HN Explorer

Ask HN: Things that suck?

34 points by jrudin ↗ HN
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.

101 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] thread
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.

tdaltonc
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...

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.
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.
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.
jonnathanson
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.
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/ 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.
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.
snihalani
How does craiglist shut down a service like padmapper?
sejje
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.

notduncansmith
+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.
[dead] 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.

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.

slurry
e-Readers - Kindle DX too awkward, old-tech; other readers can't handle PDFs worth a damn.
curtis
Matching people to jobs. The current way we do this definitely sucks, but nobody seems to be able to fix it.
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).

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.

matthewmacleod
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.
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

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.
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matthewmacleod
Don't be a smartass. Loads of things are annoying or rubbish, and the fact that people can get sick and die doesn't change that.
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[dead] dlsx
"Apps" - Nowadays every site I load asks me to INSTALL OUR APP! "Skip this page ?" "Are you sure you don't want the app?" Yes, I am fucking sure. My iPad has a fully capable web browser that displays graphic data 100% perfectly. Unless your app has a purpose other than being a native website, stop making your website an app. It's not an app, it's a fucking website in a wrapper and It ends up on the fourth or fifth page of my home screen.

A bookmark 99% of the time serves the purpose of these "apps" I am bombarded with. I don't want apps. This is just like the desktop in the early 90s. Make your website work in my browser, and bonus points if I can remember your web address without needing a bookmark.

When will people learn to stop blindly following trends that offer no benefit to the business or consumer??

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 [2]https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ [3]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.
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

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
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).

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.

na85
I think I can discern for myself whether I dislike the DOM or Javascript, thank you very much.
comrade1
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.
huhtenberg
Worse than PHP? :)
verelo
i wish i could vote this down
na85
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.

krapp
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.

dovel
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.
squiguy7
I am so happy I saw this post first. You made my Sunday.
rsp1984
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++.
dovel
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?

yellow_and_gray
Can you share more about what's stopping you from using other languages rather than Javascript?
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.

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

MrJagil
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.

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...)

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.
hugocaracoll
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.

[1] https://www.mbnet.pt/

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.