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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?
#42Showing my age here, heh:
1. Early Ruby on Rails -- Now that MVC/ORM packges are the norm, it's hard to describe how revolutionary the original '15 minute blog' video was. It really felt like a quantum leap for CRUD apps.
2. Uber/Lyft - It has literally remolded the city I live in, by making large areas that are transit-inconvenient more attractive to live in.
3. Linode -- Access to a cheap server that you could spin up/down in a minute with root access was really great, in an era where a server that wasn't just a junk shared host often required months of commitment and started at 100 bucks a month.
4. Google Maps -- Just head and shoulders above mapquest.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#43Bash was an eye opener after having to deal with CMD for years.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#44Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…
Agreed. Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#45User experience is usually the 10x differentiator. An Uber and a regular Taxi will both get me to my location with similar time and cost. The difference was that I could get an Uber by pressing a couple buttons on my phone and monitor the entire process from an app. A taxi required (at the time) phone calls, waiting around for a taxi to arrive, trying to communicate location, and other hassles that disappeared when u…
This is insightful.
I wonder how many SaaS products have the advantage of not having to talk to another human being. You don't have to align schedules ("busy signal"), convince them if they don't want to ("yes, I moved a block down, can you redirect the taxi please?"), and sometimes deal with a bad day.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#46How about a 10x reduction? Thinking of when "Paste with style" became the default. :P
This makes me mad every time. And every single thing has a different shortcut for "Paste without style", if they even have one.
On MacOS there’s a native shortcut for pasting as plain text:
Option+Shift+Command+V to paste text without any formatting.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#47Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…
> or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. For those who don't remember: That was around the time when Yahoo offered 6MB, some others only 2MB.
Found this CNET article: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-offer-gigabyte-of-free-e...
They say 2 MB Hotmail, 4 MB Yahoo. Gmail went straight to a gigabyte.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#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 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.
+ SQLite library : more than 10x improvement since I came from old school of writing custom formats for persisting data. No more dumping memory structs to disk or writing b-trees in C Language from scratch.
+ C++ STL in late 1990s. Instantly reduced need to write custom data structures like linked-lists or in-house string libraries for common tasks
+ VMware in 2000s : more than 10x productivity enhancement because I can play with malware in a virtual software sandbox instead of tediously re-imaging harddrives of air-gapped real physical machines
+ Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since misbehaving websites crashing don't bring down all the other tabs in my browsing session like Firefox/Opera.
I probably have more than a hundred examples. Some software tech 10x improvements are more diffused. Reddit+HN websites are a much better use of my time than USENET newsgroups. Youtube with recordings of tech conference presentations I can watch at 2x+ is a better used of my time than physically traveling to the site.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#49Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…
Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#50Genius Scan. I never used a scanner ever again.