Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday? • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by nikisweeting » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

doomrobo wrote: post #388

I hate to say it, but Signal. Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized ( Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and appear in the wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping behavior, opening the chat in iOS causes my audio to stop playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of the chat, copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super slow and search…

Yes, I've given up trying to report these issues as it's been years since my initial reports and I've never seen the things I reported fixed.

Signal desktop has been broken for almost a year for me "Error handling incoming message" is shown instead of each message. Theres no easy way to transfer messages between devices out-of-band when migrating to a new device (e.g. via encrypted binary backup blob). Messages constantly fail to arrive when they're sent, I often get them days after the person sent them. etc. I could go on...

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

#522

Post by vin047 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

doomrobo wrote: post #388

I hate to say it, but Signal. Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized ( Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and appear in the wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping behavior, opening the chat in iOS causes my audio to stop playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of the chat, copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super slow and search…

Can’t comment on the rest of your criticisms but you can (finally) backup chats to iCloud – features’ been present for the last few months.

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

#523

Post by dmurray » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

mdaniel wrote: post #390

doomrobo wrote: post #388

I hate to say it, but Signal. Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized ( Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and appear in the wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping behavior, opening the chat in iOS causes my audio to stop playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of the chat, copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super slow and search…

Have you reported that behavior, preferably with a debuglogs attachment in their GitHub tracker (or even the community forum)?

That would be a fair question if GP had complained about one specific but niche bug. It's disingenuous when he complains about multiple problems, at least some of which don't need a detailed bug report to discover, and specifically points to two PRs addressing one of his complaints which weren't merged.

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

#524

Post by impendia » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

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…

> Fourth, it tries to do too many things.

My institution, unfortunately, uses Blackboard. Clicking on "Course Tools", I get the following, presented as one long list:

Accessibility Report, Achievements, Announcements, Attendance, Basic LTI Tools, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Blogs, Cengage Learning Mindlinks (TM), Contacts, Content Market Tools, Course Calendar, Course Health Check, Course Messages, Course Portfolios, ...

And that's just the first three letters of the alphabet.

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

#525

Post by nikisweeting » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #457

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #315

Microsoft Outlook - decade after decade the icons change but the suckage does not, its 1987 every day when you use Outlook. Microsoft Teams - drains my battery 1% every two minutes Slack - the original “let’s forget everything we’ve learned about communications and try to discover it again”. From the threads feature nobody wants to the inability to silence bots or plugins, Slack never fails to disappoint. They pitch…

For what it's worth, I love threads. Prior to threads, channels would be pure noise, often intertwining multiple conversations at once.

Zulip has absolutely nailed threads imo, it's almost like a cross between a forum like Discourse and real-time chat, with the best of both.

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

#526

Post by vin047 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

encom wrote: post #452

creativeembassy wrote: post #220

Dropbox. I've used it for a decade, but now it's slow, bloated, and takes over CPU and memory like there isn't a single other program I need to run... and I was paying $20 for the privilege. But a few weeks ago I switched to Syncthing[0], and it's the best software transition I've ever made. Opposite of everything Dropbox is now: fast, simple, and I don't even notice it running in the background. Seamless setup, and…

I hate Dropbox for different reasons, and switched to ownCloud about 4-5 years ago now, I think. Running it on Digital Ocean, and backing up to Tarsnap. Absolutely love it. I get that it's not for everyone, but it's really not that hard either.

What’s the verdict between ownCloud and NextCloud?

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

#527

Post by the8472 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #183

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…

Docker is also essentially completely broken on MacOS and has been for years. The performance penalty on anything doing I/O is like 5x, and it tends to completely hammer my CPU. There are tons of internet discussions, so it appears to not be just me.

If it's a docker problem maybe you're running it with the vfs storage driver which copies every layer every time instead of using overlayfs? If not then it may be a problem with the virtualization solution, not docker itself. VM overhead shouldn't be 5x, not even for IO. Unless you're trying to mount parts of the host filesystem, that's slow with pretty much any virtualization solution, perhaps barring virtio-fs, but that's probably not supports on osx

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

#528

Post by podgib » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

G-Suite

Google Slides makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. Google Docs isn't much better. They're poor web versions of office software from the 90s.

Google drive is a disaster of product. Uploading and finding files are both incredibly painful.

Google sheets is fine for simple stuff, and I get why people use it, but there's far better alternatives. For anything moderately complex it's a dog.

I can't stand the gmail interface, but I can at least see why some people prefer it. It's the one part of the suite that isn't far inferior to its competitors.

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

#529

Post by tzury » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

Most frustrating first:

    01) Atlassian entirely. 
        nearly broekn, far from elegant and far too many times broken.

    02) Slack. using it since communication is a must. 
        Yet, noisy, using search too many times (left menu poor performace)

    03) npm. oh lord. miss the old plain vanilla Javascript days.

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

#530

Post by larrydag » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

SAS. I do data analysis everyday and it is just so antiquated to modern data needs. The organization I'm with is on a path to sunset and move to Python. Can't happen soon enough for me.