Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

Post by vectorboost » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 10:13 AM UTC

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what I want to do, skip through a Youtube video for the pertinent parts, discover that the youtube video is for an outdated version, google again, yaddy yadda yadda.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…

Post by dunefox » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

badpun wrote: post #190

Windows 10. Mostly the forced updates and the fact that it randomly turns the laptop on at night (to check for updates?) and spinning fans wake ME up, resulting in worse productivity the day after due to interrupted sleep.

Post by tetris11 » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 10:18 AM UTC

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…

Post by tetris11 » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 10:22 AM UTC

j7ake wrote: post #181

Random_ernest wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Post by tetris11 » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 10:27 AM UTC

Engineering-MD wrote: post #75

pjc50 wrote: 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.