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Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?

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

#251

Post by copperx »

zentiggr wrote: post #54
mr_overalls wrote: post #36

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.

The sad thing is that LaTeX can be quite temperamental with image placement too.

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

#252

Post by copperx »

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.

I've disabled all the common wakeup culprits (mouse, network, and USB activity waking up the computer), and while it has made things significantly better, I am still sometimes greeted in the morning by a powered on PC. And the wakeup log isn't helpful at all. It's driving me up the wall.

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

#253

Post by copperx »

knowyourleadcom wrote: post #210

Windows, all of it. Random hard drive spin and you think to yourself maybe all computers are like this? Maybe the 1000$ I spent on. A laptop wasn’t good enough? And then you go back to your 200$ Linux laptop and get things done.

Hard drives shouldn't spin anymore; it's 2020.

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

#254

Post by bkovacev »

guiambros wrote: post #239
bkovacev wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing your overall experience with synology? I'm planning on purchasing one for my home and all the reviews are positive, but I'm always eager to hear the bad side.

Despite my misgivings with some of their practices (e.g., modified sshd [1], hardcoded telnet password [2]), for the most part I'm very satisfied with their product and frequently recommend it to friends and family. You may need to jump through some hoops to get the GPL code, but their product is (or was? it has been a while since I last played with their source code) reasonably open and full-featured, and works nice…

Thank you so much for the thorough response! I read through your articles and then the rest of the blog post as well. On a side note, blog more, on the topic - you have convinced me to grab them!

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

#255

Post by benibela »

pchanda wrote: post #67
benibela wrote: post #65

All my own open-source projects. Thousands of hours wasted

I would like to hear your thoughts on why you would think they were wasted.

Because I never benefited from them.

And they are too niche (Pascal, LaTeX, XQuery), so I did not learn anything of relevance.

And all that programming has high opportunity costs and physical costs (back pain, worsening eyesight, vitamin D deficit).

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

#256

Post by platform »

react native packaging into an Android app. More specifically: the @react-native-community/cli followed by metro bundler.

Every single time I have to upgrade react-native, I have no problems with the code base,

but with these horrible 'put a js config file here', put 'node_modules' there, set environment variable this way -- kind of tools.

This is approximately equivalent in frustration, trying to build a Linux-kernel with a new network-interface driver in early 90s.

..may be even worth than that.

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

#259

Post by kbr2000 »

yellowapple wrote: post #109
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…

This is always surprising to hear, because for me GIMP is substantially more intuitive and productive and easy than Photoshop ever was. Maybe things have changed lately, but every time I've tried to use Photoshop my eyes glossed over, whereas whenever I fire up GIMP I'm pretty quickly able to figure out how to do something. This is especially true with "single window mode" enabled (which pulls those weird sidebar win…

Yes, it's called the "baby duck syndrome" [0], and it's stopping lots of professionals from even looking up when it comes to trying something different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_d...

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

#260

Post by kbr2000 »

rawgabbit wrote: post #150

Not technically a program. But what we call “Agile” where I work wastes one third of my day. It is essentially a way to paper over incompetence. Didn’t make deadline? Feature is unusable? Need to revisit how we are doing Agile again. Plus more meetings are needed. Never mind the fact Albert Einstein cannot follow the train of thought of many of our product owners and scrum masters.

Lol, amen to that. A popular management fad. People suddenly start to feel important when they get labels like that stuck onto them. Oh boy...
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