Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 818 posts

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

#621

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

rudyfink wrote: post #154

Here are a few that I did not see listed by others: 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation (e.g., with USB devices (also USB device categories, etc.)). Instead of trying to find a driver, things just worked. 2. Automatic updates. Keeping everything updated, largely, fell into the background. 3. Graphical integrated development environments (IDEs) for software development. I realize editors can be conte…

You gotta do WYSIWYG right, though. It seems like I break MS Teams once a week and have to start formatting part of my message over again. It's like someone stopped in the middle of implementing its Markdown support. I also frequently find myself trying to get the cursor out of the end of a block of formatting and back to normal formatting. I vaguely remember hearing complaints about Slack's editor at one time, too. There has to be a better way

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

#622

Post by s1mon »

Lots of good ones mentioned so far, but no one got Calendly.

Instead of a dozens of emails and/or texts, phone calls etc. to find a time when someone (not in my organization, so they can’t normally see my calendar) can meet, I just email a link and they pick. It will add call info or zoom links as appropriate. Tons of control over scheduling (synced to all your calendars, or even several people’s; buffers; limits to meetings per day).

Basically it eliminates needing a secretary or recruiter or admin person to arrange meetings.

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

#623

Post by agleason »

bcoates wrote: post #613

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 D…

I'm just here with my popcorn waiting for the responses on NodeJS

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

#624

Post by still_grokking »

crazygringo wrote: post #517
jarek83 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Only on HN. Otherwise it's the #1 browser by usage by far, which is saying a lot considering it doesn't come preinstalled on Windows or on Macs, so all those users are making a deliberate choice to switch. So still the hero outside of HN.

Google is gas-lighting people into using Chrome…

Ever used for example YouTube with an alternative browser?

It's buggy, it's slow (and that's on purpose; Google puts regularly quite some engineering effort into using web features that don't work well in the last independent competing browser). But those Google pages have a big banner saying it will work better in Chrome, and asking the users to "try".

That strategy works very efficiently as Google controls the sites most average people use the whole time.

That's one of the reasons why Google's monopolies need to be broken by regulation. Actually they're over-due for a break-up.

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

#625

Post by TrackerFF »

still_grokking wrote: post #611
TrackerFF wrote: post #608

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…

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-professiona…

As far as free options go, there's def. a lot of tweaking to be done, and more than anything, the end result (IMO) rests A LOT on whether or not you use decent cab impulse responses.

Lepou is one option: http://www.grebz.com/simulator_freeamp_poulin_eng.php

As for audio interfaces - there's no free things there, but if you're only interested in recording one or two tracks, like any stringed instrument, any used $50-$100 interface from the past couple of years will do. No, it will not sound like a $xxxx setup, but good enough for recording demos and even amateur records. Obviously depends on the music you're going for, too.

Now, just for the discussion - let's say you own a guitar or bass, and a computer, and you want to record something for as cheap as humanly possible, one setup could be:

instrument -> audio/microphone input on computer using ASIO4ALL -> Reaper or Cakewalk -> Freeware plugins like LePou amp plugins -> IR loader + Free cab IRs -> built-in effects in DAW.

Obviously will not sound like pro quality, but could do the work, if money really is the pressing issue.

(Another option would be "free" plugins via pirating, but that's another discussion...though many pro-grade plugins offer free trial periods, or heavily stripped down plugins)

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

#626

Post by cookiengineer »

mattmanser wrote: post #321
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).

Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar, and IEDevToolbar was superior to Firebug for years for debugging JavaScript. So not a very good example at all, in fact quite the opposite, it just happened to ride the back of the anti-M$ wave and wasn't at all innovative, copying its features from already existing products. Conversely, though it was free, IEDevToolbar was only really advertised to MSDN subscribers, so never got…

As a user of both Firebug and IE's Devtoolbar I can state this is simply not true.

While I agree that IE's devtools had more features regarding xpath integration, you'll also had the problem that it was based on libxml (yes, the reason trident was exploitable for decades, and probably still is).

IE's devtools didn't have access to the DOM and only had access to the HTML/SGML/actually XML representation _before_ it was parsed into the DOM.

This gave you hundreds of error scenarios where debugging user events was simply impossible if they caused the DOM to change, something like adding a node or debugging a parentNode was impossible in trident.

And oh how often have I seen bugs in websites that were relying on specified flow roots that behaved differently in trident. Something like an unclosed

in the wrong place could easily mess up everything in trident and switch it to quirks mode.

Remember IE was exploitable via a parentNode.remove(parentNode), too? The hooks for devtools was the underlying reason.

I am not sure why you claim that IE had superior devtools experience. You must have done a lot of ActiveX related development, because everything else was impossible to debug in my opinion.

The best thing MS did was to create the Edge team that tried to refactor trident, and soon realized that it's impossible and instead started over from scratch.

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

#627

Post by still_grokking »

llaolleh wrote: post #609
jarek83 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

No, it's because since the search is more and more based on user tracking data run through some "AI" the results become garbage for people that don't use the same five sites on the net the whole time, and prevent Google's tracking as much as possible additionally.

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

#628

Post by Aperocky »

vincent-manis wrote: post #408

The abolition of punched cards...finally, it was practical to indent code! Visual editing...I remember when all text editors used a command language that made you keep a listing of the file next to your terminal so you could translate your markup into editor commands. (And, yes, I still know my way around ed.) SCCS/CVS/RCS: as wonderful as git/hg/fossil and others are, any source control system is better than none. T…

Ah, a simpler time that I have not experienced.. since 10.

It's unbelievable how fast technology has progressed. barely 20 year has passed, and while my favorite tool is about my age (vim) the technology that you pioneered has transformed the way of life of everyone on this planet beyond imagination.

Bravo. Salute.

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

#629

Post by Aperocky »

bps4484 wrote: post #203

Jquery - abstracted away tons of cross-browser inconsistent behavior, both with the dom and javascript, and added new selectors to make dom manuplation easier. I think there was a reason it was adopted as fast as it was, it really was a 10x improvement in working client side.

I feel it's usefulness has ran its course though. The spirit lives on through ES6.
Post reply on HN