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

241–250 of 818 posts

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

#241

Post by salted-fry »

aerovistae wrote: post #204
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?

I do use Lyft to get to work most days (or did, in the Before Times). I just checked a few hopefully-representative months (June/July/August 2019) and it looks like I was spending about $400/month. Google tells me that the average TCO of a car is about $700/month, so this would seem like a net win. That average might not be representative of my needs though - it's likely being dragged up by people driving around giant SUVs and such, so take this comparison with a grain of salt.

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

#242

Post by Nekhrimah »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #206

Nobody has the audacity to mention The Pirate Bay. Ethical and moral issues aside, it was and arguably still is a 10x method for obtaining digital content and software.

In a similar vein, Napster was also a game changer for mp3 distribution.

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

#243

Post by froh »

tfehring wrote: post #170

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 bigges…

and ggplot2 for R graphics. just. wow.

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

#244

Post by Lichtso »

splittingTimes wrote: post #127
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 know 3D computer graphics libraries that use GA?

You are right, while there are already some libraries which provide GA, there are almost non which use it. I know that it is used in some photogrammetry pose estimation / frame registration code and I am currently porting my vector / path rendering library to GA.

It is still really niche, but gaining traction in the last 3 years or so (considering it was invented in 1878).

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

#245

Post by [deleted] »

jasode wrote: post #86
apples_oranges wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications.

>Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications. Email is still heavily used for business-to-business communication between humans. Talking about business matters is still more natural via email until the participants know each other well enough to switch to texting. But yes, for personal communication, friends & family have shifted from email to phone texts. E.g.…

[deleted]

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

#246

Post by vram22 »

SQL itself was huge compared to ISAM-type programming for data apps. Though I suppose it still has its place. Something like the difference between how and what, or procedural vs. declarative.

Edit: to make it more clear:

>how and what

Meaning, do how I tell you, vs. do what I tell you.

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

#247

Post by Ekaros »

jp555 wrote: post #27

How about a 10x reduction? Thinking of when "Paste with style" became the default. :P

And most insane thing I find it that sometimes it works over Operating system that is from VirtualBox to Windows...

That level of VM to host integration is though 10x innovation.

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

#248

Post by Loughla »

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…

When Steam first started being a thing, I decried it as the death of physical media and fun game inserts. I vowed never to use it, because of what I perceived as the locked down steam launcher controlling access/ability to shut off access to games that I purchased with my own money. It seemed like too close to a 'license' to play.

Then I used it for the first time and realized how stupid easy it was compared to managing all of the physical disks and keys and what-not.

I mean, I wasn't wrong. But it is easier to use.

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

#249

Post by yosamino »

Postfix. It's the only software package that I use where I am consistently sure that any issue I come up with is me making a mistake in configuration or me not having read the documentation closely enough.

It's stable, it has good error messages, it supports all the different ways to send email. And it's documentation is just really well and precisely written.

It's just really good.

It's not that I think that Postfix is 10x better than other email software that I use - it's 10 times better than any other kind of software I have used in the 20 years that this has been a relevant question.

Thank you Wietse, thank you Viktor, thank you Ralf and thank you Kyle.

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

#250

Post by spartanatreyu »

aerovistae wrote: post #204
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?

Taxis would be at least twice as expensive, for a service that couldn't rate their drivers and customers and sometimes you'd have to wait in a queue to have your call taken so you could get picked up.

Currently there's only one disadvantage to ride-sharing apps, you can't wave down a car if you see one. You have to open the app first to request a ride, and that car might have driven away by then.

Post reply on HN