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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?

#431

Post by wombatmobile »

csteubs wrote: post #392
Hammershaft wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting concept, but my gut says it could lead to some malicious use cases.

You're spot on, and that's something I think about daily. Satellite-based incumbents have an average revisit rate (assuming good weather) of roughly 2x/day, so hundreds or thousands of passes/day poses serious privacy and operational risk. We rely on guidance from EthicalGEO and other consumer privacy orgs when drafting standards, but the path to the type of hyper-revisit we're envisioning will need to be tread very…

How might this work? Could you give example of privacy heuristics you are considering?

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

#432

Post by stickfigure »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #168
aphextron wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for this. Java gets shade from the hipsters these days, but it's almost impossible to overstate what a revolution it was for software engineering.

Java brought two things to the table compared to C++: garbage collection, and an enormous library. I don't think that garbage collection, by itself, was a 10x change. For it to be so, programmers would have to be spending 90% of their effort on freeing memory. Don't get me wrong, garbage collection is a big win when you can use it, but I don't think it's quite that big of a win. The library... that might almost be 10…

In the 90s I used to spend DAYS hunting down memory issues (corruption, leaks, crashes) in C++ code. Your whole schedule could slip by weeks because of one hard to reproduce issue. I haven't seen that kind of problem in a long time.

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

#434

Post by paxys »

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 lived half of my adult life in a major city before Uber/Lyft, and yet it is unimaginable what life was like before them. Did I really get ready for a night out and go out in the rain desperately waving for a cab?

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

#435

Post by tachyonbeam »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #327
SatvikBeri wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I have multiple experiences with Toyota’s driven 200k to 300k miles with just standard repairs. A Corolla costs $20k? $25k? Let’s say $1k for new tires/brakes/oil changes/filters every 45k miles. That’s $333 per year for maintenance, and the car lasts 13 to 20 years at 15k miles per year for 200k to 300k miles, so let’s say $2k per year on the high end, $1,200 per year on the low end. Extremely high liability insuran…

Your maintenance cost seems optimistic to me, and you're also omitting parking and the cost of parking tickets (surprise yay), but besides that, I would say that there's a fairly high cost in terms of time and stress when driving a car.

As someone who doesn't own a car, I don't have to worry about parking tickets, or de-snowing my car, car not starting in winter. I also don't have to worry about finding parking, or parking tickets, dealing with repairs and scammy repairmen, paperwork, my car getting stolen or damaged, etc.

I also don't have to worry about driving drunk. It's pretty freeing to go out with friends and just have a car drop you at the door, and another car pick you back up when you want to go, and never having to worry about parking, when your parking timer might run out, or drunk driving.

And all of this being said, as someone living in a big city, between public transit, bike rentals, walking and ridesharing, the total cost I pay is less than your stated 400/month.

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

#436

Post by aszen »

Nixpkgs and the nix build.

After rough times with ubuntu default package manager I finally installed nix and there's no going back.

Previously installing any software used to be a risky affair that could corrupt the packages or bring some dpkg issue. Now I literally install whatever I find. It's truly game changing. I haven't seen a missing library error since then. Being able to reliably install software across machines with different versions is huge and right now there is no better solution than nix.

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

#437

Post by aksss »

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…

Don't forget the payment process - no tip to worry about, no conveniently "broken" credit card machines, costs and duration are estimated up front.

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

#439

Post by aksss »

Strom wrote: post #405
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…

> phone calls This can make things awfully complicated when you and the dispatcher don't speak the same language. > waiting around for a taxi to arrive The worst part about waiting for a taxi is the dice roll of whether one will actually arrive. Often in the case of a popular spot (like after the end of an event) the taxi could pick up someone else from the same location - or worse yet, not show up at all. The introd…

> dispatcher

I remember a lot of taxi companies used some funky phone-to-CB thing where the dispatcher would be talking to you over CB radio on your phone call, which was just rotten audio quality on top of any lingo barrier. Just hilariously awful.

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

#440

Post by paxys »

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?

I used to take UberPool (or the Lyft equivalent) to work every day for more than a year (around 2016). It was on average ~$3-4 one way, slightly more than but still comparable to public transit. The door-to-door time would be 15 minutes as opposed to 40. And I often got discounts which made it cheaper than public transit.
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