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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?

#593

Post by atonse »

dale_glass wrote: post #305
atonse wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love systemd and journald. The fact that you can do most things declaratively and have a common interface for logs, it's just beautiful. I can do things like "show me the logs for this service for the last 5 mins". I still don't fully understand why people prefer bash scripts. But then again, I have never once needed to edit those bash scripts since I usually don't stray too much from defaults.

It all depends of course on what you do. When you try to ship stuff for various Linux distros, having to figure out how SuSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu like doing their init scripts is a pain. Admin-wise it's nice not to ever have to look at a 3-way merge of stuff in /etc/init.d if somebody touched anything, and then the system was upgraded. But besides that there's lots of cool benefits. Like not needing to deal with PID f…

It may make the lives of distro developers harder, but doesn't it make the lives of sysadmins (of which are probably 100,000x more than distro developers) easier?

And we always wax poetic about how doing things in a declarative way ultimately leads to a better experience. So I am always perplexed when people give systemd a hard time when that's exactly what systemd has done, it's established a standard and consistent way to declare services.

Speaking of other things that seem to not want to change, why in 2021, a decade after PowerShell, do we still pipe unstructured text between processes and perform gymnastics with sed/awk/print, does that not just feel extremely janky to people? I'm not remotely a fan of Windows servers, but PowerShell got this right from day one since it started from scratch with the idea of piping objects back and forth. Can we not as a community at least have standardized flags to output the various standard commands as maybe JSON? and take inputs as JSON as well? maybe this has already been tried but I don't see it.

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

#594

Post by ralmidani »

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 Rails. Also Django (Which came out around the same time).

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

#596

Post by gautamcgoel »

boring_twenties wrote: post #458
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!

Honest question: can you explain the practical advantages of ZFS over LVM + Ext4? I understand that ZFS combines a filesystem and package manager, but why should I, a humble OSS user, care?

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

#597

Post by gorgoiler »

This is really dumb but I was watching my pupils using a REPL yesterday. They didn’t know about readline so I showed them what up, down, ^A and ^E did.

I felt like I had done them a disservice for not sharing this sooner.

Readline is fantastic. I wish even more OS components were standardised (e.g. Firefox tabs and Inkscape dialogs just being windows; let my WM handle the layout.)

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

#598

Post by redis_mlc »

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.

No need to sign-in, you just scrolled to the bottom of the page to see the answer. I don't remember it being slow either.

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

#599

Post by practicalpants »

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…

Rails + Heroku circa 2011... I became a professional web developer and launched a startup mainly because of these technologies, so quick and easy.

Yes, with Uber and equivalents around the world, I have zero reason to own a car. My driver's license expired years ago and I can't be bothered to renew it.

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

#600

Post by hackmiester »

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…

I cannot see in the dark, and I live in a city that is not very walkable. Before Lyft, I just didn't go places at night. So, yeah.
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