Ubiquity plugin for firefox, it treated the web as API, sending the request to forms without opening the webpages first.
Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
651–660 of 818 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#652Gotta say, Google's pioneering and Facebook's shamelessness in the personal information harvesting space has been, for me, the single most valuable feature of any website on the internet. If they had been even slightly less brazen, I may never have been convinced to opt out as hard as I have. Removing the most addictive and exploitative sites from my life has cut my time online and improved my quality of life dramatically. Could not recommend more.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But was it a 10x improvement on Grooveshark at the time? I went from Grooveshark, to Google Music, and finally to Spotify in around 2018
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#654Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#655 - collaborative docs like google docs, google sheets, quip.
- cloud sync like dropbox (also evernote, icloud, google drive)
- group voice chat
- open source package management (all of rpm, yum, dpkg, ports, npm , cpan , etc, etc ) – at a high level, run 1 command , get all the deps you need (and a license to use them) to build your software.Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#6561. Hot reloading in Java. I wasn't aware of Erlang at that time.
2. Erlang. It was a 10x boost after doing a whole lot of CORBA/J2EE crap. I was quite late to the party even in the mid-90's.
3. Google search, maps compared to offerings from Altavista, Excite.
4. Turbo Pascal compared to anything else before it. I don't think I have experienced that level of programming pleasure since then.
5. HotJava on the browser. It was sad how Microsoft neutered the whole Java on the browser initiative.
6. Git. So much faster and pain-free compared to SCCS, RCS ..
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're spot on, and that's something I think about daily. Satellite-based incumbents have an average revisit rate (assuming good weather) of roughly 2x/day, so hundreds or thousands of passes/day poses serious privacy and operational risk. We rely on guidance from EthicalGEO and other consumer privacy orgs when drafting standards, but the path to the type of hyper-revisit we're envisioning will need to be tread very…
How might this work? Could you give example of privacy heuristics you are considering?
Also curious. For example, if I run a shop and I normally have N cars parked out front, but anyone can see with 5 minute accuracy that I always have at least N-2 cars, they could easily figure out when nobody's watching the shop (or house).
Edit: also, nobody can ever sunbathe in peace again.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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 lvresiz…
Thanks so much for this detailed explanation, it really helped underscore the differences! Do you run ZoL or use FreeBSD?
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using google search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the search results were than in 2021
To their defense, SEO was not as developed. The average website was not a scam like today.
The SEO was there, just optimizing for different things from what Google cared about. Remember pages of keywords with the same color as the background?
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#660Firebug. 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).
As someone that was used to Visual Studio's Debugger, that Firefox had one was an (oh, they finally caught up to 1995)
To be clear I mean that Visual Studio had a C/C++ debugger but outside of that most languages that I used in any other situation were missing good debuggers.