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

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

#671

Post by a_e_k »

Psychlist wrote: post #459
jasode wrote: post #48

+ using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search. + Google Maps in 2004 and dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases + MS Window Media Player's…

Virtual machines have been a huge win, and still are. Spending 2-5 days setting up a development environment, then archiving a copy of the whole VM made some of the crappier setups usable. Back before rented software (including the OS) that meant one person could grind through the whole OS/tools/IDE/libraries stack and get something we could all use. I've broken software protection to make this work, because it's jus…

Freezing and archiving the VMs used to build a particular release is also a pretty nice trick.

It comes in very handy for those rare times when a major customer that (for some reason) insists on sticking with an ancient, obsolete version of your software desperately needs a critical fix.

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

#672

Post by NetOpWibby »

rasz wrote: post #654
cpach wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Opera Presto was the fastest browser (and js engine) in the world at its prime.

Opera was the best

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

#674

Post by nospy4312 »

exacube wrote: post #494

VS Code's Remote Development. I'm not sure how many folks rely on this, but its been amazing for me.

While it's amazing, they made the remote extensions proprietary. So projects like VSCodium (which is VSCode minus the telemetry) cannot use it. Very crappy move by Microsoft. I think they are extending that behaviour to other parts of VSCode - I think their python LSP has proprietary bits now.

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

#675

Post by cardanome »

tootie wrote: post #418
cardanome wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone working as a web developer for a smaller company, I don't get the use case for AWS. Super confusing naming of their services and nontransparent pricing. For the vast majority of people some 5 Dollar hosting is more than they need. Just copy your files to the server. Does not get simpler. And if you need more, it is super easy to set up a dedicated server these days anyway.

$5 hosting is absolute not enough for most big businesses. The times I've actually gone for simpler solutions, they're usually built on AWS (ie Heroku or Netlify)

I never said anything about big business. It is fine for a small Wordpress Blog and the like. Not everyone is Google. Lot's of small and medium sized businesses.

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

#676

Post by boring_twenties »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #658
boring_twenties wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I use both. On Debian stable, ZFS is a piece of cake, because the kernel version never changes. You just install the ZFS package (which is actively maintained) and call it a day. I imagine on something like Arch it could become quite a pain, though (never tried it myself).

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

#677

Post by utucuro »

core-questions wrote: post #335
sangnoir wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct - Opera had tabs way before Firefox, and Opera had a full mail client as well without feeling bloated or slow.

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.

Not really, I was an Opera user when Firefox 0.8 came out... Switched pretty much permanently, Opera also had mouse gestures which I was actively using and still use with a Firefox extension...

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

#678

Post by danielscrubs »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #672
rasz wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera Presto was the fastest browser (and js engine) in the world at its prime.

Opera was the best

Still remember the mouse gestures to zip around the pages.

What a fun time.

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

#679

Post by aricz »

Shorel wrote: post #512
aynsof wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> + Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since misbehaving websites crashing don't bring down all the other tabs in my browsing session like Firefox/Opera. Adding to this: just browser tabs themselves were a 10x improvement for me. I had actually forgotten what the world was like before tabs - a whole lot of unsortable windows, and a lot of clicks of the back button. It was a godsend to be able to open new lin…

In that case, Opera Browser in 2001 was the first tabbed browser I used. Long before Chrome. I still miss some features in Opera like mouse gestures. No, plugins and add-ons can't reproduce the responsiveness of a native implementation, they all fall short.

Good to see someone else remembering the mouse gestures. It was what hooked me, together with being a fast browser at the time.

On a sidenote, I stopped using Opera when they included a torrent-client in their webbrowser. The amount of bloat was staggering.

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

#680

Post by danybittel »

I hope I don't get downvoted for this:

Internet Explorer 4.0

As somebody who wrote web apps back in 2000ish, IE4 was lightyears ahead of Netscape 4. Basically IE4 was close to what we have now, and NS4 (or opera), could barely switch a color with JavaScript. While lot's of the standards were already defined, NS4 would crash constantly (when doing JS). That was at a time when NS4 was the beloved browser and IE4 tried to catch up (remember the lawsuit because they tried to bundle it with windows). Well they also made the much better browser. Enough robust to built the first web apps.

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