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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?

#111

Post by tgb »

belval wrote: post #67
sdfhbdf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On MacOS there’s a native shortcut for pasting as plain text: Option+Shift+Command+V to paste text without any formatting. https://superuser.com/a/512502

This is the same on Windows and Linux afaik you have Ctrl + Shift + V. Still makes me angry because it's a stupid default.

It's not universal on Windows: for example it doesn't work in MS Word. The place I'd want it the most! Ctrl+Shift+V does nothing at all there. It's Alt-HVT for this in Word (duh). But you can set the default to be no-formatting.

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

#112

Post by Macha »

Farbklex wrote: post #65

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…

> - the refund system is user friendly (refund if you haven't played for more than 2 hours)

Well, depends on your expectations.

* It wasn't first (that was Origin)

* It wasn't there for a long time after the store launched

* It doesn't meet minimum requirements of consumer law in places such as the EU or Australia.

The rest I agree with though.

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

#114

Post by MH15 »

Thristle wrote: post #88

So many good comments for me its a lot of what others said + - Python as the default for scripting/automation: instead of using bash/batch/autohotkey/ if you need to use some popular API it saved you time with it's huge number of packages. so many good built ins. it's dynamic enough to be comfortable but not insane like JS. So good.

I agree with this but Python is far more dynamic than JS.

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

#116

Post by aphextron »

fnord77 wrote: post #113

Java vs. the 90s C/C++ standards. Not having to deal with memory management made it so much easier to write applications. I'm guessing SQL was a 10x innovation at least when it came out, too.

+1 for this. Java gets shade from the hipsters these days, but it's almost impossible to overstate what a revolution it was for software engineering.

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

#117

Post by atonse »

dale_glass wrote: post #59

SSDs. Virtualization. Git. I've used CVS and SourceSafe before. LVM. The old MBR way of partitioning is just awful. systemd and journald, just to be a bit controversial. I really don't miss my days of screwing around with init scripts, or having to parse logs by hand. Arduino. It makes lots of cool stuff very accessible. sshfs, it's amazingly convenient. pulseaudio. Sound on Linux finally works. I spent an unbelievab…

I absolutely love systemd and journald. The fact that you can do most things declaratively and have a common interface for logs, it's just beautiful. I can do things like "show me the logs for this service for the last 5 mins".

I still don't fully understand why people prefer bash scripts.

But then again, I have never once needed to edit those bash scripts since I usually don't stray too much from defaults.

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

#118

Post by the__alchemist »

If this were true more broadly, we'd never get anywhere - most advances in science and technology are incremental, and improve slightly on past things. This applies even to great discoveries (Standing on the shoulder of giants). Is there a more precise definition of "10x" ? It's not well-defined-enough as-is to survive on intuition.

I agree that many of the things posted here were 10x better - but this is a selection of the most notable software projects in memory: Not a reasonable threshold for if a business is successful!

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

#119

Post by DevKoala »

K8. It is night and day how well our organization operates now that we are fully on k8.

ClickHouse/BigQuery have allowed me to tackle massive analytics projects with a tenth of the effort when I had to setup a map-reduce/spark infra.

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

#120

Post by Macha »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #92
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #20

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.

In other markets, they did. Where I live you need to have an appropriate license to transport passengers for money. Hailo brought the app approach to hiring taxi drivers. Uber now exists here, but all the drivers are actual licensed taxi drivers charging the standard rates. They did briefly try to "disrupt" the market here by ignoring those rules, but they got slapped down.
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