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

Post by diegof79 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #289

deckard1 wrote: post #141

Firebug. 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).

> Debugging JS in IE6 Visual Studio (even back when it was called Visual Interdev) supported first-class script debugging with Internet Explorer going as far back as Internet Explorer 4. Ditto cscript/wscript. It just wasn't popular (and few people knew about it) because most people doing front-end web-work _back then_ weren't using Visual Studio, and in general most people weren't doing back-end web-work in Visual S…

Post by datavirtue » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

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…

Post by hashingroll » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

dejv wrote: post #324

I guess I would date myself, but: - syntax highlighting in text editor - tabs in browsers (in my case that was Firefox before it was called Firefox) - DVCS, I've started with Bazaar then moved to Git (of course). Used VCS (painful) and SVN (less so) before that. - REST APIs and discovering Sinatra framework to write them. - Rails. First time I saw famous "write blog in 15 minutes" my head was blown.

Post by spartanatreyu » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

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…

Post by tolbish » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #319

ta1234567890 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kazaa

The only problem I had with Kazaa is how often people would rename files for reasons I'll never understand. Like...imagine downloading "The Matrix.avi", and you start playing it, and it turns out it was actually a copy of Fight Club. WHY!?