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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?

#541

Post by prepend »

ftio wrote: post #466
prepend wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a brilliant idea. Where were you back then? I would've benefitted immensely from a Xanga or LiveJournal post about this.

It’s really funny how isolated the Webdev world was back then. (Or at least I was).

I take stackoverflow and blogs for granted.

I did have a hand-rolled blog back then (The Hole Report) but was busy writing about magic tournaments and didn’t think anyone else cared about javascript hacks.

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

#542

Post by girishso »

thow-01187 wrote: post #209
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).

I used to love Firebug, but couldn't help but notice it getting more and more sluggish over the years, with no apparent cause for it. Does anyone know what happened?

For whatever reason Firefox decided to write it's own Dev tool. I remember Firebug developer(s) saying why are you not integrating Firebug itself in Firefox?

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

#543

Post by georgewsinger »

I literally (as in 30 minutes ago) just fixed a bug in 10 minutes that I thought was going to take me 3 days to fix using https://pernos.co/ (a "timeless" debugging tool that wraps Mozilla's `rr`). This is a factor of speedup on the order of 100x+, not 10x.

I highly recommend checking this tool out if you value your time.

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

#544

Post by 12ian34 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #194
Farbklex wrote: post #65

Steam for PC Gaming. At first, it was just annoying DRM. But it was convenient. - Before that, you had to manually update your games in order to play the latest version - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive - with the addition of steam workshops, installing mods for certain games became easier. You didn't have to manually copy paste files. - you have one central friend list, and…

> - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive Speaking of which, prior to Steam, I'd definitely consider "Making an ISO of your favorite game and mounting it as a virtual drive using DaemonTools" to be a 10x innovation.

thanks for reminding me about DaemonTools!

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

#545

Post by mishraprince »

Didn't see this mentioned, but Wordpress and Drupal have had a huge impact on my early career.

Wouldn't count them as developer tools per se, but as a software provider, I could serve a lot more customers with ease and confidence thanks to hundreds of thousands of man hours put in by the Wordpress and Drupal developers.

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

#546

Post by skinkestek »

2bitencryption wrote: post #222
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…

This was the entrypoint to Firefox for millions of people. Unlike today, back then Firefox had a clearly expressive value proposition: Use this! It has tabs! It will change how you browse the web! Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest.

Which is just another reason why it is so awfully frustrating flr me that they won't fix their extension apis:

I fully believe the extensions were really a huge part of Firefox' moat.

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

#547

Post by girishso »

showerst wrote: post #42

Showing my age here, heh: 1. Early Ruby on Rails -- Now that MVC/ORM packges are the norm, it's hard to describe how revolutionary the original '15 minute blog' video was. It really felt like a quantum leap for CRUD apps. 2. Uber/Lyft - It has literally remolded the city I live in, by making large areas that are transit-inconvenient more attractive to live in. 3. Linode -- Access to a cheap server that you could spin…

+1 for Ruby on Rails, I was developing on ASP.NET back then. It would have taken me at-least a week to develop 'the blog'. Rails had so many great ideas baked in (apart from MVC/ORM) viz. dev/production environments, migrations, default locations for css/js/images.

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

#548

Post by csteubs »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #452
csteubs wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're absolutely right, there are huge swaths of airspace that rarely see traffic. Imaging satellites have an inherent advantage when it comes to total coverage but proportionally, a small % of all images captured in an orbital period are of interest at that point in time. We look at our approach as an opposite, complementary offering that optimizes for revisit in well-established and predictable routes around population centers (and whatever else lies in between takeoff and landing).

Most airports are zoned industrial and located within or on the edge of cities and towns, so we can provide more frequent updates of areas that are of greater value to customers monitoring supply chains, construction/site development, estimating traffic flows, etc. High-revisit is equally important at cruising altitude over much of the country where demand for agricultural/environmental monitoring, crop yield data, etc. is of similar interest.

All this to say coverage is a known limitation, but based on those reasons I think (hope) we'll become the yin to satellite imagery's yang.

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

#549

Post by Mandatum »

dopeboy wrote: post #192

Stackoverflow. 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.

I wouldn't give them 10x, but certainly 2-3x for junior developers compared to predecessors and 1.2x for others. Which is still incredibly significant and nothing to sneeze at.

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

#550

Post by skinkestek »

petepete wrote: post #347
dopeboy wrote: post #192

Stackoverflow. 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.

> 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.

This might make someone here angry that they weren't aware of it (or make them smile):

This is how they did it:

The answers were always visible if you just scrolled far enough down the page.

At least that is how I experienced it - and I thought every oldtimer knew! :-)

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