Without a blink, McAfee. This abomination has the ability to put more than decent computer into a miserable slug. I cannot imagine how much my client would have saved in productivity from all its employees and contractors if that thing was uninstalled.
Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
81–90 of 261 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#82PVCS, 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…
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#83At work: saltstack - a machine provision framework that's trying hard to sound cute (pillar? grain? what the hell are they?) while making you write jinja templates which generate a yaml file while calling arbitrary python functions in a remote server, which is then sent to another remote server to be transformed into a sequence of commands in arbitrary order. Good luck debugging anything.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#84Microsoft 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…
10s of thousands of emails? Not slow.
Hangs for a few seconds? Not in my experience.
Whole series vs a single meeting? Only when editing, which makes sense. Opening to grab the conference ID? I don't get asked that question.
I've had to use Outlook in some way for the last 20 years, and I just live with it, but I'm also saying... what you describe hasn't been normal for me for a long time, at a lot of different companies. Maybe it's something to do with whoever runs your Exchange..?
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#85I 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 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.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#86Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#87Earlier 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…
Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#88Re: Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
#89MS 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.