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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?

#41

Post by mojuba »

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 perfectionist who regularly checks the SVG sources generated by Inkscape, then... you may develop insomnia. The bloody thing will stuff the file with garbage by some 90%, and will get all your coordinates un-rouned to some unreasonably distorted numbers. No, it's not the "floating point thing", it's worse. A few times I ened up writing up the SVG file by hand from scratch, while checking it in the browser. Inkscape is outrageously bad.

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

#43

Post by Minor49er »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #14

Jira and confluence

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 why blame wasn't supported. Also there was the time they displayed a huge ascii rainbow logo every time you pushed a commit, which is pretty distracting, considering you're expecting to find info related to your push while you're working (you had to turn off this info altogether to stop seeing this logo). I could go on, but basically, Atlassian isn't terribly interested in your productivity.

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

#44

Post by paulryanrogers »

cdubzzz wrote: post #9

Perhaps a loose interpretation of “wasted”, but multiple different games have wasted a lot of time I would otherwise have spent doing more productive things. E.g. currently I have a side project that is actually really interesting to me but I have been spending my limited free time (with a toddler and an infant to keep up with) playing Deus Ex Mankind Divided. I may not end up spending an actual 100 hours in it, but…

Try to give yourself some slack. I too enjoy those games and have a toddler and an interesting side project. What works for me is to let myself unwind with some game time. And similarly reframe any time put into the side project as a win, even just a few minutes.

While I do get a rush from being productive it can be exhausting to always be 'on'. Games are one way to turn 'off', bring some variety to life, and experiment without guilt. Just remember that you don't have to finish the game or win every match.

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

#45

Post by ytch »

14k12j41j211 wrote: post #10

LaTeX. Compiler errors, add-ons from the 80s, and unhelpful defaults. No problem to write Chinese chara… oh, in this environment? Sorry. C++ compiler (or even better: linker) errors. They are just not meant to be read by humans, lacking any pointers on what's really the issue.

Also the Makefile. I still cannot write customized Makefile for my side project now

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

#46

Post by cam_l »

Stevvo wrote: post #8
mikecsh wrote: post #5

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

I second that. I loose 5 to 10 minutes every time I want to change a network setting. No idea how it got messed up so bad. What used to be two mouse clicks away from the desktop in XP is now hidden away by the "settings" app that doesn't contain any settings at all.

Funny thing is, the real settings app in windows is still more or less the same as xp and still just two clicks away. I think they just put the new fake settings app in there to fool people.

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

#47

Post by Random_ernest »

probably_wrong wrote: post #13

Program that saved me 100 hours: using LaTeX to write a scientific paper. Program that wasted me 100 hours: using LaTeX to make the poster for said scientific paper. LaTeX is great for when you need to focus on your content and don't have much time to spend on the presentation. However, once the presentation is the entire point , LaTeX is not the right tool. Well, except if you like boring posters.

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.

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

#48

Post by luspr »

laurentl wrote: post #2

Microsoft Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word). I lost count of the number of days I spent trying to make my presentations and documents look good (which for me means pixel perfect). To be clear, this isn’t a failing of the software per se. PowerPoint is powerful and lets you do a lot of stuff, but I took desktop publishing lessons in high school, and I’m a bit obsessive to start with. I just have to have everyth…

At my current company, Powerpoint is used as the main medium for communication and reporting. Powerpoint slide decks are even considered some form of documentation by many, even though they are not really suited for that: Bullet points instead of coherent prose and explanations, ambiguity on the audience of the presentation (internal vs customer), general clunkiness of a ppt files. For many projects, documentation is just a shared directory with a number of powerpoint files from various stages of the project. I hate it and I want to change it, but I am still new to the organization and this behavior is deeply ingrained.

Besides that, Powerpoint is pretty good if you actually want to do a presentation.

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

#49

Post by agseward »

bartread wrote: post #37

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…

Ah, I see you have never had the pleasure of using Lotus Notes. These problems might seem insignificant in comparison.

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

#50

Post by zentiggr »

bartread wrote: post #37

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 works anymore.

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