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.
Some ideas: The DMV, Internet Speeds/Connectivity, ISP Service, etc.
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.
The problem you probably have is with the DOM, not the language.
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.
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.
Though whenever the DOM gets involve, both break down into awkward messes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
[1]http://i.imgur.com/2XGei96.jpg [2]https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ [3]https://www.gnupg.org/
I've got C+R "cards" for my google acct and treasurydirect. And thats it.
A little more might be nice.
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.
Just wondering, why do you think power grids are so challenged?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
But in all honesty, it's transformed browser development. Common JS is everywhere now
That's not a good thing.
...
Ah nevermind, I can see you're very enthusiastic about anything anti-javascript. Carry on
I fear going to the DMV, but why should this be?
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.
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.
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...
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.
If only they weren't so necessary to get anything done at the speed or scale that is expected today.
Namely: Messaging; third party authentication on the web...
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 mileage may vary, but the best developers I've personally worked with all use Vim or Emacs.
By way of comparison, the IDE users (with some exceptions) are stuck when needing to accomplish anything not directly supported by the IDE.
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.
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.