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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?

#92

User 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…

What's crazy is that any taxi company (and there are some large ones which have the resources) could have done this.

Then, after Uber launched, instead of jumping on the bandwagon and doing they same they instead dig in their heels and fought it. Only after it was too late did they attempt to do the same.

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

#94
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Most mid-to-cheap end "HDR" TVs look absolutely awful on HDR. The colours are washed out and the contrast is blown out. If your device sends an HDR signal, in many cases it'll look worse than not having HDR at all.

I completely agree. I was an early adopter of a Sony HDR10 set and am pretty worse off for it. Genuinely curious though as to what you consider a good HDR tv though.

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

#95
The personal computer (as a category, not just the IBM PC). I first ran into one in high school, when the computer science lab got five TRS80s. Before that, it was submitting a FORTRAN deck that someone took to an off-site mainframe. Half a week later, you got your results. But with the TRS80, you got them as fast as the program ran.

Now the CS lab did have a Teletype terminal, though I never used it. But the TRS80 had a real interactive display, not just static paper.

I know there were others before the TRS80. It's just the first one I came across.

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

#96

Steam for PC Gaming. At first, it was just annoying DRM. But it was convenient. - Before that, you had to manually update your games in order to play the latest version - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive - with the addition of steam workshops, installing mods for certain games became easier. You didn't have to manually copy paste files. - you have one central friend list, and…

It's very likely a smart business decision, but I wish Steam had a re-sell market. Even just having only a single possible sale, I think would help sort the crap from the gold.

There'd be one more opportunity for profit AND people could buy games for cheap. Sure, there's an opportunity to copy games before you sell them, but I think there's ways to fix that. Sell for steam-credit only maybe? and there's plenty of opportunity for a transparent DRM. Even the threat of perma-ban for cheating. Dunno.

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

#98
post #74

Not sure if mathematics counts as software: Geometric / Clifford Algebra. It makes just about every aspect of handling geometry in computer graphics and robotics so much easier. It comes with a ton of upsides and only two downsides: You probably were not taught it yet (so you have to learn it) and if you do, others will have trouble following you unless they learn it too. I somehow feel like coming from a tribe where…

Nice. I’ve been always curious but also worried about alienating myself. Any communities of GA users out there to feel connected?

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

#99
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 2FA method is preferred instead of SMS these days?

TOTP, I guess.

Hardware keys. If you can't use those, HOTP (push notification-based - OTP with an HMAC and a counter).

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

#100
post #79

I'm showing my age, but here's an abridged list: 1. Google Search - before Google came out, it was wading through Alta-vista and Yahoo's hand picked pages and ignoring the 50% adult content spam, or using a physical 'phone book' of web pages 2. Google Email - when it game out, the fact that it had gigabytes of storage was astounding 3. Wikipedia - this became one of the first resources for most queries that weren't h…

Good call on Arduino. The ability to write LED blinky embedded software on a microcontroller using a simple IDE and a USB cable was definitely 10x from what came before. The barriers to entry in terms of knowledge, tools (compilers), and dev boards was immense before Arduino.
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