Wolfram Alpha. The ability to perform calculations on "nebulous" things is amazing. Things like comparing the population of China to the population the US (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+united+s...) are great. Visual solutions to complex math problems? Awesome.
Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
341–350 of 818 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#342Breaking the 640K barrier.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#3431) Ruby on Rails.
The standardized structure.
Convention over configuration gave the app a level of consistency that I hadn't experienced before.
2) Lyft - being able to see who your driver was and exactly where they were in route to pick you up, was amazing.
I think the first couple of years of riding I would always ask the driver when they started driving for Lyft and if they enjoyed it.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#344+ 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…
> using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search. Aaahhh. The year Google launched, a friend and I were sitting next to each other, at our PCs. Both of us were techie types and into innovative stuff, although working in a software services bigco at the time. I casually said to him: "I came across this new search engine a few days ago while browsing…
I still distinctly remember the moment of shock with the minimalism of their homepage at the time; compared to AltaVista jam-packed with ads and other stuff to the brim, seeing just the logo and the editbox on a plain white page made me startle and pause with some "Whaaat's going on???" and "This can't be true" feelings.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#345Google the search engine. Before I had to us Hotbot and Altavista. Google changed the game.
YouTube. The user-generated content helped bring a lot of small time productions to be seen by millions of people. Now you can see a video about almost anything, especially if you need a how-to, tutorial, or learn about anything.
Adobe Photoshop's Content Aware Fill, Healing Brush, etc. This changed the game for photo manipulation. You no long had to do it manually by hand using clone stamp. Now the computer does a pretty good job for you.
Smartphone camera. This is more hardware than software, but they practically destroyed the entire compact camera market. Now everyone has a great camera and camcorder in their pockets. Now with their image processing, they're rivaling DSLR images for low-res images.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have multiple experiences with Toyota’s driven 200k to 300k miles with just standard repairs. A Corolla costs $20k? $25k? Let’s say $1k for new tires/brakes/oil changes/filters every 45k miles. That’s $333 per year for maintenance, and the car lasts 13 to 20 years at 15k miles per year for 200k to 300k miles, so let’s say $2k per year on the high end, $1,200 per year on the low end. Extremely high liability insuran…
Add parking in a major city (the places Uber/Lyft are a viable alternative).
Yes, parking is the big expense that makes Uber/Lyft worth it.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#347Stackoverflow. Its closest competitor, experts exchange, was a slow website that required you sign up to see an answer that was rarely useful. There's a direct correlation to SO and dollars of revenue I've driven.
Experts Exchange also used to do that awful thing where they let Google index the solution but would hide it from visitors until they'd signed in.
I believe Google penalised them for doing it so they used another sneaky trick where they showed a obscured/pixelated answer first and then the actual one further down than most people would scroll.
SO was better in every way.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I studied Google's file system. What Google figured out is that, with the rise of very fast networking such as 10 Gig Ethernet and faster, the network is much faster than local disk. Files were spread across multiple servers so they could all stream different parts of the file off their local disks simultaneously to the client computer faster than the local disk on any one computer could run. Thus, you could have sys…
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Very, very influential reading back in the day, and still interesting.
It also came out at an interesting time, because everyone was trying to push data-to-redundancy ratios to their limits. Since storage was so expensive back then, storing multiple copies of data made little sense when looking at it from a data storage view, even if the speeds were much better
Then Google dropped their MapReduce paper: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Which quite literally paved the way for modern data processing, and works extremely well with the Google Filesystem architecture
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#349* Redis and Memcached
* MapReduce
* Column stores
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#350OS X / macOS. After about 5 years of Windows, 10 years of various Linux desktops, I got converted to Mac in 2012 and never looked back.