Ask HN: Things that suck?
In your life what experience, product, service is just horrible? What is frustrating? What do you wish someone did better?
Some ideas: The DMV, Internet Speeds/Connectivity, ISP Service, etc. 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. As someone who grew up with C and C++ have to say that I rather like Javascript. Sure it has its hacks and edges but whenever I code stuff in it I find myself being about 5x more productive than using Java or C/C++. Why would your animosity be targeted at the language and the developers. The market wants what the market wants. Surely most of the time, in most cases, it is the client that signs off a design and a developer follows the brief? 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. No, my problem is definitely with the language. JavaScript has some PHP-level horrors in it, especially when it comes to type coercion. 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. I think I can discern for myself whether I dislike the DOM or Javascript, thank you very much. You only talk about client-side related features. Nothing about the language itself. I don't mean to be autistic - I now understand what you meant but it wasn't clear from the start of your post. I am so happy I saw this post first. You made my Sunday. Can you share more about what's stopping you from using other languages rather than Javascript? Worse than PHP? :) Sure. I'd rather use a PHP site with good, lightweight CSS than a site loaded down with AJAX and jQuery. Any day of the week, ESPECIALLY on mobile. 13-year-old kids still in high school styling themselves as "PHP Developers" is what gave PHP a bad rap. They're the reason PHP-Nuke existed. But novice developers produce mediocre code irrsepective of the language. I'm not saying it's the best thing ever created. I've never used PHP 5 but there's not really anything fundamentally wrong with PHP4 other than clunky syntax and stupid choices in naming some intrinsic functions. It's certainly easier to hang yourself with, say, C than with PHP. Syntactically, I would say javascript is better than PHP. PHP only recently got around to allowing array shorthand, and I don't even know if the most recent version has anything like js' object shorthand. The way javascript handles anonymous functions and closures is better too - it's just easier to write. Though whenever the DOM gets involve, both break down into awkward messes. In my experience AJAX is used a lot to do the opposite of 'loading down' a site. Often used for staggering page load - preventing a huge download time at first page load and means one page sites can be possible, with many images even, and not take 2 minutes to download on mobile. i wish i could vote this down 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. 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. 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. +1 to driving. It feels like such a waste of potentially productive time. You can't even use it to think out complex problems, because you have to pay attention to, yknow, driving. How does craiglist shut down a service like padmapper? Cease and desist. If you're arguing that they can't actually shut them down, I get that--but they denied access to their data. That's my major complaint--padmapper put a nice UI layer on craigslist data and they made them turn it off. 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. About the pseudo credit card, in Portugal (where I'm from) we have a system called mbnet [1] where any portuguese bank account owner may create a temporary credit card. I usually use it for buying things online. This card has some security restrictions: you can specify if it's going to be used for 1 or more transactions and the top amount of the transaction.
It works pretty well. You can buy pre-loaded credit cards at gas stations in the US, although I'm not sure how they work for online orders. Just fine, I've used temp cards several times for that exact use-case. 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. Thank you, I am not alone! I hope the madness will stop. 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. People use it because it's still a lot more well known, convenient, and ubiquitous than the alternatives (although that isn't saying much). I prefer Google Hangouts myself, but a lot of people I deal with are familiar with Skype, and don't seem to want to switch over. 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. When talking with a remote clients/offices, we've found 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. 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...) You can now use https://news.ycombinator.com/active to get around the penalty thing. 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. Check out 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. 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. Cool idea, but the interface is confusing me profoundly. When i Click on a story (and to a lesser extend, when i look at the front page) my eyes are zigzagging around trying to latch onto something, but everything seemingly craves my attention equally. Large headlines, up vote trackers and huge (semi-informative) pictures all over the place is really a bit too much. Make a list, have the photo the left of the headline, and maybe a blurb on the right or when hover-over. 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
[2]https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
[3]https://www.gnupg.org/ 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. Yeah I'm probably just overthinking this, although it could be a nice small project. 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. Thats a great point about California's water supply. Just wondering, why do you think power grids are so challenged? 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. 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. I happen to have a solution for this problem that this margin is too narrow to contain. I'm just going to start writing that in all of my math books. 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. 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. I'm not a lawyer but could something like temporary power of attorney be used here? 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). 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. 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. 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. https://www.pushbullet.com/ (scroll till the end of the page, it works in the browser too) Well, thank you. The first minutes of usage are pretty cool, it seems to be a keeper. Matching people to jobs. The current way we do this definitely sucks, but nobody seems to be able to fix it. What would a "fix" look like? 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. 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. Employers/job research websites that require to provide a GitHub account. If you never pushed commits onto GitHub, you can basically kill yourself. 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). 2. JavaScript (not just dynamic but weak as well + dozens of quirks - http://wtfjs.com). 3. Node.js and its hype, but at least I can avoid it. I don't really agree with any of these. JS and HTML are both pretty quirky - it's partially a legacy of their success and origins. But so are most languages - I don't really think that HTML, CSS or Javascript are particularly sucky. Node.js is so last year. But in all honesty, it's transformed browser development. Common JS is everywhere now >Common JS is everywhere now That's not a good thing. 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 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? I haven't been to a DMV since I took my driving test (a decade ago). I just go to the AAA. They can do almost anything a DMV can. I think that the relationship between the DMV and AAA is a great example of what can happen when government "services" are treated more like a platform and less like a service. The government specifies what government/citizen interaction needs to take place, private businesses can compete to fulfill that interaction as a service to citizens/customers. The biggest downside to government-as-a-platform is that the service providers my lobby to make that interaction more cumbersome than it needs to be in order to make themselves richer: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mill... 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. 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. 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. The way the internet is addictive. I still haven't found the discipline to stop wasting time. I've found this plugin showing your exact age to be pretty helpful. Shows up on the new tab page That is way too many significant digits. Also no instructions on how to install it. It's just a plugin, go the chrome app store e-Readers - Kindle DX too awkward, old-tech; other readers can't handle PDFs worth a damn. 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. 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... 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. 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. IPMI firmware. It's insecure, unusable garbage. Refrigerator shelves comcast. 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. Your point about inability to integrate large systems is the exact opposite of my experience. I find that Vim and Emacs users are the most proficient in using tools to build and integrate large systems. Most, again in my experience, know multiple languages, including shell scripting. They also are very comfortable with command line tools. This has significant benefits when turning a system over to the operations team. By way of comparison, the IDE users (with some exceptions) are stuck when needing to accomplish anything not directly supported by the IDE. I wonder why the downvotes? This is based on observation on large-team projects. Maybe you have a different insight? My experience is significantly different. I find that developers who use Vim and Emacs are generally more experienced and have chosen their tools with care. They understand the importance of simplicity in design. They don't pull in large libraries arbitrarily. They commonly write more efficient code to provide the same functionality, with less bloat. Your mileage may vary, but the best developers I've personally worked with all use Vim or Emacs. 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? 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. The love their plain-text notepads. Don't drag them into this century. This has not been my experience, even with Java. 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. 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. Geopolitics and politics in general. Money.
