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Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

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

#181

Post by j7ake »

Random_ernest wrote: post #47
probably_wrong wrote: post #13

Program that saved me 100 hours: using LaTeX to write a scientific paper. Program that wasted me 100 hours: using LaTeX to make the poster for said scientific paper. LaTeX is great for when you need to focus on your content and don't have much time to spend on the presentation. However, once the presentation is the entire point , LaTeX is not the right tool. Well, except if you like boring posters.

For me personally, my slides improved significantly when I started using Latex. Imo Latex forces you to give clean, concise presentations. If there is content that takes a lot of fiddling, your presentation is probably overloaded with things that won't reach the audience anyway.

You’ve never had to give a talk with a video inside ? Or have you gotten that to work in latex ?

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

#182

Post by secretsatan »

Balgair wrote: post #102
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…

I'll echo this. Every time I use GIMP, I have to google and re-google what I want to do, skip through a Youtube video for the pertinent parts, discover that the youtube video is for an outdated version, google again, yaddy yadda yadda. Even for something as simple as putting red text over an image, or cropping down a picture, it just takes forever to figure out the magic incantations to get google to return something…

Know what you mean, I rarely have to do image editing, if I can't do it in preview, I groan, because it usually means I have to go to GIMP and waste hours doing something that seems very simple. I think last time it was just adding a black border to an image, there seemed to be a border tool, but it insisted on making a picture frame effect and I could not understand why it just couldn't do a simple single colour border. And it seems slow, moving around the image, things like that, it should be far better.

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

#183

Post by schaum »

- Eclipse, Eclipse and Eclipse (at least till 2016 then I finally used IntelliJ) ... mainly the maven integration but to be honest everything, android and gradle integration was also just pain.

- Jira this splits up in 3 categories - because of project member think they need a complicated workflow, mostly in conjunction with time tracking - installation - integrating with other applications

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

#184

Post by franga2000 »

bflesch wrote: post #31
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…

There was recently a post on HN about a GIMP fork called glimpse which aims to improve UI/UX: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse or project page at https://glimpse-editor.org/

It's great to see that, but I doubt they can do much about the big UI issues, which come from the way GIMP's internals work. The fact that you still can't select more than one layer, not even to move them around, is a 100% deal-breaker for me and everyone I've shown GIMP to.

Fortunately, Krita has gotten extremely good, even for photo work. If anyone has a shot at clawing back some Adobe market share, it's then.

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

#185

Post by schaum »

rawgabbit wrote: post #150

Not technically a program. But what we call “Agile” where I work wastes one third of my day. It is essentially a way to paper over incompetence. Didn’t make deadline? Feature is unusable? Need to revisit how we are doing Agile again. Plus more meetings are needed. Never mind the fact Albert Einstein cannot follow the train of thought of many of our product owners and scrum masters.

Couldn't agree more. For simple 2 lines you sometimes need 4 Meetings without he whole team involved and not even discuss about the indentation.

But sometimes, it seems to work ...

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

#186

Post by altmind »

Docker. Images without command line tools(best practice!) Obscure init systems. Unmountable overlay FSes. Dangling images eating all the disk, not removable by prune. Root permissions everywhere and general necessity to debug images way too often. and looong checkout times for every image update.

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

#187

Post by franga2000 »

scoot_718 wrote: post #148
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…

Only problem with GIMP is their idiotic decision to split saving and exporting.

A bit unintuitive, yes, but it makes sense. In PS, if I save as PSD, do some work, save as PNG, do some more work and save again, it'll be saving into the PNG, not PSD, which will effectively make me lose my work.

Their "Export and overwrite" menu makes it very convenient to do quick edits where you only care about the raster, and the split avoids the above mentioned stupidity when working on bigger projects.

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

#189

Post by chaps »

throwaway_se099 wrote: post #179
chaps wrote: post #147

Surprised nobody's mentioned systemd yet! My worst experience was when I was on a cross-country train writing code for a project whose database was mysql. No internet, intentionally. Something happened with one of my inserts (can't remember what exactly) and I had to restart mysqld. Problem was, with the bad insert, mysqld took longer than 30s to start, which forced systemd to restart it because of a default, undocum…

> Nothing in the documentation hinted that this was a feature of systemd anywhere Nothing except three paragraphs in systemd.service(5) (TimeoutStartSec=, TimeoutStopSec=, TimeoutSec=), with references to systemd-system.conf(5) where the defaults are described. I wouldn't call that undocumented. Whether it should exist by default is another question; on balance, I'm glad it does.

This seems like the bug I was having at the time: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3912

Or this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/227017/how-to-chang...

Or this: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5773

Or: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3901

Or: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2047

I don't remember seeing any documentation at the time, but I'm clearly not the only one who's had issues with this exact problem. The last one has recent examples of people not being able to find it, and understandably so. Their documentation is shit, fullstop, and no reasonable service should restart in a loop by default after 90s. That's just asinine.

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