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Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

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201–210 of 261 posts

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

#201

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…

You should give the online version at https://outlook.com a try. I've been using it since the corona outbreak and it's actually better than the desktop version imo.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Atlassian products in general. Jira has had a notorious bug for nearly a decade (still ongoing, I believe) that would delete a description/comment if you accidentally hit escape in the middle of writing it. Bitbucket also changed the term "blame" to "annotate" because "blame" was a strong word that hurts feelings (seriously, this is the reason) and didn't bother telling anyone until people started wondering w…

IntelliJ also uses annotate instead of blame.

Annotate is a valid git command though right?

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-annotate

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

#203

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…

My company has recently switched to G Suite from Office, and I'm actually starting to consider this as an actual perk of working somewhere, just to avoid Office (Outlook above all, but also Sharepoint, etc…).

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I love the spirit and motivation behind Office Libre, but Excel and Word just _work_ for most basic tasks and an amazing number of corner cases. Open-source products just don't even come close. The only tools people don't complain about are the ones that no one uses.

At least Libre Writer has sane ways to anchor a picture to a paragraph / section / page. I've lost my 100 hours trying to get Word to consistently place images in technical docs, only to wind up fighting some of the most unpredictable placement calculations I've ever encountered. I want to punch my screen right now just thinking about it.

I just gave up years ago and put all pictures inline.

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

#207
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This seems like the bug I was having at the time: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3912 Or this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/227017/how-to-chang... Or this: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5773 Or: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3901 Or: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2047 I don't remember seeing any documentation at the time, but I'm clearly not the only one who'…

This seems to be veering in the direction of the Land of Moved Goalposts and Non-Sequiturs, but I'm game for one more round, because lockdown.

It's rather unlikely that the first issue, which is an ordering problem during service shutdown, has much in common with timeouts during service startup, which you have described as your original issue.

The Stack Exchange question is a straightforward how-to for adjusting the timeouts.

5773 requests a clarification of the documentation of timeouts and signalling behavior.

3901 is a case of misplacing the timeout directive.

2047 is a sort of philosophical problem of reporting uniformity vs. consistency with manual configuration. The systemd team prefers the former, whereas I would prefer the latter for not violating the principle of least surprise, although I understand the reasons for choosing the first option.

Anyhow, I still don't see good support for your assertion of the complete lack of timeout documentation, just tangentially related distractions. A complex set of problems, and service management does qualify, will have edge cases, insufficiently clear documentation, and outright bugs, which is why software is never finished. Older init systems had all of these, but they didn't give you the tools to attempt to rectify the problems, so it was all more or less swept under the rug. Using a facile "shit, fullstop" characterization therefore tells me more about your views than the actual technical merits or documentation quality of systemd.

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

#208

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…

I do that too. Hardcoded defaults is a pain. I acctually like desktop Outlook and I wish it just froze in time forever so I don't have to relearn it. I hate when the UIs are changed and I have to relearn where all the buttons are in a program I don't really care much for.

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

#209
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the bug I was having at the time: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3912 Or this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/227017/how-to-chang... Or this: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5773 Or: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3901 Or: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2047 I don't remember seeing any documentation at the time, but I'm clearly not the only one who'…

This seems to be veering in the direction of the Land of Moved Goalposts and Non-Sequiturs, but I'm game for one more round, because lockdown. It's rather unlikely that the first issue, which is an ordering problem during service shutdown, has much in common with timeouts during service startup, which you have described as your original issue. The Stack Exchange question is a straightforward how-to for adjusting the…

The post is about how systemd wasted lots of time, in a thread about software that has wasted lots of time. The issues around bad documentation and the specific issue (the last one is probably the issue I had, but this was five years ago lol. Knowing me and arch linux, I probably didn't have the full man pages installed, so the cli tools were the only thing I had available.) wasted me a lot of time and very clearly others, and that's exactly the point of this discussion!

Hell, to troubleshoot that issue, I even ran something like a `find / -exec strings -a '{}' ; | grep timeout` and found nothing that ended up being helpful. But I absolutely had some form of documentation, again likely the last link I provided which isn't simply a philosophical issue when it provides misleading information that would have ultimately fixed the issue if it gave more informative output!

You admit yourself that the documentation can be insufficiently clear with bugs, and it's true: systemd happens to have lots of time killing bugs. The whole point of this thread.

You're missing the forest for the trees, friend.

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