In the spirit of "Programs that saved you 100 hours?" ¹, - I'm curious to hear of experiences with software systems, languages, apps, or services that led you down an unproductive rabbit hole, only to come out at the other end (if ever) with not much to show for the effort.
Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
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Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#2Microsoft Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word). I lost count of the number of days I spent trying to make my presentations and documents look good (which for me means pixel perfect).
To be clear, this isn’t a failing of the software per se. PowerPoint is powerful and lets you do a lot of stuff, but I took desktop publishing lessons in high school, and I’m a bit obsessive to start with. I just have to have everything lined up and evenly spaced and just so. Which PowerPoint lets you do easily enough, but then you need to add another box to your diagram... and resize and reposition everything more or less manually.
Similar story for Word, which almost lets you do professional(ish) documents once you know where all the typesetting options are hidden. I’ve given up on Word for technical documents and now use Markdown + pandoc to convert to Latex and then pdf.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#3Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#4Microsoft Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word). I lost count of the number of days I spent trying to make my presentations and documents look good (which for me means pixel perfect). To be clear, this isn’t a failing of the software per se. PowerPoint is powerful and lets you do a lot of stuff, but I took desktop publishing lessons in high school, and I’m a bit obsessive to start with. I just have to have everyth…
TBH doing it all in LaTeX you end up down the same rabbit hole, looking for the One True Way to do this and that, at least for me. I do enjoy it a lot as it teaches me about typesetting internals, but it's not faster with one or the other technology.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#5Microsoft Windows. I lose 10-20 minutes 1-5x a day just logging in to Windows in the NHS...
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#6WYSIWYG editors...
worst: confluence, bottom: desktop office suites, still bad: google docs
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#7WYSIWYG editors... worst: confluence, bottom: desktop office suites, still bad: google docs
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Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#8Microsoft Windows. I lose 10-20 minutes 1-5x a day just logging in to Windows in the NHS...
I second that. I loose 5 to 10 minutes every time I want to change a network setting. No idea how it got messed up so bad. What used to be two mouse clicks away from the desktop in XP is now hidden away by the "settings" app that doesn't contain any settings at all.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#9Perhaps a loose interpretation of “wasted”, but multiple different games have wasted a lot of time I would otherwise have spent doing more productive things. E.g. currently I have a side project that is actually really interesting to me but I have been spending my limited free time (with a toddler and an infant to keep up with) playing Deus Ex Mankind Divided. I may not end up spending an actual 100 hours in it, but I did a few years back with its predecessor Human Revolution.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#10LaTeX. Compiler errors, add-ons from the 80s, and unhelpful defaults. No problem to write Chinese chara… oh, in this environment? Sorry.
C++ compiler (or even better: linker) errors. They are just not meant to be read by humans, lacking any pointers on what's really the issue.