Twenty years ago, GUI designers like Visual Basic or Delphi. You drag-and-drop the controls on a form to create a layout, then you compile it instantaneously and had a complete GUI app. Nothing else has come close to that productivity since
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?
#772Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately I learned Delphi Afterwards you could not take the other languages seriously Like comparing two strings for equaltiy, strA and strB. In Delphi, you write: strA = strB In Java: strA != null && strA.equals(strB) Delphi just did everything better
Java was designed when C and C++ were still going strong and there was a feeling (or fear, depending on who you asked) that C++ would be as omnipresent as C was. Java tried very hard to fix the perceived errors of C++ and operator overloading was high on that list. Nowadays, we are no longer afraid of operator overloading so I kind of wonder why it hasn't found its way into modern Java.
But they fixed the wrong "errors"
C++ is actually a good language. But everything that comes from C is bad.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#773Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…
I didn't have that experience with gmail, I had it with oddmail which was 1-2-3 years before gmail? Oddmail reproduced Outlook in a webpage (3 panes, folders, list of items in selected folder, contents of selected email)
oddmail was bought by yahoo
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#774User 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…
What's crazy is that any taxi company (and there are some large ones which have the resources) could have done this. Then, after Uber launched, instead of jumping on the bandwagon and doing they same they instead dig in their heels and fought it. Only after it was too late did they attempt to do the same.
Not quite. There was a post on here that Uber's other big advance was the fact they don't own taxis and via demand pricing they incentivize more people to drive during high demand times. A Taxi company can't do that. They can't afford to own enough cars and hire enough drivers to handle high demand times as they'd lose money. Just adding an app to taxis is not enough
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#775Java vs. the 90s C/C++ standards. Not having to deal with memory management made it so much easier to write applications. I'm guessing SQL was a 10x innovation at least when it came out, too.
Java got it wrong IMO. There are many things that need the same management. C++ allows this vis destructors. You can auto-manage memory, auto manage locks, auto manage files, auto manage GPU resources, auto manage video players, audio players, etc.. etc ...
Java you can only auto-manage memory. All the rest you can't.
Yes I get that C++ has too many foot guns but Java's solution is half assed. There's so much more to resource management than just memory.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#776+ Compiler Explorer
+ Jasik Debugger (68000 Macintosh) - One of the best pieces of software that I have ever used. It could still compete today.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#777OS X / macOS. After about 5 years of Windows, 10 years of various Linux desktops, I got converted to Mac in 2012 and never looked back.
What makes you feel MacOS is 10x better. I am a Mac convert myself but felt like it was more of an incremental improvement for me. Maybe 1.5x?
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#778VLC.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#779Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
A few more questions if you'll indulge me. First, how do you actually install ZFS on Debian? I understand you can install the ZFS package, but that in and of itself won't change the underlying filesystem on disk. Also, doesn't Ext4 also support checksumming? (See https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Metadata_Checksu... ).
Well, yes. You can't just convert filesystems in place, whether ZFS or otherwise. After installing the package you can create ZFS pools and filesystems. If you want to replace existing filesystems you would move all your stuff over after the fact.
Booting from ZFS will require some extra steps. I actually cheated here and just left /boot and / on ext4, using ZFS for /usr, /home, /var and everything else, so I don't have firsthand experience with this (on Linux anyway, on FreeBSD you can just select ZFS during installation). But if you do want that, it doesn't seem too difficult, https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Deb...
As far as ext4 checksumming, as your own link says, it only checksums metadata -- actually, a subset of the metadata apparently. ZFS checksums everything, meaning your actual data. Further, since ext4 is not aware of redundancy -- you'd be using lvm or mdraid for that -- it's not clear what it can do if it does detect an error. With ZFS these errors are fixed automatically.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#780Although i started a while JQuery was dominant, I have to imagine JQuery was a 10x improvement over vanilla dom manipulation and dealing with cross browser issues.