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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?

#231

Post by robotresearcher »

narrator wrote: post #124
jakevoytko wrote: post #17

Gmail. 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 studied Google's file system. What Google figured out is that, with the rise of very fast networking such as 10 Gig Ethernet and faster, the network is much faster than local disk. Files were spread across multiple servers so they could all stream different parts of the file off their local disks simultaneously to the client computer faster than the local disk on any one computer could run. Thus, you could have sys…

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Very, very influential reading back in the day, and still interesting.

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

#232

Post by saalweachter »

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'd end up breaking your X-windows configuration and need to spend six hours getting things mostly working again.

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

#234

Post by kccqzy »

aerovistae wrote: post #204
showerst wrote: post #42

Showing my age here, heh: 1. Early Ruby on Rails -- Now that MVC/ORM packges are the norm, it's hard to describe how revolutionary the original '15 minute blog' video was. It really felt like a quantum leap for CRUD apps. 2. Uber/Lyft - It has literally remolded the city I live in, by making large areas that are transit-inconvenient more attractive to live in. 3. Linode -- Access to a cheap server that you could spin…

I have no familiarity with #2 so that's interesting to me-- do you or other people actually use uber/lyft to get to and fro work? Isn't that like $15-20 each way every day, thousands of dollars a year?

Depends on where you live. Probably subsidized by employers, just like public transit is sometimes also subsidized by employers. Even when it's not, the mental health benefit you can get from not behind the wheel stuck in traffic is certainly worth thousands of dollars per year.

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

#235

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

ihnorton wrote: post #218

The rr debugger [1]. I desperately missed it after switching to a mac laptop -- to the point that I now have an older linux system which exists primarily to run rr. (I've heard that Pernosco [2] - partly built on rr, AFAIK - is even more revolutionary, but haven't yet tried it myself) [1] https://rr-project.org/ [2] https://pernos.co/

FYI, Jean Yang had Robert O'Callahan on her weekly PL-themed "talk show" on Twitch to talk about rr a couple weeks ago. The video is available until this coming Friday, I believe [0], at which point it will disappear into the ether.

[0] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/938439732

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

#238

Post by schappim »

OCRing items on screen with (Alfred App glue + Screen Capture.app + Google Vision).

WebUSB Printing and Postage Scales - (one click postage label creation without installing software/drivers or going through the OS printer queue is magical)

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

#239

Post by cosmodisk »

Visual Studio.

At the time I used this really shitty, platform dependant tool,which is only an inch better than Notepad. And then,one day I get to use Visual Studio. It felt like I went from a half dead donkey to Star Trek level tech. Amazing.

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

#240

Post by SatvikBeri »

aerovistae wrote: post #204
showerst wrote: post #42

Showing my age here, heh: 1. Early Ruby on Rails -- Now that MVC/ORM packges are the norm, it's hard to describe how revolutionary the original '15 minute blog' video was. It really felt like a quantum leap for CRUD apps. 2. Uber/Lyft - It has literally remolded the city I live in, by making large areas that are transit-inconvenient more attractive to live in. 3. Linode -- Access to a cheap server that you could spin…

I have no familiarity with #2 so that's interesting to me-- do you or other people actually use uber/lyft to get to and fro work? Isn't that like $15-20 each way every day, thousands of dollars a year?

It made a big difference for me with occasional trips, I took public transportation to work, but Uber/Lyft meant I could go visit my friends for $10 and 10 minutes instead of $2 and 45 minutes.

Note that a car also costs thousands of dollars a year once you factor in everything, Edmunds estimates the true cost of a corolla at $7k/year: https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2020/cost-to-own/

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