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Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
71–80 of 261 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#72At this point, Chrome, VSCode or Eclipse. I can't open all 3 in my laptop. All these 3 consuming soo much CPU. At this point, Opera is better and instead of VSCode going back to sublime and I have a terminal window separately open.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#73Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.
Compared to what?
Google Sheets and Apple Pages/Keynote, for me. They work so much better. I don't have any facts or list of features to back this up, they are just less stressful to use and don't bother me about licenses or corrupt files.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#74MUDs, in my teens.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#75Factorio? 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.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to what?
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 summary, build a pipeline for data where I see intermediate values for every step for every data point. I might be an exception but I sometimes even copy data from an SQL client to Excel to drill into it.
Or Access? Entire departments of non-technical people are running on this stuff.
If Office didn't provide anything of value nobody would use it.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#77At this point, Chrome, VSCode or Eclipse. I can't open all 3 in my laptop. All these 3 consuming soo much CPU. At this point, Opera is better and instead of VSCode going back to sublime and I have a terminal window separately open.
How many windows/tabs do you have open? I often have two WebStorm/IntelliJ windows, VSCode, a dozen Chrome tabs, and at least one Electron application open (usually Slack) and it's not too bad on the CPU.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#78Microsoft 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…
The new web-based Outlook 365 is a lot better, but still quite buggy and massively lacking compared to Fastmail.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#79Python Net-SNMP. Python GPG. My Python ecosystem as I drag it from place to place. I ask myself why I do this, frequently. In the distant past, Solaris 9 for x86 on a laptop. I was younger (and dumber) then. Took much longer than 100 hrs and aged me beyond death.
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Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#80PVCS, a versioning system so weird and inconsistent that developers actively tried to hide source code from the repository managers. When we announced a migration to subversion, project managers were literally standing in line begging to be the guinea pig for testing the migration procedure.
Some of its many random crimes againt humanity:
* Delete irrecoverably obliterates a file from history.
* The function that you should use instead of delete is almost impossible to find.
* If you do use that function, it is so buggy it causes corruption in your database, effectively obliterating the whole project.
* Acces rights management is insane. Never seen anything like it. It took 20 minutes of calculating effects from interfering rules to give someone access to a file without removing some other random person's access rights.
* Gui looks like the win31 era, and is so bad people prefer to manually update the database. Which was more trustworthy anyway.
* Multiple tree structures representing data blobs. Only one represents files. It is possible for the later part of a checkout to accidentally overwrite the early part.
* I've witnessed a team spending 6 months merging 2 weeks of development. 100 hours doesnt come close to the time wasted.
* Storage is an oracle db for metadata, and a file system for data. No deltas, changing 1 byte in a 1gb file writes out the whole gb.
* Commits over multiple files are not atomic, but the gui tries to pretend otherwise.
Now the weird thing was, it was so bad, management did not actually believe a product could be this big of a waste. Even when multiple developers gave it as a reason for leaving the company, they were brandished as whiners and no attempt to even validate the truth of the statement was made. Software stockholm syndrome is actually a thing.