WordPress hands down. Built in CMS, easy to use editor, not to mention the extensible plug-ins system. You could get a site up and running in an hour.
Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
351–360 of 818 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#352Being able to have my programs on a hard drive rather than switching between floppy disks was pretty nifty.
Going from a 300 baud modem to 1200 baud modem I guess is technically only a 4x difference, but it definitely felt more at the time.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#353GPT-3, for the first time you need to read a few minutes to know fake from real. I used to play with LSTM language models and they barely made sense 10 words at a time. The difference is a huge leap. My wish list for GPT-4 is: multimodal - to learn text, image, video and other modalities. Multitask - cultivate as many of its skills as possible, maybe it learns to combine skills in new ways. Longer sequence and additional memory, maybe even ability to use search/retrieval for augmentation. And last - recursive calls - ability to call itself in a loop and solve sub-problems. I hope in the future a pre-trained GPT-n variant will be a standard chip on the motherboard.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#354Erlang
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#355Firebug. 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?
He grows fruit
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#356+ 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 search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the search results were than in 2021
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#357Firebug. 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).
Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar, and IEDevToolbar was superior to Firebug for years for debugging JavaScript. So not a very good example at all, in fact quite the opposite, it just happened to ride the back of the anti-M$ wave and wasn't at all innovative, copying its features from already existing products. Conversely, though it was free, IEDevToolbar was only really advertised to MSDN subscribers, so never got…
That feels a bit like advocating that it was mainly Betamax which changed consumer habits in the 90s since it was technically superior to VHS.
It may very well have been the case for a small number of MS centric devs, but for the large majority of users, it was Firebug that really changed the game for the bulk of Frontend devs back then.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#358libtls. I wish it this API was more popular than it is, as it makes using TLS way easier. https://github.com/spc476/libtls-examples/blob/master/get1.c
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#359Here 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...
Yep, and you could clone it with xcopy.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#360USB. 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…
> SCSI ... which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial device
Pedantry, but: SCSI is parallel, not serial. The distinction is the number of data lines in the cable -- serial has one line, and SCSI has 8 or 16. This allows for much faster data transfer rates, at the (significant) expense of greater complexity and cabling cost.
The other advantage of SCSI is the ability to connect to multiple devices through "daisy-chaining". Old-style serial connections (RS-232, RS-422, etc) were strictly point-to-point.
Modern SCSI (SAS) runs the SCSI protocol over a serial connection, because port clock speeds are now fast enough that the parallel advantage isn't important for most uses.
Not to detract from USB though. It was an improvement over all of the above, and nowadays it's pretty fast, too.