Where Planes Go to Die: A One Way Trip to the Mojave Boneyard (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scoutingla.com/where-planes-go-to-die-a-one-way-trip-to-the-mojave-boneyard/ <comment> tuna-piano For those interested in freely visiting somewhere like this, there are a few planes (including a 747) rotting on a plot of land in Bangkok. It's called the "Airplane Graveyard"[1,2].

When I went, a Mother+Son seemed to have the place fenced off, and asked for $6 (200 baht) to let me in. I happily paid and had a great time walking around, taking pictures, and climbing through the airplanes. It was fun climbing up the back of a 747, going up the stairs, hanging out in the cockpits, out doors, on wings, etc.

When I was there, there were no other tourists there (as I assume is usually the case). You have to be careful, as there are scraps and sharp things everywhere (though everything small seems to have been taken). One of the airplanes seemed to have someone (homeless?) sleeping in it, so I left it alone.

On the way out, the ~6 year old boy living there with his Mom asked me for another $6 before he unlocked the gate, but I told him I already paid. I argued for maybe 30 seconds and by chance another tourist showed up and the kid opened the gate for that guy and I left. Not sure what would have happened if the kid kept asking for money.

[1] [http://triphackr.com/visiting-the-airplane-graveyard-in- bang...](http://triphackr.com/visiting-the-airplane-graveyard-in-bangkok/)

[2] [https://www.wheresidewalksend.com/bangkok-airplane- graveyard...](https://www.wheresidewalksend.com/bangkok-airplane-graveyard/)

<comment><USER4> >Not sure what would have happened if the kid kept asking for money.

Depending on the situation bluffing may work.

Just name drop somebody "important".

Also learned this from... John McAfee:

Do not get out of the car at checkpoints/shakedowns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great photo series. It's worth noting that not _all_ of the planes are there permanently. Many are there in long-term storage and would be flyable with some maintenance.

<comment><USER6> I was going to add this as well. I have visited the Mojave airfield and "space port" a number of times, both when Rotary Rocket and Scaled Composites were active there and later as part of a group that was looking into wind turbine efficiency (there are big turbines up on the ridge to Tehachapi) A bunch of planes there have come off lease and are being held pending new leasing arrangements, those are basically ready to fly. Some have used up their cycle count (landings/takeoffs/pressurization/depressurization cycles) and act as spare parts for similar models still flying. One clue is the ones that have had their winglets removed are generally 'donor dollies' where the owner has started parting them out to recover what remaining value they have.

I would also love to crawl around the military depot in Arizona but so far have come up short on a good enough reason :-).

<comment><USER7> Given at least some of these aircraft have reached their usable lifecycle and presumably those stressed parts can't go back into similar aircraft at that point, why aren't the materials being recycled more?

Is it too costly to recycle these alloys? One might think that if aluminum drink cans are worthwhile recycling, more massive aircraft parts would also be profitable to recycle.

<comment><USER6> That is a good question, and it was the subject of a paper in 2007 ([http://www.phinix.net/services/Recycling/Recycling_Aluminum_...](http://www.phinix.net/services/Recycling/Recycling_Aluminum_Aerospace_Alloys.pdf)) which basically says that aircraft alloys have a lot of impurities to improve their toughness which makes it harder to recycle them into something useful.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, that's interesting. Although it seems to presume that the recycled aluminum alloys would go back into aircraft and thus would need further [relatively costly] processing/refining to remove impurities and meet modern specs.

However, unless expensive to process at all (recycle) they could be recycled for other uses --like park bench frames, ladders, food service furniture, new truck beds, camper tops, etc. I can see where cheap iron may be more economic than even recycled aluminum though.

<comment><USER6> It is a solid idea. One of the things I have done a little research on is the question of planned economic communities. One possible engine in that type of community would be recycling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be amazing if you could go there like pick-a-part for car parts and pick your own aircraft parts.

Some of those propellers and other parts would make amazing decor. The huge amounts of sheet metal could be put to good use too, I'm sure.

<comment><USER9> Aircraft junkyards are a thing - google "air salvage" and you'll find quite a few. Listed parts prices for usable parts are often high but they're usually friendly folks and could probably help you out with scraps. The Lowry air museum in Denver has a small sport aircraft built entirely of junkyard parts and flown by a private pilot for years in it, and I wish I could recall the name of it.

<comment><USER10> [http://nortonsalesinc.com/](http://nortonsalesinc.com/)

I know rockets have been built out of these salvaged parts. A lot of money has gone into developing some of them.

<comment><USER11> Wonder what this guy could do with access to salvage parts like that..

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia- india-41813389](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-41813389)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My brother as a kid found this on Google Earth or maybe even terraserver (which was an early host of satellite imagery of earth, I think from Microsoft) and obsessed over it forever.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Army has a boneyard in Northern California near the Nevada state line.

[https://goo.gl/maps/JnJBvefnT5G2](https://goo.gl/maps/JnJBvefnT5G2)

There's lots of M1 Abrams in storage there, as well as munitions in bunkers that were built for WW-II (to be clear - the munitions are pretty modern - <USER2> bunkers are the vintage part of that. Old/obsolete/unsafe munitions are disposed of.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Apologies for the extreme nerd pedantry, but...

When he gets into the TG 747, he emerges in First, and then later makes his way to Business, rather than Business then First as he describes. Also the seats he's describing as leather-covered are fabric upholstered. I was on one of these a few days ago, as TG are still flying them, and with the hard product shown.

</comment><comment><USER15> The featured C-133 propeller driven planes were death-traps when they were new, the chance of any of the ones in museums needing spare parts from the boneyard to make them air-worthy so we can see-off those pesky Russians is just not a good enough reason to hold on to these old air-frames. Yet they have kept them rather than put them through the recycling. Why hold onto these things for fifty years, do they have a procrastination problem?

Compared to the air force boneyard in Arizona - Davis Monthan AFB - <USER3> boneyard is miniscule so maybe they are doing a really good job of recycling all those 747s nobody needs and have their own reasons for keeping the junk. Fascinating the place may be, it could be tidier.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know how to access this, or if tours or gates are open to the public?

<comment><AUTHOR> The last line of the post states:

"The Mojave Boneyard is available for film shoots – send me an email if interested. Unfortunately, no tours are offered at this time, and the facility is strictly off-limits."

<comment><USER16> Thank you! Fascinating stuff, a shame there's no access but it makes sense for safety reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _American 9643, Tampa Tower, line up and wait Runway 01L_

A long time ago when I was a student PP, the standard terminology would have been "American 9643, Tampa Tower. Taxi to position Runway 01L and hold. Acknowledge hold" at any airport I ever flew out of.

Did this change in the 25 years or so since I last sat in the left seat or is it just the reporter's interpretation? Then again, over a couple decades, jargon can be expected to evolve...

</comment><comment><USER18> Just need some feral children chanting about Capn' Walker.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great photos, I'm so glad that they weren't posted on Instagram...

Nice round-up at the bottom of the page:

 _In the end, the Boneyard gets us all._

</comment><comment><USER20> There's an even larger (huge, in fact) graveyard in Tucson, Arizona:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-110.8350419,2145m/d...](https://email@example.com,-110.8350419,2145m/data=!3m1!1e3)

<comment><USER21> That "graveyard" is more of a military base (which it is), where they reassemble planes from spares (when they can), preserve others for parts, and scrap the rest. Most of the money is made from the first two activities, and the facility is highly profitable.

They give bus tours of the facility from the adjacent fantastic PIMA Air & Space museum; I highly recommend visiting both when you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How do they actually bring the planes to that location? Road transport or do they have at least a runway?

<comment><USER23> They fly them in, where they are officially handed over to a third party for possibly resale, but more than likely cannibalization and the scrapping.

American Airlines retired 20 MD-80s at once last year and documented the whole thing. [0] You can also search #Super80Sendoff on Twitter to see thoughts at the time. [1] They sent theirs to Roswell, New Mexico I think, but it's the same general idea.

[0] [https://airwaysmag.com/airchive/american- retires-20-md-80/](https://airwaysmag.com/airchive/american-retires-20-md-80/)

[1] [https://twitter.com/hashtag/Super80Sendoff](https://twitter.com/hashtag/Super80Sendoff)

<comment><USER24> Really enjoyed the airwaysmag.com article, thanks. The article was meticulously put together with obvious passion for the field and the people who work in it. Even the reading experience on mobile was pretty good which is unusual these days. I was surprised by one or two details, including the fact that some of these quintessential American airliners were actually manufactured in China, as long as 25 years ago.

<comment><USER23> > I was surprised by one or two details, including the fact that some of these > quintessential American airliners were actually manufactured in China, as > long as 25 years ago.

It's rumored in aviation circles that COMAC secretly reused the MD-80 jigs and tooling to develop the ARJ21 [0], which bears a _strong_ resemblance to the DC-9/MD-80 series jets.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this where Mythbusters did their "explosive decompression" episode?

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to drive past this all the time. It's quite a sight, even from the road.

</comment><comment><USER27> A developed country should dismantle its planes and not let them rot in the nature just because its easy. My two cents.

<comment><USER28> This is not a landfill it's a junkyard, there is a difference. These planes are still valuable in several ways. They can be salvaged for parts to update operating planes. And some of them can be returned to service, though obsolete by modern standards. Unlike automobiles there aren't millions of any of these planes, only hundreds or thousands. It doesn't take up that much space to keep a bunch of obsolete planes laying around in the desert, and they may prove valuable in the future. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and all that.

<comment><USER27> I get your point, but lets be realistic for a second: These planes were not put there for altruistic reasons. But rather because it is much cheaper to simply forget them :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Should say 2015.

<comment><USER30> It has been a bone yard long before 2015 and will be for long after.

<comment><USER31> It is convention, on HN, to mention the year that articles were written (if not the current year), whether or not the subject matter is changing rapidly.

<comment><USER30> It is not.

<comment><USER32> It is, the moderators even regularly edit the titles to add this where it is missing. random example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16128592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16128592)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> the cross-sections always strike me with the number of parts which are involved and thus the amount of labor to build the planes body, wings, etc. with accompanying question of whether it can be simpler or done in other ways, like 3d printing, robotic assembly, etc.

<comment><USER34> 3D printing materials currently aren't strong enough to use as most aircraft structural components. New aircraft designs are switching from aluminum to carbon fiber which has to be molded and bonded in sheets (totally unsuitable for 3D printing). Robots are already used where they make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This may sound...whacky..but has anyone ever considered some of these fuselages could be turned into homeless housing somewhere?

<comment><USER36> Nice idea but aircraft and houses are solutions to rather different problems.

Assume an aircraft is a very large cigar tube with wings, tail and wheels on stilts. So, start by cutting off the wings and tail and seal the holes. You need to remove the wheels and fix the thing down so that it wont blow away in a strong wind. It is probably too long for one family, so it will need partitioning or chopping up and the ends stoppered. You'll also need external doors - ideally at least two per dwelling for fire safety. You can't open the windows so those will need sorting out. You probably will want to divide up the living/sleeping/food prep/lav areas. You need plumbing, potentially heating and/or cooling. At least it wont rust, being aluminium. However, being ali. means that alterations will cost a fortune. You can't put steel and ali directly together (Galvanic) and any alterations that puncture the skin will need very careful waterproofing.

I'd go for something like this instead: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut) They are very cheap to build and are not just for military use.

<comment><USER37> Shipping containers could be another choice for temporary budget housing and is modular. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_container_architect...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_container_architecture)</comment></comment></comment>


Blurry vision may stop us living in space - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/news/blurry-vision-may-stop-us-living-in-space-20120213/ <comment><USER2> > The overall effect is individuals become progressively more far-sighted.

What does this mean for nearsighted people? Does it have a correcting affect or do objects at any distance become blurry?</comment>


Polyglot Makefiles - <AUTHOR> http://agdr.org/2020/05/14/Polyglot-Makefiles.html <comment><USER2> That's interesting.

Author probably wants to use `private` for those target-local variables, though.

For example,

        R: .SHELLFLAGS := -e
        R: SHELL := Rscript
        R:
            greeting = "bonjour"
            message(paste0(greeting, ", R!"))

Everything that target `R` depends on will also have SHELL and .SHELLFLAGS over-ridden. If `R` depends on some data generated by another program, it probably wants to be built and executed with the default SHELL (or another shell, perhaps).

        R: private .SHELLFLAGS := -e
        R: private SHELL := Rscript
        R:
            greeting = "bonjour"
            message(paste0(greeting, ", R!"))

Now, `R`'s dependencies will be generated with the makefile's defaults.

Usually I prefer to build up richer stages like this using the system shell anyway, though. Build a target which in turn is executed by the shell normally to traverse the next edge in the graph. But I can see how this mechanism has its uses.

See also [https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Target_00...](https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Target_002dspecific.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know about private. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Make was designed for building dependencies. I think it is always problematic to use it as a command runner (for example there is no standard way to list out the available commands).

[just]([https://github.com/casey/just](https://github.com/casey/just)) is a tool that feels similar to make but is designed explicitly for the purpose of running commands.

I think of this as a simple CLI for your project workflow. You still really want to avoid putting code into a Justfile and put it into scripts. But the Justfile helps provide a slightly nicer UX and automatically invoke dependencies.

<comment><USER4> The tool you want is remake: [http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/remake/](http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/remake/)

This is GNU Make + a few patches. So it's 100% compatible. And you get an interactive debugger, and lots more stuff. For instance, to list out the commands:

      remake --targets

No idea why this hasn't been merged upstream.

Your larger point really stands, though: if you're just running commands, you shouldn't be using Make. But it is abused in that way often, so...

<comment><USER5> > remake --targets; No idea why this hasn't been merged upstream

I would think because it's useless. The targets in a Makefile are very often just internal and aren't always meant to be run by the user.

<comment><USER6> Many shell autocompleters would read the makefile to complete target names though, suggesting it is not useless.

Anyway, one could always have a 'help' target that prints a short documentation. This also avoid listing internal targets.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I remember using zsh and in my experience this was barely useful since most Makefiles are auto-generated with hundreds or thousands of targets.

> one could always have a 'help' target that prints a short documentation

Sure, that's fine. But the point is that if you have an unknown Makefile you can't (or shouldn't) just execute it without knowing what it will do. Makefiles should be treated as individual programs just like any other executable and there's no guaranteed standard way to get help from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For complicated pipelines that I want to reuse multiple times, I have turned Makefiles into executables by putting this at the top:

        #!/usr/bin/make -f

And then putting them in my $PATH. I run them with arguments like:

        $ process-data.mk INTSV=a.tsv DB=largefile.gz OUTDIR=finished

This makes me feel like I've sold my soul to the devil, and that I'm just living on borrowed time until it all fails and falls apart. It hasn't yet, however...

<comment><USER8> I can see two areas in which it might break.

I might put _#! /usr/bin/env make -f_ in case it's somewhere in else in PATH.

Also some systems (BSD, old commercial Unix) have non-gnu-compatible make and sometimes call their gnu make port "gmake" or "gnumake".

<comment><USER9> AFAIR on Linux shebangs only support single argument so it would fail in this case. One can overcome this treating the file as a shell script:

      #!/bin/sh
      # make ignores next line \
      set -e
      # make ignores next line \
      exec make -f "$0" "$@"

Make treats slash-escaped new lines as a continuation even for comments, shell does not.

<comment><USER8> Wow. Impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ainar-g Note that this article (like many, many others) assumes GNU Make. POSIX Make has neither .ONESHELL nor local macros. Neither do most built-in Make implementations in other OSes, like OpenBSD's bmake.

<comment><USER10> POSIX shell is also notoriously obtuse and difficult to use. As a big advocate of POSIX as a target, I don't blame anyone for using GNU make - or perhaps BSD make is a better lowest common denominator.

Personally, I try to use POSIX Makefiles, but I often find that they're most useful as a target for Makefile generators (in my case, these are usually a shell script called configure).

<comment> ainar-g One person's obtuseness is other person's simplicity :-) . In all of my personal and some of my work projects I used nothing but portable features in Shell, Make, Sed, etc. Checking with multiple implementations where possible. As long as you use the right tool for the right job, there shouldn't be any problems.

The most common mistake of that sort that I've seen is people trying to do complex conditionals inside their makefiles when they clearly would be better off in a Shell script. (I'm looking at you, fans of ifeq.)

<comment><USER11> You can implement conditionals semi-portably. See [https://github.com/wahern/autoguess/blob/master/Makefile.gue...](https://github.com/wahern/autoguess/blob/master/Makefile.guess.sub), which works with GNU Make, NetBSD/FreeBSD make, OpenBSD make, and Solaris make. Alas, it doesn't work with AIX's native make.

Once POSIX standardizes "!=" then POSIX-portable conditionals will be possible using the same technique as above, replacing, e.g. OS = $(shell $(OS.exec))$(OS.exec:sh) with just OS != $(OS.exec). Though, you'd need to wait for Solaris, AIX, and macOS gmake[1] to add support for !=.

Alternatively, if you add an extra level of indirection using .DEFAULT to capture and forward make invocations, you can simply pass OS, etc, as invocation arguments. Indirection solves everything, though, so that's cheating.

[1] Apple's ancient GNU Make 3.81 predates != support. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish someone would write a modern alternative to GNU Make. I've looked and there don't seem to be any. The closest is Ninja but it doesn't seem to be intended to be hand written.

<comment><USER13> [https://build2.org/build2/doc/build2-build-system- manual.xht...](https://build2.org/build2/doc/build2-build-system- manual.xhtml#intro)

<comment><USER2> > We believe, paraphrasing a famous quote, that those who do not understand > make are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

Alas, I think the developers have in fact done just that. Make is not a build system. Make is a batch shell.

Build2 didn't produce a better make, they produced yet another C++ build system.

<comment><USER13> We did start with C++ thinking (correctly, IMO) that if we can build C++, we can build pretty much anything. But build2 is a general-purpose build system, for example:

[https://build2.org/build2/doc/build2-build-system- manual.xht...](https://build2.org/build2/doc/build2-build-system- manual.xhtml#module-bash)

[https://github.com/build2/libbuild2-rust](https://github.com/build2/libbuild2-rust)

<comment><USER2> I think these examples support my position, they do not refute it.

If you have to write plugins to describe the rules that walk the edges of the DAG, then you haven't captured the essence of Make. It isn't just the DAG, its also the ability to walk graph edges with a generic shell alone. Here's some examples of things that we're using it for:

\- Compile C, C++, and FORTAN on a common DAG for 5 unique ABIs.

\- Parallelizing and sequencing atmospheric analysis with orbital mechanics programs.

\- Post-processing our regression test suite.

\- Executing and verifying SystemVerilog tests.

\- Generating documentation with Doxygen and LaTeX.

\- Generating linear flash images and a compressed initial filesystem.

\- Transforming said initial filesystem into a linkable object.

Make does all of things without any prior knowledge of any of them, because it just uses the shell to express how the edges are walked. In some cases, we build the program that traverses an edge and express that as just another dependency in the chain.

If you have to write and compile plugins into build2 to do things like that, then you haven't re-implemented Make. You've just created another purpose- dedicated build tool. That's fine if its what you set out to do. But that also means statements like "We believe, paraphrasing a famous quote, that those who do not understand make are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." do not belong in your documentation. Because I don't think you understand Make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I added this to my list about Make at [https://github.com/adelarsq/awesome- make](https://github.com/adelarsq/awesome-make)

Pull requests are welcome.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this might have repercussions? Like if you do "make foo bash bar" then can you predict what that SHELL is used for?

<comment><AUTHOR> The shell is specific to each target. So doing `make ruby bash python docker` works. It even works in parallel if you do `make -j`.

Edit: I'm the author.

<comment><USER15> And what happens if there's overlap between the targets?

<comment><USER16> Define 'overlap'?

<comment><USER15> What if they have a common prerequisite?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> loving the python3 makefiles</comment>


MIT Security Analysis of "Voatz" App [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://internetpolicy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/SecurityAnalysisOfVoatz_Public.pdf <comment><USER2> > . Speaking to the Harvard Business Review, Voatz backer and political > philanthropist Bradley Tusk stated: It's not that the cybersecurity people > are bad people per se. I think it's that they are solving for one situation, > and I am solving for another. They want zero technology risk in any way, > shape, or form.

I think the goal should be that there's not a net increase in risk of election tampering by moving from vote technology A to vote technology B.

I am inclined to think that the peak might be filling out paper ballots to be read by machines (penciling in ovals/scantron).

If we want to improve turnout, we should try some existing ideas that are much less novel and risky: offer early voting, make elections a holiday or hold them on a weekend. Or make it compulsory.</comment>


Ask HN: How much info do you want to know about the people behind a product? - vanilla-almond I've seen SaaS services where there is no address, no employee names, even the twitter account gives no indication of location.
How much info do you expect to see about the people behind a project when you download a commercial or open source project/product?
Which of the following would you prefer or expect to see? (indicate whether you expect this for commercial or open source or both)
- At least one or more person names behind the project or programme
- Profile or mini biography of one or more people
- Country location
- Address
- mini biography of the project or company
Anything else? <comment><AUTHOR> Country is required. Names are almost required, but they don't necessarily need to be on the About page if there's a support forum or some such. If there's something notable about any of the people involved (past projects) that's good to have too, but trivial/bogus/empty biographies do more harm than good. Ditto for company "vision" statements. The exact address is not needed.</comment>


Ask HN: Offline Advertising Impressions - <AUTHOR> Any ad networks able to sell ads/sponsorships based on offline impressions (printable PDFs with predictable translation from online to offline impressions)? <comment><USER2> Not so much networks in the 'Adwords' sense but offline companies, many of which have networks of outlets, have media kits to let you understand offline impressions/audience etc.

Agencies can aggregate across advertising companies if you want a wider reach and don't have the time yourself.

Basically hire and agency to be the expert, or decide where you want to advertise and ask for their media kit if they don't have it online already e.g. here is one from Condenast: [http://www.condenast.com/brands/vogue/media- kit/print](http://www.condenast.com/brands/vogue/media-kit/print)

Rates are almost always negotiable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. I should have clarified I am looking in the opposite direction – I'm offering up the ad space. But I imagine the middleman may be the same. Just wasn't sure who was out there.</comment></comment>


2,000-year-old toilet paper gives us a whiff of life on the Silk Road in China - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/2000-year-old-toilet-paper-gives-us-a-whiff-of-life-on-the-silk-road-in-china/ <comment><USER2> Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase Poo[h] Sticks.</comment>


Jeffrey Epstein used MIT to launder his image - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/9/20856944/jeffrey-epstein-mit-ronan-farrow-joichi-ito <comment><USER2> Epstein was a horrific person. Joi Ito and MIT accepted donations from a wealthy donor. So what? They logged them as anonymous. They had no part in advertising any good will gained by Epstein. Epstein also helped broker other donations. This is a good move for any institution. I've yet to see any evidence of Epstein exerting control over the curriculum or management of MIT.

If Epstein was able to drum up press from his donations, where was the due diligence of those that reported on him? Why not bring up the accusations then?

The idea that no one had any idea about this until the court records were unsealed is utter nonsense, as is this attack on Ito. Before being at MIT he was an angel investor known for finding unlikely funding sources. He continued that tradition at MIT.

<comment><USER3> "They had no part in advertising any good will gained by Epstein."

And as we've found out, they certainly did.

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/13/meeting-with- ep...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/13/meeting-with-epstein-led- gift-and-now-regrets/0SPYm0hSg8iNh3JdDwPICP/story.html) shows the donations were not anonymous, but "confidential", that many people knew about them, and that Ito asked staff to send Epstein presents and meet Epstein for dinner.</comment></comment>


Pipeline spills 176,000 gallons of crude into creek about 150 miles from Dakota - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/12/pipeline-spills-176000-gallons-of-crude-into-creek-about-150-miles-from-dakota-access-protest-camp.html <comment><USER2> Everything is relative. Can someone say, if that pipeline didn't exist, how much more or less theoretical damage would have happened had it been shipped by truck on highway instead?

The Dakota Access line is running a few miles from my workplace here in Iowa. I'm not opposed to the pipeline, per say, but the politics behind it are crap. It's approved by our utility board, which is composed of persons selected by our Governor, who has personal financial interest in the pipeline company. What's worse, the pipeline doesn't start or end in Iowa, so it just runs through here and is a total loss for us. No new jobs created. Needless to say, the utility board approved it along with eminent domain. (Shouldn't eminent domain be illegal when the land is going to a private company and not public use? The constitution is kind of clear on that, not sure how they get around it.)

The pipeline workers here are causing lots of trouble too. They're trespassing and tearing up land well outside of their easements. They're littering. They bury the scrap pipe and trash instead of hauling it out. They tear up the roads and hold up traffic.

Honestly, it's just such a net loss for us. And this is before the inevitable leaks. It's a racket.

<comment><USER3> > Shouldn't eminent domain be illegal when the land is going to a private > company and not public use? The constitution is kind of clear on that, not > sure how they get around it

There was a controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decision on this in 2005, Kelo v. New London.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London)

<comment><USER4> Way to stand up for the little guy liberals, you are truly an inspiration to us all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > North Dakota officials estimate more than 176,000 gallons of crude oil > leaked from the Belle Fourche Pipeline into the Ash Coulee Creek.

> Since 2006, [operators Wyoming-based True Cos.] have reported 36 spills > totaling 320,000 gallons of petroleum products...

According to this article's cited numbers, this single spill is larger than all of the previous decade's 35 reported spills ... COMBINED.

These protests could not be more timely. I can only imagine how many spilled gallons have gone unreported: this spill was discovered by a landowner, not the intended automated monitoring equipment.

<comment><USER6> Trump will realize this and will take swiftnand decisive action to fix things once he gets in office.

<comment><USER7> /s missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is sad is the lack of an image. A picture tells a thousand words and I would imagine a photo of the problem would evoke a strong reaction in the readers.

I am also always disappointed in the low quality images news sites use. I understand the need for a responsive page design but a click to enlarge would help out a lot.</comment>


Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours? - <AUTHOR> In the spirit of "Programs that saved you 100 hours?" ¹, - I'm curious to hear of experiences with software systems, languages, apps, or services that led you down an unproductive rabbit hole, only to come out at the other end (if ever) with not much to show for the effort.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849208 <comment><USER2> 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 doofer that never disappears until you switch to a different view and switch back

\- The message list font size gets corrupted by moving between Windows of different DPIs forcing you to switch to a different folder then switch back again to make everything readable

\- It asks you whether you want to save changes just because you've clicked a link in a calendar appointment

\- Got thousands of emails? It's slow, slow, SLOW, SLOW(!!!), _SLOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!_

\- Too many modal dialogs

\- It's clunky as hell when juggling calendar appointments, booking rooms, etc.

\- When opening a meeting series it asks me whether I want to open the whole series or a single meeting _every single time_. Can I just have a modifier key for this, please, so that I can open whichever way I choose without being prompted?

\- Inconsistent and unpredictable behaviour when it comes to inserting images as attachments versus inline in an email

\- Losing messages in conversation view

\- Difficult to follow conversations/find all messages if you don't use conversation view(!)

\- Inconsistent behaviour around contact auto-completion: sometimes people end up in the auto-complete list, sometimes they don't

I could go on. I won't.

<comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER4> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 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 the only reason I have to keep Windows alive (or atleast use wine)

<comment><USER6> IMHO, Gimp was much easier to use before they revamped the GUI to imitate Photoshop. For those who didn't try it, it looked like this: [https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cleaning_up_Fourie...](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cleaning_up_Fourier_screenshot_gimp_1.png)

<comment><USER7> The menu layout and structure looks exactly the same, except it's floating, which you get in modern GIMP by default. Can you explain in more depth how it's tangibly different?

<comment><USER8> The icons are different which still throw me off. The colour select tool is weirdly now stacked behind the cropping tool or some other selection tool.

<comment><USER9> That's why you learn keyboard shortcuts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> MS Sharepoint takes the cake. Impossible to navigate, hysterically difficult to use for storing and maintaining content repositories / wiki's.

Also the outlook/skype/teams/lync universe of communication tools is laughably inconsistent, it's very difficult for me to do very simple tasks in these tools.

<comment><USER11> I was playing around with Sharepoint Online, the latest version. It was my first time looking at sharepoint and I had something usable working in about 30 minutes. Maybe they fixed things with the cloud version?

<comment><USER12> I've disliked Sharepoint in the past, and recently also had good experiences. Yes, perhaps they have cleaned up their act.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> 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.

<comment><USER15> You've never had to give a talk with a video inside ? Or have you gotten that to work in latex ?

<comment><USER8> Tab out to the video. Play. Tab back to presentation.

Video is included as a separate attachment in the email sent around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 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 all linear but a sawtooth: the top few bits were getting lost somewhere. Development required Eclipse, and the reboot-download- reboot cycle took several minutes. No real JTAG, only debug logging over USB. Crashes would, however, lose the log buffer, so you couldn't be quite sure where the program crashed, and all the important bits were real-time so couldn't be single-stepped. Debugging all that was _extremely_ slow.

A hundred hours is only just under three work weeks. It's very easy to get led into a dead end that wastes that much development effort on a feature that turns out to be infeasible or a bad idea, or an intractable bug. I think I've had one of those incidents at every job, not necessarily every year but frequent enough that they're not all memorable.

<comment> Engineering-MD 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.

<comment><USER17> This is why I avoid the more complex games where you build things (Factorio, Kerbal space program, etc.) Playing them scratches some of the same itches I get from writing software. So I avoid playing them and re-direct that energy into using an actual programming language to build a real thing.

There are upsides and downsides. The challenges in a game are designed to be overcome, but the satisfaction of solving real problems is even better than solving puzzles in-game.

Sometimes the parallels for me are uncanny. I'm faffing about with OpenSSL right now and it feels like nothing so much as a badly designed game sub- system. Can somebody please fix OpenSSL so I can get back to the core game please? :)

I used to say that Unity3D is Minecraft for programmers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 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, undocumented setting to restart a service if it's not up after 30s. Again. And again. And again. _Nothing_ in the documentation hinted that this was a feature of systemd anywhere, and I was stuck troubleshooting that nonsense instead of just writing code.

Systemd is just filled with undocumented crap and features that shouldn't exist by default, leading to headache after headache after headache. Such a pain in the ass.

<comment><USER19> > _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.

<comment><USER18> This seems like the bug I was having at the time: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3912](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3912)

Or this: [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/227017/how-to- chang...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/227017/how-to-change- systemd-service-timeout-value)

Or this: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5773](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5773)

Or: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3901](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3901)

Or: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2047](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's had issues with this exact problem. The last one has recent examples of people not being able to find it, and understandably so. Their documentation is shit, fullstop, and no reasonable service should restart in a loop _by default_ after 90s. That's just asinine.

<comment><USER19> 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.

<comment><USER18> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 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.

<comment><USER21> > _Android programming._

Android Studio and Gradle can both die in a fire - how anyone manages to actually write a decent app with those two, is completely beyond me.

<comment><USER22> I always chuckle when I see a huge franchise app just crashing because I have worked with android and understand how frustrating it can be. It just tells me that I was not the only one struggling with the android development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nvidia GPU drivers and CUDA installations on Linux. Got better recently but I've spent many nights fixing these installs, wrestling with nouveau etc.

Compilation of deep learning libraries from source on Windows -- don't do it.

Tikz -- LaTeX drawing "language". The images produced can be stuninngly beatiful, but the manual has 1200+ pages and it takes forever to become productive. If only journals accepted hand-drawn images...

<comment><USER24> Can second this.

Also audio libraries on linux. ALSA vs whatever. Had a lot of issues with my particular hardware & Arch.

Also way back when, X itself. Back when it was likely to not work on many systems (~2001). I spent so many hours going back and forth to use my friend's computer & internet to Altavista some help.

<comment><USER25> lol +1 for audio libraries / drivers on linux. spent many hours on the "battle of configuration".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 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 everything lined up and evenly spaced and just so. Which PowerPoint lets you do easily enough, but then you need to add another box to your diagram... and resize and reposition everything more or less manually.

Similar story for Word, which _almost_ lets you do professional(ish) documents once you know where all the typesetting options are hidden. I've given up on Word for technical documents and now use Markdown + pandoc to convert to Latex and then pdf.

<comment><USER27> 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.

<comment><USER28> On the flip side, I've noticed PowerPoint can bring immense efficiency gains to environments where the standard is to write to a detailed report for every little thing. You don't need a detailed user guide of 20 pages of text if a few ppt do the same job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Personally: Linux desktop environments in general. Still couldn't figure out how to manually save session states since last upgrade (using Linux Mint Cinnamon now), took me a few hours to make hibernation work, and every time I upgrade, Korean IME is either broken, does something slightly differently, or first broken and after lengthy troubleshooting does something slightly differently. (After last upgrade, for some reason it's not working only on Facebook on Chrome. Fine, who needs to view Facebook on Linux anyway.)

At work: saltstack - a machine provision framework that's trying hard to sound cute (pillar? grain? what the hell are they?) while making you write jinja templates which generate a yaml file while calling arbitrary python functions in a remote server, which is then sent to another remote server to be transformed into a sequence of commands in arbitrary order. Good luck debugging anything.

</comment><comment><USER30> Excel.

Mostly because it makes you think you can do anything, and you can. It's a rope to hang yourself with.

While Excel is a great prototyping tool, it's really not great for production use. I've seen so many financial calculations attempted on Excel that ended up creating a huge ball of spaghetti, references going all over, VBA code mixed in with DLLs, VLOOKUPS all over, sometimes $A$1 sometimes A$1 (copying behaviour), huge Rube Goldberg contraptions.

And people love it, they often don't think about maintainability or ease of understanding for newcomers.

<comment> hunter-gatherer I'm with you. My org tries to do so many things with excel, despite that fact that is fails and breaks on us ever single day. What is worse, is that we use excel sheets and a shared folder to monitor projects, tasks, and even track casework. I hate it so much.

<comment><USER30> Yeah don't get me started on versioning, lol.

bondspricing_final_2_withswaptions_final_final5.xls. In a folder with 25 similarly named files. Good luck tracing the diffs.

But I guess that's not specifically Excel that causes this, it's people not understanding versioning.

<comment><USER31> Blame the software industry for still not having a decent GUI for version control.

Version control has been "solved" for the better part of 20 years but the tools are awkward and only make sense if you're a software developer.

People unironically suggest you should learn more about tree structures to understand and work with git. That's just about acceptable for developers, but for non-developers that's a complete no-go.

One day there'll be a killer GUI for git or svn (or even just basic whole-file linear version histories) but until then, people are doomed to email files named like Presentation_FINAL_2_EJB_Edit.xlsx sitting under a "FINAL - DO NOT DELETE" folder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> China Great Firewall - no comments, just a huge idiotic waste of time and a major, major, major PITA for every normal person that lives in China.

Webpack - I ain't no frontend dev, coming back to it episodically to discover that FooBarPlugin is now BarBazPlugin, moved from alice: setting to bob:, XxxPlugin just stopped working at all and unsupported (after like 9 months), and ZzzPlugin now nukes the entire dist/ dir as a side effect.

XPS 15 9570 fans, they're controlled by BIOS and start at 45C specifically to annoy people to no end. So under Linux, after much googling, you need to build the dell-bios-fan-control utility which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, in shamanic ways. E.g. running lspci resets fans and they spin up again. Load kvm modules, spin up again. I've spent probably way more than 100 hours to make the laptop quiet.

</comment><comment><USER33> PVCS, a versioning system so weird and inconsistent that developers actively tried to hide source code from the repository managers. When we announced a migration to subversion, project managers were literally standing in line begging to be the guinea pig for testing the migration procedure.

Some of its many random crimes againt humanity:

* Delete irrecoverably obliterates a file from history.

* The function that you should use instead of delete is almost impossible to find.

* If you do use that function, it is so buggy it causes corruption in your database, effectively obliterating the whole project.

* Acces rights management is insane. Never seen anything like it. It took 20 minutes of calculating effects from interfering rules to give someone access to a file without removing some other random person's access rights.

* Gui looks like the win31 era, and is so bad people prefer to manually update the database. Which was more trustworthy anyway.

* Multiple tree structures representing data blobs. Only one represents files. It is possible for the later part of a checkout to accidentally overwrite the early part.

* I've witnessed a team spending 6 months merging 2 weeks of development. 100 hours doesnt come close to the time wasted.

* Storage is an oracle db for metadata, and a file system for data. No deltas, changing 1 byte in a 1gb file writes out the whole gb.

* Commits over multiple files are not atomic, but the gui tries to pretend otherwise.

Now the weird thing was, it was so bad, management did not actually believe a product could be this big of a waste. Even when multiple developers gave it as a reason for leaving the company, they were brandished as whiners and no attempt to even validate the truth of the statement was made. Software stockholm syndrome is actually a thing.

<comment><USER34> I used it years ago over and VPN and it would literally take a day to pull the latest branch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> 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.

<comment><USER36> Couldn't agree more. For simple 2 lines you sometimes need 4 Meetings without he whole team involved and not even discuss about the indentation.

But sometimes, it seems to work ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Gmail.

At some point they redesigned the UI and it's been a horrible experience since. It hasn't wasted 100 hours, but it certainly feels like it: \- It takes multiple tries to delete files or select them as read. If you select the options to mark as read, or delete a message. For some reason it 'forgets' that I've done this when I exit the browser, and so I usually have to perform this operation at least twice. \- There's some sort of annoying animation that pops up when the inbox loads. Why?

<comment><USER38> I switched back to the HTML version.

<comment><USER39> How does a company go backwards?

<comment><USER39> Many do and it is inevitable. No good thing ever lasts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Microsoft Word, every single time I have to produce a document in which there is a lot of content. Edit a table, it screws up the image legends, which in turn screws up the table of contents. Fix the table of contents, and the something else in the document breaks. I curse my existence every time I have to use anything from microsoft in my job. Having done consulting for many clients across a myriad of environments and configs, whenever anything microsoft was involved, it was a given that any task would take at least double the time and require more resources. Using MS Word however is the thing, that almost every time, drives very close to jumping out of window.

</comment><comment><USER41> Desktop Linux. Always something needs to be set up, always something breaking, always something needed to be fixed, always had a problem to solve.

<comment><USER42> Definitely agree with others: you might have had the wrong distro.

I have been running Ubuntu for about 6 years and have had less day-to-day config or issues than Windows had.

The only issues that stick out are either trying to use apps that haven't been maintained or trying to do something Linux just isn't good at (games).

I use Windows 10 for games, but day-to-day I am on Ubuntu 18.04.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> 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 I did a few years back with its predecessor Human Revolution.

<comment><USER44> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> 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.

<comment><USER46> Also the Makefile. I still cannot write customized Makefile for my side project now

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Windows as a porting target for desktop applications. I've written a few for work (using PyQt5), and about 10% of my effort typically goes into getting the application working on Linux. The other 90% goes into wrestling with Windows doing everything in its power to fucking ruin my week.

Fman Build System (fbs) helps quite a bit, I've found, but there are still more often than not some really annoying rough edges (not to mention that Windows' file access performance is abysmal, so startup times for a PyQt5 app are anywhere from multiple seconds to a full minute on Windows v. instantaneous on Linux).

I've been looking into .NET Core w/ Avalonia as a potential replacement, both because it's easier to cross-compile and because hopefully being more designed-for-Windows will make it less of a royal pain in the ass. Not being subject to the GNU GPL is a nice bonus (for internal stuff this ain't much of a problem, but I generally prefer my FOSS projects to be as compatible with as many other FOSS projects as possible; I'd rather proprietary software be able to "steal" my work than prevent non-GPL FOSS projects from being able to incorporate it).

<comment><USER48> fbs author here. Thank you for the mention :-)

<comment><USER47> Of course! Thank _you_ for the awesome tool. Probably would've lost my marbles entirely without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Without a blink, McAfee.

This abomination has the ability to put more than decent computer into a miserable slug. I cannot imagine how much my client would have saved in productivity from all its employees and contractors if that thing was uninstalled.

<comment><USER50> Not to mention the video to remove it, hilarious but completely useless: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Every single failed project that I ever worked on.

I've built a lot of useful software but there have been years where I've worked on projects that nobody ever used or will use. Half the time the cause is the dysfunctional organization that I'm working for, that doesn't understand their responsibility or won't listen to good advice.

The other portion of the time it's a side project that I never finished.

</comment><comment><USER52> Microsoft Access. I think the main problem is I keep expecting it to behave like a normal database. Perhaps if you go in without those expectations you'll have a better time? I don't know, and hopefully I'll never have to find out.

When I had to work with it on a semi-regular basis I kept this list of WTFs that I'd add to each time I finished tearing my hair out trying to fix some seemingly simple thing [https://github.com/bourbonspecial/AccessFail/blob/master/why...](https://github.com/bourbonspecial/AccessFail/blob/master/why%20i%20hate%20access.md)

</comment><comment><USER53> Wordpress. After banging on it over and over with themes and templates etc etc I realized I should have just stuck with a static hosted Jekyll site, so thats what I did.

</comment><comment><USER54> The Unity game engine. Backwards compatibility is low; documentation is scant or out-dated; error messages are misleading or opaque; stack traces for crashes are sometimes impossible to reason about.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've become wiser over the years, but the top 3 were

3: Windows/Symantec Defrag (pre-Vista era) When I had 10-40GB hdds it used to be mesmerising watching the blocks fly around the screen. Eventually I find something else to do and pretend the computer's broken.

2: Macromedia/Adobe Flash. Sometimes animations just didn't want to work. Tweens are notoriously random with complex drawings. Delete and start all over again.

1: Editing HTML after using a WYSIWYG editor. Code clean-up. It takes _ages_.

<comment><USER56> Defrag felt so good knowing things were getting put where they belonged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Jira and confluence

<comment><USER58> 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.

<comment><USER59> IntelliJ also uses annotate instead of blame.

<comment><USER60> Annotate is a valid git command though right?

[https://git-scm.com/docs/git-annotate](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-annotate)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> In recent times, Angular. It's utter rubbish and needlessly complex for doing even the smallest of things.

<comment><USER62> I'm curious, can you share an example of what you mean? My experience has typically been the opposite.

<comment><USER63> 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.

<comment><USER64> That is the point though. Front end is a hot mess, so Angular makes it opinionated so you don't have to spend time on lots of small design decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> WYSIWYG editors...

worst: confluence, bottom: desktop office suites, still bad: google docs

<comment><USER2> Oh my goodness: #### that WYSIWYG editor in Confluence hard. It's like an extremely buggy version of Word 95. I've outright banned its use in our company.

<comment><USER65> And I can't count the hours I spent converting from org-mode or markdown to WYSIWYG, only to be stripped of my beloved editing tool at the point I need to share a doc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Docker. Images without command line tools(best practice!) Obscure init systems. Unmountable overlay FSes. Dangling images eating all the disk, not removable by prune. Root permissions everywhere and general necessity to debug images way too often. and looong checkout times for every image update.

</comment><comment><USER67> Slack: It refuses to accept that it is a webapp, so even though firefox fully supports the relevant audio/video api:s I need to open another browser or fiddle around with XWayland (electron/chrome does not support wayland) just to be able to use it.

Microsoft Teams: Same as above, but with multiple login prompts each time.

Jira/Confluence: I swear every click/hover requires a network roundtrip to the server because that's the only way it can be so sluggish. Also, 30s loading times.

Webpack/Babel/Parcel/WhateverJS: Either kill me or kill IE so I can stop using these tools to get even a moderately modern stack.

<comment><USER28> Making a more usable Jira must be a potential billion dollar business. Outside it support/development It's used by many orgs because for their vague use cases nothing else is available.

<comment><USER68> It's amazing to me that there's 1000s of 'more useable Jira' variants out there, but IME every team that tries to use one inevitably ends up back using Jira.

<comment><USER69> but almost none with both markdown and dark mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Microsoft Windows. I lose 10-20 minutes 1-5x a day just logging in to Windows in the NHS...

<comment><USER71> 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.

<comment><USER72> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Perforce. The more I learned of it, the worse it got. Take the worst parts of CVS and Subversion, and then toss them in the bin, because they're too good to be in Perforce.

<comment><USER74> Oh yeah - perforce is such a stupid crap, I simply don't understand why they still exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> sshd on Synology NAS [1].

It took me two weeks of troubleshooting, cross-compiling binaries and reverse engineering the source code, until I figured out that I wasn't doing anything wrong - Synology had actually changed their version of sshd to add all sorts of proprietary crap [2].

Another one was the "Mouse battery low" alerts on Gnome under Ubuntu [3]. The root cause was in upowerd, but Gnome developers could have applied more sane defaults (e.g., no need to show the same alert several times _per day_ , and even worse considering they don't go away unless you click to dismiss). Certainly not 100 hours, but much more time than I'd like.

[1] [https://serverfault.com/questions/458553/cant-log-in-via- ssh...](https://serverfault.com/questions/458553/cant-log-in-via-ssh-to-any- accounts-using-bin-bash-shell-on-synology-nas)

[2] [https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology- openssh/](https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/)

[3] [https://wrgms.com/disable-mouse-battery-low-spam- notificatio...](https://wrgms.com/disable-mouse-battery-low-spam- notification/)

<comment><USER76> 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.

<comment><USER75> 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 nicely out of the box. They also release frequent updates, have a decent set of options for backup / logging / media sharing out of the box, alerts are effective, and you also have an appstore-like for 3P apps.

Also, they use Linux as the base, and in some models you can even get access to the serial console with some effort, so you're not totally locked in on a proprietary system, should something go really bad [3][4].

I have a RS815+ and an old DS212+, and both are very reliable. Not terribly fast, but wouldn't expect much more from spinning disks anyway.

[1] [https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology- openssh/](https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/)

[2] [https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet- password/](https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/)

[3] [https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology- diskstation-d...](https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology-diskstation- ds2xx-serial/)

[4] [https://wrgms.com/entering-single-user-mode-on-a- synology/](https://wrgms.com/entering-single-user-mode-on-a-synology/)

<comment><USER76> 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!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Probably not quite 100 hours, but proprietary "enterprise" VPNs. Everyone needs a different version (universally outdated), many need hand-holding to work on an up-to-date OS, need workarounds to have them not break routing entirely, ...

</comment><comment><USER78> Docker For Mac / OSXFS - steaming pile of garbage...

</comment><comment><USER79> Internet Explorer 6

I wasted a lot more than 100 hours coding workarounds for its numerous CSS bugs. Probably millions of hours wasted world-wide. I hate Microsoft for the way they screwed web developers.

<comment><USER80> I almost switched careers early on due to IE6. At the time - 2006 or so, it was every new junior developer's job to get up to speed with the codebase by tackling a few of those outstanding IE6 glitches.

So for months on end, it was just 8 hours a day of Googling, scouring blogs and mailing lists for obscure CSS and JS hacks to get something to work in IE, while not breaking it in every other browser.

Luckily the recession ended a few of those jobs for me, and once hiring picked up again, there was enough demand for real work, and IE6 was no longer considered (probably about the time that YouTube refused to cater to IE6 users), and it quickly died off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Dial-up modems and sound cards and IRQ settings. Getting them to work simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER82> The AWS Management Console.

<comment><USER83> Thank you. It blows my mind how rarely I see anyone talk about what an utter disaster of a product this frontend is.

<comment><USER84> I like to tell people that you can measure how bad the AWS console is by looking at the valuation of companies like Heroku and Digital Ocean. Both wouldn't exist if AWS has a better console, the former was even built atop EC2!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Python Net-SNMP. Python GPG. My Python ecosystem as I drag it from place to place. I ask myself why I do this, frequently.

In the distant past, Solaris 9 for x86 on a laptop. I was younger (and dumber) then. Took much longer than 100 hrs and aged me beyond death.

</comment><comment><USER65> Tools without good open standards forcing me in to their UI or restricted file formats:

jira, microsoft exchange, horribly sceumorphic PDF, anything with DRM

</comment><comment><USER74> Visual Studio + UWP. I can't say the result is not good, but the wasted time is waaaay over 100 hours in the span of roughly 9 months. And by waaay over 100 hours, I would say it's probably 1.5-2 hours/day , 7 days/week.

</comment><comment><USER86> At this point, Chrome, VSCode or Eclipse. I can't open all 3 in my laptop. All these 3 consuming soo much CPU. At this point, Opera is better and instead of VSCode going back to sublime and I have a terminal window separately open.

<comment><USER87> How many windows/tabs do you have open? I often have two WebStorm/IntelliJ windows, VSCode, a dozen Chrome tabs, and at least one Electron application open (usually Slack) and it's not too bad on the CPU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Python. Mostly other people's python, but also everything I've ever written in python.

<comment><USER89> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I'm surprised no one mentioned openstack. I never deployed it, but by mere reading its deployment docs, its going to be a mess in production and its not doable by a solo dev. Anybody care to correct me?

<comment><USER90> I'll be eager not to correct you: it's such a complex tangle that it's a liability. Also, it is huge, and full of inconsistencies that sweep through the documentation, code, interfaces... It guarantees that anyone that wants to use this professionally needs help sooner or later -- and you can guess where that help comes from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> A somewhat obscure one, but Xenword. In theory the idea was a good one; connect a XenForo install to a WordPress install so people could sign up/login with the former and get access to various settings on the latter.

In practice on the other hand, I found the integration a complete nightmare, and everything was very prone to breaking for random reasons, making it either impossible to login or so the data wasn't pulled in properly etc.

And it's been a similar story with quite a few other software bridges/integrations. So much so in fact, that I realised it's almost always more practical to either find a solution that does both A and B at the same time, or to just build something yourself with the features needed rather than spend hours debugging an integration between two separate programs.

Edit: Oh, and Adobe Target. Even for an A/B testing tool this thing is frustrating as hell to use, and has a ton of design decisions that make no sense at all. For instance, you can't track clicks on an element by class/ID if the class/ID doesn't exist on that page at the time you use the editor, meaning you can't track clicks on an element that exists on some of the pages you want to test but not others, or all items in a list/feed. You also can't easily run the same test on multiple different pages with different URLs, so you have to 'add a page' in the editor for each URL pattern and copy the code over to it again.

</comment><comment><USER92> Fixing plsql errors in Oracle. Only a c++ compiler in a bad mood gives more errors or as inscrutable ones ...

</comment><comment><USER93> Skype for Business - I really hate this shit. Random disconnects, errors, no offline message support, idiotic message history in Outlook, random errors "Text is too long" etc.

<comment><USER94> You forgot mangling urls by inserting underscores in the url, not being able to copy and paste part of a message cleanly, stuttering audio or video when your internet connection is perfect, and screen sharing that doesn't start or drops whenever it feels like. Oh and abysmal workflow around picking the right audio device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Most NoSQL databases, for sure. I tried plenty, but will avoid naming and shaming specific ones here.

</comment><comment><USER36> \- Eclipse, Eclipse and Eclipse (at least till 2016 then I finally used IntelliJ) ... mainly the maven integration but to be honest everything, android and gradle integration was also just pain.

\- Jira this splits up in 3 categories \- because of project member think they need a complicated workflow, mostly in conjunction with time tracking \- installation \- integrating with other applications

</comment><comment><USER96> Microsoft Defender. It gradually went from an invisible safety check to a massive tax on battery, I/O and productivity.

I disabled it recently after it got into an incomprehensible endless CPU loop. It's suddenly like having a new computer - it boots faster, I can switch tabs without grinding, just everything is faster.

I can't think how much time it must have cost me - on every interaction in years.

</comment><comment><USER97> `material-ui` react component library. obscene amounts of boilerplate + every update would require refactoring the mess they made me make.

<comment><USER98> What? <Typography> elements are not intuitive to you with variants? All text is Typography after all ...

I always say Material is such an aesthetically good looking UI, that developers forfeit their common sense to leverage it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Salesforce (using their API). Our boss insisted on importing 4 years worth of past data in to Salesforce so he could print some graphs via Tableua. I tried to explain that it would be far easier just to leave Salesforce out of the equation completely, but they had paid a small fortune for it, so insisted on the wasted effort. Terrible platform from a developer perspective.

Then they bought Marketing Cloud, again terrible. Its supposed to be point and click enough that non technical users can use it, but its too complicated for them and absolutely terrible as it took 7 clicks to the edit page any HTML email.

These two things make my current platform and all it's technical debt seem like an absolute dream.

</comment><comment><USER100> I don't want to mention individual projects and services, but the two most common experiences are:

1\. Documentation. A chat provider and a serverless framework where the documentation or the typescript definitions weren't kept up to date with the code. Having to check types and their REST API and 'suck it and see' to actually find out how it works. If you want contributors, your OSS project should have working demos. If you want customers, the same.

2\. Unnecessary complexity. I think there's going to be a major change in the front end world in the next few years as people realise they can already achieve reactive data binding without the complexity of popular frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER59> Datadog on Kubernetes, lately. Its blackbox nature creates tricky issues in my company's infrastructure.

OTOH, I used New Relic with PHP website 6..8 years ago, and it was awesome in everything, except the price.

I guess it all depends on the context.

</comment><comment><USER42> Heroku.

It just isn't good. I tried it way back and most of the time it turned into a struggle that wasted hours.

I recently went back to it, thinking that it should be good now; it isn't.

My typical environment for a site is supervisor + nginx. Nothing crazy, super simple.

For whatever reason, the heroku instance refused to take in my config (set with `heroku config` and it was showing up in the Heroku console... but my service was like "nope, not there". The keys existed on process.env but were empty).

After about an hour I said "whatever" and stood it up on nginx + supervisor in 15 minutes.

<comment><USER101> I once wanted to deploy a React front end (only), not served by Node. I spend 4 hours just to do a simple deploy and the app kept crashing. Finally, an obscure build pack command that needs to be executed surfaced on a blog post which solved my problem, which was not to be found ANYWHERE else!

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> first time hacking on Mac OS Carbon. I had to port my open source project (which ran on linux and Win32), to Mac (circa 2008?). I'd never built a thing on a mac before.. at that point, Mac dev wasn't as big as it is now (and then it was C++).. so Googling no help at all.. compiler errors, linker errors.. 6 months of 15 hour days.. completely lost most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER103> Without a doubt: perl.

"There is more than one way to do it" is such a boneheaded idea when you have to work with other people on the same codebase.

</comment><comment><USER104> Emacs. Spent a lot of time writing up my on config, switched to Doom eventually. Been a happy user since then.

</comment><comment><USER105> Witcher 3

</comment><comment><USER106> Hacker News! (But in a good way...)

</comment><comment><USER107> \- Counter-Strike 1.6

\- Quake 3 Arena

</comment><comment><USER108> 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.

<comment><USER109> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> Debezium: reads mysql bin logs, feeds to kafka connect, then a kafka consumer, and then replicates given tables into a separate db. Wasted around 100 hours myself on it. As an org, we wasted closer to 2000 hours. Why? It can't handle 0000-00-00 dates due to a Java issue. They don't plan to fix it as it is "not their problem." It can't replicate cascade deletes. We seeded our replicated tables working through those issues and then the tables had different numbers of records. I could have written a custom data migration utility in the time wasted. I know because I have multiple times.

Chef: at one point, we had Chef Consultants come to help us with our monstrosity. They said that we had something more complex and full featured than anything they had ever seen and declined helping. I've lost weeks and weeks to fighting against what we eventually grew.

Sysdig: personally, I lost maybe a few hours. As an org, we lost hundreds on people trying to get it to work similar to Grafana. Sysdig, at the time, did not support math operations. How this got passed on down to engineering is a different story, but when you can't compute derivatives on counters, you can't make decisions based on rates of change, something we require.

Twisted Python: Factories with mixins where a variable you are trying to discover where it came from turns out to be a parent class's parent class's mixin's parent class's mixin's parent class. True story. Dealing with cases where someone raised an exception somewhere in the code years ago, but now the section you are working in, you realize you cannot use Deferrals because Twisted uses exceptions as control flow, and now the exceptions at some other part of the code trigger ErrBack code somewhere else. As for the python part itself, not knowing the actual type for the variable incoming on a function is a pain. String? Int? Slice? Who knows! Add some print statements or read a bunch of code to find out. Honorable mention to time lost on SQL Alchemy. I can write SQL no problem. Every time I have to do something in SQL Alchemy, I start with SQL which is done in 30 seconds, then I spend the next hour going over documentation and experiments to get the query to build via SQL Alchemy.

AnyEvent Perl: 40 functions deep and not having a method signature. Yeah, time to read through hundreds of lines of code with branches that could send any number of parameters down to your function that you are looking at, or put print statements to know _what_ has been stuffed into your parameter list. Large systems benefit so much from strict typing. 40 functions deep and you know _exactly_ what is coming into your function and what it should return.

Go Modules. I've probably not hit the 100 hours yet, but I'd not be surprised to be in the 20 hour range. The module system was rolled out shoddily in my opinion. We went from things Just Work(tm) to multiple environment variables and language servers and editor issues. All I want is "is a vendor dir there? Use it. Else, use GoPath." Can't have that though. With private repos, proxies, vendor directories, environment variables, and varying levels of support from editors, it is just a mess. With Go 1.14, modules are getting better, but I'm still fighting the proxy servers in combination of vendor directory and private repos. I _love_ Go. I hope it goes back to sanity.

</comment><comment><USER111> 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.

</comment><comment><USER112> The web browser by several orders of magnitude...e.g. this.

</comment><comment><USER113> All my own open-source projects. Thousands of hours wasted

<comment><USER114> I would like to hear your thoughts on why you would think they were wasted.

<comment><USER113> 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).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> Instana. It helped me troubleshoot some really nasty bugs in production but it always takes me ages to find the information I'm looking for.

</comment><comment><USER116> Bash; windows; safari mobile browser; the stock android samsung ships with their phones; Tizen

This list is not exhaustive. You can help by expanding it.

</comment><comment><USER117> Definitely sbt, the absolutely terrible scala build tool (and it used to be called the simple build tool, ha!)

</comment><comment><USER118> PeopleSoft's PeopleTools and nVision might be one of the worst out there. Randomly hangs and crashes

</comment><comment><USER119> redux

redux sagas

2fa in general

those fucking cookie banners that no one gives a shit about

recaptcha

webpack

<comment><USER98> Let me add to the list:

\- Trying to test isolated components with a mock Redux store

\- Figuring our how to set up tests for 'connected' components

\- The long walks I go on after looking at an actions file that I need to work with

\- The long walks Redux has made me go on

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> BMCRemedy. Anything over 4000 records will kill you.

</comment><comment><USER121> MUDs, in my teens.

<comment><USER122> Except with muds it wasn't 100 hours, it was more often 100 days character age..

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> Writing game cheats. This was me 5 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER38> Video games. Notable EVE Online

</comment><comment><USER124> Jenkins FML

</comment><comment><USER125> 2fa

</comment><comment><USER126> Drupal

</comment><comment><USER127> SAS

Minecraft

<comment><USER128> Minecraft has potential to develop creativity though :D It's a hard one to quantify, but I think sometimes things like MineCraft, lego can boost cognition if used in a deliberate way and one actually takes some learnings from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> Chronologically: Internet Explorer Firefox Facebook (the app) Chrome

</comment><comment><USER130> git. Most of which was googling basic commands.

</comment><comment><USER131> Healthshare

</comment><comment><USER132> Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.

<comment><USER133> Compared to what?

<comment><USER134> 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.

<comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER109> The sad thing is that LaTeX can be quite temperamental with image placement too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> 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.

<comment><USER109> Hard drives shouldn't spin anymore; it's 2020.</comment></comment>


Choose Your Co-Founder Wisely - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@juney/70ebfc17d541

<comment><USER2> Fun read! If everyone can find cofounders like you guys found each other, all startups will be successful!</comment>


Is "Long-Term Shareholder Value" The Answer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/06/29/is-long-term-shareholder-value-the-answer/

<comment><USER2> Pay dividends.

The titular "owners" of companies should receive the "profits" created by those companies. Until that happens, "owners" (oh, they can issue new shares at their discretion, didncha know?) will be beholden to an irrational, short- term and easily manipulated stock price based on nothing but scuttlebutt and abstractions like earnings yield.

If a company is paying a fat dividend, you, as the owner, start caring about the long run a _lot_ more. If they miss a growth target... well, you've got your dividend. You don't care as much about it, so long as it is a short term issue and not putting the money machine at risk.

It would do a lot to reign in absurd executive compensation, too.

OTOH, Wall Street hates it because they don't get any vig on a dividend payment.

</comment><comment><USER3> _> Because the new approach makes more money, its triumph is inevitable._

If only this were true, then the current problems would never have arisen. This _new approach_ isn't wholly new. He quotes Peter Drucker and mentions Toyota, after all. Otherwise the observations seem largely correct, and I can believe in a shift where people again begin to believe in this sort of approach.

<comment><USER4> This is actually a very old idea, but seemingly still quite new to many American companies and US MBA programmes.

Several non-Anglo American corporate cultures and capitalist systems have always worked like this or done so for a long time. For example, the Swiss, German and Japanese home-grown companies.

The failure of the SVM model was made high profile due to two quotes from General Electric's former CEO, Jack Welch across a time-span of approx. 30 years.

It is only now, perhaps also as a result of the financial crisis, that the negative synergy inherent to the "Unholy Trinity" of:

1\. Debt as a vehicle for growth (applies to economies too),

2\. Excessive executive total compensation (including growth of professional shareholder class),

3\. Shareholder Value Maximisation,

is becoming clear.

As hinted above, other systems focus on, e.g. generating customer value and cash first, executive compensation tightly linked to both company performance and compensation levels within the firm, shareholders take a backseat or are strongly tempered by long-term stakeholder interests, etc.

Oddly enough, some of the most successful US companies generally already follow or followed these customer value and cash-flow oriented principles from the start. For example, the tech companies, Apple, Microsoft and Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do not miss the link to Denning's prior review of Roger Martin's "Fixing the Game",

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing- shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/)

where he explains why _maximizing shareholder value_ is misguided.

</comment><comment><USER6> These are the companies I want to buy from. Long term.</comment>