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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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?

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.

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.

"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??

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.

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.

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.

Geopolitics and politics in general. Money.