
Ask HN: Things that suck? - jrudin
In your life what experience, product, service is just horrible? What is frustrating? What do you wish someone did better?<p>Some ideas: The DMV, Internet Speeds&#x2F;Connectivity, ISP Service, etc.
======
na85
Javascript. It's possibly the worst language I've ever had the misfortune of
coming across, and it's gained this cult-like devoted fan base amongst the
startup crowd. Everyone tries to cram Javascript into applications it's
completely unsuitable for like desktop non-browser 3D gaming or encryption. It
is an enabler of pervasive surveillance by marketers and a huge security risk
for the privacy-conscious. Not to mention every web developer thinks the
pinnacle of web design involves a megabyte of jquery or whatever is
fashionable these days, reinventing parts of the browser's functionality like
fading content in instead of just letting me scroll the fucking page.

I wish javascript would just die already. I greatly prefer static or server-
side dynamic sites. I miss the days when you just had a PHP session, and when
you posted your message it didn't show up until a refresh.

My animosity towards javascript and javascript developers simply cannot be
overstated.

~~~
comrade1
Javascript is fine in itself as a language, but no one uses it like it's meant
to be used. It's a prototype inheritance language and yet people try to use it
like regular java (classes and instances).

The problem you probably have is with the DOM, not the language.

~~~
nilved
No, my problem is definitely with the language. JavaScript has some PHP-level
horrors in it, especially when it comes to type coercion.

~~~
comrade1
I can't believe I'm having to stick up for javascript... I don't particularly
like it myself, and I think the growth of node.js oven the past few years is
one of the biggest jokes in our industry... But that said, every language has
its surprises when it comes to coercion/equality/etc. When you move from Java
to Ruby you get burned by the differences and when you move from just about
anything else to javascript you suffer as well.

You as a programmer just have to know the differences between these languages
and work appropriately.

Again... I can't believe I'm sticking up for javascript. I prefer strongly
typed languages that can have projects with several dozens to hundreds of
developers.

But I can see the appeal for javascript and other prototype inheritance
languages. My first two languages were Dylan and Newtonscript.

------
sejje
Driving. I want to be able to look out the windows or work or whatever I want
to do.

Power. I'm so tired of my devices running out of juice. Road trips and
festivals etc become much less fun when I have to continually worry about how
to charge my phone or laptop.

Craigslist: They shut down services like padmapper but continue to give us a
totally shit interface to work with. Finding a place to live, in particular,
is a horrific experience.

Vehicle maintenance: I don't want to think about when to change my oil, or
when I can take it to the shop, or anything. I'd like to just pay someone who
comes to my house and deals with it as-needed.

~~~
xur17
The vehicle maintenance one would be great - have an odb device that connects
via bluetooth to your device, and knows when to schedule oil changes, or
handle more complex issues.

~~~
unfamiliar
Or... just pay someone to check it once a month for you, like you might have a
gardener or cleaner come round to your house. Not everything needs a high tech
solution.

------
enrmarc
Temperature: I can't stand more than 25 °C (well, I can, but I don't like it).

Big software: I missed the old times where you just needed a text editor and a
terminal in order to "create" computer programs. Nowadays it seems that you
need IDEs (specially in mobile development), frameworks, unit testing
frameworks, CI servers; and you have all types of "mini software programs" you
have to use just because your team says "it's great". For example: Jasmine,
Bower, Composer, Rake, Pip, Grunt, Gulp, Browserify, etc. I know all of them
are pretty useful (and I would say, indispensable). Yeah, I know that the new
rule in software development today is "write big-readable-maintainable-
scalable-featurable software"... but as I've said I miss the little less-
featured programs (like "ls").

Money: not to be able to buy online without a credit card. I would love to go
to a physical store and buy a "pseudo credit card": "Hey dude, here you have
50 euros, give me a temporary credit card for that value". And then go to
Amazon or whatever online shop and use that pseudo credit card without give
any of my personal information or have to link the pseudo credit card with my
bank account (like PayPal does).

Politics: I would love to see some engineers or scientists working in
politics. I only see lawyers, economists and the like.

~~~
Thriptic
You can buy pre-loaded credit cards at gas stations in the US, although I'm
not sure how they work for online orders.

~~~
notduncansmith
Just fine, I've used temp cards several times for that exact use-case.

------
rsp1984
I would like to point out that any existing issues with web technologies
(HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/your newest hyped web framework) are merely a symptom. The
underlying cause, and the thing that _actually_ sucks, is the fact that the
web has been designed as a sort of document viewing system, as opposed to a
cross-platform app execution system.

And it sucks in particular that 20 years ago, when there was still room to
steer things into the right direction, it seems that _nobody_ was smart enough
to anticipate the change of requirements or got the courage to stand up
against existing authorities and bring the traditional web model into
question.

Whenever I see some web demo of a particularly flashy CSS trick or the newest
WebGL effect on HN, something inside me cringes because nobody of the hype
crowd would ever consider giving a _wet fuck_ about it if the demo was running
in a native app.

~~~
CmonDev
Thank you, I am not alone! I hope the madness will stop.

------
Kenji
Skype. Everyone has it and it's so bad. Random freezes of the conversation or
the window, call drops (Teamspeak has almost none), can't disable alerts for
file transfers in a group chat, the search doesn't work properly (can't find
words that are there) in a long chat log. I could go on. I have used many chat
clients in my life, but I have never seen such a bad implementation before. It
is a mystery to me why everyone uses it, thus forcing me to use it too.

~~~
matthewmacleod
I'd extend this to videoconferencing and remote meeting solutions in general.
I've never found anything that works reliable, across platforms, with a simple
interface, can scale to larger events, and so on. You'd think it would be a
solved problem by now.

~~~
maaaats
When talking with a remote clients/offices, we've found
[http://appear.in/](http://appear.in/) to be great. No hassle with adding each
other on Skype/Google, just send a link. Even supports screen sharing when
demoing. Not saying it will be a silver bullet for your listed issues, though.

------
kens
Maybe a HN company can fix home automation. Home automation seems to be like
personal computers around 1980: you can do it but it's expensive, you don't
get a lot of functionality, and you have to do a lot of hacking yourself.

Some specific pain points: walking outside and pushing little buttons to
adjust the irrigation timer. Walking outside to turn on the hot tub. Manually
putting a light on a timer when traveling. Pushing little buttons on the
thermostat (although now there's Nest). Alarm system not integrated with
anything.

What I want is that when I buy a $40 irrigation timer from Home Depot, it
"just works" with the internet. I shouldn't need to buy a $500 internet
irrigation controller with proprietary software (e.g. CyberRain).

(Of course I shouldn't bother responding to threads that will get clobbered by
the controversy filter for having too many replies vs upvotes. My explanation
[http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-
really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-
works.html))

~~~
Houshalter
You can now use
[https://news.ycombinator.com/active](https://news.ycombinator.com/active) to
get around the penalty thing.

------
hellbanTHIS
There are a lot of terrible things out there but one that really bugs me is
all the misinformation/propaganda that the internet causes. I didn't see it
coming, I thought the web would make people more informed, not less.

~~~
xwowsersx
Check out [http://grasswire.com](http://grasswire.com) (I'm the co-founder).
It's a newsroom that's fact-checked and curated by everyone. We're just
getting started and have a lot of work to do, but we've had some pretty good
success so far crowd-sourcing the news and debunking misinformation/propaganda
that tends to spread like wildfire on the internet.

~~~
krapp
How do you fact-check the fact checkers, or the facts? Every newsroom and
plenty of other sites claim to be impartial and unbiased, but it's impossible,
once you have an audience, not to play to that audience.

On the front page you state what could be interpreted as an anti-capitalist,
left-wing bias: _information that governs the world should be controlled by
everyday people, not governments or corporations._ And yet 'everyday people'
can be just as biased, bigoted and self-interested as governments and
corporations. Curation does not in and of itself imply impartiality or truth -
if anything, it can magnify the biases of a group through network effects and
positive feedback loops.

------
robinhoodexe
Having a physical card[1] with challenge & response codes for when using my
bank and all pulic services in Denmark. I actually thought about making a
simple CLI program that can OCR the card using tesseract[2], convert the
output to a simple sqlite database and use GnuPG[3] to encrypt the database.
The user feeds the application (probably just a simple bash script) the given
challenge code, decrypts the database and is given the response code (probably
just copied to the clipboard).

[1][http://i.imgur.com/2XGei96.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/2XGei96.jpg)
[2][https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-
ocr/](https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/)
[3][https://www.gnupg.org/](https://www.gnupg.org/)

~~~
VLM
Maybe start somewhere a little more basic.

I've got C+R "cards" for my google acct and treasurydirect. And thats it.

A little more might be nice.

~~~
robinhoodexe
Yeah I'm probably just overthinking this, although it could be a nice small
project.

------
jonnathanson
This isn't a "thing that sucks" so much as a thing that _will_ suck, but
California needs to gets its act together with water supply and use. Smarter
use is one thing, but it's abundantly clear that we'll also need more of it.

Desalinization technology exists, but is considered to be prohibitively
expensive relative to the benefits -- or at least that's the received wisdom
we always hear whenever the subject comes up. Would love to know more about
this, and whether anyone is working on a more cost-effective and sustainable
solution.

On a more day-to-day note, to no one's great surprise, ISPs suck. So do power
grids, especially in CA.

~~~
jrudin
Thats a great point about California's water supply.

Just wondering, why do you think power grids are so challenged?

~~~
jonnathanson
Exactly why the power grids are so challenged is a bit above my intellectual
or educational pay grade. (I'm neither an electrical engineer nor a city
planner.) But I do know that the system is aging and is stretched to capacity.
SoCal, in particular, is riddled with more issues than NorCal -- probably
because of greater population, more A/C usage during the hot summer months,
etc.

------
patmcguire
Paywalls across apps. I've got a subscription to the Economist, but I'm not
logged in on Facebook, Twitter, whatever HN client I'm using, etc, so it's
like I don't.

~~~
jacques_chester
I happen to have a solution for this problem that this margin is too narrow to
contain.

~~~
patmcguire
I'm just going to start writing that in all of my math books.

------
paulgb
Cancelling services (phone, internet, etc.) It took me 40 minutes (mostly on
hold) to cancel my internet the other day, a problem I wish I could pay
someone else to take care of.

~~~
Omniusaspirer
Unfortunately this is something that is _intentionally_ designed to suck in
almost all cases. It's even hard to pay someone else to do the canceling for
you since you're generally required to offer up a lot of personal info to
verify that it is in fact you that wants to cancel the account. I've
personally had this range from phone number all the way up to SSN.

~~~
paulgb
I'm not a lawyer but could something like temporary power of attorney be used
here?

~~~
tombrossman
Read your contract. It will almost certainly have a section on cancelling
which will give a postal address. Write a short letter with your account
details and whatever else the contract says to provide, and cancel by mail. It
is faster than using the phone.

I've been doing this for years and it always works. Pay a tiny bit extra and
get signed proof of delivery. This is helpful when the company 'accidentally'
loses the cancellation. It's good enough to beat them in court and god help
them if they ding your credit and you have proof you cancelled (and that they
received your cancellation letter).

------
Thriptic
1\. University procurement systems and methodologies(the PO / cost object
etc).

2\. The difficulty in finding people with specific technical expertise in a
university setting. People spend enormous amounts of time troubleshooting
problems which could be easily solved by just talking to the right person for
a brief amount of time. Yet, typically people have no idea what is going on
outside of their group / lab and lack a mechanism by which to find people
locally or remotely with the domain-specific expertise they are looking for.

3\. The lack of a wikipedia-esque resource for bio or a resource to onboard
new investigators and students into a new field. Textbooks are paywalled,
journal articles typically assume a base level of knowledge of the field, and
reviews can be very hit or miss. Someone should create a way for leaders in
each sub-domain of science to select the top reviews for new entrants into
their respective field, and establish a curated collection of such reviews.
Going off of citation count or potentially impact factor would be a good
start.

------
Ixiaus
There are so many! Most of them are actually very unsexy too in industries
most people don't think about. I think one of the best product development
strategies for technologists and founders is to get jobs in companies that
have little to do with programming and see what kind of fundamental problems
there are that could be solved with technology.

------
johnchristopher
Many times a day I want to share an url with my SO. I use a desktop, she uses
a laptop and half of the time I just give up. Opening a mail client, or
facebook, wait for the app/website to load, find a textfield on the screen,
type her name, correct auto complete, no I don't need a subject, yes I want to
send it... half of the time I give up.

I wish there was something like her picture in my browser toolbar and when
clicked it asks me "send that page to X?" and I hit enter et voilà. It should
not ask me if I want to send it via fb, mail, tw or anything (I would be okay
with configuring it but only once. Ideally all our messages should be sent
through a private hub that dispatch to the recipient's fb/tw/email but I
disgress).

I might try hitting addons.mozilla.org/firefox/ after posting this.

~~~
ga2arch
[https://www.pushbullet.com/](https://www.pushbullet.com/) (scroll till the
end of the page, it works in the browser too)

~~~
johnchristopher
Well, thank you. The first minutes of usage are pretty cool, it seems to be a
keeper.

------
curtis
Matching people to jobs. The current way we do this definitely sucks, but
nobody seems to be able to fix it.

~~~
enraged_camel
What would a "fix" look like?

------
Houshalter
All things that require getting other people to simultaneously change to a new
standard. E.g. things with lock-in or network effects. They are almost always
suboptimal in some significant way, but no one can do anything about it. This
seems to be the root of a lot of the problems posted here.

------
edavis
Health insurance. All the terms (co-pay, co-insurance, deductible, premium,
etc.) with non-obvious meanings. The delicate dance between me, the insurer,
and the health provider when a bill needs to be paid. The whole thing feels
scuzzy.

I would probably be more proactive about seeing a dentist or getting a
physical if I knew I didn't have the headache of dealing health insurance on
the other side of it.

And this is with good (I think) employer-provided health insurance! I can't
even imagine the situation on the individual market.

------
Artemis2
Employers/job research websites that require to provide a GitHub account. If
you never pushed commits onto GitHub, you can basically kill yourself.

------
CmonDev
1\. HTML (no fashionable crap like Bootstrap or flexbox is capable of giving
me somethong as simple as XAML's grid, also dozens of quirks -
[http://wtfhtmlcss.com](http://wtfhtmlcss.com)).

2\. JavaScript (not just dynamic but weak as well + dozens of quirks -
[http://wtfjs.com](http://wtfjs.com)).

3\. Node.js and its hype, but at least I can avoid it.

~~~
sehr
Node.js is so last year.

But in all honesty, it's transformed browser development. Common JS is
everywhere now

~~~
na85
>Common JS is everywhere now

That's not a good thing.

~~~
sehr
Yeah, standardization & being able to use the largest package manager on the
planet really blows!

...

Ah nevermind, I can see you're _very_ enthusiastic about anything anti-
javascript. Carry on

------
tester88
I completely agree with your DMV comment. I'd love it for someone to take a
good look at DMVs across the country, and see what works and what doesn't. Can
things be digitized that haven't? Can processes be split based on time
(efficient, quick tasks vs. longer discussions)?

I fear going to the DMV, but why should this be?

~~~
sejje
I mostly fear the resentful attitude and poor treatment I receive from
employees there.

I'm rarely treated like a person, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a DMV
employee smile.

The DMV where I currently live, however, has eliminated wait times to
basically nil, and that's the complaint I hear most often.

~~~
freehunter
I recently moved to a new state for the first time, and I have a complaint
about the DMV here: they move too quick. Well, actually the real complaint is
the amount of paperwork. It was about five minutes from the time I got the
paperwork to get a new driver's license to the time I was called up. I just
didn't have the paperwork done. So I was standing at the counter filling it
out, slowing down those behind me.

The biggest thing that would help, in my experience, is designing a DMV
website that accurately points you to the right paperwork and lets you at
least fill it out online or print it out at home to fill out on your own time.
Having to go there and do paperwork just takes too much time.

The wait is bad. But even if there's no wait, the paperwork makes sure there
will be some delay.

------
Kroem3r
The failure of Democracy to scale.

More specifically, the failure of people who would have common cause within
some topic to actually come together over that cause and effect a change.
Instead, people seemingly fall victim to 'wedge issues', reactionary
prejudices, and etc.

------
zupatol
The way the internet is addictive. I still haven't found the discipline to
stop wasting time.

~~~
sehr
I've found this plugin showing your exact age to be pretty helpful. Shows up
on the new tab page

[https://github.com/maccman/motivation](https://github.com/maccman/motivation)

~~~
Houshalter
That is way too many significant digits. Also no instructions on how to
install it.

~~~
sehr
It's just a plugin, go the chrome app store

------
slurry
e-Readers - Kindle DX too awkward, old-tech; other readers can't handle PDFs
worth a damn.

------
pavlov
Computers, tablets and phones. I'd like to spend less time peering at these
backlit screens, wiggling fingers at primitive input devices.

If only they weren't so necessary to get anything done at the speed or scale
that is expected today.

------
scrollaway
Some ubiquitous, very hard-to-replace technologies which are currently closed
down and leading us to a very, very dangerous place.

Namely: Messaging; third party authentication on the web...

------
chatmasta
Learning. Why does it take so long?! Specifically, language learning. I wish I
could plug a USB drive into my skull and download the ability to speak a new
language.

------
hernantz
Having to connect to Facebook to get the user relationships. I would love
something like Mozilla Persona but where you specify what connections to
share.

------
devicenull
IPMI firmware. It's insecure, unusable garbage.

------
iterationx
Refrigerator shelves

------
porter
comcast.

------
comrade1
Fellow programmers that don't use an IDE and insist on vim or emacs..

I often work on large projects with dozens of programmers and the developers
that don't use an IDE are very small-thinking. They don't seem to know any
libraries besides the base libraries and can't integrate large systems
together.

They're fine for writing algorithms but beyond that they slow everyone else
down.

~~~
comrade1
I wonder why the downvotes? This is based on observation on large-team
projects. Maybe you have a different insight?

~~~
e15ctr0n
I didn't downvote you but I'd honestly like to ask why you think that
integrating large libraries would speed you up instead of increasing the bloat
of the code base?

~~~
comrade1
Just the reality of the projects. Just doing something simple like database
access from a java project, or matrix math in a python projects, you're going
to use a library.

------
comrade1
I've never had a problem at the DMV in CA when I lived there. It was one of my
better experiences with the government. The USPS is great too. Even my
experience with the IRS has been great - they saved me many thousands of
dollars by pointing out that I put some income under the wrong category.

My current frustration is cablecom.ch here where I live in Switzerland. They
have two completely different billing systems for their cable tv and for their
internet. I didn't realize it but you have to pay for cable tv even if you
don't have a television in order to get internet (125 mbit down, 10mbit up).
Because I thought that they were billing me incorrectly I fought with them
until it almost went to collections before someone explained the situation.

I'm about to move to Zurich where I'll have gigabit internet through swisscom
(telecom), so screw cablecom and their screwy billing system.

~~~
comrade1
One quick follow-up... Despite good experiences with the IRS I have to say
that the u.s. tax code is majorly fucked up. We spend $3K - $7K/year to have
our taxes done by a competent accounting company and they usually end up
around 20+ pages in length, and because taxes are lower in Switzerland than in
the u.s. we end up paying u.s. taxes despite not living there for 6 years.

US citizenship is like a virus - it infects people that aren't even american
if you, for example, marry an american or have a child in the u.s. you have to
start reporting your bank account information to the u.s.

I really wish someone would look out for us expats in congress, but of course
there's no incentive to do so. We're just normal people, not fabulously
wealthy. We live in the most expensive country in the world and still end up
sending money to the u.s.

------
WorldWideWayne
Geopolitics and politics in general. Money.

