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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?

#761

Post by aaronax »

derefr wrote: post #749
aaronax wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so when the game starts up it needs to see some proof that you own a license for it. So it needs to see proof that you own an NFT. I am not aware of the technical details of various NFTs but I'm going to assume that you prove ownership similarly to how it can be done in Bitcoin--signing a transaction/message with a private key that corresponds to the public key of the asset in question. I would be happy to learn…

You prove you own the NFT the same way you prove to your bank that you have money: by letting the bank hold it for you. You deposit or lock the NFT into the service (essentially making it a staking contract ). This associates the NFT with an account within the service's smart-contract (of the depositor's choice), which can then be mirrored by an oracle-process observing on the service's backend to become "a record in…

Thanks, pretty good explanation of a way for it to work.

I don't see what advantage this implementation offers though (happy to be wrong). The game is checking with Valve to see if I am allowed to play it. I will need Valve to agree to honor my token and talk to the game appropriately in perpetuity. A third party that I sell the token to would also be relying on Valve to honor the validity of the token after I transfer it to them. This has very similar characteristics as if Valve build out tools to sell/trade games using their existing database. Valve can decide any day to stop honoring tokens, maybe "locking" currently deposited tokens to your account by making the database record permanent and not caring about tokens any more.

Maybe the game has a facility to check with other services that also implement the staking contract, as sort of a backup in case Valve dies or as an attempt to be vendor agnostic? I think that has some interesting difficulties too.

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

#762

Post by bad_username »

Loughla wrote: post #260
saalweachter wrote: post #232

Modern Linux distros. Yeah, I have so many complaints about them, but for a wide range of use-cases and hardwares, they "just work" now. In the olden days, Linux desktops and servers, and especially laptops were much more "pets" than "livestock", needing constant attention and care to keep them working, correctly configured, and up to date. Half the time when you added a new software package or piece of hardware you'…

Linux Mint literally just works 99.99999% of the time. It's better than windows, tbh, in terms of stability on my machines. Compare that to Ubuntu, Mint, or Fedora from even 10 years ago, and it's startling. Go back to 2004-5 when I was really into this kind of thing in college (and had time to dicker with it), and it's like they're not even the same product. You're 100% right. Linux desktops used to be pets, very fr…

I found the 0.0001%. Mint could not reliably connect to my run off the mill BW Brother wireless laser printer. I had to reboot often to get printing. Same problem on 2 different PCs.

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

#763

Post by mackrevinack »

still_grokking wrote: post #611
TrackerFF wrote: post #608

From a musicians standpoint, the everything today is 10x of what he had just 20 years ago. If I wanted to record a halfway decent sounding guitar 20 years ago, I had a couple choices: 1. Go to some studio, spend probably at least $1k, get the stems and transfer them to my computer. 2. Purchase recording gear (microphone, preamp, etc.), which would minimum cost around $1k, and on top of that, have a computer and audio…

Could you point to some professional grade plugins or DAWs that are free? Never heard of that. Also a decent professional grade audio interface is still quite some $$. It's not like $$k like in the past, but you still have to pay a few hundred bucks. Compared to say 50 years ago everything audio got really cheap, sure. It was in the tens of thousands range, now it's in the "a few thousands" range for semi-professiona…

there might be something on this list that interests you: https://github.com/ciconia/awesome-music

reaper is another DAW that is not free but its only 60 or something so its practically nothing compared to others. i used it for 3 or so years without paying and the only drawback is you have to wait 5 seconds for the nag screen at the start to close.

i don't want to sound like im on commission for reaper but i really love how fast it is to open a project and get started (once you have a licence that is), it has no bs logins that need to connect to a server before it will work. its insanely customisable and its also portable so you can run it from a usb drive. you can also have different versions that can run side by side and be set up in different ways with different settings etc. there's really nothing like it!

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

#764

Post by dkarl »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #20

User experience is usually the 10x differentiator. An Uber and a regular Taxi will both get me to my location with similar time and cost. The difference was that I could get an Uber by pressing a couple buttons on my phone and monitor the entire process from an app. A taxi required (at the time) phone calls, waiting around for a taxi to arrive, trying to communicate location, and other hassles that disappeared when u…

> An Uber and a regular Taxi will both get me to my location with similar time and cost

I don't know how many places that was true. I gave up on taxi service in my city (Austin) a few years after moving here, because it wasn't a reliable or quick way to get anywhere. Twice I ordered taxis hours ahead of time to get to the airport (once literally the night before) and after being assured on the phone over and over again that the driver would be there "in just a few minutes" ended up driving myself at the last minute and barely making my flight. I also had a few treats of walking miles home after waiting 45 minutes for a cab to arrive. Uber was a game-changer simply because they would show up.

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

#765

Post by alexchantavy »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #194
Farbklex wrote: post #65

Steam 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.

Ha, and you'd have to sometimes turn on DaemonTools' securom defeat. CloneCD was also probably the best way at the time to reliably make isos.

Slightly related, but moving from doom9.net dvd-rip tutorials (make vob, encode to DiVX for decent size) to simply using Handbrake and h264 was awesome.

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

#766

Post by saalweachter »

Aperocky wrote: post #629
bps4484 wrote: post #203

Jquery - abstracted away tons of cross-browser inconsistent behavior, both with the dom and javascript, and added new selectors to make dom manuplation easier. I think there was a reason it was adopted as fast as it was, it really was a 10x improvement in working client side.

I feel it's usefulness has ran its course though. The spirit lives on through ES6.

Boost for C++ likewise. It was a necessary bridge in the long wait for C++0x, but once the language started updating again it's no longer as necessary.

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

#767

Post by stefanfisk »

domano wrote: post #220
omosubi wrote: post #148

A couple i havent seen listed: Tivo - pretty cool when it came out - you didn't have to run to the bathroom/kitchen during commercial breaks and hope you made it back in time. Of course it's obsolete now but a significant improvement over the standard at the time Streaming music services - i spent an embarrassing amount of time as a kid/early teenager collecting cds and ripping them to my hard drive - if only I could…

I have never witnessed somebody tripping over a laptop charging cable - does that happen a lot for others?

I completely wrecked my PowerBook G4 by accidentally getting my leg on the wrong side of the cable when getting up from the couch in a hurry. It flew up in the air and landed on the floor at a weird angle, and after that it was forever bent...

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

#768

Post by saalweachter »

marianov wrote: post #416

Wireshark. I've saved countless enterprise problems that nobody could debug by intercepting traffic and guessing, or looking at the raw data nobody knew was there. Python list comprehensions + ipython: it changed how I approach all compley python code. I iterate over the data until I get it right, then use that as the basis of the program/script. Youtube: I can learn anything now. It's the real world The Matrix

Re: YouTube, the internet as a whole has gotten pretty for "How do I X?" queries.

My favorite anecdote was the time I ripped a hole in the side of my house, then googled "How do I frame a rough opening for a window?" ... and that story turned out fine, with my house having a new window at the end of the day, and not a gaping hole with a tarp tied to it.

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

#769

Post by drstewart »

still_grokking wrote: post #624
crazygringo wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google is gas-lighting people into using Chrome… Ever used for example YouTube with an alternative browser? It's buggy, it's slow (and that's on purpose; Google puts regularly quite some engineering effort into using web features that don't work well in the last independent competing browser). But those Google pages have a big banner saying it will work better in Chrome, and asking the users to "try". That strategy w…

That's not what gaslighting means.

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

#770

Post by narrator »

dragonwriter wrote: post #277
narrator wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember developing in the early 90s and there was no open source coding tools. It was miserable. One had to write everything from scratch or buy expensive libraries.

> I remember developing in the early 90s and there was no open source coding tools. There were open source coding tools in the early 90s (a lot of the GNU tools, including Emacs and GCC, were first released in the mid-to-late 1980s.)

I did not have access to a unix machine, the internet or the GNU toolchain in the early 90s. I was coding on macs and DOS PCs using Borland compilers and Think C on the Mac.
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