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Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you've used in the last week?
15 points by throwaway0255 on June 17, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments


Excel for Mac. For the life of me I can't understand why Microsoft takes a beautiful piece of software and transforms it into something utterly unworkeable.

Besides the fact that the ribbon and menu structures are completely different, I find myself screaming at my mac on a daily basis "What the fuck do you think the 'C' in CSV stands for? I'll give you one hint, Excel for Mac: it doesn't stand for 'Semicolon'!"

Still better than Numbers for Mac, though.


Character Separated Variables


Snapchat. If I have 10-20% battery on my iPhone 6S, it’s a risky proposition to open Snapchat as it will kill the battery many times just by opening the app.

It’s such an atrociously coded POS, and I say this as someone who spent a significant amount of time reverse engineering it. The performance of basic actions, like opening the app, is abysmal and unnecessarily resource intensive. It’s infuriating that a public company with a massive valuation cannot produce better engineered software than the Snapchat app.

I also have trouble understanding the thought process behind their latest UI revamp, specifically merging stories and chats into the same screen. It’s so user hostile and was met with such hatred, I’m surprised they haven’t rolled it back. Fundamental UI changes to mature products are dangerous, and often the negative effects of the changes don’t manifest themselves for 6-12 months after introducing them, at which point it’s too late.

FWIW I hardly ever use Snapchat now (less than once a day) though I never used it much anyway. It also seems like far fewer of my friends are posting stories on Snapchat, and far more are posting them on Instagram.


I made an account just to answer this - ServiceNow.

Uuuugh.


I'm curious. Can you share any specifics?


Sharepoint administration thingy. Don't know too much but had to follow some setup steps. So you open a program in Windows to do admin, launches an IE and logs you in using AD. You are not allowed to log out and log in as someone else. And once you are inside it's pretty hard to navigate.

At one point, there was a popup with a link to a page that you cant get to via the menu system, so had to type that URL from a screenshot someone luckily took. There is a weird program for configuring some parts of it where you have to paste bits of XML into boxes with no confirmation you did it right, other than something else not working later on. Oh yuck.

This is worst from a UX perspective. I am making no remarks on the underlying tech which is quite useful for us.

Second worst is google sites.


Hulu's client for Apple TV. It's like a UI nightmare.

"Lets make things as unintuitive as possible, people will love the "unique" vibe." - Hulu probably


Whatever software Pizza Hut used in the 90’s for their antique terminals to take orders and serve as cash registers. It was so slow, you could watch individual characters draw and clearing the screen was a multi-second operation. Oh and it used cryptic mnemonics.


The software for my 'smart' tv. Restarts constantly to free up memory, apps take forever to load, switching between apps is a pain. I've resorted to using my ps4 if I want to watch Netflix.


Xcode - watch it freak out over clicking 'Upload to app store'


WordPress, and its menagerie of terrible plugins.


While WordPress plugins certainly differ vastly in terms of quality there's a fair number of pretty good ones for most use cases.

What don't you like about WordPress? It's not perfect but as far as content management systems go I'd say it fares pretty well, especially when compared with alternatives such as TYPO3 (which is very powerful but also an utter usability nightmare).


Liferay


IBM's Rational Team Concert. I haven't used a worse version control system in my entire life.


The ancient travel booking app we started using after the acquisition. SAP monstrosity that feels twenty years old.


Supermarket self checkout machines.


Trinet company expensing app


Python.


I'm curious: do you mean the language itself, one of the main implementations (e.g. CPython), the inevitable business facing big-ball-of-mud proof-of-concept miasma that's ended up running in production [1], or the packaging ecosystem?

[1] this one isn't really Python's fault, it's arguably a feature of Python having a relatively low barrier of entry for people to hack together valuable balls of technical debt.


SAP


IBM DataStage (Shit-age)


Neto (neto.com.au)


mysql workbench


Why? I use MySQL Workbench occasionally and it's good enough to get the job done and doesn't crash or anything on me.


Banking app


Roku.


Stubhub.


Apple News




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