[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are some "10x" software product innovat...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What are some "10x" software product innovations you have
experienced?
Peter Thiel has written about the "10x rule" for startups, where
your innovation has to be 10 times better than the second best
option [1]. Have you personally experienced such 10x improvements
in your own interactions with software? What were they? [1] -
https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2015/07/13/the-10x-rule-for-
great-startup-ideas/
Author : pramodbiligiri
Score : 176 points
Date : 2021-03-16 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
| blunte wrote:
| Wise (was Transferwise). Literally made my monthly alimony
| payments less painful and much cheaper compared to international
| bank wires. I'm talking about saving 200-300EUR per month on
| fees. (No I have no affiliation with them.)
|
| Slashdot back in the day.
|
| Digg back in the day.
|
| Hackernews, back .. ... ... .
|
| Java in 1997.
|
| Python and Ruby starting around 2004ish.
| stblack wrote:
| Google Earth.
|
| In many ways this was the killer app for first version iPads.
| It's still top-echelon, and a delight to use (mostly).
| dgellow wrote:
| MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) was a complete game changer.
| alex_duf wrote:
| one click deployment to prod as opposed to a deployment ceremony
| dejv wrote:
| 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.
| hashingroll wrote:
| Link to the Ruby on Rails demo for anyone wondering
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY
| vbsteven wrote:
| Some parts of the Rust ecosystem belong to this category. For
| example the way Rustup and Cargo features with conditional
| compilation helps cross compiling code to new platforms.
|
| Yes we also have cross compiling in C/C++ but the extra tooling
| that cargo/rustup provide make the 10x difference.
| haolez wrote:
| Since there are already a lot of great answers, I'll give a niche
| one: fzf.
|
| It's a simple concept and implementation, but you can plug it in
| all kinds of things and quickly compose complex tools in a simple
| manner. You can use it to search (and navigate to) logs, files,
| git history, external APIs (e.g. AWS). It's amazing.
| aerovistae wrote:
| Zocdoc. It is SO easy to find good doctors now compared to what
| you used to have to do.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Stackoverflow. Its closest competitor, experts exchange, was a
| slow website that required you sign up to see an answer that was
| rarely useful. There's a direct correlation to SO and dollars of
| revenue I've driven.
| scubbo wrote:
| TIL that Experts Exchange actually existed, rather than being a
| meme of "why you should consider how your business name will
| look as a domain".
| strgcmc wrote:
| What's wrong with www.ExpertSexChange.com? People deserve to
| hire experts for that don't they? /s
|
| Somewhere out there must be an RFC that discusses the
| original thought process behind designing for case sensitive
| vs case insensitive domain names, or why domains should be
| case insensitive while URL paths should be case sensitive...
| Ironically this SO post seems to be a decent starting point
| for my curiosity:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7996919/should-url-be-
| ca...
| Nition wrote:
| It's still around: http://www.experts-exchange.com
| chx wrote:
| I think poor therapists suffered most from the curious nature
| of how domain name are. Like http://www.therapist.com/ still
| exists but redirects. ...
|
| Let's not even mention the plant nursery on the Mole River
| which ended up with www.molestationnursery.com ...
| petepete wrote:
| Experts Exchange also used to do that awful thing where they
| let Google index the solution but would hide it from visitors
| until they'd signed in.
|
| I believe Google penalised them for doing it so they used
| another sneaky trick where they showed a obscured/pixelated
| answer first and then the actual one further down than most
| people would scroll.
|
| SO was better in every way.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| * Redis and Memcached
|
| * MapReduce
|
| * Column stores
| marton_s wrote:
| OS 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.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Google & stackoverflow
|
| Prior to this everything was based out of tech manuals, now I can
| find good information fast, and memorize pointless trivia far
| less.
| blunte wrote:
| 5 years ago I would have agreed.
|
| Now, Google is heavily polluted with SEO garbage, junior-level
| blog posts churned out by what must be student assignments to
| "write a blog post about this week's programming assignment",
| and the truly horrible data scraping sites like xspdf or
| whatever. General web search is increasingly poor.
|
| And Stackoverflow was great for a long time. Now it is mostly
| outdated (which usually means incorrect) Q/A data. Worse, the
| old information that should be retired actually blocks new
| questions with current answers because of the aggressive system
| of trying to prevent "duplicate" questions. It's not a
| duplicate question if there's an 8+ year (or even 3+ year!) gap
| between the date of the original and the date of the new one.
| Quite often, even if the original question is close enough to
| current needs, the answers are very unlikely to be correct now.
| boringg wrote:
| Git + Github
| jng wrote:
| vim - when I started using it around 2004, switching from
| UltraEdit and Visual Studio. Haven't stopped using it to this
| day.
| jp555 wrote:
| How about a 10x reduction?
|
| Thinking of when "Paste with style" became the default. :P
| fredley wrote:
| This makes me mad every time. And every single thing has a
| different shortcut for "Paste without style", if they even have
| one.
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| On MacOS there's a native shortcut for pasting as plain text:
|
| Option+Shift+Command+V to paste text without any formatting.
|
| https://superuser.com/a/512502
| belval wrote:
| This is the same on Windows and Linux afaik you have Ctrl +
| Shift + V. Still makes me angry because it's a stupid
| default.
| tgb wrote:
| It's not universal on Windows: for example it doesn't
| work in MS Word. The place I'd want it the most!
| Ctrl+Shift+V does nothing at all there. It's Alt-HVT for
| this in Word (duh). But you can set the default to be no-
| formatting.
| Nition wrote:
| It works in LibreOffice but it pops up a window asking
| you which sort of paste you want, which wastes more time.
| ayemiller wrote:
| The following is almost a reflex for me: Win+R -> notepad
| -> Ctrl+v -> Ctrl+a -> Ctrl+c
| Ekaros wrote:
| And most insane thing I find it that sometimes it works over
| Operating system that is from VirtualBox to Windows...
|
| That level of VM to host integration is though 10x innovation.
| andrecp11 wrote:
| Because it wasn't mentioned yet, Dropbox was quite magical as an
| end user tool. You use your computer normally with folders and
| everything is sync'd to other computers.
|
| Unfortunately dropbox the company chose to grow into everything
| except their core product.
| RantyDave wrote:
| Windows NT4.
|
| In two years we went from Win3.11, delightful cooperative
| multitasking et al. Via Win95. To something that would survive a
| nuclear bomb.
|
| Then security happened.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| Notarize.com - I was blown away by how easy, simple and fast it
| was to get documents notarized.
| passivate wrote:
| Reaper. Its simple, fast, and no licensing bull.
|
| Steam. Just works, simple and easy to use. Copy-Paste the Steam
| folder to your new system to move your entire game library.
|
| ZoomIt by Sysinternals - excellent, excellent tool that has
| improved all my presentations/screen-share sessions.
|
| Everything by David Carpenter - super fast system wide search for
| files that has bookmarks and other features like match using file
| name/file path/regex etc.
|
| ShareX - Very useful screenshoting/screenrecording + more tool
| with automation capabilities like auto upload to imgur, etc.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I've never used a more stable, feature-filled, and affordable
| DAW than Reaper. Making music with it is a lot of fun
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| > Steam. Just works, simple and easy to use. Copy-Paste the
| Steam folder to your new system to move your entire game
| library.
|
| I use Steam, GOG, Epic, Battle.NET, Origin, Uplay/Ubisoft
| Connect. Steam and B.Net are only ones that can handle this
| smoothly and it's INFURIATING.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Reaper also came to my mind. The "everything is a track"
| philosophy feels so natural to me now while other DAWs seem
| convoluted. I look back to my early Cubase and Samplitude days
| with amusement.
|
| Also, Reaper basically never crashes for me.
| Kagerjay wrote:
| shareX is a godsend, I wish MacOS had as good as it
| high_byte wrote:
| Sysinternals never ceases to amaze me.
| Loughla wrote:
| When Steam first started being a thing, I decried it as the
| death of physical media and fun game inserts. I vowed never to
| use it, because of what I perceived as the locked down steam
| launcher controlling access/ability to shut off access to games
| that I purchased with my own money. It seemed like too close to
| a 'license' to play.
|
| Then I used it for the first time and realized how stupid easy
| it was compared to managing all of the physical disks and keys
| and what-not.
|
| I mean, I wasn't wrong. But it is easier to use.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Years ago, when MS Flight Simulator X came to Steam, I bought
| it even though I had MSFSX on DVD.
|
| Eliminating the need for the discs as well as removing the
| silly DRM in favor of Steam's far more sane DRM was worth the
| $10.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Home Assistant has been a revelation in terms of a platform
| against which to create sensor networks. Their MQTT discovery
| isn't ideal but it's damn good.
|
| Related to this, Tasmota as a platform that I can run on ESP8266
| devices to keep my IoT local to my network.
|
| A document scanner connected to Wi-Fi (wish it had the ability to
| send directly to my laptop instead of having the laptop pull from
| it, but still 10x better than connecting a USB cable or emailing
| attachments).
|
| Last night I discovered Tabula, a GUI for extracting tables from
| PDFs. Saved me more than 10x the time than copy pasting by hand.
| Fuck banks that only let you download the last 60 days of
| transactions as a CSV.
|
| Discord is 10x better than most other chat platforms (Slack being
| the workplace competitor). Mainly this is because of how easy the
| signup process is.
|
| Django is 10x better than PHP I left.
|
| Pelican is better than WordPress for my needs.
|
| Waze's ability to search for things along my route (gas, food,
| coffee, etc.) instead of in my current area.
|
| Reddit. Reddit to me is a community in a box for any new
| interest. If I pick up knitting, there is already an established
| knitting community that will have lots of info and helpful people
| to answer my questions. Same with motorcycles, home improvement,
| bargain hunting, rug weaving, whatever.
|
| Instagram. It's 10x better than most social networker for
| interacting with people. Still sucks, but everything else sucks
| more.
|
| AirBnB experiences. Had some great tours through them when I
| visited Italy a couple of years ago and was way easier than the
| individual scammy-looking tour company sites.
| whalesalad wrote:
| svn to git/github was a 10x for sure
| banga wrote:
| Using a terminal instead of punch cards. That was liberating.
| ihnorton wrote:
| 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/
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| 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
| danielrhodes wrote:
| A more recent one:
|
| Retool
|
| I just started using them, and it saved an ungodly amount of time
| setting up internal dashboards. Typically speaking internal
| dashboards are an afterthought, don't work well, accumulate a lot
| of tech debt, and yet are indispensable to running an online
| service. Retool isn't perfect, but what you get is way beyond
| anything you'd be willing to build for yourself early on.
| poyu wrote:
| WordPress hands down. Built in CMS, easy to use editor, not to
| mention the extensible plug-ins system. You could get a site up
| and running in an hour.
| ace2358 wrote:
| When I started making music 10 years ago, I limited myself to
| using hardware only. Hardware synth, drum machine, mixer, effects
| etc. It was a great learning experience, which is why I did it. I
| wanted to understand the fundamentals.
|
| 5 years ago I finally took the dive into the digital realm with a
| mixer/soundcard combo and a DAW (logic X).
|
| Forget 10x software, this was closer to 1000x faster.
|
| I'm sure the early days of DAWs wasn't like stepping into the
| game in 2015, but the software workflow was stupidly quicker than
| doing everything physically in real-time.
|
| Now days we have heaps of choices for DAWs and soundcards and
| cross platform comparability. What an age to be a musician!
| jeswin wrote:
| While it helped as a conversation starter here, the 10x rule is
| hollow punditry.
| jbob2000 wrote:
| Multiple cursors in Sublime Text. Made it incredibly easy to do
| repetitive edits to json data or html templates. VS Code does a
| better job of cursor management now, but I think that was
| inspired by sublime text.
|
| Language and date time services like Moment and i18n. Huge
| productivity gains from having off the shelf solutions for multi-
| language features.
|
| Node.js and Express got rid of all the cruft from backend API
| development. It's a breeze to spin up a new API, whereas years
| prior needed a fairly strict environment setup to run reliably.
| bombcar wrote:
| Reminds me that "columnar select" like BBEdit has is amazingly
| useful when dealing with tabular data.
|
| https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/faqs.html#rectangle
| nicbou wrote:
| Docker.
|
| I don't hear "works on my machine" nearly as much nowadays.
| Everyone is running the same code in the same environment. It's
| all there under source control.
|
| Now I can get a project running on a different machine in a few
| minutes, without any special instructions. That also applies to
| my colleagues, or people looking at my GitHub projects. My
| software's interface with the host machine is clearly defined, so
| there are very few surprises.
| ddux wrote:
| Version Control. Imagine going back to FTP-ing updated files onto
| servers not knowing if you've overwritten someone else's work. Or
| not being able to see a file's history.
| szszrk wrote:
| APM software (application performance monitoring). It was super
| expensive, pain in the ass to maintain, required a lot of
| training. But when someone skilled sat down with it - just wow.
| You could investigate particular users problem, and see that when
| she typed "s" in search form it triggered a few proxies, sql
| query which had proper execution plan, but it seems that
| connections pools are handled poorly.
|
| It could visualize what is the actual architecture (not what we
| think it is) and show which connections are laggy, or more used,
| when it should be round robin.
|
| It discovered undocumented connections and could show us laggy
| requests even if remote system was not monitored by APM - purely
| based on data from one side.
|
| I could report to developers a particular line of code that is
| problematic from performance perspective (like "this takes 40% of
| time of the request, even though it's the simplest task in the
| process) without knowing much about that program or even coding
| in general (I'm more of an admin).
| splittingTimes wrote:
| What software do you use? It sounds like for monitoring a
| website. Is there something similar for a desktop app?
| CyanDeparture wrote:
| Macromedia Dreamweaver - It was 10x times better than Microsoft
| FrontPage (I was very young, please don't judge).
|
| Mac OS X - Moving from Windows ME on my Packard Bell tower, to an
| iMac G3 with Mac OS X was quite a pivotal moment in my life -
| everything just felt smoother, it was actually nice to use an
| operating system, not a battle.
|
| Heroku.com - The ease of getting a Rails site live was 10x better
| than setting up your own server.
|
| Git - I was always messing up SVN systems, as soon as I switched
| to Git it just didn't seem possible to mess it up.
| shafyy wrote:
| - Revolut (vs. traditional banks and traders)
|
| - Wolt (vs. Lieferando, Germany)
|
| - Hey (vs. Gmail, Fastmail)
| [deleted]
| omosubi wrote:
| 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 have all that time back
|
| The selfie camera on smartphones - pretty self explanatory
|
| MagSafe connector - why they ever removed this is beyond me. I
| don't know if it made my life 10x better but if extended the life
| of a laptop a year or two it's worth it's weight in gold
| domano wrote:
| I have never witnessed somebody tripping over a laptop charging
| cable - does that happen a lot for others?
| omosubi wrote:
| Yes, but also pulling your laptop to where the cable is taut
| and having it yank out. I realized this is more of a hardware
| innovation
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| I can go with a couple of my own experiences:
|
| 1. Ride hailing apps like Uber, Lyft
|
| 2. Wix.com and similar website builders
| yosamino wrote:
| > Wix.com and similar website builders
|
| I understand this in the sense of a website builder that gives
| endusers a way to build a websites - but wix.com is a world of
| pain.
|
| It tries to lock you in (no way that I have found to add
| javascript without using their online IDE), the output is
| really inefficient and buggy (how on earth did they manage to
| duplicate one of my menu entries?) and their online editor
| leaks so much memory that Chrome consistently crashes after a
| while when I try to use it.
|
| I mean wordpress has so many annoyances - but compared to wix
| it's not nearly as nerve wrecking.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Power query for Excel. It trivialized data transformation for
| admin/operations users, who would have spent 50x the time on a
| VBA solution or (more likely) not bothered.
| f00zz wrote:
| tmux
| dimal wrote:
| USB. It's hard to imagine, but we used to have a thing called
| SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy", and that's how it felt) which allowed
| you to connect to exactly one serial device. The plug was huge.
| And cables cost $50. Mice used an entirely separate interface
| that was different on Macs and PCs, and since Apple was dying at
| the time, it was a struggle to get Mac mice for a reasonable
| price. With USB, you could suddenly attach any device to Mac or
| PC and often not even need a driver. You could buy a splitter and
| attach multiple devices. Incredible! Wifi. I remember seeing
| Apple's Airport demo. You could connect to the internet WITHOUT
| WIRES! Magic!
| mikewarot wrote:
| >we used to have a thing called SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy", and
| that's how it felt) which allowed you to connect to exactly one
| serial device.
|
| No, SCSI was worse than that... you had 5 or so different
| types, about 5 different connectors, and you had to terminate
| things, set the dip-switches just right, have the right Adaptec
| card, with the right drivers, and if you didn't look at things
| too hard... you might be able to take a $5 CD blank and get a
| good burn on it... otherwise you had a $5 coaster.
|
| I hate SCSI because I always had the SCSI Blues.
| aksss wrote:
| I was super excited the first time I personally owned my
| first SCSI card though. I look back on my fascination with
| the tech of those days fondly. It was super cool even though
| it badly sucked by todays standards.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, I'm running a lab experiment right now, and I count six
| USB cables coming out of the computer, one of which goes to a
| powered hub with a further five cables plugged in. Two of the
| USB interfaced hardware gadgets are homemade. All controlled by
| Python. A couple of the devices required downloading drivers
| from the vendor, but the setup process was utterly uneventful.
| quesera wrote:
| > SCSI ... which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial
| device
|
| Pedantry, but: SCSI is parallel, not serial. The distinction is
| the number of data lines in the cable -- serial has one line,
| and SCSI has 8 or 16. This allows for much faster data transfer
| rates, at the (significant) expense of greater complexity and
| cabling cost.
|
| The other advantage of SCSI is the ability to connect to
| multiple devices through "daisy-chaining". Old-style serial
| connections (RS-232, RS-422, etc) were strictly point-to-point.
|
| _Modern_ SCSI (SAS) runs the SCSI protocol over a serial
| connection, because port clock speeds are now fast enough that
| the parallel advantage isn 't important for most uses.
|
| Not to detract from USB though. It was an improvement over all
| of the above, and nowadays it's pretty fast, too.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Showing my age: windows 95 being able to play FULL SCREEN VIDEO
| mogrim wrote:
| The Weezer video it included! Still love that song!
| 13415 wrote:
| The following come to my mind:
|
| - Google Earth: A globe with ultra-zoom just didn't exist before.
|
| - Tex and LaTeX: They revolutionized Academic typesetting and
| publishing.
|
| - DAWs: I used to use a four-track recorder. When I first got to
| edit in a DAW with a few built-in effects, that was such a
| quantum leap. (I was about to write "affordable DAWs" but to be
| honest these came quite late and my first DAW was a cracked copy
| of Protools, of course.)
|
| - REALBasic when it was affordable shareware: I've never been
| more productive than in REALBasic. (Also learned my lesson,
| though, never rely on commercial tools whose price suddenly might
| skyrocket.)
|
| - XLisp: I did not end up programming much in it but this was so
| good and mature software for hobby programmers interested in Lisp
| during the 90s (at a time when CommonLisp was hard to get outside
| your university).
|
| - Wikipedia: Doesn't really count as software but I had to
| include it. It's possibly the most useful Internet-based tool
| besides email.
| thraxil wrote:
| - SSH. Maybe not in terms of performance or efficiency, but
| before SSH, we were using telnet everywhere and just sending
| passwords in plaintext all over the internet. Plus, you could
| give someone your public key and they could give you access to a
| server instead of the "here's a temporary password, change it as
| soon as you log in" approach.
|
| - Perl. This was at the time when the other languages available
| to me as a student were Java or C (mid to late 90s). Those were
| fine, but Perl definitely felt 10x more productive for me for the
| things I actually wanted to write. Plus CPAN was the first
| directory of libraries/modules that I'd encountered of its ilk.
|
| - VMWare/virtualization. We used it for an Operating Systems
| class so we could learn by actually writing Linux kernel code and
| running it on a VM. This was huge at the time. Friends at other
| schools taking Operating Systems had to work on dumbed down
| simulations and "teaching" OSes. Before VMWare, if you wanted to
| work on the kernel, you had to have spare hardware and a lot of
| patience for re-building your system when you did something
| stupid. With VMWare, you could just restore from a good snapshot
| and try again.
|
| - apt-get. Coming to Debian from (old, pre-yum) Redhat, being
| able to type a command and reliably install pretty much anything
| was a huge improvement over untangling RPM dependencies. Even
| RPMs were a pretty big improvement over manual compiling or
| Windows-style installer wizards.
|
| - Numpy (or "Numeric" as it was called at the time). Vector math
| in clean Python that was mind-blowingly efficient. The only other
| option that really balanced performance and high level
| accessibility was MATLAB, but that wasn't suitable for using in
| an application.
| atian wrote:
| Yes, the thing in iOS that automatically clips SMS verification
| codes sent to you. It saves me from going to my messages and
| finding the code.
| soheil wrote:
| Yes but not being able to copy and paste the code in iMessage
| by right clicking on it if you're on MacOS reverts this back to
| 1x. In MacOS right clicking on any word shows the copy menu
| with that word selected but in iMessage for some the entire
| message gets selected. You first need to highlight the word
| you're interested in before right clicking, major pain.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Yeah, this was phenomenal the first time I experienced it. I
| wish it also came with a "don't use SMS for 2-factor
| authentication" warning though. ;)
| aquodyssey wrote:
| What 2FA method is preferred instead of SMS these days?
| d3nj4l wrote:
| TOTP, I guess.
| vngzs wrote:
| Hardware keys. If you can't use those, HOTP (push
| notification-based - OTP with an HMAC and a counter).
| tediousdemise wrote:
| I take this one for granted. I can't wait until they add the
| same thing for emails.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Sorry, but that one is 4x at best.
| boringg wrote:
| 4x? 1x at best - saves my brain from memorizing a small thing
| very infrequently. Might be detrimental to my brain over the
| long run.:)
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Ha yes, my point was just that it is hard to quantify most
| of these and that 10x ends up meaning so awesome you buy
| it, which is almost a tautology.
|
| (Thiel actually quantifies it in the examples he offers in
| the original text, if I remember correctly)
| MalcolmDwyer wrote:
| When I took driver's ed many years ago, the official
| state written material had it as fact that highway
| driving is "3 times easier" than city driving. It was
| actually on my written test. Multiple choice, and the
| other answers were different numbers to chose from... but
| no: "3 times" is the correct answer.
| vngzs wrote:
| Maybe if you're only counting brain cycles saved, but brain
| cycles of pure joy and amazement are worth more than ones
| spent doing pointless tasks.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| It was both magical and instantly obvious, the best kind of
| change.
| rekoros wrote:
| Gmail, Git, tmux
| stunt wrote:
| VIM and VIM key bindings on other software (e.g., Vimium
| extension for Firefox and Chrome)
| cadr wrote:
| Being able to have my programs on a hard drive rather than
| switching between floppy disks was pretty nifty.
|
| Going from a 300 baud modem to 1200 baud modem I guess is
| technically only a 4x difference, but it definitely felt more at
| the time.
| jakub_g wrote:
| Some pretty basic but workflow changing improvements for me
| (maybe 10x is too much, but 5x maybe? :)
|
| 1) Tabbed browsing in Opera/Mozilla in early 2000s. You'd have to
| open new window each time before that.
|
| 2) Moving from Windows Phone 8 (Nokia Lumia) to Android 4.4:
|
| IE Mobile was okayish and pretty standards compliant browser, but
| could only handle 6 tabs, and switching between tabs would reload
| the page. Chrome Mobile would open infinite no. of tabs, and
| easily keep 10-20 of them in memory, allowing to switch around.
|
| 3) Two features of Sublime Text compared to old generation
| editors/IDEs:
|
| - multiple cursors (ctrl-d) make editing very different
|
| - keeping new unnamed files as drafts when closing editor
| (instead of asking "do you want to save the newfile1? newfile2?
| ...")
|
| One fundamental change:
|
| 4) Firebug. Debugging websites before that was slapping random
| CSS `border`-s/`background-color`-s and `alert()` calls.
| Lichtso wrote:
| Not sure if mathematics counts as software:
|
| Geometric / Clifford Algebra.
|
| It makes just about every aspect of handling geometry in computer
| graphics and robotics so much easier. It comes with a ton of
| upsides and only two downsides: You probably were not taught it
| yet (so you have to learn it) and if you do, others will have
| trouble following you unless they learn it too.
|
| I somehow feel like coming from a tribe where we only count up to
| three, and then being introduced to the concept of natural
| numbers (and other number classes) by outsiders. As I stared to
| use it myself, it changed the way I think about things, but now I
| can't communicate with the rest of my tribe anymore. Yet, I think
| it is worthwhile and about the only silver bullet I have seen.
|
| If you are interested, here [0] is a nice introduction to one
| class of clifford algebras.
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04509
| splittingTimes wrote:
| Do you know 3D computer graphics libraries that use GA?
| Lichtso wrote:
| You are right, while there are already some libraries which
| provide GA, there are almost non which use it. I know that it
| is used in some photogrammetry pose estimation / frame
| registration code and I am currently porting my vector / path
| rendering library to GA.
|
| It is still really niche, but gaining traction in the last 3
| years or so (considering it was invented in 1878).
| dmarcos wrote:
| Nice. I've been always curious but also worried about
| alienating myself. Any communities of GA users out there to
| feel connected?
| Lichtso wrote:
| I think the biggest gathering is: bivector.net
|
| It has a discourse and a discord.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Do you think it is all of GA that helps, or really just the
| concept of bivectors / multivectors?
|
| (I have a lot of skepticism about the geometric product as a
| useful object, but I think that multivectors are clearly
| fantastically useful everywhere. My exposure is mostly in
| physics where multivectors are basically necessary to make any
| sense of a bunch of concepts. But I don't work in
| robotics/graphics so maybe don't know how much good the
| geometric product does in practice?)
| Lichtso wrote:
| >> Do you think it is all of GA that helps, or really just
| the concept of bivectors / multivectors?
|
| Yes, definitely all of it. Especially in physics, where every
| well known equation comes with its own, not so well known
| algebra. There are dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of them, all
| with their own notations and shenanigans. The thing is, all
| of them can be covered by GA. And you only need three
| instances of GA to cover everything [0]: Classical mechanics,
| quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics / space time.
|
| >> I have a lot of skepticism about the geometric product as
| a useful object
|
| The geometric product is kind of like: "Here is everything
| you could possibly want to do, all at once!". We usually pick
| out specific parts of it (called grade projections) to
| operate on sub-algebras matching the specific problem domain
| at hand. Yet, all of them are still connected in one uber-
| algebra so to speak. So, we don't need to switch notations.
|
| >> bivectors / multivectors
|
| Multivectors, the vectors of GA, are like "normal" vectors,
| from linear algebra, just tuples. There is nothing special
| about them. The genius lies in the idea that unlike "normal"
| vector algebra, where you have one element in your tuple for
| every dimension, you also have elements for every combination
| of dimensions in a multivector. The multivector is usually
| sorted by the grade (number of dimensions an element
| combines). That way a multivector has a 0D scalar, 1D
| vectors, 2D bivectors, 3D trivectors, etc.
|
| [0]: https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?Pape
| rID=...
| ronald_petty wrote:
| control^r in bash - literally 10x faster to type things which
| (ideally) makes 10x more productive :)
|
| control^r is reverse search in the command history (for UI people
| out there).
| vehemenz wrote:
| It's also Undo in Vim. Cheers!
| callesgg wrote:
| If you like that you should try the fish Shell. Not great for
| automation but amazing for general use.
| bizzleDawg wrote:
| If you like ctrl^r, you'll _love_
| https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
| mikewarot wrote:
| PKzip - way faster and better compression that previous things
| like ARC. The first version control I did was project01.zip,
| project02.zip, etc.
|
| SideKick - Being able to pop up and edit underneath a running MS-
| DOS program was a game changer for me
|
| Turbo Pascal - Being able to compile programs in less than a
| second in MS-DOS was _magic_ , compared to 15min - hour waiting
| for the compiler queue on the VAX at school, only to find out you
| had an error.
|
| Backpack Portable Hard drive - A piece of hardware, but being
| able to boot a floppy and have 100 megabytes of storage instantly
| available was like magic.
|
| EDwin - TurboPower Software - the first text editor (that I used)
| that could record and playback macros, I did all kinds of cool
| stuff with it.
|
| GoBack - A system tool that kept all the changes to your hard
| drives.. the salesman demo involved deliberately infecting a
| system with a virus... then undoing it via GoBack. Unfortunately
| the wrong people decided it was too slow and "optimized it for
| speed", which killed the ability to undo virus attacks.
|
| MultiLink - Allowed running of multiple MS-DOS users with serial
| terminals, usually a Wyse 60.
|
| The $25 network - Allowed the very slow emulation of networking,
| with just plain old serial ports and cables. Saved hundreds of
| dollars if you only need a file now and then, back when Arcnet
| cards were about $100.
|
| Delphi - GUI development for Windows that just works, and like
| Turbo Pascal, compiles in a blink. Drag your components into a
| form, hook up the events, make a report or two, and you're done.
|
| Microsoft Office - This one is way under-rated
| Microsoft Excel - Reactive programming, comprehensible by humans
| and accountants. Microsoft Word - The outliner is
| quite useful for keeping track of tasks, and the details of
| projects Microsoft Access - being able to do a forms
| based database with nice reports, master/detail records all with
| zero SQL required is powerful stuff Microsoft
| Exchange/Outlook - Exchange is *the world's best database*
| disguised as a task manager/calendar/email server/client. You
| can make offline changes, and they just work consistent with
| expectations.
|
| WebDAV - Uploading by just copying to a folder in explorer was
| far more intuitive than FTP.
|
| Mercurial - Being able to keep old versions without sucking up
| the hard drive was very nice.
|
| GIT/GitHub - Being able to keep all versions, branches and push
| them almost instantly to the web.
|
| Python - The ability to get a lot done in almost no code is very
| powerful. It's too bad that there's no good GUI for it that works
| as well as Delphi.
|
| VMware - Ersatz Capability Based Security - The virtual machine
| gets a set of resources, and nothing more. It'll do until we get
| better Operating Systems. Being able to save a machine as a file
| is a very powerful thing.
|
| ThumbsPlus - A photo organizer from Cerious Software, keeps
| thumbnails in a database, does tagging, etc.
|
| Picassa 3.0 - Killed by google, does local photo management, with
| local facial recognition, helped me tag the more than 10,000
| photos of my daughter. 8)
|
| Hugin - Panorama alignment software - very handy for my
| experiments in virtual focus/synthetic aperture photography, and
| for doing landscapes.
|
| GIMP - Orders of magnitude better than Microsoft Paint
|
| WSL - Windows Subsystem for Linux - Allows me to run Ubuntu and
| Windows programs at the same time. VScode supports running you
| compiled code in Linux, while it lives in Windows... wizardry!
|
| GNU Radio - If you have a fast enough machine, you can build
| almost any type of radio you want in a flowgraph, and it supports
| $25 USB dongles that receive 25-1200 Mhz.
| knowuh wrote:
| Picassa was the best thing miss it so.
| bin_bash wrote:
| Unlocking my iPhone with a mask on in 14.5
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| For those not fully versed into Apple stuff:
|
| Parent comment is referring to the new functionality in iOS
| 14.5 that allows you to use your Apple Watch to unlock your
| iPhone if it concludes you're wearing a mask while trying to
| unlock with Face ID [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/unlock-iphone-wearing-
| mask-...
| bitwize wrote:
| 1) Emacs. When I was growing up, it was per-language IDEs for
| development. There was Visual Basic, Visual C++, Borland Pascal
| and C++, etc. Emacs was an editor that, to a certain extent,
| understood _every_ programming language out there, and could be
| taught new ones using Lisp. It took a long time for me to learn
| Emacs Lisp and understand the true nature of this power, but
| saying 'M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead' for the first time gave me a
| glimpse of it.
|
| 2) Framework. The best way to understand this 1980s "integrated
| software" (as office suites were called in the 80s) is as "Emacs
| for the office". Usually, until Microsoft Office, integrated
| packages offered cut-down, entry-level versions of a word
| processor, spreadsheet, rudimentary database like a cardfile, and
| maybe a telecommunications program. Framework was different. It
| was basically a self-contained pseudo-GUI, in which documents and
| spreadsheets were represented with the unifying metaphor of a
| frame. Each frame, drilling down to individual cells in a
| spreadsheet which themselves counted as frames, was addressable,
| and frames could be nested, allowing for compound documents
| containing word-processed reports, spreadsheets, imported
| database data, and even graphs and charts. And, much like Emacs,
| it was scriptable in a Lisp-like language (though Framework's
| language had a Lotus-inspired @function syntax). Every frame
| could have code associated with it that responds to events. It
| was so powerful, it was marketed as an executive decision making
| tool, not a productivity tool for office drones. It was WAY ahead
| of its time for 80s software.
|
| 3) The Video Toaster. Professional grade video effects in your
| bedroom studio. Perhaps single-handedly turned amateur video from
| "home movies" into actual productions. In an era well before
| YouTube, when video was still analog and equipment was
| prohibitively expensive. With LightWave, it also gave you an
| inexpensive option for the then new and hot technology of 3D CG.
| Required an Amiga because of course it did; what else could
| handle all this?
|
| 4) Tcl/Tk. Still to date, the fastest way to author a GUI, as it
| was in the 90s. I would take entering a few lines of shell-like
| script to lay out a GUI over the (admittedly powerful) form
| designer tools in environments like Delphi any day, just due to
| the rat wrestling involved in the latter, and the fact that Tk's
| layout options do a much better job of placing widgets in various
| window size and configurations than I could manually in the form
| designers back then. And recently I tried to put together an
| Electron app with $HOT_FRAMEWORK_OF_THE_WEEK, and spent several
| hours figuring out how all the pieces fit together. With Tcl/Tk,
| I said 'sudo apt-get install tcl tk' and was prototyping in wish
| immediately after. Tcl may be a crazy-pants stringly-typed
| language from space, but it's still the best thing for throwing
| together GUIs quickly.
| lurker619 wrote:
| Uniswap in 2020. So much easier to buy any altcoin compared to
| making an account, passing KYC and sending crypto first on all
| other exchanges.
| rektide wrote:
| The availability of the "mpris" dbus interface[1] for controlling
| media players. I've used joysticks, & midi mixers, & command line
| tools, & my phone to control whatever media player is playing. I
| can keep an "audioscrobbler" program running that will record
| whatever I'm playing on whatever app I'm using, without needing
| to configure each app.
|
| It's so nice being able to have programs that extend programs.
| Rather than needing to build a big robust program with all the
| features built in, I can have tools that access & enhance
| whatever other program is running. This is such a better model
| for software, so much more creative & extensible, & having this
| modular software environment for media playing has absolutely has
| been a 10x experience over monolithic applications.
|
| [1] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mpris-spec/latest/
| vincent-manis wrote:
| The abolition of punched cards...finally, it was practical to
| indent code!
|
| Visual editing...I remember when all text editors used a command
| language that made you keep a listing of the file next to your
| terminal so you could translate your markup into editor commands.
| (And, yes, I still know my way around ed.)
|
| SCCS/CVS/RCS: as wonderful as git/hg/fossil and others are, any
| source control system is better than none.
|
| Tree-structured file directories, so you could separate files of
| different projects into different directories.
|
| Yes, I HAVE been around a long time!
| arpyzo wrote:
| Infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation). I
| can easily manage 10x the infrastructure once this is in place.
| [deleted]
| poniko wrote:
| Not a single mention of Spotify, the first version was magic,
| click a song and there were no lag, started to play instant ..
| idlewords wrote:
| Google Maps when it first came out fits this description, for
| those who remember MapQuest and the Before Times.
|
| I would also mention flight tracking and package tracking, which
| felt like sci-fi the first time you used them.
| drwicked wrote:
| Clipboard History a la CopyClip for Mac
|
| I'm honestly surprised it's not more widely adopted, the ability
| to have a shortcut key to access the last X things I've copied to
| the clipboard has made a huge difference in my dev work.
| tfehring wrote:
| The R packages plyr/reshape2 and subsequently dplyr/tidyr. Data
| manipulation in base R can be pretty painful (awk arguably even
| more so, and Pandas didn't exist yet), and going from that to an
| environment that's syntactically the nicest option available
| today for complicated manipulations of tabular data was a game
| changer. I know it's become fashionable to hate on the Tidyverse
| lately, but IMO it's the single biggest reason (though there's
| also a very long list of smaller reasons) that R is still
| relevant in industry.
| froh wrote:
| and ggplot2 for R graphics. just. wow.
| AlexB138 wrote:
| I'll avoid dating myself by keeping it sufficiently vague, but
| Open Source Software. Going from the world of closed source, for-
| profit software to that of FOSS is like night and day. It's more
| like a 100x improvement. Today's open-source world is quite
| different, but I'll still take it hands-down.
| anderspitman wrote:
| I find it interesting how big companies have adapted to use OSS
| to their advantage, leading to the popularity of JS libraries
| like React and complicated infrastructure systems like
| kubernetes.
|
| They've managed to completely move the goalposts for what the
| baseline needs of a computer program are.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Python (coming from the C/C++ world), amazing productivity gains
| for basic stuff. Sure, there was Perl, Awk, etc, but I didn't
| learn those
|
| Zsh/Oh-my-Zsh (from Bash)
|
| Virtualization. Making it practical to run 2 or 3 different OSs
| on the same machine has saved me countless hours. Docker is good
| but it's a smaller step
| exdsq wrote:
| Staying on topic with HN today I have to say Docker. Getting
| running dev builds through Docker has definitely saved me a '10x'
| metric of time.
| sabas123 wrote:
| sci-hub
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| Not sure if this is the kind of thing you had in mind, but...
|
| `clang-format` saves a non-trivial chunk of time during code
| reviews, eliding a very banal topic.
| red_hare wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's a 10x improvement, but formatters and
| linters have definitely cut my time writing code by 50% in
| stupid bugs and time wasted moving parenthesis.
|
| And enforcing those formatters and linters cuts the time I
| spend reviewing other people's code by at least 50% because I
| know those issues have been dealt with.
| anthonyskipper wrote:
| Gitlab - Having 12 products in the SDLC space rolled into a
| single product was a life changing productivity benefit.
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here. Thanks for this comment! I just shared
| on our team Slack.
| imagine99 wrote:
| I was frankly shocked at some of the things mentioned here.
| Instagram? Wix.com? Uber? Discord? Seriously?
|
| BUT that got me thinking: Could it be that a large portion of the
| 10x improvement could be in marketing, i.e. you'll have to be
| able to market your product as "10 times as good", regardless of
| whether or not it actually is?
|
| AND secondly, could it be that many if not most products that are
| marketed as 10x as good are also - at the same time - 10x worse?
|
| Just picking random examples from the thread:
|
| - Gmail: Definitely 5-10 times better than Outlook Express or
| Horde. But also at least 10x worse when it comes to support,
| privacy, flexibility, agency in regard to your own data and
| server configuration and many other areas.
|
| - Siri/Alexa: Speech recognition and what you can do with it is
| easily 10x better than what existed before. However, again at
| least 10x worse in terms of what you can control about the
| underlying technology and hardware and in terms of (controlling)
| what happens with the recordings of your voice. Also, if you want
| to go so far (someone mentioned dictation, more generally) you
| could also include lost jobs (e.g. secretarial jobs/assistants).
| Not convinced so much myself by this argument though.
|
| - AWS Workspace: That might be somewhat more cost-effective and
| easier to set-up than a local VDI infrastructure. But in many
| ways it is, or can be, 10x or infinitely worse than having your
| own server.
|
| - Wix.com: 10x easier to use than Notepad++ for web development
| (if you don't know what you're doing) but arguably at least 10x
| worse for good websites, web developers and designers, people
| locked into subscription payments, limits on flexibility etc.
|
| Other "great innovators", like Reddit (severely optimised towards
| monetisation, data extraction and advertising over the last
| years), Uber (questionable employment practices and corporate
| culture), even Google making memorisation unnecessary
| (everything's just a click away... but what happens if the
| internet is down?) and Amazon ("killing local businesses since
| 1994" ;-)) also could be argued to come with severe downsides.
|
| Personally, I would greatly appreciate much more widespread 2x
| innovation vs. chasing the rare unicorn 10x innovators.
|
| 70 MBit/s internet would be much nicer than the 35 I can get
| right now. I don't need (nor would be willing to pay for) 350,
| let alone if the 350 are only available in large cities. If Gmail
| was just one tenth as innovative in parsing my mails for data
| nuggets and instead cared ten times more about my privacy, I
| would be more than okay with that.
|
| Personally, real 10x innovations without large apparent downsides
| (although there might be some) for me right now are Wikipedia and
| Starlink. I also want to mention Delphi, whose approach to
| programming and UI design was at some point definitely a 10x
| innovation over existing solutions at the time (in many ways it
| still can be 2x as good even today, but unfortunately, they've
| also increased the price 10x and stopped caring for their users).
|
| On a grander scale, a well-working and ethical interplanetary
| species/society might also be a 10x improvement over being
| confined to Earth only. But that might very well turn out to be
| incorrect.
|
| As always, if you disagree, please DON'T downvote, instead reply
| and tell me why and how you Think Different(tm). I post here
| because I'm curious to discuss, not just to share and read
| isolated opinions.
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| You have a point. A product can be 10x better only in one or
| two aspects. And there will be downsides in other dimensions.
|
| But usually that suffices because the other dimensions don't
| really matter or have ceased to matter (like MS Word's advanced
| features).
| issa wrote:
| I was going to post something similar. There has been some
| amazing technology in the past 30 years, but the argument can
| be made that we are focused on the wrong things. I love that
| anyone can carry all the world's knowledge in their pocket, but
| we have also increased the hours people spend working so much
| that we no longer have TIME to take out an encyclopedia and
| look something up the old fashioned way.
| bombcar wrote:
| Often the 10x improvement is just an [?]x - because you're
| overcoming the barrier for someone to try it. The key is
| getting them to try it.
|
| Often "worse" solutions win in the apparent 10x improvement
| because they're the one to finally get people to try it out.
|
| Uber would have been as useful to me in the beginning if
| literally all it did was hail a cab for me. The "ridesharing"
| part was pointless (for me).
| showerst wrote:
| 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 up/down
| in a minute with root access was really great, in an era where a
| server that wasn't just a junk shared host often required months
| of commitment and started at 100 bucks a month.
|
| 4. Google Maps -- Just head and shoulders above mapquest.
| mchusma wrote:
| +1 for Uber/Lyft. I remember being SO excited for them to come
| to my area, as they are so much better than taxis.
| aerovistae wrote:
| 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?
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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.
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| 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/
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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 insurance is $50 a month or less.
|
| Fuel is 10 cents per mile if you assume $3 per gallon and
| 30 miles per gallon, so $1,500 per year in fuel for 15,000
| miles.
|
| $1,500+$50*12+$2k+$333 = $5k per year on the high end.
|
| Excluding insurance and fuel costs, you can push a reliable
| Toyota/Honda's costs down to 5 cents per mile or less.
| jaxn wrote:
| Add parking in a major city (the places Uber/Lyft are a
| viable alternative).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, parking is the big expense that makes Uber/Lyft
| worth it.
| salted-fry wrote:
| I do use Lyft to get to work most days (or did, in the Before
| Times). I just checked a few hopefully-representative months
| (June/July/August 2019) and it looks like I was spending
| about $400/month. Google tells me that the average TCO of a
| car is about $700/month, so this would seem like a net win.
| That average might not be representative of my needs though -
| it's likely being dragged up by people driving around giant
| SUVs and such, so take this comparison with a grain of salt.
| x0x0 wrote:
| in sf, pre uber, taxis just didn't come. They were extremely
| unreliable -- call, and they'd come if they felt like it.
| maybe. and on their own schedule. Also, they were run by
| utter assholes who knew you had 3-4 companies to choose from,
| and they all sucked.
|
| uber and lyft later turned it into a service that was highly
| reliable (came, or at least told you if they weren't coming).
| It seriously enabled the use of taxis as a reliable part of a
| transportation solution, or eg to cover the 1-2 days a week
| you needed a car without having to own a car.
| aerovistae wrote:
| Really interesting! Didn't know. In the northeast taxis are
| generally reliable, although I've never used them with the
| regularity of someone who uses them to get to work.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| Taxis would be at least twice as expensive, for a service
| that couldn't rate their drivers and customers and sometimes
| you'd have to wait in a queue to have your call taken so you
| could get picked up.
|
| Currently there's only one disadvantage to ride-sharing apps,
| you can't wave down a car if you see one. You have to open
| the app first to request a ride, and that car might have
| driven away by then.
| kureikain wrote:
| https://www.stitchdata.com/
|
| A happy user. It helps you connect data from multiple places and
| write to a single source. Anyone know a smiliar open source
| project like that?
| rudyfink wrote:
| Here are a few that I did not see listed by others:
|
| 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation (e.g., with
| USB devices (also USB device categories, etc.)). Instead of
| trying to find a driver, things just worked.
|
| 2. Automatic updates. Keeping everything updated, largely, fell
| into the background.
|
| 3. Graphical integrated development environments (IDEs) for
| software development. I realize editors can be contentious, but
| tab completion of variable names, automatic identification of
| methods within scope, syntax highlighting, easily dropping
| breakpoints, etc. are, in my experience, wonderful improvements
| on productivity.
|
| 4. What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) text / image editors.
| Thankfully, I did not spend much time in the prior era, but it
| was, at times, maddening to get something to format correctly.
|
| 5. Ad blockers / reader modes. Again, I know these can be
| contentious, but, for me, these reformatting services are
| sometimes the only way to make some websites practically
| readable.
|
| I strongly second:
|
| -The rise of memory-managed languages (e.g., JAVA, C#, etc) with
| pretty robust default library sets, especially for string
| manipulation, graphics, and network operations.
|
| -Moving map software, especially for mobile GPS mapping.
|
| -Spreadsheet software.
|
| -Being able to easily search for answers to fairly technical
| programming problems, compiler errors, etc. along with better
| access to online documentation.
| bombcar wrote:
| >1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation (e.g.,
| with USB devices (also USB device categories, etc.)). Instead
| of trying to find a driver, things just worked.
|
| I remember well when installing Windows went from "make sure
| you have all the driver CDs before you start" to "just make
| sure you have the network card driver and the disk driver (if
| needed)" and then it went to "as long as you can connect to the
| internet Windows Update will get everything".
|
| Before you had to get on the internet and find all the driver
| files yourself. The last hold out was graphics card drivers
| IIRC.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| In my experience, you'll still want to go to the NVIDIA/AMD
| website to download the latest drivers. What you get from
| Windows Update is likely 6+ months out of date.
| bradstewart wrote:
| True, but you at least have a functioning display out of
| the box, which lets you get to that website.
| xenocratus wrote:
| > 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation
|
| Fun story. Had Windows 7 installed on an old HDD. Decided to
| build myself a new PC, so I got all the parts (completely
| different setup than what the HDD had been in), put them all
| together, connected the HDD, and powered it on to see what
| would happen. I was shocked to see that Windows booted just
| fine with the new setup, like nothing had changed...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Yeah, Windows got a lot better at handling motherboard swaps.
|
| I remember trying to do a PC overhaul with Windows 2000. I
| swapped out the motherboard, RAM, and CPU, and Windows would
| fail to boot, crashing with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE
| error. IIRC, I managed to recover without wiping the drive
| and doing a clean install by putting back in the old
| mobo/RAM/CPU, booting up, and swapping the IDE driver from a
| motherboard-specific driver to a generic IDE driver (Which
| comes at a signifcant performance penalty because I lost UDMA
| support), then swapping back to the new mobo. It booted fine
| after that, and I was able to install the proper motherboard
| drivers to get UDMA support on my IDE drive.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yep, and you could clone it with xcopy.
| zyemuzu wrote:
| It's a wonderful feature - I've now been through 3 full
| system swaps with the same OS. The only exception is software
| that ties it's license to a kind of hardware identifier. Even
| then it's a very minor inconvenience compared with the Win
| 98/XP years. I have a few teenage memories of pulling all
| nighters just to reinstall my OS and programs.
| apozem wrote:
| I'm at the point now where I won't code without an IDE.
| Automatic imports, code completion, running a linter on save,
| nice git diff displays, finding all usages of a function - this
| stuff makes my life so much easier.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| bradford wrote:
| Reading your comment (and replies to) is a bit interesting
| because I almost never see an admission that Linux is anything
| but gods gift to humanity. (yes, I exaggerate, bot not too
| much). It's nice to see more reflection and honesty about
| various annoyances that came with it.
|
| I remember being told (circa 2005) that my PC issues would be
| resolved if I just switched from Windows to Linux.
|
| I tried Linux a few times back then, and it never stuck. I
| would hit some small issue that I couldn't solve and eventually
| I'd give up and go back to Window (which certainly had its own
| problems, but I wasn't under any illusion that it was a
| flawless)
|
| I use Linux more now (mostly as part of WSL) and I really enjoy
| it when I get to use it.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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
| fragile, sensitive pets. Now, they're machines that work. It's
| remarkable how far its come.
|
| (and I know this is a fanboy statement forever, but) I
| genuinely do not know what is holding linux back from massive
| adoption anymore.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Microsoft Office and most desktop games, basically.
|
| Linux is a little too command-line happy, sure, but not being
| able to run Excel or World of Warcraft is a much bigger deal-
| breaker for most people.
| dopeboy wrote:
| You're giving me flashbacks to when I had to compile my own
| kernel for ubuntu on a macbook.
|
| All to get suspend working.
| jenkstom wrote:
| Delphi.
| biryani_chicken wrote:
| Bash was an eye opener after having to deal with CMD for years.
| callesgg wrote:
| Makes one wonder how someone was able to create a shell that is
| as shity as CMD is.
|
| It is remarkable how bad it is.
| ycom13__ wrote:
| These came to mind
|
| On Demand tv
|
| DVR
|
| SSDs versus regular hard drives
|
| windowing functions in databases
|
| MP3s vs CDs or minidisks. (Suddenly I could hold 1000 songs in my
| pocket)
|
| Columnar databases (Sybase IQ, SQL Server, Redshift)
|
| 20 tools on 1 device in your pocket.. replaced flashlight,
| magnifying glass, calculator, maps, notepad etc etc
|
| Multicore CPUs.. Oh I can do 2 or more things while stuff is
| compiling in the back ground.. and of course async
|
| Ajax.. no more refreshing the whole page
|
| Automated tests and builds..
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| visarga wrote:
| GPT-3, for the first time you need to read a few minutes to know
| fake from real. I used to play with LSTM language models and they
| barely made sense 10 words at a time. The difference is a huge
| leap. My wish list for GPT-4 is: multimodal - to learn text,
| image, video and other modalities. Multitask - cultivate as many
| of its skills as possible, maybe it learns to combine skills in
| new ways. Longer sequence and additional memory, maybe even
| ability to use search/retrieval for augmentation. And last -
| recursive calls - ability to call itself in a loop and solve sub-
| problems. I hope in the future a pre-trained GPT-n variant will
| be a standard chip on the motherboard.
| naveensky wrote:
| Not software but transition from Floppy Drive to USB was perhaps
| more than 10X. I remember the first time I used USB, I was amazed
| at the capacity of 128MB, vs 1.4MB, the speed of transfer and
| ease of carrying around.
| 0x008 wrote:
| - Internet
|
| - fibre
|
| - email
|
| - Smartphones
|
| - gpus
|
| - starlink will be one
|
| More personal:
|
| - language servers/linters
|
| - Package Management
|
| - a mouse
|
| - dictation
| chevill wrote:
| Great list. I agree with pretty much all of them but I'd also
| add the following to my list:
|
| - Multi-Core CPUs which enabled switching between applications
| pretty much instantly.
|
| - Solid State Storage
| FirstLvR wrote:
| Solid State was the last great change to our personnel
| hardware, computers went from meh to awesome in a flash
| willmacdonald wrote:
| Launchbar for Mac from obdev.at. Makes using a mac so much
| quicker and simpler.
| rekoros wrote:
| Erlang
| ramadis wrote:
| mtailor and their fancy body measurement algorithm.
| rajacombinator wrote:
| Python. The productivity and elegance of it are way more than
| 10x.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Unity for indie/mobile game development. Especially around 8
| years ago (Unity 4.x era) when it really took off.
|
| It completely redefined what was possible for a solo developer or
| small team to create. Easy to learn, yet very flexible for
| experienced users. And moving from C++ to C# was a real game
| changer.
| abraxas wrote:
| Prisma ORM. It's an ORM done right and makes storing in an RDBMS
| fun and convenient
| tootie wrote:
| Surprised no one has mentioned AWS yet. Anyone who remembers
| procuring, racking and imaging physical servers knows how utterly
| incredible it is create a cloud VM. And probably a good 20X
| improvement to use a value add cloud service like S3 or Netlify.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| AWS? Peuh. Hetzner made it possible to host websites with many
| millions of pageviews per month without robbing a bank.
| atwebb wrote:
| A bit, but hosting providers were around long before AWS. You
| could do multi-tenant web / database deployments in the 90s.
| jasode wrote:
| _> , but hosting providers were around long before AWS._
|
| Yes but AWS exposed a _programmable web api_ to provision
| servers and disk. You download an SDK and get a AWS developer
| key and then could create S3 buckets for storage and EC2
| instances.
|
| Yes, hosting datacenters like Rackspace in 2003 existed but
| you had to _talk to a human_ or send an email to provision
| compute resources. There wasn 't a "Rackspace web SDK".
|
| The Amazon AWS that made "cloud" more acceptable was such a
| paradigm shift that both Google and Microsoft didn't have a
| competitive offerings of GCP & Azure for more than a year.
| AWS has kept its lead from the very beginning.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Their software defined networking & virtualization was a
| big deal too. Many of the primitives of on-prem or "LAN"
| networking were translated into the cloud.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| thats not 100% true. it wasnt SDK driven but it was console
| driven. no need to talk to people back in the days of the
| hosting market.
| tootie wrote:
| And the console. They set the standard for self-service.
| It's the most sophisticated enterprise software platform in
| the world and you can bootstrap without talking to a
| salesperson. That was pretty revolutionary.
| cardanome wrote:
| As someone working as a web developer for a smaller company, I
| don't get the use case for AWS. Super confusing naming of their
| services and nontransparent pricing.
|
| For the vast majority of people some 5 Dollar hosting is more
| than they need. Just copy your files to the server. Does not
| get simpler.
|
| And if you need more, it is super easy to set up a dedicated
| server these days anyway.
| nlh wrote:
| +1000 to this. At my first startup after college (~2000-2002),
| I remember clearly our first "deployment" for a paid customer
| -- we had to order $thousands in Sun SPARC machines, rent a
| rack at a local data center, hire someone to set it all up,
| etc. etc. etc.
|
| I don't think people appreciate what an absolute miracle the
| various cloud providers are. I'd say it was 100x - 1000x
| improvement, not just 10x.
| naveensky wrote:
| I guess torrent clients were pretty useful to share large files
| :P
| jasode wrote:
| + using Google for search in 2000 and being _amazed_ at how much
| better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search.
|
| + Google Maps in 2004 and _dragging_ the map interactively
| around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest 's page reload
| and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm
| shift that let me _explore_ a geography better than any book
| atlas. I gave away all my atlases
|
| + MS Window Media Player's ability to _cleanly_ accelerate
| playback to 2x,3x,4x of audiobooks and tutorial videos for slow
| speakers. MS Windows 7 had this long before Youtube 's player had
| a 2x playback option.
|
| + SQLite library : more than 10x improvement since I came from
| old school of writing custom formats for persisting data. No more
| dumping memory structs to disk or writing b-trees in C Language
| from scratch.
|
| + C++ STL in late 1990s. Instantly reduced need to write custom
| data structures like linked-lists or in-house string libraries
| for common tasks
|
| + VMware in 2000s : more than 10x productivity enhancement
| because I can play with malware in a virtual software sandbox
| instead of tediously re-imaging harddrives of air-gapped real
| physical machines
|
| + Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since misbehaving
| websites crashing don't bring down all the other tabs in my
| browsing session like Firefox/Opera.
|
| I probably have more than a hundred examples. Some software tech
| 10x improvements are more diffused. Reddit+HN websites are a much
| better use of my time than USENET newsgroups. Youtube with
| recordings of tech conference presentations I can watch at 2x+ is
| a better used of my time than physically traveling to the site.
| aynsof wrote:
| > + Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since
| misbehaving websites crashing don't bring down all the other
| tabs in my browsing session like Firefox/Opera.
|
| Adding to this: just browser tabs themselves were a 10x
| improvement for me. I had actually forgotten what the world was
| like before tabs - a whole lot of unsortable windows, and a lot
| of clicks of the back button.
|
| It was a godsend to be able to open new links in a tab, and to
| be able to see those tabs organised neatly in front of you.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| This was the entrypoint to Firefox for millions of people.
|
| Unlike today, back then Firefox had a clearly expressive
| value proposition: Use this! It has tabs! It will change how
| you browse the web!
|
| Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy
| stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in
| their best interest.
| namrog84 wrote:
| I believe opera had tabs for a while before Firefox. It was
| one of the main reasons I think I used opera for a good
| long while.
| sangnoir wrote:
| You are correct - Opera had tabs way before Firefox, and
| Opera had a full mail client as well without feeling
| bloated or slow.
| core-questions wrote:
| I strongly believe that if Opera had had a cool name, it
| would have been a real contender. People don't like
| operas, they're boring and stodgy.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Opera was a paid option. It was doomed from the start.
| safetytrick wrote:
| To me, the value proposition is still tabs. I have hundreds
| open at a time. Once or twice a month I will cleanup
| hundreds of windows and tabs. I've created habits to open
| up most everything in new tabs and new "projects" in new
| windows.
|
| I think I do this as a self-remedy for my ADHD, I am likely
| to allow an interruption to disrupt me but I do need to
| close the loop on whatever I was working on before an
| interruption. A window or set of open tabs is enough of a
| reminder to help me close the loop.
| wheybags wrote:
| I use a vertical tab extension, and with that I regularly
| get to > 1k tabs.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy
| privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even
| if it's in their best interest.
|
| They'll still use Chrome or Edge/IE, but will use NordVPN
| or ExpressVPN after seeing their favorite YouTuber claim
| that the VPN protects their data and gives them privacy...
|
| ...while still not using an ad blocker, which makes the VPN
| almost entirely worthless from a privacy perspective. At
| most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're doing.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| That's not totally fair. They also hide your IP from
| sites you access. So if somebody sent me a link to an IP
| logger and I clicked it, they would not know what city or
| state I actually live in, for example.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > At most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're
| doing.
|
| In fairness, that _is_ a nontrivial privacy win for a
| decent number of people.
| xeromal wrote:
| I remember using Avant browser to have tabs back in the day
| before I discovered FF. I think it was just an IE wrapper
| davio wrote:
| Google Maps was amazing. Back when I showed it to my dad for
| the first time, he expected it to be a live satellite view of
| his house.
| [deleted]
| csteubs wrote:
| I'm working on a startup trying to make that happen now.
| There's an immense amount of "free energy" in the form of
| 120k+ flights around the world every day with that # expected
| to increase in the future with air taxis, delivery drones,
| etc. Idea is to hitch a ride on these platforms and
| crowdsource (cloudsource?) as much aerial image data as
| possible to create a map that updates every few minutes.
| Planet Labs and Maxar are great and satellites aren't going
| anywhere, but we see a pretty big unfilled opportunity in the
| remote sensing market.
|
| Apologies for the shameless plug--we're on IG @notasatellite
| if you're interested in seeing some examples :^)
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Interesting concept, but my gut says it could lead to some
| malicious use cases.
| csteubs wrote:
| 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 cautiously.
| vram22 wrote:
| > using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much
| better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search.
|
| Aaahhh. The year Google launched, a friend and I were sitting
| next to each other, at our PCs. Both of us were techie types
| and into innovative stuff, although working in a software
| services bigco at the time.
|
| I casually said to him: "I came across this new search engine a
| few days ago while browsing for interesting stuff. They say
| they are fast(er than others)."
|
| Gave him the URL. He typed it in, ran a search, saw the results
| and the time, like 0.0x seconds or so. And muttered "That's
| fast".
|
| It was Google.
| akavel wrote:
| I still distinctly remember the moment of shock with the
| minimalism of their homepage at the time; compared to
| AltaVista jam-packed with ads and other stuff to the brim,
| seeing just the logo and the editbox on a plain white page
| made me startle and pause with some _" Whaaat's going on???"_
| and _" This can't be true"_ feelings.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Heck, GMaps is slow and clunky for me, but it's _still_ 10x
| better than anything else I 've ever used. I'm pretty sure
| it'll be the last GOOG service I manage to get myself off. Is
| there even a single OSM-based alternative that offers
| competitive POI search?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Sadly, OpenStreetMap is weakest in POI coverage.
|
| In typical area Google has simply much better data - and that
| is before interface optimised for selling ads about POIs and
| therefore displaying POIs quite well.
|
| I map a lot in OSM, and POIs in my city are still light years
| behind Gmaps. And even with StreetComplete (an Android app
| that I recommend) that made adding and resurveying opening
| hours data easier, this info is often missing/outdated :/
| datavirtue wrote:
| Using google search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better
| the search results were than in 2021
| narrator wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.)
| jaxn wrote:
| And Matt's Script Archive was mid-90s.
| wnissen wrote:
| I know what you're saying but the discoverability of such
| tools, especially on DOS, was poor. Everyone I knew was
| buying compilers or, ahem, downloading them from other than
| authorized sources. It was unreal when I was able to buy a
| RedHat CD-ROM for a few bucks (from Tucows?) and get access
| to a full tool suite. You couldn't get huge software
| packages over 56K modems from BBSes.
| murph-almighty wrote:
| I cannot imagine a period of time where the STL didn't exist,
| which perhaps outs me as a younger dev
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I know of the STL but don't know a damn thing about how to
| use it. They didn't teach STL at all in my university, even
| in the C/C++ classes.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| There was arguably a worse period than non-existence, which
| was when it existed but didn't work very well.
| schappim wrote:
| 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)
| legulere wrote:
| Probably one underestimates productivity increases a lot. You
| really only see how much something gives you when you have to go
| back to the old way.
|
| For instance large parts of the company where I am currently
| working still does not have short-lived feature branches. CI
| means after checking into the development branch used by everyone
| else you have to wait minutes up to hours to see if your changes
| broke something. Only seeing the pain and wasted time regularly
| lets you realize how much easier you have it now.
| baptlac wrote:
| Genius Scan. I never used a scanner ever again.
| nobozo wrote:
| This was a while ago, but Borland's Turbo languages were
| revolutionary.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| 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.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| Heroku
|
| - Git push to deploy
|
| - Scaling dynos
|
| - Turning add-ons on/off
|
| - Managed PG (backups, rollback, copies)
|
| I can't imagine how much time I would have had to invest in
| building my first few apps without Heroku. Had a similar
| experience with Google AppEngine in ~2009; I barely knew how to
| code and I was able to charge a customer for the first time ever
| for a working service.
| sneak wrote:
| PaaS is still the best model, IMO, and the one I still use
| today for all of my businesses and personal projects.
|
| IaaS is too much sysadmin overhead, serverless can't be easily
| selfhosted.
| mam2 wrote:
| CMA-ES for black box optimization. Insane.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Docker containers (and the Dockerfile).
|
| Docker has almost completely eliminated the need for OS-level
| configuration management. That's an entire class of software that
| is now virtually obsolete. Developers don't understand this, but
| Ops people got back like 20-50% of our time, and we can now do
| Immutable Infrastructure with apps. (Though it appears we traded
| Puppet for Terraform.... F*#&*@^&^!!!)
|
| Creating immutable images with stock packaging tools and allowing
| you to build on top of them was the core of the revolution. But
| the other critical part was the Dockerfile. At first it seems
| almost stupidly simple. But actually, its genius is in its lack
| of freedom or functionality. It is incredibly impressive that it
| hasn't been overwhelmed by logic statements, templating, nested
| frankenstructures, etc. It's also wonderful that it's constructed
| for humans, not machines. Probably the best configuration format
| I've ever seen.
|
| It's definitely not perfect, and there's still a lot of
| improvement needed. But we're never going back to _not_ using
| containers. (The only alternative for Immutable IaC at the OS-
| level are entire VM images built by Packer and a shell script,
| and it 's just not the same)
| teekert wrote:
| Docker-compose: Over the past years I've gone from running some
| things I really wanted (Samba, Nginx with a website or 2 and
| maybe Drupal) to just about anything (NextCloud [2 installs for 2
| families], Home Assistant, Bitwarden_rs, Minecraft servers, Unify
| Controller, Samba, WireGuard ...) And trying something new is
| soooo easy with Traefik taking care of name based routing and
| certs. And it feels good that my entire personal infrastructure
| can be backed up by copying a single Yaml file and a single
| folder (with many subfolders of course).
| mwambua wrote:
| Google Photos. Easy image backup, arranged chronologically, with
| the ability to arrange stuff into albums. I haven't found
| anything quite like it since they killed off Picasa... and it has
| the added bonus of working across my operating systems.
|
| Google being Google... I still backup my photos elsewhere, but
| I'm more than happy to keep paying for the convenience that it
| offers. It's amazing that I can pull up photos from 10 years ago
| on my phone on a whim.
| francisofascii wrote:
| wireless headphones
| diegof79 wrote:
| * Any Smalltalk IDE (VW, Vast): it's hard at the beginning, but
| once that you get used to evaluate expressions everywhere it's
| amazing. I don't use St since a long time, but I haven't seen
| that dev UX in any other editor or IDE.
|
| * MS Word for Windows: today we are used to the spellchecking as
| you type, but IIRC Word was the first one to have that feature.
|
| * VMWare.. being able to run a Windows VM from Linux in the 2000
| was amazing. It also changed the QA processes for desktop apps.
|
| * GMail... 1GB email for free, it was way beyond of any other web
| email at the time (that and also good IMAP support, and Pop3 with
| TLS, none of the competitors had that when it launched)
|
| * Photoshop... if you used any image editor, PS was 10x better.
| revel wrote:
| The boring answer is that most "sexy" features don't make that
| much of a difference. However, a lot of spreadsheet or manually
| processed data being automated is well over 10x improvement for a
| customer. Headline features like AI don't make nearly as much of
| a difference as not having to perform repetitive manual labor.
|
| How much better is it to run a script to extract image file names
| out of a big csv file and convert them into a different format in
| a different directory if you were doing that by hand before? 10x?
| 100x? more?
| Joeboy wrote:
| Ripgrep.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| California DMV services going online are 100x
| shireboy wrote:
| The most recent one I've experienced is ElasticSearch + Kibana +
| FileBeat/MetricBeat. I've gone from munging through log files in
| a text editor or maybe LogParser to being able to quickly
| visualize issues in charts and dashboards, but then zoom into
| log-level details in seconds. It may not be fair to call notepad
| the "second best option", but for open source log (and more)
| analysis, Elastic+Kibana definitely stands out among competition.
| bps4484 wrote:
| 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.
| spc476 wrote:
| libtls. I wish it this API was more popular than it is, as it
| makes using TLS _way_ easier. https://github.com/spc476/libtls-
| examples/blob/master/get1.c
| mpweiher wrote:
| Storage combinators [1] Which are my own, so shameless plug, I
| guess. When I wrote the paper, I asked colleagues if they could
| say something about the productivity increase. They wrote back
| that it was a 2x improvement, which I put in the paper. When I
| bumped into them at a meet-up, they confided it was actually more
| like 10x, but they didn't say that because they felt it sounded
| unrealistic.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| [1] http://objective.st/Publications/
| zz865 wrote:
| When I started as a developer the internet wasn't there. If you
| wanted a new library or tool you had to go to a shop and buy the
| floppy disks (or mailorder). If you wanted docs you used the man
| pages or had to buy the book, probably the bookstore would order
| it for you. Its hard to imagine now.
| justwalt wrote:
| I'm a millennial, and that is hard to imagine. Though, some of
| my favorite coding exercises have been writing something for
| which there already exists a library, so I'd probably have
| learned a lot more of nitty gritty details if I had grown up in
| that kind of environment.
| zz865 wrote:
| It was liberating as there wasn't this continual firehose of
| new applications, tools and ideas. There weren't as many
| developers around and you also didn't know how good many
| other teams were. You just had your little world of getting
| your application to work.
| trebor wrote:
| PHP Inspections (EA Extended)[1] by Vladimir Reznichenko, a PHP
| language static analysis plugin for PHPStorm / JetBrains. I've
| coded in PHP for many years now, but there are many helpful
| reminders and checks that come standard with it. Some of the
| small performance quirks are game changers in long running
| processes, or intensive methods.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/kalessil/phpinspectionsea
| thesumofall wrote:
| iOS pausing music when unplugging headphones. Totally obvious
| nowadays, but a revolution to me when I experienced it the first
| time (coming from Nokia). It was one key experience that shifted
| my perception of my phone as something that needed to be
| "managed" to do what I wanted to something that supports me
| throughout the day
| jbpnoy6fifty wrote:
| 1) Pandas for data analysis and manipulation 2) BitTorrent (P2P
| file distribution technology). It is the best and fastest way to
| distribute files, however, it's main problem is piracy 3) Self
| updating software (Google chome was an early example) 4) AJAX -
| The web wouldn't have been what it is today without it 5) VIM 6)
| Package management software - Brew / apt-get / yum 7) software
| package management - pip / npm / maven
| vitorbaptistaa wrote:
| dbt [1] is a tool that is deceptively simple, but kind of created
| a new job role: analytics engineer. It allow you to define tables
| using SQL plus Jinja2, so you can add loops and variables to
| create your SQL code. It might sound complicated, but it's a
| pleasure to work with.
|
| This improvement was only possible because of other improvements
| in cloud databases and reductions in storage costs, which allowed
| us to go from ETL, where we transform the data outside of the
| database, to ELT, where we load the raw data in the DB and
| transform it using SQL.
|
| All these improvements taken together allows a single person to
| do a job that required a small team not many years ago.
|
| [1] https://www.getdbt.com/
| apples_oranges wrote:
| For me the switch to Mac many years ago was like that. It was
| like 100 mini annoyances suddenly disappeared from my life. True
| or not, I believe that's how it felt.
| revskill wrote:
| Darkmode for the web.
| kleer001 wrote:
| How exactly did that improve your life by 10x ?
| revskill wrote:
| My customers need it :) So my customers' satisfation improved
| by 10x
| fnord77 wrote:
| Java 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.
| blunte wrote:
| And to think, Java was a tough sell to companies at one time. I
| had to sneak it in (same way we snuck Linux in) by building
| some invisible infrastructure thing with it, having it run
| without fail for months, and then saying, "Oh hey, did you know
| thing X is actually Java/Linux?"
| zz865 wrote:
| One other thing about Java is it had great libraries. C++
| didn't have things like collections so you couldn't write a
| library that used a 3rd party linked list because your user
| might not have a roguewave license etc. STL became popular soon
| after Java which helped.
| bluedino wrote:
| The same, except today, Python vs C/C++
|
| Novice C programmers would get stumped on opening a file,
| reading and parsing the data.
|
| Now you have: with open('foo') as reader:
| # blah blah
| aphextron wrote:
| +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.
| bhaak wrote:
| Java saved me from having a C++ career. And that was the 90s
| C++, not the C++ of today. I dodged a bullet there.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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 10x, by itself, because
| of everything that you don't have to write. The combination
| of that plus garbage collection gave Java quite a kick
| compared to C++.
| thow-01187 wrote:
| +another huge benefit - Jar files and class files made the
| IDEs possible. Studying at the university, moving from
| Visual Studio/C to Eclipse/Java was a wtf-how-is-that-even-
| possible moment.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Not freeing memory, but tracking down memory leaks. We
| rarely even hear that term nowadays, but most large
| commercial programs used to have them.
| loopz wrote:
| Memory leak is a thing on JVM too. Tends to reoccur at
| times.
|
| Java brought call stack dumps, security model and alot of
| standardisation across orgs.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Java had an impact similar to COBOL in the previous
| generation of business apps. I used to call it COBOL for the
| 90s.
|
| If you don't know COBOL, it was a revolution compared to
| programming in Assembler. It's hard to overstate how big an
| improvement it was for productivity.
| cramja wrote:
| I think clipboard managers (like flycut for mac) are under rated.
| I regularly use the last 3-5 clips.
|
| Heck, it'd be great if clipboard history was baked into the OS.
| Tistron wrote:
| It is on windows. I use win+v all the time.
| Veen wrote:
| Pastebot is pretty good too. I use its sequential paste queue
| many times a day.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Check out Alfred.
| abetusk wrote:
| I'm showing my age, but here's an abridged list:
|
| 1. Google Search - before Google came out, it was wading through
| Alta-vista and Yahoo's hand picked pages and ignoring the 50%
| adult content spam, or using a physical 'phone book' of web pages
|
| 2. Google Email - when it game out, the fact that it had
| gigabytes of storage was astounding
|
| 3. Wikipedia - this became one of the first resources for most
| queries that weren't highly specialized and, even, then,
| sometimes Wikipedia would come through
|
| 4. Stack Overflow - hours or days of debugging are reduced to a
| search with an occasional copy/paste
|
| 5. Arduino - suddenly electronics became within reach and was
| reduced, for the most part, to software, all for a fraction of
| the cost microcontrollers and electronics were just a decade
| previously
|
| 6. Amazon, Aliexpress, Ebay - to a certain extent. Each provided
| a trove of sellers with access to items that were previously very
| difficult and expensive to find, sometimes with a 10x difference
| in price or accessibility. They've all kind of normalized out now
| but there was a time when they were more differentiated.
|
| 7. Raspberry Pi - A full linux box with a Ghz processor for
| $20-$50. There was a time when we were talking about the $100
| laptop as the great white whale
|
| 8. Archive.org - one of the few resources that has an astounding
| amount of public domain work that can be searched, sorted and
| downloaded
|
| 9. Github - the amount of free/libre/open source software that
| can be accessed and used is at least an order of magnitude larger
| than it's closest competitor (Gitlab? Sourceforge?). It's not
| just investing in Git's source management model, it's also
| providing a clean interface to search code and present projects
| cleanly
|
| Maybe these are all obvious but you did ask...
|
| Here are some software projects that I think give me a "10x"
| boost or I think have large potential:
|
| * Bootstrap - Before bootstrap, I could barely cobble a website
| together that didn't look like it came out of the 90s
|
| * Clipperlib - When you need to do 2d polygon boolean operations,
| in a programmatic way, Angus Johnson's clipperlib is it
|
| * WebAudio - I'm still playing with this but this provides an
| entry point to music creation that was orders of magnitude more
| painful before. Currently I'm playing with Gibber (gibber.cc)
|
| * Face Recognition - This is now a Python package that you can
| use to find faces in images. This used to be bleeding edge
| technology just a decade ago
|
| * Mozilla's DeepSpeech - though it still has it's problems, for
| someone who has a mind to, they could theoretically make (an
| offline and FOSS) competitor to Google's Dot and Amazon's Alexa
|
| Unix/Linux in general provides many orders of magnitude more
| productivity than any other environment I've worked in (at least
| for me) so I'm not sure it's worth going into all the tools,
| "classic" and recent, that help me build software, analyze data,
| do data wrangling or any of the other myriad of tasks that I do.
| Delphiza wrote:
| Good call on Arduino. The ability to write LED blinky embedded
| software on a microcontroller using a simple IDE and a USB
| cable was definitely 10x from what came before. The barriers to
| entry in terms of knowledge, tools (compilers), and dev boards
| was immense before Arduino.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| came to say Arduino; I cut my teeth on Basic Stamps in school
| but today they still cost over $150 just to get all the
| hardware you need to started. And forget about leaving just
| the brains in a home monitoring gadget or clock project, they
| cost over $50 each!
|
| Arduino MCUs can literally be removed from the developer
| board and function stand-alone with a few cents of external
| hardware, and the chip itself can be replaced with a blank
| for a few dollars.
| dopeboy wrote:
| You mean getting a oscillator, caps, breadboard, MCU, avr-
| gcc, and a JTAG interface was too much work to get a LED to
| blink? :)
|
| Arduino changed the game, wish I had it in college. Honorable
| mention to Microchip's PIC line - they had a arduino like kit
| that made a lot of those things easier too.
| ator wrote:
| git, alarumist (trading alerts)
| Thristle wrote:
| So many good comments
|
| for me its a lot of what others said +
|
| - Python as the default for scripting/automation: instead of
| using bash/batch/autohotkey/<programmingLanguage> if you need to
| use some popular API it saved you time with it's huge number of
| packages. so many good built ins. it's dynamic enough to be
| comfortable but not insane like JS. So good.
| MH15 wrote:
| I agree with this but Python is far more dynamic than JS.
| teddyh wrote:
| It's just as dynamic, but its typing is stronger.
| vram22 wrote:
| SQL itself was huge compared to ISAM-type programming for data
| apps. Though I suppose it still has its place. Something like the
| difference between how and what, or procedural vs. declarative.
|
| Edit: to make it more clear:
|
| >how and what
|
| Meaning, do how I tell you, vs. do what I tell you.
| intrasight wrote:
| Banking apps(avoid going to bank to deposit check, or going to
| post office to pay bills) Podcasts (alternative is reading a
| blog) Airbnb (alternative is hotel or possibly a BnB)
| pjc50 wrote:
| My first use of proper capacitative touch screen on the iPad. It
| was an absolutely transformative device compared to all the
| insensitive resistive ones that you had to jab at. Multi-touch
| for zoom and auto-rotate weere also innovations that felt like
| magic at the time.
| e12e wrote:
| Maybe the original AJAX in internet explorer? Combined with
| Javascript it moved the web from being RESTful hypertext
| applications to enabling moveable code - killing Java applets,
| Ole/com plug-ins (including flash).
|
| I'm a bit sad that tls/http2 basically put the final nail in the
| coffin, essentially killing the viability (if not possibility) of
| elegant caching from REST. But arguably it's an architecture
| that's not needed with today's ample resources (fast networks,
| fast cpus, ample ram and storage).
|
| Hard to imagine that the defining technology of this decade came
| out of a classic "screw standards;
| extend/embrace/extinguish"-playbook.
|
| Thanks to Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox (and opera/chrome) it went the
| other way.. .
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| To my chagrin:
|
| 1) Robinhood for normal stocks
|
| 2) Disney+ vs AmazonPrime/Netflix
|
| -> HDR for no additional fee, remastered exclusive content, a
| very full non region-locked (AFAIK) library, consistent streaming
| quality, straight-to-VOD shows, and premium movies.
|
| ->Some might argue not 10x, I can be convinced to agree. It's a
| solid 1.5x at a minimum though.
|
| 3) AWS Workspaces vs RDP
|
| -> Ease of use out of the box is just unparalleled.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| > _HDR for no additional fee_
|
| The first thing I turn off when I get a new TV is motion
| smoothing. The second thing is HDR.
| monstersinF wrote:
| Why?
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Most mid-to-cheap end "HDR" TVs look absolutely awful on
| HDR. The colours are washed out and the contrast is blown
| out. If your device sends an HDR signal, in many cases
| it'll look worse than not having HDR at all.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| I completely agree. I was an early adopter of a Sony
| HDR10 set and am pretty worse off for it. Genuinely
| curious though as to what you consider a good HDR tv
| though.
| t0mbstone wrote:
| The only way HDR looks good is on an OLED screen with
| perfect black levels, in my opinion.
|
| When the entire screen can be pitch black, and a single
| pixel can be fully lit up, that's when HDR really shines.
|
| All of the LED/LCD HDR solutions look like shit, in my
| opinion. Even the screens touting a hundred different
| lighting zones. Nothing compares to OLED.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| OLED is about double the price, but IMO, it's worth it.
|
| Being able to have TRUE blacks with no light bleed
| anywhere is amazing. Yeah, you've got TVs with a hundred
| zones as you said, but that just means you get blocks of
| grey when there's something on top of true black.
| Depending on the scene, that compromise can look even
| worse than just allowing all the black to be grey from
| the backlight.
| [deleted]
| jaxn wrote:
| Heroku. We used to Colo servers or rent dedicated servers. You
| had to setup linux/apache/database, etc. Manage logging and
| backups. And then to scale up you had to do it all over again.
| First you split the dB onto its own server, then start
| sharding/load balancing/replicating. And then you take the whole
| site down by letting a log file fill a disk or something.
|
| Heroku and 12-factor apps easily made building a business 10x
| easier/faster/cheaper.
| abought wrote:
| For web development, error monitoring services like Sentry are a
| breath of fresh air: instantly find the exact lines of code that
| are causing problems, even in front end code, before anyone files
| a bug report.
|
| Any tool that automatically captures a lot of data needs to be
| used with care (eg verifying that no sensitive data is sent to
| the server), but many tools in this space make an effort to scrub
| the most common fields. In practice, the payoff has been worth it
| most of the time.
| speechly wrote:
| Here's one case where I clocked an over 3x improvement when
| measuring time only. Probably would go as a 10x improvement in
| some cases (accessibility, intuitivity etc)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2gwzTWADns
| typhonic wrote:
| In the 1980s I was impressed with LapLink software which I used
| to move files between computers. The copy I bought came with
| cables to connect the computers, both serial and parallel cables.
| The serial cable had 25 pin and 9 pin connectors on both ends. If
| one PC did not have a disk drive, they gave you instructions to
| write a short command to re-direct the serial input. LapLink
| would then transfer itself across the serial link and begin
| running.
| dpcx wrote:
| Wolfram Alpha. The ability to perform calculations on "nebulous"
| things is amazing. Things like comparing the population of China
| to the population the US
| (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+united+s...)
| are great. Visual solutions to complex math problems? Awesome.
| skanga wrote:
| The very first iPhone after it's release by Steve Jobs. Easily
| 100x better than the phones that came before it.
|
| I still have it - though I'm an Android user now...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The personal computer (as a category, not just the IBM PC). I
| first ran into one in high school, when the computer science lab
| got five TRS80s. Before that, it was submitting a FORTRAN deck
| that someone took to an off-site mainframe. Half a week later,
| you got your results. But with the TRS80, you got them as fast as
| the program ran.
|
| Now the CS lab did have a Teletype terminal, though I never used
| it. But the TRS80 had a real interactive display, not just static
| paper.
|
| I know there were others before the TRS80. It's just the first
| one I came across.
| dale_glass wrote:
| SSDs.
|
| Virtualization.
|
| Git. I've used CVS and SourceSafe before.
|
| LVM. The old MBR way of partitioning is just awful.
|
| systemd and journald, just to be a bit controversial. I really
| don't miss my days of screwing around with init scripts, or
| having to parse logs by hand.
|
| Arduino. It makes lots of cool stuff very accessible.
|
| sshfs, it's amazingly convenient.
|
| pulseaudio. Sound on Linux finally works. I spent an unbelievable
| amount of time fighting with it before.
|
| valgrind. Amazing for debugging memory issues.
|
| Modern hardware. It's only recently that I'm no longer tightly
| restricted by RAM, disk space or the CPU. I remember the hours
| spent on freeing up conventional memory, a kernel taking 3 hours
| to compile, and having room for half the stuff I wanted to
| install.
| bombcar wrote:
| SSDs did it twice - the improvement from spinning disk to SSD
| it desktops was amazing, and then NVME/M.2 took it ANOTHER 10x
| - the speeds for storage are now so insanely fast that some of
| the trade-off decisions no longer apply.
| darepublic wrote:
| +1 for git, I learned it at my second job and I remember at my
| previous position using window shared network drives as a very
| basic versioning control system
| atonse wrote:
| I absolutely love systemd and journald. The fact that you can
| do most things declaratively and have a common interface for
| logs, it's just beautiful. I can do things like "show me the
| logs for this service for the last 5 mins".
|
| I still don't fully understand why people prefer bash scripts.
|
| But then again, I have never once needed to edit those bash
| scripts since I usually don't stray too much from defaults.
| dale_glass wrote:
| It all depends of course on what you do. When you try to ship
| stuff for various Linux distros, having to figure out how
| SuSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu like doing their init scripts is a
| pain.
|
| Admin-wise it's nice not to ever have to look at a 3-way
| merge of stuff in /etc/init.d if somebody touched anything,
| and then the system was upgraded.
|
| But besides that there's lots of cool benefits. Like not
| needing to deal with PID files, the fact that you always know
| what a random process belongs to, and that if you want to
| stop something, nothing will be left behind. Plus all the
| nice resource limits, auto-restart and other useful
| parameters that can be applied to anything.
| kipchak wrote:
| Password managers for me.
| [deleted]
| fnord77 wrote:
| kubernetes. so much easier to treat "servers" as cattle now
| rather than pets. The way it manages many things that you used to
| have to write chef/puppet/ansible thingies for is just magical.
| jedberg wrote:
| Breaking the 640K barrier.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Nobody has the audacity to mention The Pirate Bay. Ethical and
| moral issues aside, it was and arguably still is a 10x method for
| obtaining digital content and software.
| Nekhrimah wrote:
| In a similar vein, Napster was also a game changer for mp3
| distribution.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| Kazaa
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| 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!?
| tolbish wrote:
| A large chunk of the internet exists for the lulz.
| Imagine having to postpone your phone calls for an entire
| weekend in order to download a 1GB copy of Final Fantasy
| 7 on a crappy 32 kbps dial-up connection, only to open up
| the game and realize you got Leisure Suit Larry 6.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I was lucky enough that we had a second phone line
| dedicated to the modem.
| dpcx wrote:
| For the same reason trolls are everywhere: because they
| can :/
| gxqoz wrote:
| One thing I liked about Napster and the like is that
| bootlegs and B-sides circulated along with the official
| releases. I miss not having these on Spotify. Yes, there
| are official live albums on there. And yes, you can still
| find these bootlegs elsewhere. But there's enough
| friction that I rarely do this.
| aksss wrote:
| Yeah, Napster's value still hasn't been replaced in full.
| I remember pulling some obscure song from another
| endpoint halfway around the planet and then being able to
| browse their music collection, which turned me on to
| other cool music. You can kind of do the same thing on
| spotify by following people and playlists, but it's not
| the same discovery magic that Napster had, especially for
| obscure or hyper-local stuff. I'm not enough of a music
| nerd anymore to care as much these days, but Napster
| really was the cat's venerable pj's back then.
| bobosha wrote:
| As a mac user: Cleanshot and Alfred. Very well thought out
| products, am a happily paying customer.
| majewsky wrote:
| Configuration management.
|
| A few years ago, I timed myself doing a full reinstall on my
| private notebook to switch to a different partition layout. I was
| done in 30 minutes, of which most of the time was spent waiting
| for packages to download and install and for the /home backup to
| restore. Without configuration management, this would have been a
| full day of work just installing stuff and figuring out things
| like "how do you enable palm detection on that touchpad model
| again".
| aquodyssey wrote:
| Which specific software do you use for configuration
| management?
| bozzcl wrote:
| Steam Link (and lately nVidia Gamestream). It made my dream
| viable: having a server rack in my garage or basement, and stream
| my games to any room in my house. Wanna play in the living room
| TV? Sure! Want to play from your laptop in your room at full
| performance? No problem!
|
| Later, I switched to Gamestream because the performance is vastly
| superior. Eventually, I'd like to enable multiple devices playing
| games from the same server... I might have to switch to a VM
| setup.
| jakevoytko wrote:
| 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. And its UI was simple and easy-to-use. And you
| could search it.
|
| A lot of other products are 10x better in individual areas. For
| instance, Google Sheets was much more portable/shareable than
| Excel when it launched. But even today there's no comparison,
| Excel is superior for actual spreadsheet functionality. But Gmail
| was better on every axis, even against local clients like
| Thunderbird and Outlook.
| macNchz wrote:
| Gmail was amazing when it launched...I was so excited to get an
| invite from a friend during the beta period. It made the crappy
| POP sync for my ISP email account look like a joke. Funny thing
| is-closing in on 20 years later-I dislike the latest generation
| of Gmail's web interface so much that I'm back to using a
| desktop email client.
| mtmail wrote:
| > or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes.
|
| For those who don't remember: That was around the time when
| Yahoo offered 6MB, some others only 2MB.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Found this CNET article: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-
| offer-gigabyte-of-free-e...
|
| They say 2 MB Hotmail, 4 MB Yahoo. Gmail went straight to a
| gigabyte.
| ajuc wrote:
| It was so crazy people wrote code to use gmail as a network
| drive.
| bombcar wrote:
| Today a single email without attachments can get close to
| those numbers!
| jasode wrote:
| _> And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No
| questions asked. And its UI was simple and easy-to-use. And you
| could search it._
|
| Also don't forget that Gmail at the time had the most
| intelligent _spam blocking algorithm_ compared to AOL
| /Yahoo/Hotmail/etc.
|
| It was a big enough deal that some observers that switched to
| Gmail considered _the email spam problem as "solved"_ because
| Gmail seemed so good at it. (On the other hand, many
| independent people trying to run their own SMTP servers think
| that Gmail is too aggressive with spam filtering because it
| also blocks many legitimate senders with low/unknown
| reputation.)
| mike_h wrote:
| Is there a better spam filter today?
| narrator wrote:
| 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
| systems like Gmail that could run much faster than even local
| disk based email clients, even with thousands of users.
|
| Other providers were probably using expensive NASs with huge
| profit margins built in. Google was using thousands of the
| cheapest crappiest commodity parts because it was all triple
| redundant... and it worked faster because the network was
| really fast and multiple computers could stream different parts
| of the same file to clients.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c.
| ..
|
| Very, very influential reading back in the day, and still
| interesting.
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| It also came out at an interesting time, because everyone
| was trying to push data-to-redundancy ratios to their
| limits. Since storage was so expensive back then, storing
| multiple copies of data made little sense when looking at
| it from a data storage view, even if the speeds were much
| better
|
| Then Google dropped their MapReduce paper: https://static.g
| oogleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
|
| Which quite literally paved the way for modern data
| processing, and works _extremely_ well with the Google
| Filesystem architecture
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yeah, and then everyone took hadoop and threw it on a NAS or
| they provision it in the cloud and...throw it on a NAS.
| Always scratched my head on that one.
| shmoe wrote:
| Seems ancient at this point, but a total game changer at the
| time. I can actually recall getting my invite in 2006.
| listenallyall wrote:
| I bought invites on eBay for myself and a few family members.
| Maybe $5 each. Although I thought it was closer to 2004.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Agreed. Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now,
| as email nowadays is mostly for notifications.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| "Notifications" is being generous here. The average user's
| email inbox is 90% marketing spam.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Any sources on that? I'm guessing the 90% is hyperbole, but
| I still wonder how much spam the average user actually
| gets. (For me, close to absolute zero)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Pretty much every company/service out there opts you into
| spam unless you proactively opt-out of it (which takes
| effort and knowledge to work around the dark patterns).
|
| Looking at my password manager I've got ~260 logins right
| now and keep in mind that I don't do social media and try
| to avoid creating accounts as much as possible (and
| delete the ones I don't use for a long time), so the
| average user is likely to have a lot more accounts.
|
| Even if each one of these companies only spammed once a
| week (most will do more frequently if you let them),
| that'll already significantly outnumber the amount of
| legitimate e-mail I receive.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as
| email nowadays is mostly for notifications._
|
| Email is still heavily used for _business-to-business_
| communication between humans. Talking about business matters
| is still more natural via email until the participants know
| each other well enough to switch to texting.
|
| But yes, for _personal_ communication, friends & family have
| shifted from email to phone texts. E.g. my friend who
| graduated from college in 1990s used to communicate with his
| parents with 100% email but now it's 100% text messaging.
| Email is too much friction for personal comms.
| [deleted]
| deliriousferret wrote:
| Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| In terms of mailbox space, it was 500x Hotmail. Before Gmail
| you had to delete your old emails because if your mailbox was
| full it would stop receiving. The whole approach of "archive"
| and being able to search your entire email history from any
| computer in a webmail interface came from Google.
|
| There was POP3 before this of course, to keep all your mail
| locally and empty out the server box. But that only works if
| you have a single computer that you check mail from. Even
| back in 2004 when Gmail launched that was a non-starter for
| me, I had email at home and at school.
| roadbeats wrote:
| Hotmail was 10x worse than all alternatives. It was an ugly
| web page, not an app.
|
| Gmail took XMLHttpRequest and its ActiveX fallback (we used
| to call this "comet") and proved the world that we can ship a
| robust app inside a web browser.
|
| It was well designed, had no ugly banners like Hotmail did,
| it was really fast, simple and working like a desktop app.
| SahAssar wrote:
| For historical context: XMLHttpRequest was invented for
| outlook web access, so the idea and usecase preceded gmail.
| dopidop wrote:
| Long story short, yes.
| apohn wrote:
| Gmail was 100x Hotmail, if not even more than that. I think
| anybody who was on Yahoo Mail/Hotmail (or even something like
| Roundcube) who switched to Gmail probably realized how much
| these other companies had been holding stuff back.
|
| I've never cared for invite only stuff, but Gmail really was
| a total revolution when it came out.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?
|
| No.
|
| Gmail did not suck badly enough to be merely 10x better than
| Hotmail.
|
| Gmail was lightyears beyond other early free webmail
| services.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Sadly, this isn't even snark.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Not just a GB. It was also constantly _increasing_ in size,
| with a live counter to show how much storage you had available.
| Super gimmicky, but fun.
|
| I guess there are probably a lot of people here who are too
| young to have ever used those early versions. You also had to
| scrounge forums for an invite code.
| path411 wrote:
| I convinced my mom to buy me a beta invite for $5 on ebay and
| then spread my invites out to my family and friends.
| jldl805 wrote:
| I made my account(s) off invite codes and have "just my last
| name" at gmail dot com as an address... it's one of my most
| prized possessions, to this day!
| dopeboy wrote:
| Hanging out in IRC channels in early 2000s was how I wasted
| my teenage years. But I did get a gmail invite out of it
| leading to my primary email address to this day:
| arithmetic@gmail.com
| [deleted]
| Hrundi wrote:
| I managed to snag my (very common) italian last name. I get
| a flood of messages every day. I both love and hate my
| account.
|
| I don't even speak italian!
| apohn wrote:
| Gmail also automatically saved drafts. I can't tell you how
| many long emails I wrote and lost before hitting the send
| button with other web email UIs.
|
| Gmail was not just 10x. I think it redefined what a good web
| based email experience could be. I think it completely changed
| what people realized and expected the web browser could be from
| an interactivity standpoint.
| RajBhai wrote:
| And conversation view. Hiding the quoted email being
| responded to.
|
| Email before always looked like how Twitter threads do today.
| chrbr wrote:
| They announced it on April Fools. And it seemed like a joke -
| 1GB for email? Yeah. Right. Hotmail had, what, 10MB? 15?
|
| Best April Fools joke ever.
| Franciscouzo wrote:
| > If you didn't log in for a while, your account would
| disappear
|
| That's still true for gmail, but the time is more reasonable at
| two years.
| aerovistae wrote:
| 7zip. God winrar was annoying.
| dividead wrote:
| running slack, skype and zoom in a browser tabs instead of 3
| extra electron apps
| cande wrote:
| Collaborateandelevate.com
| aantix wrote:
| 1) Ruby on Rails.
|
| The standardized structure.
|
| Convention over configuration gave the app a level of consistency
| that I hadn't experienced before.
|
| 2) Lyft - being able to see who your driver was and exactly where
| they were in route to pick you up, was amazing.
|
| I think the first couple of years of riding I would always ask
| the driver when they started driving for Lyft and if they enjoyed
| it.
| 015a wrote:
| Retool [1]. Its been years since I've ran into a software product
| to support software teams which could so fundamentally change how
| you build things, and how you build the things you build. Retool
| can basically cut down the effort of making internal
| administrative dashboards by, like, a solid 70%. I still
| sometimes run into dashboards other engineers have made on Retool
| and say "holy shit you can do this?" or "how did we have the time
| to build this, is it really that easy?"
|
| I believe its possible Retool will become the next Jira, in the
| sense that its a totally internal tool that's so valuable
| companies hire people whose entire job is to just live in it and
| develop it out.
|
| [1] https://retool.com/
| deliriousferret wrote:
| - Amazon Prime - VLC - Netflix - Slack
| yosamino wrote:
| Postfix. It's the only software package that I use where I am
| consistently sure that any issue I come up with is me making a
| mistake in configuration or me not having read the documentation
| closely enough.
|
| It's stable, it has good error messages, it supports all the
| different ways to send email. And it's documentation is just
| really well and precisely written.
|
| It's just _really good_.
|
| It's not that I think that Postfix is 10x better than other email
| software that I use - it's 10 times better than any other kind of
| software I have used in the 20 years that this has been a
| relevant question.
|
| Thank you Wietse, thank you Viktor, thank you Ralf and thank you
| Kyle.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| And all that without having to learn the amazing m4 macro
| language so you can 'easily' configure Sendmail
| meowzero wrote:
| Google the search engine. Before I had to us Hotbot and
| Altavista. Google changed the game.
|
| YouTube. The user-generated content helped bring a lot of small
| time productions to be seen by millions of people. Now you can
| see a video about almost anything, especially if you need a how-
| to, tutorial, or learn about anything.
|
| Adobe Photoshop's Content Aware Fill, Healing Brush, etc. This
| changed the game for photo manipulation. You no long had to do it
| manually by hand using clone stamp. Now the computer does a
| pretty good job for you.
|
| Smartphone camera. This is more hardware than software, but they
| practically destroyed the entire compact camera market. Now
| everyone has a great camera and camcorder in their pockets. Now
| with their image processing, they're rivaling DSLR images for
| low-res images.
| Farbklex wrote:
| 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 invite system which many
| PC games use. It took some time until more companies launched own
| launchers and fragmented this ecosystem again.
|
| - save game cloud backups became the norm. No need to manually
| backup a savegame folder if you want to ever reinstall a game.
|
| - the refund system is user friendly (refund if you haven't
| played for more than 2 hours)
|
| - steam link allows you to stream your games from a PC to other
| clients locally or through the internet
|
| - steam remote play together allows you to stream a game to a
| friend for remote couch-coop. Other player doesn't need to own
| the game and since a recent update, doesn't require a Steam
| account.
|
| - family sharing lets users easily share a whole game library
| with friends and family
|
| - big picture mode offers a great gamepad focused UI which is
| ideal for living room gaming PCs on the TV
|
| - enchanced Steam controller settings which let you configure the
| Steam Controller and after some updates also other controllers
| for each game. This even works if the game doesn't have official
| controller support.
|
| - compared to other launchers it is really fast...looking at you
| "Xbox Game Pass for PC Launcher" thing
| kleer001 wrote:
| It's very likely a smart business decision, but I wish Steam
| had a re-sell market. Even just having only a single possible
| sale, I think would help sort the crap from the gold.
|
| There'd be one more opportunity for profit AND people could buy
| games for cheap. Sure, there's an opportunity to copy games
| before you sell them, but I think there's ways to fix that.
| Sell for steam-credit only maybe? and there's plenty of
| opportunity for a transparent DRM. Even the threat of perma-ban
| for cheating. Dunno.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| This is one of the more interesting use cases I've seen posed
| for NFTs. Use an NFT when a user buys the game and then they
| can resell the game later.
| aaronax wrote:
| What is the advantage of an NFT versus a record in Valve's
| database?
| Lionga wrote:
| It's Crypto!!!1111
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > - 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.
| Farbklex wrote:
| Oh yes. Been there.
| no_one_ever wrote:
| I want to piggyback off this comment and also throw in HL:Alyx
| for VR Games. I was honestly blown away by how _good_ VR felt,
| VALVe did an amazing job and I think /hope it sets the
| standards for all other VR Games.
| Macha wrote:
| > - the refund system is user friendly (refund if you haven't
| played for more than 2 hours)
|
| Well, depends on your expectations.
|
| * It wasn't first (that was Origin)
|
| * It wasn't there for a long time after the store launched
|
| * It doesn't meet minimum requirements of consumer law in
| places such as the EU or Australia.
|
| The rest I agree with though.
| Kagerjay wrote:
| I forgot how annoying things were before steam. Manually
| patching and update games, making sure the disc you bought had
| a key that wasn't already used.
|
| That being said, I do miss the little game guides that would
| come with your game. Starcraft 1 comes to mind. It told you
| what every unit did and it was a handy little reference
| companion that was wedged between the frontpanel of the CD
| cassette
| Loughla wrote:
| I also (even though it was a form of DRM) miss some of the cd
| keys that existed. My first, favorite game was Hillsfar on
| windows 3.1 or DOS, I don't remember which.
|
| To play you had to have the little spinner 'secret decoder'.
| It seemed part of the game, but was obviously just to keep
| people from playing pirated copies.
|
| But I miss that kind of neat little gee-gaw that used to come
| with games.
| Nition wrote:
| Steam actually has a built-in feature for games to upload
| manuals, where they get a dedicated link[1]. Hardly any games
| bother though.
|
| [1]In the current version of Steam, if there is a manual,
| it's at: Right click the game->Properties->General tab.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Yeah but I want to be able to only buy one disc, take it out
| after the game starts on PC 1, and pop it into PC 2 for
| multiplayer.
| deckard1 wrote:
| 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).
| sfblah wrote:
| You didn't like debugging with window.alert()?
| sdesalas wrote:
| I remember filling js files with alert messages back in 2004.
| Imagine the joy debugging a 15k line js codebase back then.
| crimper wrote:
| this gave me a vivid image of young me flailing around in the
| dark trying to understand why undefined is not a function
| nicoburns wrote:
| [object Object]
| zachruss92 wrote:
| I miss Firebug. Simpler times...
| scubbo wrote:
| What do you miss from Firebug that's missing from the built-
| in tools in any major browser?
| Minor49er wrote:
| Same here. I miss when I could inspect network headers from
| the console without having to go over to the Network tab.
| Updating HTML in realtime without committing to an edit was
| also really handy since I wouldn't lose the context that I
| was just editing in.
| aerovistae wrote:
| I don't. We have chrome dev tools and firefox dev tools which
| are both literally the same thing as firebug but with a
| decade of refinement. There are so many great aspects to
| those tools that firebug didn't have back then because it was
| the first version basically.
| yold__ wrote:
| Seconding that. Although Firebug was wonderful, cross-
| platform development was not (IE and FireFox). Example of
| "quirks mode" nonesense:
|
| 1. The "hidden" element at the root of the IE DOM tree,
| only accessible with "*" via CSS
|
| 2. inline-block was broken on IE6 (but fixable with hacks),
| and no transparent PNG support.
|
| 3. The outline CS property was implemented the same as
| background in IE
|
| Best of all was the dog slow IE 6 JavaScript interpreter,
| which was like 50x slower than Firefox and IE 7+.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > 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 Studio either because (pre-ASP.NET MVC),
| ASP.NET WebForms is, was, and ever-shall-be, godawful.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| This didn't really help with the DOM or CSS, though. The
| developer toolbar that worked with IE6 was sorely lacking.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I _think_ you could explore the DOM tree in the Document
| Outline window of VS and see node properties in the
| Properties window, but that could be a false-memory of mine
| - it 's also completely undiscoverable, even today.
|
| Support for CSS "debugging" was completely absent, yes.
| diegof79 wrote:
| I used Visual Interdev, but the debugger experience was bad:
| it was slow to start, and many times it didn't worked (when
| it worked it was fine).
|
| I'll add that to the other valid reasons that you mention.
| [deleted]
| tolmasky wrote:
| It's interesting that this is kind of a constant .1x * 10x = 1
| cycle we repeatedly go through with new platforms. We rarely
| realize the _cost_ of a new development platform in the fact
| that we often have to start from zero with documentation,
| tools, communities, etc. Tools are arguably the easiest to
| realize on day 1, when all of a sudden you can 't set a
| breakpoint. So it's really .1x development in many ways until
| someone reimplements these standard utilities to "10x" us back
| to 1.
| hinkley wrote:
| Some day, before I die, I hope that when I say "If it doesn't
| work for the developers, then soon it won't work for the
| customers," and people will know what the hell I'm talking
| about.
| jcheng wrote:
| Whatever happened to Joe Hewitt (one of my developer heroes
| back in the day)? Did he retire after Facebook?
| x0x0 wrote:
| He grows fruit
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyALl2EILQk
| thow-01187 wrote:
| I used to love Firebug, but couldn't help but notice it getting
| more and more sluggish over the years, with no apparent cause
| for it. Does anyone know what happened?
| kgc wrote:
| Firebug was the same speed, but Chrome got faster and
| websites felt comfortable piling on more JS as a result.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar, and IEDevToolbar was
| superior to Firebug for years for debugging JavaScript.
|
| So not a very good example at all, in fact quite the opposite,
| it just happened to ride the back of the anti-M$ wave and
| wasn't at all innovative, copying its features from already
| existing products.
|
| Conversely, though it was free, IEDevToolbar was only really
| advertised to MSDN subscribers, so never got much penetration,
| especially as by then everyone hated IE6 and a lot of Devs
| worked in Firefox first.
|
| But my company only supported IE6, and when we finally started
| supporting Firefox, firebug was an annoyingly sub-par
| experience when debugging js.
|
| Even Chrome's early Dev tools had some sorely missed features
| when it first came out, as far as I can remember it took them
| years to support being able to just hold your mouse over a
| variable and see its value. And because it was a web-page about
| a web-page you got all these weird bugs. And the CSS editor was
| (and still is) super annoying with its attempts to cut up your
| text.
|
| On top of that visual studio also had a JavaScript debugger,
| I'm sure there were plenty more paid tools you simply didn't
| know about.
| endymi0n wrote:
| That feels a bit like advocating that it was mainly Betamax
| which changed consumer habits in the 90s since it was
| technically superior to VHS.
|
| It may very well have been the case for a small number of MS
| centric devs, but for the large majority of users, it was
| Firebug that really changed the game for the bulk of Frontend
| devs back then.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| Do you realize that Firebug was the successor to the Venkman
| debugger and the original DOM Inspector for Mozilla/Netscape?
| (Joe Hewitt created DOM Inspector and checked it in to CVS
| while working at Netscape. Robert Ginda had separately
| created Venkman. Firebug used the XPCOM interfaces that had
| been created to allow for Venkman's debugging capabilities,
| but IMO was always inferior to the much more powerful
| Venkman, even if Firebug was slightly prettier to look at.)
|
| > Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar
|
| I'm not sure that even if you focus purely on Firebug and
| ignore DOM Inspector and Venkman that this is even true. Do
| you have a source for that?
| the__alchemist wrote:
| If this were true more broadly, we'd never get anywhere - most
| advances in science and technology are incremental, and improve
| slightly on past things. This applies even to great discoveries
| (Standing on the shoulder of giants). Is there a more precise
| definition of "10x" ? It's not well-defined-enough as-is to
| survive on intuition.
|
| I agree that many of the things posted here were 10x better - but
| this is a selection of the most notable software projects in
| memory: Not a reasonable threshold for if a business is
| successful!
| DevKoala wrote:
| K8. It is night and day how well our organization operates now
| that we are fully on k8.
|
| ClickHouse/BigQuery have allowed me to tackle massive analytics
| projects with a tenth of the effort when I had to setup a map-
| reduce/spark infra.
| NiekvdMaas wrote:
| I assume you mean k8s (kubernetes)?
| DevKoala wrote:
| Correct.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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 using Uber.
|
| Same final product (car transportation between points) but the
| experience was 10x better.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| A regular taxi costs you the same as an uber? May I ask what
| country you live in?
|
| In Australia, a taxi usually costs between 1.6ish - 2.3ish
| times as much as an uber or didi.
| Strom wrote:
| > _waiting around for a taxi to arrive_
|
| The worst part about the 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.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| This is insightful.
|
| I wonder how many SaaS products have the advantage of not
| having to talk to another human being. You don't have to align
| schedules ("busy signal"), convince them if they don't want to
| ("yes, I moved a block down, can you redirect the taxi
| please?"), and sometimes deal with a bad day.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| In other markets, they did. Where I live you need to have an
| appropriate license to transport passengers for money. Hailo
| brought the app approach to hiring taxi drivers. Uber now
| exists here, but all the drivers are actual licensed taxi
| drivers charging the standard rates. They did briefly try to
| "disrupt" the market here by ignoring those rules, but they
| got slapped down.
| taormina wrote:
| In Austin, they had a taxi app at the right time. The problem
| was that they were still taxis, and if no one felt like ever
| coming to pick you up, then you were just left high and dry.
| Uber told a specific person to come pick me up. Taxis would
| take whatever fare they found on the way to my house.
| roadbeats wrote:
| Kindle
| Arrath wrote:
| This one little brick has more than my entire bookshelf on
| it...and isn't even close to full. It's one part of the future
| I really appreciate.
| thow-01187 wrote:
| A lot of people dislike it, but Maven was a massive productivity
| boost.
|
| A tool that automatically downloads dependencies, manages their
| transitive dependencies, resolves conflicting artifact versions,
| is able to check for changes, constructs proper classpath,
| standardizes builds, compilation, testing, artifact storage and
| versioning.
|
| The onboarding went from days of fiddling to "just download
| Maven, run mvn install and off you go"
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