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Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

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171–180 of 261 posts

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

#171

In recent times, Angular. It’s utter rubbish and needlessly complex for doing even the smallest of things.

I'm curious, can you share an example of what you mean? My experience has typically been the opposite.

Don't know what exactly he means, but I have a similar feeling. My area is a performance-oriented close-to-metal backend, but when I have to do something in the UI I find it extremely opinionated and 90% of the code you read is to make angular work while 10% is for your actual task.

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

#173

Desktop Linux. Always something needs to be set up, always something breaking, always something needed to be fixed, always had a problem to solve.

I wish some major hardware vendor would just hire some engineers to keep up on OS maintenance for the hardware they provide. Maybe I would pay a small premium on the hardware for the service of maintaining the OS. /s

(Why I currently only run Linux on servers)

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

#174
post #38

Factorio? 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.

Somewhere on the back of an envelope I have written "bipolar train-sistor", as the start of an attempt to do computation in Factorio without using any of the features intended for the purpose like the circuit network. Never got round to actually building it.

(An unloaded train is clearly a "hole" charge carrier..)

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

#175

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…

The one feature I love about Outlook is that the inbox can be sorted by Received time, ascending. And the list focus defaults to the most recent entry. Every SMS and email client that has 'most recent on top' as the only view drives me f *g nuts. I want my oldest conversations on top so I can see which ones have been awaiting a response or are done and can be archived/deleted, but apparently that's not how anybody wo…

That’s a really great way to get to emails I’m going to try it

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

#176
post #154

Python. Mostly other people’s python, but also everything I’ve ever written in python.

My experience too, but I recovered when I stopped to make the code "pythonic". If you use it basically as C with automatic memory management, it's OK. But other people's python is still pythonic, of course.

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

#179
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.

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