Bitcoin for money you as an individual control and cannot be seized. There is no alternative so it’s infinitely better (altcoins don’t count due to governance or tokenomics issues).
Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
661–670 of 818 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#662First example that comes to my mind is Jupyter Notebooks with NBDev - a game changer for some kinds of software development. Coding feels way more efficient, even without all the extra gains that come with having tests, documentation website, CI, package management etc built in. (https://github.com/fastai/nbdev)
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#663Nobody 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.
BitTorrent too the underlying protocol with less nonsense than download sites that often want to tease you in to a paid subscription. Torrents are as good as it gets but malware and pretend movies linking to the aforementioned sites are sometimes a problem
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’ve noticed a pattern of what I get downvoted for and it doesn’t reflect well on this community.
1. Asking people to show a little empathy to others (eg use your scroll wheel so people can benefit from reading a thing or clicking it at all)
2. Asking people to show a little empathy to others (eg recognizing that people who have violent ideologies are dangerous and don’t deserve free mandatory amplification from others’ resources).
3. Asking people to show a little empathy to others (eg not trashing people’s fun/exploratory/educational/hobby projects).
I don’t get downvoted for anything else. I’m sometimes surprised for the silly stuff I get upvoted for. But give half a damn and it’s just like the hateful crowds on Slashdot and 4chan and every platform they’ve flocked to, who just hate seeing anyone give a fuck about anyone or anything.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#665Using the Palm Tx.
It was one of the first small devises that connected to the Internet. I was in Goodguys when it was closing down. They had a highly crooked third party liquidator selling off the merchandise.
I’m not into games, buy saw Halo 3 Collector’s edition for 5 bucks each. There was 500 games for sale.
I took my beloved Palm Tx to the library across town. It had free Wífi up to 9 pm. (No password—just connect.) I got a rough idea what the retail on the game was going for.
I went back and bought all the units. Sold all for $30-50 on eBay, and it felt great. So many mothers emailing me, “I have no idea what you sold my son, but he hasn’t left his room, and loves the game.
I remember thinking I will make a fortune with this devise.
This was just when the internet was getting reliable, most people just had a dumb cell phone.
I blinked, and it seemed like everyone had smart phone.
Anyway, I really liked Palm products. The quality of the hardware was outstanding. The software was just ok, but for the time, I thought great. I once tied a gps to a Palm tx, and took a river trip down the Rogue River. I could tell when the class 4-5 rapids were coming up.
It’s to bad what the company has turned into.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#666- SSH. Maybe not in terms of performance or efficiency, but before SSH, we were using telnet everywhere and just sending passwords in plaintext all over the internet. Plus, you could give someone your public key and they could give you access to a server instead of the "here's a temporary password, change it as soon as you log in" approach. - Perl. This was at the time when the other languages available to me as a st…
> - Perl
For me, Python. I knew Perl was the "leet" language and was determined to add its power to my toolkit. I made several (three, I think) weeks-long intensive efforts to master it. Every time, I read the book, read PerlMonks every day, did exercises, and got to the point of writing useful scripts using pretty powerful features. I'd think "I've finally got it!" and would be a Perl programmer for a while, but eventually a few weeks would go by without any need to use Perl, and it would turn to mush in my mind, and I'd have to start over again at the beginning.
One day in 2000 I was yet again failing to do things in Perl that had felt easy six weeks ago, and I thought, "Huh, I think I remember how to do this in that language Python I fiddled with for a few minutes once after reading some blog post." I started typing Python and was very quickly able to get it working.
I didn't really want to write such easy, bland, straightforward code. I wanted to be a wizard who could do amazing things with a few cryptic characters. Writing Python was like doing a magic trick while simultaneously explaining exactly how the trick was done. It reduced my style points to zero. But I liked how easy it was, and Perl kept brutally showing me that I wasn't cut out to be a wizard.
Twenty years later, and Python is still an important part of my toolkit.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#667+ Ruby
I never thought programming could be so enjoyable and eloquent.
+ Ruby on Rails
I never thought building web app from scratch could be so quick and fun.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#668Steam for PC Gaming. At first, it was just annoying DRM. But it was convenient. - Before that, you had to manually update your games in order to play the latest version - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive - with the addition of steam workshops, installing mods for certain games became easier. You didn't have to manually copy paste files. - you have one central friend list, and…
> - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive Speaking of which, prior to Steam, I'd definitely consider "Making an ISO of your favorite game and mounting it as a virtual drive using DaemonTools" to be a 10x innovation.
Thanks for reminding me about this! I've just experienced a huge nostalgia rush! Oh, I wish I could go back 15-20 years back just for a day!
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#669- SSH. Maybe not in terms of performance or efficiency, but before SSH, we were using telnet everywhere and just sending passwords in plaintext all over the internet. Plus, you could give someone your public key and they could give you access to a server instead of the "here's a temporary password, change it as soon as you log in" approach. - Perl. This was at the time when the other languages available to me as a st…
Good for you, but I personally don't want to read or edit any Perl code again if I can avoid it.
Joke's on you for trying to read code in a write-only language!
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#670I'll avoid dating myself by keeping it sufficiently vague, but Open Source Software. Going from the world of closed source, for-profit software to that of FOSS is like night and day. It's more like a 100x improvement. Today's open-source world is quite different, but I'll still take it hands-down.
Initially everything was OSS. Then Gates and Jobs came along and started doing closed source software. But in 50's and a good chunk of 60's people programming those frameworks would freely exchange software.