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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?

#561

Post by eitland »

Maven: not having to hunt dependencies in bookshelves, on file shares, on vendor web sites or sourceforge.

Actual extensions for Firefox (no, not the awful watered-down thing we have to live with today):

Back when Firefox created the extensions API they had two competitions with (I think) rather huge sum of cash as prizes for the three top spots.

The quality and ingenuity of those early extensions were nothing short of astounding IMO.

Later extensions were also brilliant.

(To fully understand just how powerful the early extension API was consider this: Firebug, for all practical concerns the precursor of todays developer consoles, was just another Firefox extension! Same with adblocking! Yes, ad blockers still exist, but only because of that legacy, no way someone would have proposed and gotten away with implementing that if the extension API had been invented today IMO.)

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

#562

Post by lotsofpulp »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #503
lotsofpulp wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Others have commented on other points, but I'll note "Extremely high liability insurance is $50 a month or less." – the cheapest liability only insurance I can find is $120/month, and I'm 32 & married with a clean driving record. $100–$150/month seems to be the norm, talking to my friends.

I should have written "liability only insurance", meaning it protects me from everything except paying for my own vehicle, which I opted not to get since I can afford to replace or repair my vehicle out of pocket. I have $250k/$500k liability insurance incl uninsured and underinsured for ~$40/month from Amica on the west coast right now. I had it for $45/month or so from Geico on the east coast. Both my wife and I have clean driving record for past 15+ years.

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

#563

Post by slt2021 »

selcuka wrote: post #492
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…

The Gmail web interface also (re)invented AJAX. The number of web applications that used XMLHttpRequest increased exponentially after the success of Gmail.

it was also written in Java which then compiled into client side javascript(!)

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

#565

Post by jimbokun »

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.

Their weekly podcast where they discussed progress on building the site that week was fascinating too.

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

#566

Post by billfruit »

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.

Its closest competitor has been Quora for several years.

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

#567

Post by p1mrx »

The Microsoft Intellimouse. When I was in school in the '90s, I had to de-gunk mouse rollers almost every time I sat down in a computer lab. A low cost optical mouse for generic surfaces made all that work just evaporate.

(I guess that's not strictly software, since it needs a basic digital camera.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliMouse

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

#569

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

Shorel wrote: post #507
tolmasky wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes. Web technology has advanced so much that now I can do what I was able to do in FoxPro 25 years ago, in just twice the time.

But think about all the things that you can't do in FoxPro, like build an accessible and beautiful user-experience :)

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

#570

Post by still_grokking »

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…

Yes. Web technology has advanced so much that now I can do with a Web-based GUI editor and some DB-to-JSON-Rest framework, what every child was able to do in VB6 25 years ago, just in 10x the time. We're finally almost there.
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