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

Could you point to some professional grade plugins or DAWs that are free? Never heard of that.

Also a decent professional grade audio interface is still quite some $$. It's not like $$k like in the past, but you still have to pay a few hundred bucks.

Compared to say 50 years ago everything audio got really cheap, sure. It was in the tens of thousands range, now it's in the "a few thousands" range for semi-professional studio equipment.

Audio is actually one of the remaining software niches where they still call prices in the "a few hundred bucks" range for a end-user license. Other things around got much cheaper much faster.

1. Windows 95, as opposed to Win3.x/DOS. 100% worth the hardware/software compatibility pains for GUI/multitasking/multimedia/PnP that just worked, an amazing thing at the time (and honestly, in retrospect, giving the preposterous unstandardized diversity of PCs & their peripherals and software in that decade)

2. SQLite, vs fopen and hand-parsed files for any random data storage that didn't rate a full blown remote DBMS. Never using sscanf again!

3. NodeJS. Memory Safety, Thread Safety, No Deadlocks, No build system nonsense, credibly scalable I/O concurrency, and only ~an order of magnitude slower than C? Absolutely worth the nightmare syntax and (then) lack of decent libraries. As soon as npm came on the scene (0.6?) Java ceased to have any reason to exist.

4. Uber. It's like a taxi, but the UI doesn't suck, and they tell you when the car is coming, and the car actually arrives, and they'll pick up in areas other than the 30% of the city and 50% of the day and 60% of the population that taxis are willing to cover in LA!

5. Linux network namespaces + associated tools. So many things I used to have to do on dedicated boxes/VMs, or multiple network interfaces, or single-purpose network equipment. Worth it for per-process ovpn tunnels alone, but you can scale it up to crazy elaborate SDN schemes if you need to. Blows away almost every middlebox and hypervisor networking tool.

6. AWS. There were lots of stick-a-host-on-the-internet services before, but nothing like this: software provisionable, software networking, reliable host-to-host and host-to-storage networks, no lead times... There are credible competitors now but it was a gamechanger for anyone working at the servers > fingers > datacenters scale.

7. This one's kind of goofy, but TimeSnapper. It just takes a screenshot of my display. Every 10 seconds. And saves it into a time-and-keyword searchable database. You can't remember exactly how you fixed that thing 5 months ago that's broken again? I can. The best productivity tool you can get for $40 with the possible exception of 1440 post-it notes.

Not all of ZFS's advantages necessarily apply to "humble" uses like your home PC, but I can think of a few that surely do.

Filesystems share all available space in the pool. Say you have 16GB space available, so with LVM, you might make an 8GB /home and an 8GB /var. Later on, you've run out of space in /home while still having 4GB free in /var. What do? Well, you can probably get by with resize2fs followed by lvresize ... but this is not only cumbersome, but prone to catastrophic failures. With ZFS this is simply never an issue.

Snapshots. LVM has them too, of course, but they're not aware of files so they're far less useful. With ZFS, you can simply run `zfs diff` and it will pretty quickly tell you which files were added, modified, and deleted.

Building on this snapshot functionality, incremental backups become a breeze with `zfs send` and `zfs receive`, obviating the need for clunky (by comparison, at least) solutions like rsnapshot.

ZFS actively detects data corruption, by checksumming everything. Assuming you have redundancy (mirrors or raidz pools), it also automatically fixes them. It's often said that this is only relevant to "enterprises," but I'd disagree: I don't want to discover my personal files have been corrupted any more than an enterprise does their business files. A better argument is that this protection is incomplete if one is not using ECC RAM, however, a partial counter to that is that a lot of recent consumer hardware (namely, AMD's) does support ECC RAM.

Overall I'd say comparing ZFS to LVM+ext4/XFS/whatever is kind of comparing, say, Windows 95 to Windows 2000 (or Unix, if you prefer). It's just not a fair comparison, they're not even playing the same sport. A much more apt comparison would be to BTRFS, but ZFS has been rock-solid for longer than BTRFS has been in existence, and the latter has been eating people's data left and right for most of that time.

On the other hand, one downside to using ZFS at home is that you can't really add one drive at a time. Say you have a raidz2 (similar to RAID-6) pool with 6 drives in it. You can't just add a seventh. The ideal way to grow such a pool in ZFS would be to add a whole nother raidz2 "vdev", which would then be striped with the first one. That means buying 6 new drives, not 1.

a few of my favorite things: shellcheck when dealing with bash scripting; pylint for python scripting; package managers (yum, pip, brew - all of them); valgrind for c/c++ development; intellij for java development; unit testing; stackoverflow, github code search, google + duckduckgo; libgen;

To their defense, SEO was not as developed. The average website was not a scam like today.