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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?

#601

Post by BeetleB »

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.

Extensions were the other 10x thing with Firefox. Even now browsing the web without them is torture.

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

#603

Post by hanniabu »

mtmail wrote: post #36
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…

> or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. For those who don't remember: That was around the time when Yahoo offered 6MB, some others only 2MB.

How many emails was that back then?

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

#604

Post by justinzollars »

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 owe a lot to DHH and Ruby on Rails. It landed me a job in Silicon Valley 11 years ago. It was a game changer for my life. Glad to see it listed here.

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

#605

Post by hackmiester »

paxys wrote: post #429
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.

True, but Spotify was another 10x improvement. You click on ANY song, and, WELL under 1 second later, you are listening to that song. Closer to a quarter of a second. In 2010 or so, when I first used it.

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

#608

Post by TrackerFF »

From a musicians standpoint, the everything today is 10x of what he had just 20 years ago.

If I wanted to record a halfway decent sounding guitar 20 years ago, I had a couple choices:

1. Go to some studio, spend probably at least $1k, get the stems and transfer them to my computer.

2. Purchase recording gear (microphone, preamp, etc.), which would minimum cost around $1k, and on top of that, have a computer and audio interface. Again, $$$.

3. Purchase some early modeller, some audio interface, DAW, etc. Probably $1k just in that.

Simply put, there weren't any really affordable or efficient method, that didn't sound like a$$.

Today, it's a breeze. Free plugins, free DAWs, extremely affordable audio interfaces.

As far as cost, quality, and efficiency goes - everything is 10x of what we had 20 years ago. And almost everything boils down to the software products involved.

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

#609

Post by llaolleh »

jarek83 wrote: post #510
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…

Funny how Google went from user's hero to zero.

It's because most of HN user queries are very niche.

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

#610

Post by eyelidlessness »

fouric wrote: post #576
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most web sites aren't accessible. A capability is irrelevant if it's never used. Meanwhile, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The modern webtech trends are offensive to my eyes - in addition to being ridiculously compute- and visual-space-inefficient.

> visual-space-inefficient

If you’re referring to the oft discussed “information density” issue, my goodness, scroll a little. That spacing is good for usability and, yes, accessibility. Those larger action targets and the space between them are not only good for us with vision impairment but for people whose only computing device is a phone.

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