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Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
111–120 of 261 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#112Microsoft Outlook, no question: - It hangs all the time for a few seconds at a time, - The search is moronic (how about you look on the server and on my computer at the same time instead of hanging for a while and then displaying that dumbass message offering the option to search on my computer instead when there's a problem with the connection?), - Switching to the unread message view regularly results in a progress…
MS Windows, any version except 3.1 or earlier. MS Outlook, MS Word, MS Excel, McAffe crap, KDE, Gnome, Pulseaudio, CMake (you don't need to configure anything).
Android any version. MS would be proud to have the same amount of brain damage as in Android. Any Google software.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#113Microsoft Windows. I lose 10-20 minutes 1-5x a day just logging in to Windows in the NHS...
And then when you just want to shut down your laptop so you can put it away but Windows insists on spending 20 hours installing updates first...
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#114Slack: It refuses to accept that it is a webapp, so even though firefox fully supports the relevant audio/video api:s I need to open another browser or fiddle around with XWayland (electron/chrome does not support wayland) just to be able to use it. Microsoft Teams: Same as above, but with multiple login prompts each time. Jira/Confluence: I swear every click/hover requires a network roundtrip to the server because t…
Making a more usable Jira must be a potential billion dollar business. Outside it support/development It's used by many orgs because for their vague use cases nothing else is available.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#115Factorio? More seriously, the absolute worst developer experience I've ever had was a weird proprietary environment called "OpenAT" for a mobile module system. Admittely we were in the beta programme because we needed features, but every new firmware update would fix some features of the operating system and break others . At one point while trying to debug terrible sound we noticed that the volume control wasn't at…
Factorio is great, I don’t see it as a waste! It’s given me a new respect for logistics and advanced planning. I think the whole idea is a massive exercise in programming, producing functions, changing structures and then debugging the problem/expanding the bottle neck. But yeah it’s still a game.
This is why I avoid the more complex games where you build things (Factorio, Kerbal space program, etc.) Playing them scratches some of the same itches I get from writing software. So I avoid playing them and re-direct that energy into using an actual programming language to build a real thing.
There are upsides and downsides. The challenges in a game are designed to be overcome, but the satisfaction of solving real problems is even better than solving puzzles in-game.
Sometimes the parallels for me are uncanny. I'm faffing about with OpenSSL right now and it feels like nothing so much as a badly designed game sub-system. Can somebody please fix OpenSSL so I can get back to the core game please? :)
I used to say that Unity3D is Minecraft for programmers.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#116Microsoft 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…
At my current company, Powerpoint is used as the main medium for communication and reporting. Powerpoint slide decks are even considered some form of documentation by many, even though they are not really suited for that: Bullet points instead of coherent prose and explanations, ambiguity on the audience of the presentation (internal vs customer), general clunkiness of a ppt files. For many projects, documentation is…
On the flip side, I've noticed PowerPoint can bring immense efficiency gains to environments where the standard is to write to a detailed report for every little thing. You don't need a detailed user guide of 20 pages of text if a few ppt do the same job.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not using them. Its amazing what you can accomplish with a plain text editor and your brain. Ever seen a presentation that didn’t rely on PowerPoint? It’s such a refreshing thing to witness. How many Excel “applications” have you used that actually worked as intended consistently and weren’t just a giant time suck that would be better spent building a simple form over data app? Ask yourself this: When was the last ti…
Tell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX? Sure, designers create beautiful presentations outside PowerPoint, but I can grab master slides, plomp down the stuff that I wrote in a plain text file and bam - presentation ready in 10 minutes. Excel - I'm a programmer but even I use Excel for quick data tasks - cleanup, remove duplicates, create histogram and su…
> Tell me how you format your PhD thesis in a plain text editor without wasting countless hours on LaTEX?
I've never written a thesis (at all, let alone for a PhD), but my impression from people who have is that the academic institution typically already has a LaTeX .sty or template or whatever, so literally all you're doing is writing content (and the minimal amount of markup necessary for document structure).
That said, I can see how this might quickly go sideways as soon as you start using TikZ, or if you do indeed have to create your own style (though in the latter case the defaults seem reasonable, and indeed seem common if the numerous academic papers I've read over the years are any indication). I've written my fair share of technical documentation with LaTeX and it can definitely be a rabbit hole, albeit usually a self-inflicted one.
And that's definitely true about Excel and Access. Virtually every company has at least one Excel spreadsheet or Access database that's effectively mission-critical, lol.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#118Factorio? More seriously, the absolute worst developer experience I've ever had was a weird proprietary environment called "OpenAT" for a mobile module system. Admittely we were in the beta programme because we needed features, but every new firmware update would fix some features of the operating system and break others . At one point while trying to debug terrible sound we noticed that the volume control wasn't at…
Factorio is great, I don’t see it as a waste! It’s given me a new respect for logistics and advanced planning. I think the whole idea is a massive exercise in programming, producing functions, changing structures and then debugging the problem/expanding the bottle neck. But yeah it’s still a game.
True. Factorio shows how complicated and power wasting logistics are. And it's already generous enough by not having items that can expire, it makes logistics exponentially harder
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#119The AWS Management Console.
Thank you. It blows my mind how rarely I see anyone talk about what an utter disaster of a product this frontend is.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#120Gmail.
At some point they redesigned the UI and it's been a horrible experience since. It hasn't wasted 100 hours, but it certainly feels like it: - It takes multiple tries to delete files or select them as read. If you select the options to mark as read, or delete a message. For some reason it 'forgets' that I've done this when I exit the browser, and so I usually have to perform this operation at least twice. - There's some sort of annoying animation that pops up when the inbox loads. Why?