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

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

#411

Post by inasio »

chrbr wrote: post #339
jakevoytko wrote: post #17

Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…

They announced it on April Fools. And it seemed like a joke - 1GB for email? Yeah. Right. Hotmail had, what, 10MB? 15? Best April Fools joke ever.

pretty sure Yahoo was 5MB and Hotmail 2MB when gmail came out.

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

#412

Post by aksss »

x0x0 wrote: post #282
aerovistae wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

in sf, pre uber, taxis just didn't come. They were extremely unreliable -- call, and they'd come if they felt like it. maybe. and on their own schedule. Also, they were run by utter assholes who knew you had 3-4 companies to choose from, and they all sucked. uber and lyft later turned it into a service that was highly reliable (came, or at least told you if they weren't coming). It seriously enabled the use of taxis…

This describes the taxi experience I've had in every city the world over. Not that I've been everywhere, but places in Europe, Asia, North/Central America, that's been my experience. Small towns are generally better because the taxi driver isn't anonymous.

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

#413

Post by [deleted] »

tolmasky wrote: post #389
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).

It's interesting that this is kind of a constant .1x * 10x = 1 cycle we repeatedly go through with new platforms. We rarely realize the cost of a new development platform in the fact that we often have to start from zero with documentation, tools, communities, etc. Tools are arguably the easiest to realize on day 1, when all of a sudden you can't set a breakpoint. So it's really .1x development in many ways until som…

[deleted]

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

#414

Post by CodeGlitch »

murph-almighty wrote: post #187
jasode wrote: post #48

+ 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…

I cannot imagine a period of time where the STL didn't exist, which perhaps outs me as a younger dev

Many video games still don't use the STL due to performance concerns.

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

#415

Post by antipaul »

xeromal wrote: post #390
aynsof wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> + Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since misbehaving websites crashing don't bring down all the other tabs in my browsing session like Firefox/Opera. Adding to this: just browser tabs themselves were a 10x improvement for me. I had actually forgotten what the world was like before tabs - a whole lot of unsortable windows, and a lot of clicks of the back button. It was a godsend to be able to open new lin…

I remember using Avant browser to have tabs back in the day before I discovered FF. I think it was just an IE wrapper

And Maxthon!

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

#416

Post by marianov »

Wireshark. I've saved countless enterprise problems that nobody could debug by intercepting traffic and guessing, or looking at the raw data nobody knew was there.

Python list comprehensions + ipython: it changed how I approach all compley python code. I iterate over the data until I get it right, then use that as the basis of the program/script.

Youtube: I can learn anything now. It's the real world The Matrix

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

#417

Post by inasio »

Black

Black [0] has been 10x for me. Automatic code formatting frees up a whole bunch of cycles that would otherwise be spent trying to comply with someone else's style guide, or trying to convince someone to write their code in the approved style. I don't have to anymore.

[0] https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

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

#418

Post by tootie »

cardanome wrote: post #278
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.

As someone working as a web developer for a smaller company, I don't get the use case for AWS. Super confusing naming of their services and nontransparent pricing. For the vast majority of people some 5 Dollar hosting is more than they need. Just copy your files to the server. Does not get simpler. And if you need more, it is super easy to set up a dedicated server these days anyway.

$5 hosting is absolute not enough for most big businesses. The times I've actually gone for simpler solutions, they're usually built on AWS (ie Heroku or Netlify)

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

#419

Post by jschwartzi »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #291
murph-almighty wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot imagine a period of time where the STL didn't exist, which perhaps outs me as a younger dev

I know of the STL but don't know a damn thing about how to use it. They didn't teach STL at all in my university, even in the C/C++ classes.

We had to write our own Scanner class in our Java classes because the version of Java we were using didn't have that functionality yet. It came out in the middle of the course.

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

#420

Post by aspnet_dev »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #289
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).

> Debugging JS in IE6 Visual Studio (even back when it was called Visual Interdev) supported first-class script debugging with Internet Explorer going as far back as Internet Explorer 4. Ditto cscript/wscript. It just wasn't popular (and few people knew about it) because most people doing front-end web-work _back then_ weren't using Visual Studio, and in general most people weren't doing back-end web-work in Visual S…

WebForms is still one of the quickest things to actually build intranet applications with and it still does it incredibly well.

If I wanted to have a editable table (datagrid) control it literally took about 20 minutes and I had something working and people could use it.

The problem with it (much like Angular which btw is basically webforms for JavaScript) is that it required you learning how the event lifecycle worked properly. Whereas other things at the time were web scripts and you could just hack against.

It of course had a lot of problems (like everything on the web at the time) but for what it was actually intended for, it was actually really good.

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