coaches to use Jira to measure wrong things, which makes of it a horrible combo).

So what is like Jira but good?

I use jira at work and I like it.

But our use case is maybe more limited/liberal. For us it is:

1) list tasks to do and how tasks are linked

2) archive discussion about issues and integrates with butbucket (so in commit it will link to ticket to read about why something was done; similarly from issue discussion I can see the relevant commits; this also goes well with history either by looking to linked issues or blaming in git and getting issues that resulted in the commits)

3) enables pointing other devs to something (I did some partial task, need help, I assign or cc someone else, they contribute to the issue as appropriate and then hand it back). Helps ensure all relevant discussion is centralized and persisted.

What we don’t do is use it as an explicit performance/formal sprint tool... there is no middle manager questioning me about something I wrote/didn’t write in jira. is this where people start to hate it?

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

#480

Post by regularfry »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #63

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 was thinking through how you might do this, and my brain dredged up User-Mode Linux. A UML wrapper around those docker containers would behave almost exactly like you describe. You should (if I remember correctly) be able to nest them, too.

I'm pretty sure this is doable today. It's a monstrous hack, and I've got no idea what the performance overheads would look like, but as a way of hiding a mess behind a clean facade, I'm not aware of any reason it shouldn't work.

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