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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?

#161

Post by ajkjk »

Lichtso wrote: 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…

Do you think it is all of GA that helps, or really just the concept of bivectors / multivectors?

(I have a lot of skepticism about the geometric product as a useful object, but I think that multivectors are clearly fantastically useful everywhere. My exposure is mostly in physics where multivectors are basically necessary to make any sense of a bunch of concepts. But I don't work in robotics/graphics so maybe don't know how much good the geometric product does in practice?)

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

#162

Post by tootie »

jasode wrote: post #159
atwebb wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit, but hosting providers were around long before AWS. You could do multi-tenant web / database deployments in the 90s.

>, but hosting providers were around long before AWS. Yes but AWS exposed a programmable web api to provision servers and disk. You download an SDK and get a AWS developer key and then could create S3 buckets for storage and EC2 instances. Yes, hosting datacenters like Rackspace in 2003 existed but you had to talk to a human or send an email to provision compute resources. There wasn't a "Rackspace web SDK". The Amaz…

And the console. They set the standard for self-service. It's the most sophisticated enterprise software platform in the world and you can bootstrap without talking to a salesperson. That was pretty revolutionary.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #14

To my chagrin: 1) Robinhood for normal stocks 2) Disney+ vs AmazonPrime/Netflix -> HDR for no additional fee, remastered exclusive content, a very full non region-locked (AFAIK) library, consistent streaming quality, straight-to-VOD shows, and premium movies. ->Some might argue not 10x, I can be convinced to agree. It's a solid 1.5x at a minimum though. 3) AWS Workspaces vs RDP -> Ease of use out of the box is just u…

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by zachruss92 »

deckard1 wrote: post #141

Firebug. Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Debugging JS in IE6 was like trying to build a house blindfolded with both arms tied behind your back. Firebug is when JS went from just a web augmentation toy that could silently fail and your web page would still mostly function to becoming a critical function for a web page (many will see this as all a big mistake).

I miss Firebug. Simpler times...

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

#166

Post by MalcolmDwyer »

omarhaneef wrote: post #32
boringg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4x? 1x at best - saves my brain from memorizing a small thing very infrequently. Might be detrimental to my brain over the long run.:)

Ha yes, my point was just that it is hard to quantify most of these and that 10x ends up meaning so awesome you buy it, which is almost a tautology. (Thiel actually quantifies it in the examples he offers in the original text, if I remember correctly)

When I took driver's ed many years ago, the official state written material had it as fact that highway driving is "3 times easier" than city driving. It was actually on my written test. Multiple choice, and the other answers were different numbers to chose from... but no: "3 times" is the correct answer.

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

#167

Post by passivate »

Reaper. Its simple, fast, and no licensing bull.

Steam. Just works, simple and easy to use. Copy-Paste the Steam folder to your new system to move your entire game library.

ZoomIt by Sysinternals - excellent, excellent tool that has improved all my presentations/screen-share sessions.

Everything by David Carpenter - super fast system wide search for files that has bookmarks and other features like match using file name/file path/regex etc.

ShareX - Very useful screenshoting/screenrecording + more tool with automation capabilities like auto upload to imgur, etc.

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

#168

Post by AnimalMuppet »

aphextron wrote: post #116
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.

Java brought two things to the table compared to C++: garbage collection, and an enormous library.

I don't think that garbage collection, by itself, was a 10x change. For it to be so, programmers would have to be spending 90% of their effort on freeing memory. Don't get me wrong, garbage collection is a big win when you can use it, but I don't think it's quite that big of a win.

The library... that might almost be 10x, by itself, because of everything that you don't have to write. The combination of that plus garbage collection gave Java quite a kick compared to C++.

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

#169

Post by roadbeats »

deliriousferret wrote: post #49
jakevoytko wrote: post #17

Gmail. 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?

Hotmail was 10x worse than all alternatives. It was an ugly web page, not an app.

Gmail took XMLHttpRequest and its ActiveX fallback (we used to call this “comet”) and proved the world that we can ship a robust app inside a web browser.

It was well designed, had no ugly banners like Hotmail did, it was really fast, simple and working like a desktop app.

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

#170

Post by tfehring »

The R packages plyr/reshape2 and subsequently dplyr/tidyr. Data manipulation in base R can be pretty painful (awk arguably even more so, and Pandas didn't exist yet), and going from that to an environment that's syntactically the nicest option available today for complicated manipulations of tabular data was a game changer. I know it's become fashionable to hate on the Tidyverse lately, but IMO it's the single biggest reason (though there's also a very long list of smaller reasons) that R is still relevant in industry.
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