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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?

#701

Post by thraxil »

Shorel wrote: post #519
thraxil wrote: post #264

- 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.

I haven't really written any Perl in probably 15 years now and I mostly avoid it if I can. But put yourself in my shoes back in 1996 or so as a student. Didn't own a computer of my own but had access to random computer labs on campus and an account on the university unix box that I could telnet to. My options for programming were to try to get a spot in the one computer lab that had Java and C++ compilers (and carry around a stack of floppy disks with code I was working on). Those were always booked solid and not open at odd hours (I was a Physics major, not necessarily taking a CS class that would grant me priority access). Or, I could find any any Mac or PC in any computer lab, including the 24/7 library ones, telnet in, and write real, useful programs in Perl. The Perl man pages were available right there (and extremely well written), everything was stored on the server, the Perl standard library was pretty comprehensive compared to what was included with most other environments at the time, and my editing environment (pico at first, then vi and emacs as I learned) was consistent no matter what computer I was on. As much as I wouldn't chose Perl for a project in 2021, it was really a game changer for me in 1996 and I'm not even sure if I would've transitioned from Physics to programming if it weren't for Perl.

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

#702

Post by thraxil »

emilsedgh wrote: post #526
henrikschroder wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When I installed my first Linux (Red Hat 9) I was trying to install Gaim on it. I was trying different methods and I managed to install it by source compilation but not through rpm.

Yeah, I started out on Red Hat (maybe 3 or 4.x) and spent years fighting with RPM dependencies. At one point I installed one of those source only distros on a spare machine for fun ("Source Mage", before Gentoo took over that space). For all the misery involved in having to compile everything from scratch on slow hardware, I was absolutely blown away that mplayer with proprietary codecs just worked out of the box. It always took me hours to get the right combination of packages on Red Hat to make that work and would frequently break whenever I updated anything.

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

#703

Post by jerome-jh »

As SW developer, the 10x improvement for me is having the callstack on a crash, like in Java, Python or C with Valgrind. In combination with memory safety, so many bugs can simply be fixed with only the callstack.

10x is quite much so please excuse if I am a bit conservative.

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

#705

Post by rurban »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #414
murph-almighty wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot imagine a period of time where the STL didn't exist, which perhaps outs me as a younger dev

Many video games still don't use the STL due to performance concerns.

They rather use the proper C counterpart, the CTL, written by a game dev. Nobody should ever use set and unordered_map, and many despise string. btree and the various open hashtables are 10x better than the STL parts, (fuck pointer and iter stability), string only recently got improved via string_view.

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

#706

Post by aspnet_dev »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #451
aspnet_dev wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebForms is still one of the quickest things to actually build intranet applications with and it still does it incredibly well. If I wanted to have a editable table (datagrid) control it literally took about 20 minutes and I had something working and people could use it. The problem with it (much like Angular which btw is basically webforms for JavaScript) is that it required you learning how the event lifecycle work…

I respect that WebForms had a decent concept for RAD, copying VB6’s “drag and drop components, write glue-logic to make them work together”, the problem is that you had to give up a lot of control over the generated HTML, which was a huge problem because the generated HTML was awful, like “1998’s HTML in 2006”-awful, to put it succinctly. WebForms supported item-templates, but using them was hard, and you still could…

I will agree with some of your criticisms. However there are some things that aren't pertinent.

While the HTML is awful in earlier versions was IME of no concern. Most intranet apps just need to be functional not slick. I am sure it served different HTML based on the user-agent but I could be mis-remembering now as it was well over 15 years ago.

The lack of being able to run it on anything other than IIS isn't a concern. Most places using WebForms were Microsoft shops and whatever your opinion of IIS and Windows server maybe they weren't going to be running their ASP.NET app on a Linux server.

Most of the problems I've encountered was when people tried getting around the framework itself and rebuilding what already worked quite well within the framework (many people used to use large string builder objects in the code behind files in the page load event rather than using Web Components and building their custom HTML in there, I suspect it was because they didn't understand the Page/Component lifecycle).

I'm actually trying to get away from using .NET entirely (I am bored of the language, the frameworks and most importantly I don't like working with the developers who can't do anything outside of Visual Studio to save their life). But I do think the framework get unfairly maligned because of the quality of programmers that were using it. It is the same with VB.NET, the language isn't the best but the RAD aspect of it hasn't been bettered by anything IME.

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

#707

Post by beardyw »

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 wish I could hear you but there's this echo ....

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

#708

Post by rasz »

cpach wrote: post #694
rasz wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was thinking more what the result looked like.

Website often broke in Opera due to being written for "IE" standard.

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

#710

Post by artificialLimbs »

passivate wrote: post #167

Reaper. Its simple, fast, and no licensing bull. Steam. Just works, simple and easy to use. Copy-Paste the Steam folder to your new system to move your entire game library. ZoomIt by Sysinternals - excellent, excellent tool that has improved all my presentations/screen-share sessions. Everything by David Carpenter - super fast system wide search for files that has bookmarks and other features like match using file na…

I've been deploying Everything to anyone who loses their documents on our employee workstations. It's a wonderful tool; how Windows search should work.
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