Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 818 posts

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

#201

Post by bombcar »

jbob2000 wrote: post #72

Multiple cursors in Sublime Text. Made it incredibly easy to do repetitive edits to json data or html templates. VS Code does a better job of cursor management now, but I think that was inspired by sublime text. Language and date time services like Moment and i18n. Huge productivity gains from having off the shelf solutions for multi-language features. Node.js and Express got rid of all the cruft from backend API dev…

Reminds me that "columnar select" like BBEdit has is amazingly useful when dealing with tabular data.

https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/faqs.html#rectangle

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

#202

Post by dopeboy »

Delphiza wrote: post #100
abetusk wrote: 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.

You mean getting a oscillator, caps, breadboard, MCU, avr-gcc, and a JTAG interface was too much work to get a LED to blink? :)

Arduino changed the game, wish I had it in college. Honorable mention to Microchip's PIC line - they had a arduino like kit that made a lot of those things easier too.

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

#203

Post by bps4484 »

Jquery - abstracted away tons of cross-browser inconsistent behavior, both with the dom and javascript, and added new selectors to make dom manuplation easier. I think there was a reason it was adopted as fast as it was, it really was a 10x improvement in working client side.

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

#204

Post by aerovistae »

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…

I have no familiarity with #2 so that's interesting to me-- do you or other people actually use uber/lyft to get to and fro work? Isn't that like $15-20 each way every day, thousands of dollars a year?

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

#205

Post by Farbklex »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #194
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…

> - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive Speaking of which, prior to Steam, I'd definitely consider "Making an ISO of your favorite game and mounting it as a virtual drive using DaemonTools" to be a 10x innovation.

Oh yes. Been there.

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

#207

Post by bombcar »

imagine99 wrote: post #85

I was frankly shocked at some of the things mentioned here. Instagram? Wix.com? Uber? Discord? Seriously? BUT that got me thinking: Could it be that a large portion of the 10x improvement could be in marketing, i.e. you'll have to be able to market your product as "10 times as good", regardless of whether or not it actually is? AND secondly, could it be that many if not most products that are marketed as 10x as good…

Often the 10x improvement is just an ∞x - because you're overcoming the barrier for someone to try it. The key is getting them to try it.

Often "worse" solutions win in the apparent 10x improvement because they're the one to finally get people to try it out.

Uber would have been as useful to me in the beginning if literally all it did was hail a cab for me. The "ridesharing" part was pointless (for me).

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

#209

Post by thow-01187 »

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 used to love Firebug, but couldn't help but notice it getting more and more sluggish over the years, with no apparent cause for it. Does anyone know what happened?

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

#210

Post by Minor49er »

zachruss92 wrote: post #165
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...

Same here. I miss when I could inspect network headers from the console without having to go over to the Network tab. Updating HTML in realtime without committing to an edit was also really handy since I wouldn't lose the context that I was just editing in.
Post reply on HN