Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

news.ycombinator.com

161–170 of 261 posts

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

#161

Gmail. 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. - The…

I switched back to the HTML version.

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

#162

The AWS Management Console.

AWS has had an unusual approach to console development. There seems to be an internal opinion that a software engineer can do the job of a frontend developer just fine. And a small percentage of them do an excellent job of just that, but the majority don’t. People are trying hard to address that, but it’s a lot of work.

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

#164

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…

It hasn't changed much in the twenty years since I last used it then.

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

#165
post #5

Microsoft Windows. I lose 10-20 minutes 1-5x a day just logging in to Windows in the NHS...

I remember one site where I would arrive in the morning and login. Then go downstairs, cross the street to Starbucks, queue up, buy a cup of coffee and if I was lucky the login would have finished by the time I got back.

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

#166
post #16
post #5

Microsoft Windows. I lose 10-20 minutes 1-5x a day just logging in to Windows in the NHS...

I hope the other side of this pandemic NHS finally get their computer system replaced and not reliant on a single proprietary OS or DB. I imagine if one were to add up all the estimated time wasted using that system and compare it to writing a client agnostic one from scratch it would probably turn out to be a massive saving.

I hope they don't try and do another massive centralised system. It failed before and will fail again.

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

#167

Windows as a porting target for desktop applications. I've written a few for work (using PyQt5), and about 10% of my effort typically goes into getting the application working on Linux. The other 90% goes into wrestling with Windows doing everything in its power to fucking ruin my week. Fman Build System (fbs) helps quite a bit, I've found, but there are still more often than not some really annoying rough edges (not…

Cross platform is always a pain, I suspect Avalonia will just present different problems.

I suspect the Sublime guys went the right way, have a very thin UI layer for each platform and a common backend.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love Outlook until my work switched over to Office 365 version of Outlook. Now it is driving me nuts. The small things such as the animations when switching between mail and calendar, the way it displays conversations, the way it searches. I could go on, but I think we are on the same sinking boat here.

I think you're right: company I'm with has been using Office 365 since I joined back in 2017. In many ways it's decent but Outlook is just full of small irritations that really start to add up when you find yourself having to spend a lot of time in it.

The last good version of Outlook was 2010. Ever since they re-wrote the UI form 2013 onward, it's got more progressively worse.

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

#169
post #41

In addition to the already mentioned MS Office pieces: • Android programming. Tried it once, wasted many days trying to make sure the app works on all phone models ranging from $10 to $1000. There were some hardware-related parts that are poorly standardized and abused by the manufacturers a lot. And yeah, the $10-$1000 range coverage is a bit too much for such a poorly designed platform. • Inkscape: if you are a per…

> Android programming.

Android Studio and Gradle can both die in a fire - how anyone manages to actually write a decent app with those two, is completely beyond me.

Post reply on HN