iPhone in 2007 is 10x better than other "smart phones".
Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
691–700 of 818 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think it is all of GA that helps, or really just the concept of bivectors / multivectors? (I have a lot of skepticism about the geometric product as a useful object, but I think that multivectors are clearly fantastically useful everywhere. My exposure is mostly in physics where multivectors are basically necessary to make any sense of a bunch of concepts. But I don't work in robotics/graphics so maybe don't k…
>> Do you think it is all of GA that helps, or really just the concept of bivectors / multivectors? Yes, definitely all of it. Especially in physics, where every well known equation comes with its own, not so well known algebra. There are dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of them, all with their own notations and shenanigans. The thing is, all of them can be covered by GA. And you only need three instances of GA to cover…
I'm very aware of GA and multivectors and the usual equations that are included in GA texts, like the one-term form of Maxwell's equations. I'm specifically interested in whether you know of a good reason to include the geometric product in all this. It seems to me that for the most part you can do all of the useful stuff without ever mentioning it, and the equations it produces tend to be very awkward (compute something, grade project, compute something else, project again...) -- it's very 'just so', and kinda feels like it's all using the wrong tool. But I haven't figured out what the better tool is yet.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#693Tab-completion in the shell
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#694Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest. They'll still use Chrome or Edge/IE, but will use NordVPN or ExpressVPN after seeing their favorite YouTuber claim that the VPN protects their data and gives them privacy... ...while still not using an ad blocker, which makes the VPN almost entirely worthless from a privacy pe…
That's not totally fair. They also hide your IP from sites you access. So if somebody sent me a link to an IP logger and I clicked it, they would not know what city or state I actually live in, for example.
True. You're definitely right there.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#696Firebug. 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).
Prior to Firebug, when I was unfortunately writing ActionScript in Flash, there was Charles [0].
It's still really good!
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
But think about all the things that you can't do in FoxPro, like build an accessible and beautiful user-experience :)
Ever really built an accessible Web-UI? I mean with all that ARIA stuff, that really works for the blind or other disabled people? An accessible UI that honors the platform specific conventions and integrates into the OS environment? Ever built an user-experience atop ideas like "form follows function" and "don't make me think", that has beautiful design at the same time? I actually question that there are more than…
A user
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#698Dropping off social media.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#699- 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 eve…
Yeah, I switched to Python in 2002-2003ish when I started noticing that all the interesting new things I was seeing were using it (and I had to do some scientific/graphics stuff where Numpy and PyGame were much nicer than any of the Perl options). I probably haven't written any Perl in 15 years now, but I have to respect it for what it was at the time. When I learned Perl in 1996 or so, I didn't even own a computer; I just had access to a shell account on the university's unix server that I could telnet into from any computer lab. I basically got started by reading manpages. As hard as that was, it was far more accessible to me than figuring out how to get whatever weird C compiler there was on there working or getting a machine in the one computer lab that had a Java IDE installed on the desktops.
The "wizard" aspect was part of what eventually drove me away from Perl as well. I was never really into the whole JAPH/golf thing and I worked hard to write Perl that was well structured and readable, and there were plenty of other Perl programmers like me. But there was also always that part of the community that wanted things to be as obscure and obfuscated as possible and they were very visible. Python's complete rejection of that was really refreshing.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#700- 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…
> apt-get. I saw a joke the other day that went something like: "What, is your grandma so senile that she can't type ./configure; make; make install" ? Installing software on linux truly sucked before package managers.
Not just packages managers, but repositories. When I started using Linux, I was still downloading or building RPM files, and manually working out dependencies. The idea that you could suddenly netboot a tiny image and `apt-get install xfce4-desktop` was amazing.