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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?

#421

Post by guidoism »

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).

This.

I worked at Amazon during this time on our custom web server and before that I had been using telnet to hand type my commands or various perl scripts I wrote to emulate a browser's requests. And... ugh, tcpdump to figure out what exactly browsers were sending before they got to apache.

Firebug was like magic!

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

#422

Post by prepend »

sfblah wrote: post #252
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).

You didn't like debugging with window.alert()?

I remember running in a frame set just so I could document.write instead of a million window.alert. Fun times.

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

#423

Post by kiliantics »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #327
SatvikBeri wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It made a big difference for me with occasional trips, I took public transportation to work, but Uber/Lyft meant I could go visit my friends for $10 and 10 minutes instead of $2 and 45 minutes. Note that a car also costs thousands of dollars a year once you factor in everything, Edmunds estimates the true cost of a corolla at $7k/year: https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2020/cost-to-own/

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…

AAA does this kind of calculation in more detail and publishes its results regularly for the average cost per mile driven for an average car owner in the US. It's on the order of about a dollar per mile, depending on the kind of car. Average sedan is about half a dollar, so you are still out by a factor of 10. It's obviously going to be higher in certain places too, like in cities, where there are extra and higher costs to car ownership.

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

#424

Post by gxqoz »

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.

In most Office apps you can make this Alt + 1 by setting "Paste As Plain Text" as position 1 in the Quick Access Toolbar (the small list of icons in the top left of the app). But yes, would love for this to be a universal Windows command.

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

#425

Post by aspnet_dev »

yold__ wrote: post #395
aerovistae wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. We have chrome dev tools and firefox dev tools which are both literally the same thing as firebug but with a decade of refinement. There are so many great aspects to those tools that firebug didn't have back then because it was the first version basically.

Seconding that. Although Firebug was wonderful, cross-platform development was not (IE and FireFox). Example of "quirks mode" nonesense: 1. The "hidden" element at the root of the IE DOM tree, only accessible with "*" via CSS 2. inline-block was broken on IE6 (but fixable with hacks), and no transparent PNG support. 3. The outline CS property was implemented the same as background in IE Best of all was the dog slow I…

Having a proper doc type and having a specific IE stylesheet that added zoom:1 property to element could fix a lot of that off the bat and was a simple one to include on a webpage. Transparent PNGs of course wouldn't work (well there was a way but it was an arcane trick and I can't remember it for the life of me now).

TBH I found cross platform development during that time easier than when smart mobile phones came out. There was about 20-30 slightly incompatible forks of the Android Browser/Webkit and the processors were slow and everything was JS. Blackberry OS was still a thing. I also don't miss the problems with iPhone 3GS and 3D background layer flickering.

Also programming cross platform at the time showed me how to write lightening fast JS. That has made me a lot of money when people come to me to fix their crap web apps.

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

#426

Post by wackget »

scubbo wrote: post #214
zachruss92 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss Firebug. Simpler times...

What do you miss from Firebug that's missing from the built-in tools in any major browser?

Personally I hate that you can no longer copy an entire URL and its GET/POST data in a single click like you previously could.

Now you can "copy URL" or "copy URL parameters" but there's no way to copy them all in one go. You need to manually combine them in an external text editor which is annoying.

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

#428

Post by antipaul »

`dplyr`, the data manipulation library in R.

Some prefer base R or data table, or python pandas, but for me, dplyr is essentially a _perfect_ data manipulation library for small to medium data, and nothing comes close.

Given that for a data scientist, data cleaning is “80% of the work”, and in a world where science is increasingly data science, means that dplyr has done a LOT of good.

Honorable mention goes to ggplot2, the plotting library, and the rest of the tidyverse.

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

#429

Post by paxys »

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.

Pirate Bay, Napster, Limewire etc. are what dragged us into the digital media age. Might not seem like it today but had studios and record companies had their way, Netflix or Spotify would not exist.

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

#430

Post by prepend »

inasio wrote: post #417

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/

Single quotes are better.
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