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

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

#311

Post by analog31 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

dimal wrote: post #263

USB. It's hard to imagine, but we used to have a thing called SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy", and that's how it felt) which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial device. The plug was huge. And cables cost $50. Mice used an entirely separate interface that was different on Macs and PCs, and since Apple was dying at the time, it was a struggle to get Mac mice for a reasonable price. With USB, you could suddenly attac…

Indeed, I'm running a lab experiment right now, and I count six USB cables coming out of the computer, one of which goes to a powered hub with a further five cables plugged in. Two of the USB interfaced hardware gadgets are homemade. All controlled by Python. A couple of the devices required downloading drivers from the vendor, but the setup process was utterly uneventful.

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

#312

Post by bluescrn » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

Unity for indie/mobile game development. Especially around 8 years ago (Unity 4.x era) when it really took off.

It completely redefined what was possible for a solo developer or small team to create. Easy to learn, yet very flexible for experienced users. And moving from C++ to C# was a real game changer.

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

#313

Post by Nextgrid » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

KMnO4 wrote: post #195

Nextgrid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Notifications" is being generous here. The average user's email inbox is 90% marketing spam.

Any sources on that? I’m guessing the 90% is hyperbole, but I still wonder how much spam the average user actually gets. (For me, close to absolute zero)

Pretty much every company/service out there opts you into spam unless you proactively opt-out of it (which takes effort and knowledge to work around the dark patterns).

Looking at my password manager I've got ~260 logins right now and keep in mind that I don't do social media and try to avoid creating accounts as much as possible (and delete the ones I don't use for a long time), so the average user is likely to have a lot more accounts.

Even if each one of these companies only spammed once a week (most will do more frequently if you let them), that'll already significantly outnumber the amount of legitimate e-mail I receive.

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

#314

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

xenocratus wrote: post #229

rudyfink wrote: post #154

Here are a few that I did not see listed by others: 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation (e.g., with USB devices (also USB device categories, etc.)). Instead of trying to find a driver, things just worked. 2. Automatic updates. Keeping everything updated, largely, fell into the background. 3. Graphical integrated development environments (IDEs) for software development. I realize editors can be conte…

> 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation Fun story. Had Windows 7 installed on an old HDD. Decided to build myself a new PC, so I got all the parts (completely different setup than what the HDD had been in), put them all together, connected the HDD, and powered it on to see what would happen. I was shocked to see that Windows booted just fine with the new setup, like nothing had changed...

Yeah, Windows got a lot better at handling motherboard swaps.

I remember trying to do a PC overhaul with Windows 2000. I swapped out the motherboard, RAM, and CPU, and Windows would fail to boot, crashing with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. IIRC, I managed to recover without wiping the drive and doing a clean install by putting back in the old mobo/RAM/CPU, booting up, and swapping the IDE driver from a motherboard-specific driver to a generic IDE driver (Which comes at a signifcant performance penalty because I lost UDMA support), then swapping back to the new mobo. It booted fine after that, and I was able to install the proper motherboard drivers to get UDMA support on my IDE drive.

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

#315

Post by jcheng » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

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).

Whatever happened to Joe Hewitt (one of my developer heroes back in the day)? Did he retire after Facebook?

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

#316

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

My first use of proper capacitative touch screen on the iPad. It was an absolutely transformative device compared to all the insensitive resistive ones that you had to jab at. Multi-touch for zoom and auto-rotate weere also innovations that felt like magic at the time.

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

#317

Post by Nition » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

tgb wrote: post #111

belval wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It works in LibreOffice but it pops up a window asking you which sort of paste you want, which wastes more time.

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

#318

Post by nlh » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #132

Surprised no one has mentioned AWS yet. Anyone who remembers procuring, racking and imaging physical servers knows how utterly incredible it is create a cloud VM. And probably a good 20X improvement to use a value add cloud service like S3 or Netlify.

+1000 to this. At my first startup after college (~2000-2002), I remember clearly our first "deployment" for a paid customer -- we had to order $thousands in Sun SPARC machines, rent a rack at a local data center, hire someone to set it all up, etc. etc. etc.

I don't think people appreciate what an absolute miracle the various cloud providers are. I'd say it was 100x - 1000x improvement, not just 10x.

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

#319

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

ta1234567890 wrote: post #261

Nekhrimah wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Kazaa

The only problem I had with Kazaa is how often people would rename files for reasons I'll never understand.

Like...imagine downloading "The Matrix.avi", and you start playing it, and it turns out it was actually a copy of Fight Club.

WHY!?

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

#320

Post by bozzcl » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

Steam Link (and lately nVidia Gamestream). It made my dream viable: having a server rack in my garage or basement, and stream my games to any room in my house. Wanna play in the living room TV? Sure! Want to play from your laptop in your room at full performance? No problem!

Later, I switched to Gamestream because the performance is vastly superior. Eventually, I'd like to enable multiple devices playing games from the same server... I might have to switch to a VM setup.