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Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#801

Post by aaronax »

derefr wrote: post #791
aaronax wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, pretty good explanation of a way for it to work. I don't see what advantage this implementation offers though (happy to be wrong). The game is checking with Valve to see if I am allowed to play it. I will need Valve to agree to honor my token and talk to the game appropriately in perpetuity. A third party that I sell the token to would also be relying on Valve to honor the validity of the token after I transf…

The idea would be that you could transfer your license NFT away from Steam to, say, Origin; and then the Origin release of the game would be checking with Origin’s servers instead of Valve’s. You’d delete your Steam copy of the game (which would no longer work) and install the Origin copy (which would now work.) Yes, each individual release of the game checks with some particular private corporate server, rather than…

Thank you for putting in so much time to respond. I think this does make sense and does have a useful purpose, particularly in providing cross-vendor usefulness of purchases.

Of course now that I go back and read one of your earlier comments, this is exactly what you were saying all along:

> People could in theory take a game license they bought through some other service supporting NFT game licenses, and move it to Steam, or vice-versa.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#802

Post by paulryanrogers »

xeromal wrote: post #482
paulryanrogers wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't Avant a reference browser to check standards compliance? I recall toying with it. Then switched to a Firefox plugin which used an HTML linter.

I was a teen so I'm not sure what it was. It just had the magic of tabs. Haha

I was thinking of Amaya. Avant is unrelated.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#803

Post by eyelidlessness »

fouric wrote: post #797
eyelidlessness wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> visual-space-inefficient If you’re referring to the oft discussed “information density” issue, my goodness, scroll a little. That spacing is good for usability and, yes, accessibility. Those larger action targets and the space between them are not only good for us with vision impairment but for people whose only computing device is a phone.

> my goodness, scroll a little That's an anti-solution. Scrolling is bad for your brain and reduces comprehension - it makes it harder for your brain to figure out what's going on. There's a continuum between "everything on the screen is 6pt text with no spacing" and gigantic mobile-UI buttons on a desktop environment - and modern webdev errs far too close to the latter. > That spacing is good [...] accessibility. Bi…

First of all, I appreciate you responding. And confirming that I did understand your complaint.

> There's a continuum between "everything on the screen is 6pt text with no spacing" and gigantic mobile-UI buttons on a desktop environment - and modern webdev errs far too close to the latter.

This is probably not out of laziness or lack of consideration, but because pixel accurate pointing devices also better serve a wider range of desktop users when there’s larger targets. If you’re upset by this, you’re better off focusing on improving vision correction and motor skills than complaining about designs that accommodate more people than just you.

> Big buttons with small text and no borders - which are part of the design trend - are significantly worse for accessibility.

I disagree with your interpretation of the design trend. What I see is buttons with text consistently sized, and with padding fitting to the container to halve the cumulative padding while providing the same tappable area.

> Spacing in general? Yes. The ridiculous amounts of spacing that modern webdev encourages? Absolutely not. There are diminishing returns, and modern webdev goes from "reasonable" into "unreasonable" territory.

This is apparently entirely a matter of experience and opinion. But I do the majority of my web browsing on my phone except when I’m doing dev, and I feel exactly the opposite. Stuff is too crammed in. When I do browse on my computer I don’t see more spacing, just larger sizes of everything.

> My argument had to do with desktop platforms. You can build websites that are usable on phones while being efficient on desktops, either by building two separate sites, or through responsive design - but modern webdev doesn't, instead choosing to build desktop sites that have all of the aforementioned problems for no good technical reason.

What you’re describing is the baseline principle of responsive design. It should be available on every device. If you’re using a touch interface on a tablet, no one can know for sure you’re not on a desktop. So, big touch targets are still necessary for those users.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#804

Post by eyelidlessness »

brokenmachine wrote: post #782
eyelidlessness wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed a pattern of what I get downvoted for and it doesn’t reflect well on this community. 1. Asking people to show a little empathy to others (eg use your scroll wheel so people can benefit from reading a thing or clicking it at all) 2. Asking people to show a little empathy to others (eg recognizing that people who have violent ideologies are dangerous and don’t deserve free mandatory amplification from othe…

Personally, I get downvoted for literally anything I type about Apple. Apple zealots will steadfastly defend the honor of the company even in opposition to their own interests. Bring on the downvotes!

Well for what it’s worth I’m a lifelong Apple user and have no desire to downvote your criticisms of them.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#805

Post by Psychlist »

a_e_k wrote: post #671
Psychlist wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual machines have been a huge win, and still are. Spending 2-5 days setting up a development environment, then archiving a copy of the whole VM made some of the crappier setups usable. Back before rented software (including the OS) that meant one person could grind through the whole OS/tools/IDE/libraries stack and get something we could all use. I've broken software protection to make this work, because it's jus…

Freezing and archiving the VMs used to build a particular release is also a pretty nice trick. It comes in very handy for those rare times when a major customer that (for some reason) insists on sticking with an ancient, obsolete version of your software desperately needs a critical fix.

> Freezing and archiving the VMs used to build a particular release is also a pretty nice trick.

An essential trick if you have long-lasting products. I've been able to (and asked to!) make fixes in ~2015 to code that was written in Turbo Pascal 6. With firmware for embedded devices it's more necessary and often also harder, because often the hardware to flash the firmware doesn't work with new computers. Or you end up with a chain of USB-Serial adapter to serial-to-weird adapter to "programmer board" to actual device... but I knew that when I carefully packed everything into an antistatic bag 10 years ago :)

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#806

Post by account42 »

jasode wrote: post #48

+ using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search. + Google Maps in 2004 and dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases + MS Window Media Player's…

> + MS Window Media Player's ability to cleanly accelerate playback to 2x,3x,4x of audiobooks and tutorial videos for slow speakers. MS Windows 7 had this long before Youtube's player had a 2x playback option.

I'm pretty certain there were third-party players that could do increased playback speed with unchanged pitch before Windows 7.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#807

Post by urthor »

apozem wrote: post #362
rudyfink wrote: post #154

Here are a few that I did not see listed by others: 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation (e.g., with USB devices (also USB device categories, etc.)). Instead of trying to find a driver, things just worked. 2. Automatic updates. Keeping everything updated, largely, fell into the background. 3. Graphical integrated development environments (IDEs) for software development. I realize editors can be conte…

I’m at the point now where I won’t code without an IDE. Automatic imports, code completion, running a linter on save, nice git diff displays, finding all usages of a function - this stuff makes my life so much easier.

I'm the opposite, I've come me to rely on auto completion so much I cannot spell English. I've had to toggle it off.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#809

Post by wkmeade »

1. Power Query/Pivot Tables/Power Pivot Directly connecting to SQL from Excel for data exploration 10x for me. Personal record is 77,000,000 rows in Excel via Power Pivot. Lining up count vs count distinct on year-week is my go to garbage data detector. Weather data suppliers have an unseemly habit of over as well as under reporting. :-) 2. SYGRAPH, the data visualizer Lee Wilkinson to accompany SYSTAT, before he wrote THE GRAMMAR OF GRAPHICS which we now now as ~ggplot2 3. NT 3.51 - the first vision of what a stable workstation could be 4. SSDs "20 times faster" but non-users can't process the meaning of those 3 perfectly good English words
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