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

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

#641

Post by radley » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

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…

> 10 times better than the second best option

It's not who was first, just who seemed 10x better than the next best option.

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

#642

Post by bryananderson » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:15 AM UTC

Firefox! Oh my god, there are tabs! I had never used anything but Internet Explorer. Browsing the web was never, ever the same. 30 minutes in and I didn't know how I'd lived without it.

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

#643

Post by icsa » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:18 AM UTC

VisiCalc, Turbo Pascal, WATCOM Compilers, Perl, Mathematica, C++ STL, Memory Mapping APIs, cURL, clang/LLVM

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

#644

Post by dmingod666 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:19 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #555

aaronax wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the advantage of an NFT versus a record in Valve's database?

Open standards, sort of. People could in theory take a game license they bought through some other service supporting NFT game licenses, and move it to Steam, or vice-versa. Steam et al would essentially be crypto wallets that let you download+play the games corresponding to the licenses they held. (Better yet if they’re non-custodial, actually. Decouple the responsibilities of originating licenses [i.e. buying games…

That's a good use case, buy and actually own copies of digital assets.

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

#645

Post by pdamoc » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:21 AM UTC

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…

Hotmail offered 2Mb space and Yahoo proudly claimed "twice the space of other providers" with their 4Mb offer. I had a GMX.de account that was providing 25 Mb and felt like a king. Then April 1, 2004 came and nothing was the same anymore.

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

#646

Post by 27182818284 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

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.

I actually understand what the grandparent is talking about with respect to the "hero" to "zero" comment they made, though I might not say that it has fallen all the way to zero.

The reason I understand their comment is because there was a period of time when Google was so cool that people wore Google t-shirts without having ever been affiliated with Google. You could find random college students wearing a Google t-shirt like they would a band t-shirt.

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

#647

Post by 3np » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:23 AM UTC

- terraform. Declarative, centralized, cross-platform configuration. There's no way I'd be able to manage the amount of stuff I am without it (or some comparable alternative like pulumi)

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

#648

Post by duke_core » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:25 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #590

wheybags wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a vertical tab extension, and with that I regularly get to > 1k tabs.

Different strokes for different folks but what on earth do you people do on 1000 or even 100 tabs? I have a handful of sites I regularly go to and maybe 50 that I visit more than occasionally. They’re all bookmarked. When I’m done browsing I close the window. What state are you preserving keeping everything open in a tab?

What are those 50 sites you visit? I have like 4 which I visit on a daily basis (reddit/4chan/hckrnews/youtube)

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

#649

Post by cpach » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:36 AM UTC

tinus_hn wrote: post #393

core-questions wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly believe that if Opera had had a cool name, it would have been a real contender. People don't like operas, they're boring and stodgy.

Opera was a paid option. It was doomed from the start.

IIRC the rendering engine wasn’t that great either at that time.

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

#650

Post by mandaputtra » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:36 AM UTC

VPN servers and client, I don't know how to build one. There are many opensource VPN like wireguard, I just don't understand why this and that. And how do I makesimole VPN, how do they intercept our request etc.