Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 261 posts

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#131

Post by wakkaflokka »

robpal wrote: post #96

Nvidia GPU drivers and CUDA installations on Linux. Got better recently but I've spent many nights fixing these installs, wrestling with nouveau etc. Compilation of deep learning libraries from source on Windows -- don't do it. Tikz -- LaTeX drawing "language". The images produced can be stuninngly beatiful, but the manual has 1200+ pages and it takes forever to become productive. If only journals accepted hand-drawn…

This, this, this. I needed to run some code that was only compatible with an older version of tensorflow. Figuring out how to get the proper Nvidia drivers, CUDA version, etc. was an absolute and utter nightmare.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#132

Post by Crazyontap »

antioedipus wrote: post #85
Crazyontap wrote: post #11

I apologize for saying this in advance but I'd have to say for me it's GIMP. Even after all its feature and popularity I find it extremely hard to use and often end up wasting hours trying to create a simple graphic. As a last resort I always end up booting Windows just to use Photoshop to do the same. I have been trying to move away from Windows to linux and so far I'm super happy with everything. But Photoshop is t…

It’s interesting you say that, because I find myself to be quite productive in GIMP. I think the basic set of tools are pretty easy to use, and the one or two other windows you need open (like the tool-specific settings) are also pretty understandable. When I stumble upon something new I often find pretty good official docs on the topic.

I don't know man maybe you're right.. But just today I had to edit a small screenshot and draw an arrow from text to a button and after trying all sorts of things like downloading scm scripts from defunct sites to reading two9 tutorials I couldn't do it. Maybe I lack knowledge to understand it. I kinda wasted more than 20 minutes and still don't know how to make arrow. Would take me 10s to do it in PS (plus boot time of Windows).

Regardless I do appreciate the hard work the guys have put in. I feel like such an ingrate to make comments like this about free software. I guess it's time to find an online course and learn it properly and if I still don't get it then that's that.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#136

Post by 1MachineElf »

bartread wrote: post #37

Microsoft 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…

laughs in Lotus Notes

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#137

Post by darrelld »

isoprophlex wrote: post #22

MS Sharepoint takes the cake. Impossible to navigate, hysterically difficult to use for storing and maintaining content repositories / wiki's. Also the outlook/skype/teams/lync universe of communication tools is laughably inconsistent, it's very difficult for me to do very simple tasks in these tools.

I burned 4 years making SharePoint intranet sites inside a big corporation. None of those skills transferred to modern development.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#138

Post by guiambros »

sshd on Synology NAS [1].

It took me two weeks of troubleshooting, cross-compiling binaries and reverse engineering the source code, until I figured out that I wasn't doing anything wrong - Synology had actually changed their version of sshd to add all sorts of proprietary crap [2].

Another one was the "Mouse battery low" alerts on Gnome under Ubuntu [3]. The root cause was in upowerd, but Gnome developers could have applied more sane defaults (e.g., no need to show the same alert several times per day, and even worse considering they don't go away unless you click to dismiss). Certainly not 100 hours, but much more time than I'd like.

[1] https://serverfault.com/questions/458553/cant-log-in-via-ssh...

[2] https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/

[3] https://wrgms.com/disable-mouse-battery-low-spam-notificatio...

Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

#139

Post by tjalfi »

bartread wrote: post #37

Microsoft 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…

If you have any third-party Outlook add-ins enabled, you might try disabling them.

There are a lot of poorly written add-ins out there.

Post reply on HN