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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?

#171

Post by knowaveragejoe »

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…

Their software defined networking & virtualization was a big deal too. Many of the primitives of on-prem or "LAN" networking were translated into the cloud.

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

#172

Post by tediousdemise »

atian wrote: post #3

Yes, the thing in iOS that automatically clips SMS verification codes sent to you. It saves me from going to my messages and finding the code.

I take this one for granted. I can't wait until they add the same thing for emails.

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

#173

Post by anderspitman »

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…

Heck, GMaps is slow and clunky for me, but it's still 10x better than anything else I've ever used. I'm pretty sure it'll be the last GOOG service I manage to get myself off. Is there even a single OSM-based alternative that offers competitive POI search?

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

#174

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

passivate wrote: post #167

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 na…

shareX is a godsend, I wish MacOS had as good as it

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

#175

Post by listenallyall »

shmoe wrote: post #40
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…

Seems ancient at this point, but a total game changer at the time. I can actually recall getting my invite in 2006.

I bought invites on eBay for myself and a few family members. Maybe $5 each. Although I thought it was closer to 2004.

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

#176

Post by shireboy »

The most recent one I've experienced is ElasticSearch + Kibana + FileBeat/MetricBeat. I've gone from munging through log files in a text editor or maybe LogParser to being able to quickly visualize issues in charts and dashboards, but then zoom into log-level details in seconds. It may not be fair to call notepad the "second best option", but for open source log (and more) analysis, Elastic+Kibana definitely stands out among competition.

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

#177

Post by vitorbaptistaa »

dbt [1] is a tool that is deceptively simple, but kind of created a new job role: analytics engineer. It allow you to define tables using SQL plus Jinja2, so you can add loops and variables to create your SQL code. It might sound complicated, but it's a pleasure to work with.

This improvement was only possible because of other improvements in cloud databases and reductions in storage costs, which allowed us to go from ETL, where we transform the data outside of the database, to ELT, where we load the raw data in the DB and transform it using SQL.

All these improvements taken together allows a single person to do a job that required a small team not many years ago.

[1] https://www.getdbt.com/

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

#178

Post by mchusma »

showerst wrote: post #42

Showing 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…

+1 for Uber/Lyft. I remember being SO excited for them to come to my area, as they are so much better than taxis.

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

#179

Post by anderspitman »

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…

Not just a GB. It was also constantly increasing in size, with a live counter to show how much storage you had available. Super gimmicky, but fun.

I guess there are probably a lot of people here who are too young to have ever used those early versions. You also had to scrounge forums for an invite code.

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

#180

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

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…

I forgot how annoying things were before steam. Manually patching and update games, making sure the disc you bought had a key that wasn't already used.

That being said, I do miss the little game guides that would come with your game. Starcraft 1 comes to mind. It told you what every unit did and it was a handy little reference companion that was wedged between the frontpanel of the CD cassette

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