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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?

#451

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

aspnet_dev wrote: post #420
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 work…

I respect that WebForms had a decent concept for RAD, copying VB6’s “drag and drop components, write glue-logic to make them work together”, the problem is that you had to give up a lot of control over the generated HTML, which was a huge problem because the generated HTML was awful, like “1998’s HTML in 2006”-awful, to put it succinctly. WebForms supported item-templates, but using them was hard, and you still couldn’t override other HTML until Control Adapters came out, and even then it was a lot of work and very, very brittle. Oh, and so many third-party components embedded ancient versions of jQuery. It was a mess.

Other complaints about WebForms weren’t inherent to its architecture and should have been corrected early on, such as the lack of testability and over-use of [ThreadLocal] storage, and the nigh-impossibility of running WebForms outside of IIS, but these were never properly addressed by Microsoft, instead we had ugly band-aids like “BaseHttpRequest” and “HttpRequestWrapper”. Le sigh.

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

#452

Post by antoineMoPa »

csteubs wrote: post #199
davio wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Maps was amazing. Back when I showed it to my dad for the first time, he expected it to be a live satellite view of his house.

I'm working on a startup trying to make that happen now. There's an immense amount of "free energy" in the form of 120k+ flights around the world every day with that # expected to increase in the future with air taxis, delivery drones, etc. Idea is to hitch a ride on these platforms and crowdsource (cloudsource?) as much aerial image data as possible to create a map that updates every few minutes. Planet Labs and Max…

I would expect that most planes fly on specific "routes", leaving a lot of area uncovered. Do you have any solution for this problem?

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

#453

Post by pornel »

vbsteven wrote: post #24

Some parts of the Rust ecosystem belong to this category. For example the way Rustup and Cargo features with conditional compilation helps cross compiling code to new platforms. Yes we also have cross compiling in C/C++ but the extra tooling that cargo/rustup provide make the 10x difference.

And docs.rs.

Having one place with documentation for every library is just amazing. Cargo as standard layout for all projects is such a force multiplier.

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

#454

Post by NotPavlovsDog »

Apache and *nix, for some applications LAMP was a game-changer for rapid web solutions for me, back in the day.

Started with FreeBSD for my servers and box, then GNU/Linux on my boxes and laptops, as the hardware support got better on GNU/Linux. Apache, but really the whole stack, what a 10x!

No clicking, no checkboxes, no go to this or that website to download, just run a command or a shell script and pull in software you need, configs, etc ...

Of course I wish we had Lisp machines, but this is what I have to work with. Having *nix, learning it over 30 years ago, and it's still at the core of what I do. So much time saved over the years not re-learning the fads. I shudder to think how much time I would waste on the other platforms and their quirks, planned obsolescence, etc.

Was saved relatively early (enough), an iMac I got as a gift & tried to update to the next OS got fried, was perhaps a bug, some say malevolent design by apple to get consumers to buy new machines. Don't care, done with that platform. Though I did buy an iPad 2 for peanuts, to read on. It's cheap because people can't update it anymore, so there's that.

I suppose I saved about a year of man-hours at this point in life, just using the *nix stack that just keeps on truckin'

& Common Lisp for rapid idea implementation.*

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

#455

Post by tbrock »

bradstewart wrote: post #379
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, you'll still want to go to the NVIDIA/AMD website to download the latest drivers. What you get from Windows Update is likely 6+ months out of date.

True, but you at least have a functioning display out of the box, which lets you get to that website.

You poor souls running windows... even Linux can do this with mostly no fuss today.

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

#456

Post by flemhans »

jasode wrote: post #83
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…

>And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. And its UI was simple and easy-to-use. And you could search it. Also don't forget that Gmail at the time had the most intelligent spam blocking algorithm compared to AOL/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc. It was a big enough deal that some observers that switched to Gmail considered the email spam problem as "solved" because Gmail seemed so good at it. (On th…

Funnily enough, Gmail can be on the receiving end sometimes too, e.g. being blocked in SORBS.

The response was:

  451 Currently Sending Spam See:
  http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?209.85.215.41
Although some may argue that SORBS is a bad system, anyway.

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

#457

Post by benibela »

bhaak wrote: post #146
aphextron wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for this. Java gets shade from the hipsters these days, but it's almost impossible to overstate what a revolution it was for software engineering.

Java saved me from having a C++ career. And that was the 90s C++, not the C++ of today. I dodged a bullet there.

Unfortunately I learned Delphi

Afterwards you could not take the other languages seriously

Like comparing two strings for equaltiy, strA and strB.

In Delphi, you write: strA = strB

In Java: strA != null && strA.equals(strB)

Delphi just did everything better

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

#458

Post by boring_twenties »

dale_glass wrote: post #59

SSDs. Virtualization. Git. I've used CVS and SourceSafe before. LVM. The old MBR way of partitioning is just awful. systemd and journald, just to be a bit controversial. I really don't miss my days of screwing around with init scripts, or having to parse logs by hand. Arduino. It makes lots of cool stuff very accessible. sshfs, it's amazingly convenient. pulseaudio. Sound on Linux finally works. I spent an unbelievab…

> LVM. The old MBR way of partitioning is just awful.

Just wait until you find out about ZFS!

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

#459

Post by Psychlist »

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…

Virtual machines have been a huge win, and still are.

Spending 2-5 days setting up a development environment, then archiving a copy of the whole VM made some of the crappier setups usable. Back before rented software (including the OS) that meant one person could grind through the whole OS/tools/IDE/libraries stack and get something we could all use. I've broken software protection to make this work, because it's just such a huge productivity win.

Being able to have a whole test matrix worth of systems virtualised also helps. One place we interacted with MS-Office, so the matrix was Win95/98/Me/XP/2000 (etc), then three versions of Office {cries}. It would have been just unreasonable as a small company for us to have and maintain 2-3 copies of that matrix as physical machines.

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

#460

Post by schwede »

enraged_camel wrote: post #31
atian wrote: post #3

Yes, the thing in iOS that automatically clips SMS verification codes sent to you. It saves me from going to my messages and finding the code.

Yeah, this was phenomenal the first time I experienced it. I wish it also came with a "don't use SMS for 2-factor authentication" warning though. ;)

Users aren’t always in control of that though.
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