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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26477507

441 795 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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/

pramodbiligiri2• 5 years ago

I can go with a couple of my own experiences:

1. Ride hailing apps like Uber, Lyft

2. Wix.com and similar website builders

yosamino2• 5 years ago

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.

atian• 5 years ago

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.

omarhaneef3• 5 years ago

Sorry, but that one is 4x at best.

boringg2• 5 years ago

4x? 1x at best - saves my brain from memorizing a small thing very infrequently. Might be detrimental to my brain over the long run.:)

vngzs2• 5 years ago

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.

enraged_camel• 5 years ago

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. ;)

aquodyssey2• 5 years ago

What 2FA method is preferred instead of SMS these days?

schwede• 5 years ago

Users aren’t always in control of that though.

jasonpeacock2• 5 years ago

It was both magical and instantly obvious, the best kind of change.

soheil• 5 years ago

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.

tediousdemise• 5 years ago

I take this one for granted. I can't wait until they add the same thing for emails.

closeparen• 5 years ago

Android apps did this first, but by having an all-or-nothing permission to read your texts. Making it part of the keyboard under user control was so much nicer.

bin_bash• 5 years ago

Unlocking my iPhone with a mask on in 14.5

sdfhbdf2• 5 years ago

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-...

DoofusOfDeath• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

0x008• 5 years ago

- Internet

- fibre

- email

- Smartphones

- gpus

- starlink will be one

More personal:

- language servers/linters

- Package Management

- a mouse

- dictation

chevill• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Solid State was the last great change to our personnel hardware, computers went from meh to awesome in a flash

ramadis• 5 years ago

mtailor and their fancy body measurement algorithm.

mpweiher• 5 years ago

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.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] http://objective.st/Publications/

trebor• 5 years ago

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

revskill2• 5 years ago

Darkmode for the web.

kleer0012• 5 years ago

How exactly did that improve your life by 10x ?

revskill2• 5 years ago

My customers need it :) So my customers' satisfation improved by 10x

cramja• 5 years ago

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.

adamnemecek• 5 years ago

Check out Alfred.

Tistron• 5 years ago

It is on windows. I use win+v all the time.

cloudking• 5 years ago

Whoa, mind blown thanks for the tip

Veen• 5 years ago

Pastebot is pretty good too. I use its sequential paste queue many times a day.

intrasight• 5 years ago

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)

no-dr-onboard2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Why?

speechly• 5 years ago

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

jakevoytko• 5 years ago

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.

mtmail• 5 years ago

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.

wlesieutre2• 5 years ago

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.

hanniabu2• 5 years ago

How many emails was that back then?

shmoe• 5 years ago

Seems ancient at this point, but a total game changer at the time. I can actually recall getting my invite in 2006.

listenallyall• 5 years ago

I bought invites on eBay for myself and a few family members. Maybe $5 each. Although I thought it was closer to 2004.

apples_oranges2• 5 years ago

Agreed. Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications.

jasode4• 5 years ago

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.

Nextgrid2• 5 years ago

"Notifications" is being generous here. The average user's email inbox is 90% marketing spam.

deliriousferret2• 5 years ago

Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?

apohn2• 5 years ago

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.

wlesieutre2• 5 years ago

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.

dopidop• 5 years ago

Long story short, yes.

roadbeats2• 5 years ago

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.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?

No.

Gmail did not suck badly enough to be merely 10× better than Hotmail.

Gmail was lightyears beyond other early free webmail services.

shirro• 5 years ago

I don't use either but the hotmail/live/outlook system is a disaster.

I think people who have addresses there must just use them as throwaways as they don't seem to have much utility. You can be a small email sender with everything right, clean IP, on no block lists, SPF, DKIM, mta-sts. You can have no problems with any other major email provider. You can be signed up to SNDS. And they will just routinely block your IP for no reason and it will not even show up in SNDS and you can't resolve it through the tools they provide to mail senders on SNDS. So you have to go through this stupid process of filling in a support form which gives an automatic reply saying there is nothing to fix and you can't reply. But you do reply and then they fix it until next time.

There is no innovation there. I guess some accountant has determined that paying sweat shop labour to untick an IP every time their brain dead system blocks the same sender with no spam history is cheaper than actually fixing their systems. This is a flashback to 1990s Microsoft where their software was buggy as hell and your support options were power cycling or reinstalling.

They not only put their company name on this mess but offer it on outlook.com which creates an association with the pro email solutions they sell to a massive enterprise market. They should be embarrassed.

apohn2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

And conversation view. Hiding the quoted email being responded to.

Email before always looked like how Twitter threads do today.

macNchz2• 5 years ago

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.

smaryjerry• 5 years ago

I dislike it so much out of the box, or with a new account. When I help older people they look at Google like it is in hieroglyphics that they can’t understand because everything is an icon instead of a word. Then there’s the by default sorting your mail box for you and also having threaded emails. Features that have good intentions but just make it impossible to find the emails you are searching for.

jasode4• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Is there a better spam filter today?

flemhans3• 5 years ago

Funnily enough, Gmail can be on the receiving end sometimes too, e.g. being blocked in SORBS.

The response was:

  451 Currently Sending Spam See:
  http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?209.85.215.41

Although some may argue that SORBS is a bad system, anyway.

narrator3• 5 years ago

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.

robotresearcher2• 5 years ago

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

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

datavirtue3• 5 years ago

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.

anderspitman4• 5 years ago

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.

jldl8052• 5 years ago

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!

path411• 5 years ago

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.

Franciscouzo• 5 years ago

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.

chrbr• 5 years ago

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.

inasio2• 5 years ago

pretty sure Yahoo was 5MB and Hotmail 2MB when gmail came out.

selcuka2• 5 years ago

The Gmail web interface also (re)invented AJAX. The number of web applications that used XMLHttpRequest increased exponentially after the success of Gmail.

slt2021• 5 years ago

it was also written in Java which then compiled into client side javascript(!)

pdamoc• 5 years ago

Hotmail offered 2Mb space and Yahoo proudly claimed "twice the space of other providers" with their 4Mb offer. I had a GMX.de account that was providing 25 Mb and felt like a king. Then April 1, 2004 came and nothing was the same anymore.

Jleagle• 5 years ago

Gmail was so good that when it was in beta i sold invites for £200 each.

gfxgirl4• 5 years ago

I didn't have that experience with gmail, I had it with oddmail which was 1-2-3 years before gmail? Oddmail reproduced Outlook in a webpage (3 panes, folders, list of items in selected folder, contents of selected email)

oddmail was bought by yahoo

dividead• 5 years ago

running slack, skype and zoom in a browser tabs instead of 3 extra electron apps

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

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.

omarhaneef3• 5 years ago

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.

jasonpeacock2• 5 years ago

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.

Macha2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

gfxgirl4• 5 years ago

Not quite. There was a post on here that Uber's other big advance was the fact they don't own taxis and via demand pricing they incentivize more people to drive during high demand times. A Taxi company can't do that. They can't afford to own enough cars and hire enough drivers to handle high demand times as they'd lose money. Just adding an app to taxis is not enough

spartanatreyu2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

phone calls

This can make things awfully complicated when you and the dispatcher don't speak the same language.

waiting around for a taxi to arrive

The worst part about waiting for a taxi is the dice roll of whether one will actually arrive. Often in the case of a popular spot (like after the end of an event) the taxi could pick up someone else from the same location - or worse yet, not show up at all. The introduction of feedback associated with a specific driver has completely changed the incentive to actually show up and pick up the correct person.

aksss6• 5 years ago

dispatcher

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

aksss6• 5 years ago

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

dkarl2• 5 years ago

An Uber and a regular Taxi will both get me to my location with similar time and cost

I don't know how many places that was true. I gave up on taxi service in my city (Austin) a few years after moving here, because it wasn't a reliable or quick way to get anywhere. Twice I ordered taxis hours ahead of time to get to the airport (once literally the night before) and after being assured on the phone over and over again that the driver would be there "in just a few minutes" ended up driving myself at the last minute and barely making my flight. I also had a few treats of walking miles home after waiting 45 minutes for a cab to arrive. Uber was a game-changer simply because they would show up.

alex_duf• 5 years ago

one click deployment to prod as opposed to a deployment ceremony

vbsteven• 5 years ago

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.

pornel• 5 years ago

And docs.rs.

Having one place with documentation for every library is just amazing. Cargo as standard layout for all projects is such a force multiplier.

softwaredoug• 5 years ago

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.

blunte3• 5 years ago

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.

boringg2• 5 years ago

Git + Github

jp5552• 5 years ago

How about a 10x reduction?

Thinking of when "Paste with style" became the default. :P

fredley• 5 years ago

This makes me mad every time. And every single thing has a different shortcut for "Paste without style", if they even have one.

sdfhbdf2• 5 years ago

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

jp5552• 5 years ago

This is why most of my copy-paste is actually: copy-paste_in_SublimeText-copy-paste.

Ekaros• 5 years ago

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.

IgorPartola• 5 years ago

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.

whalesalad2• 5 years ago

svn to git/github was a 10x for sure

szszrk3• 5 years ago

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).

splittingTimes2• 5 years ago

What software do you use? It sounds like for monitoring a website. Is there something similar for a desktop app?

szszrk3• 5 years ago

I used a few, mostly Dynatrace. Experimented with Pinpoint and did like 3 PoC of commercial products. Dynatrace won for me but the prices were insane.

There is now a lot of opensource ones, usually not so fancy on the visual side. Elastic APM, Pinpoint and so on.

szszrk3• 5 years ago

And for a desktop app I guess it's just called a debugger :> Unless said desktop app still uses http requests or something similar to webapps that can be attached to APM software. Then APM will know were it came from, but you won't get insight into the app itself, just the resulting connections.

shafyy• 5 years ago

- Revolut (vs. traditional banks and traders)

- Wolt (vs. Lieferando, Germany)

- Hey (vs. Gmail, Fastmail)

rekoros2• 5 years ago

Gmail, Git, tmux

idlewords• 5 years ago

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.

anthonyskipper• 5 years ago

Gitlab - Having 12 products in the SDLC space rolled into a single product was a life changing productivity benefit.

john_cogs• 5 years ago

GitLab team member here. Thanks for this comment! I just shared on our team Slack.

showerst2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

+1 for Uber/Lyft. I remember being SO excited for them to come to my area, as they are so much better than taxis.

aerovistae5• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

SatvikBeri3• 5 years ago

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/

salted-fry• 5 years ago

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.

spartanatreyu2• 5 years ago

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.

x0x03• 5 years ago

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.

paxys3• 5 years ago

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

will4274• 5 years ago

250 days is mon-fri, with three days off. 250 * 2 * $20 is $10,000. That sounds like a lot, but - it depends on what you gain/lose. If you can avoid buying a car (plus insurance and gas), and live a little further away, in a place that's a little bit cheaper - you can easily save more than $10,000 a year. Uber-enabled at the edge of the city for $1200 / month vs walkable in the middle of the city at $2000 / month, and you're pretty close to break even.

I still took the bus for fixed commutes (to and from work) - when I woke up on time. But uber is very convenient if you're in a city - the population density makes rides near instantaneous.

showerst2• 5 years ago

It's too expensive to take to work, but I live in a city (DC) with a downtown centered transit system, so certain 20 minute drives take an hour or more on transit. Add in a 5-10 minute walk on both sides if your home/destination aren't right on top of a metro, and some trips become super inconvenient.

If you know DC, I'm thinking, say, Van Ness to Eastern Market, H-street, or anywhere off-metro in SE over the river. Cabs here are infamously unreliable, and just don't serve many neighborhoods, to the point of illegally refusing to take you once you're already in the cab.

Before Uber, if you were someone who wanted to go out to eat or visit friends in other neighborhoods a few times a week, you had to live as close as possible to metro/bus hubs on the same lines as your social group. If you couldn't afford that, you got a bike and dealt with it being stolen 3x a year.

Now you can reasonably live a little further from transit and still take those trips. You still want to live somewhere that minimizes commute, but I'm no longer optimizing for commute AND social group AND restaurants AND groceries, which widens things quite a bit price wise.

paxys3• 5 years ago

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

bmn__4• 5 years ago

go out in the rain desperately waving for a cab

That's mind boggling. All my life I've been able to call central dispatch and order a taxi to a pick-up address of my choice.

CalChris• 5 years ago

Yeah, Uber/Lyft is 10x better than cabs ever were.

girishso2• 5 years ago

+1 for Ruby on Rails, I was developing on ASP.NET back then. It would have taken me at-least a week to develop 'the blog'. Rails had so many great ideas baked in (apart from MVC/ORM) viz. dev/production environments, migrations, default locations for css/js/images.

ralmidani• 5 years ago

+1 for Rails. Also Django (Which came out around the same time).

practicalpants• 5 years ago

Rails + Heroku circa 2011... I became a professional web developer and launched a startup mainly because of these technologies, so quick and easy.

Yes, with Uber and equivalents around the world, I have zero reason to own a car. My driver's license expired years ago and I can't be bothered to renew it.

hackmiester2• 5 years ago

I cannot see in the dark, and I live in a city that is not very walkable. Before Lyft, I just didn't go places at night. So, yeah.

justinzollars• 5 years ago

I owe a lot to DHH and Ruby on Rails. It landed me a job in Silicon Valley 11 years ago. It was a game changer for my life. Glad to see it listed here.

eps• 5 years ago

Re: Age

C with Classes was a very welcome advancement over C.

Watcom C/C++ compiler with DOS/4G extender was a pure fucking miracle. Need 1MB in one chunk? Just call the damn malloc().

Windows NT was a phenomenal leap forward for desktop OSes.

biryani_chicken• 5 years ago

Bash was an eye opener after having to deal with CMD for years.

callesgg2• 5 years ago

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.

jasode4• 5 years ago

+ 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.

narrator3• 5 years ago

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.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

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.)

benibela6• 5 years ago

I do that, because I use a not popular enough programming language.

hondo77• 5 years ago

Let me introduce you to comp.sources.unix: https://www.krsaborio.net/unix-source-code/research/1987/081...

davio• 5 years ago

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.

csteubs4• 5 years ago

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 :^)

flemhans3• 5 years ago

My grandmother had the same expectation.

anderspitman4• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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 :/

flemhans3• 5 years ago

For me, Google Maps got slow some 5 years back.

murph-almighty• 5 years ago

I cannot imagine a period of time where the STL didn't exist, which perhaps outs me as a younger dev

robotresearcher2• 5 years ago

There was arguably a worse period than non-existence, which was when it existed but didn't work very well.

Sohcahtoa829• 5 years ago

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.

CodeGlitch• 5 years ago

Many video games still don't use the STL due to performance concerns.

aynsof• 5 years ago

+ 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• 5 years ago

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.

xeromal2• 5 years ago

I remember using Avant browser to have tabs back in the day before I discovered FF. I think it was just an IE wrapper

Shorel4• 5 years ago

In that case, Opera Browser in 2001 was the first tabbed browser I used. Long before Chrome.

I still miss some features in Opera like mouse gestures. No, plugins and add-ons can't reproduce the responsiveness of a native implementation, they all fall short.

vram223• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

datavirtue3• 5 years ago

Using google search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the search results were than in 2021

speedgoose2• 5 years ago

To their defense, SEO was not as developed. The average website was not a scam like today.

Psychlist2• 5 years ago

Virtual machines have been a huge win, and still are.

Spending 2-5 days setting up a development environment, then archiving a copy of the whole VM made some of the crappier setups usable. Back before rented software (including the OS) that meant one person could grind through the whole OS/tools/IDE/libraries stack and get something we could all use. I've broken software protection to make this work, because it's just such a huge productivity win.

Being able to have a whole test matrix worth of systems virtualised also helps. One place we interacted with MS-Office, so the matrix was Win95/98/Me/XP/2000 (etc), then three versions of Office {cries}. It would have been just unreasonable as a small company for us to have and maintain 2-3 copies of that matrix as physical machines.

bombela• 5 years ago

I remember when I switched to Linux around 2004. Compared to Windows XP, setting up anything became minutes instead of days. Because everything was just so much simpler to automatr and so much faster in general.

a_e_k• 5 years ago

Freezing and archiving the VMs used to build a particular release is also a pretty nice trick.

It comes in very handy for those rare times when a major customer that (for some reason) insists on sticking with an ancient, obsolete version of your software desperately needs a critical fix.

jarek83• 5 years ago

Funny how Google went from user's hero to zero.

crazygringo• 5 years ago

Only on HN.

Otherwise it's the #1 browser by usage by far, which is saying a lot considering it doesn't come preinstalled on Windows or on Macs, so all those users are making a deliberate choice to switch.

So still the hero outside of HN.

llaolleh• 5 years ago

It's because most of HN user queries are very niche.

shakezula• 5 years ago

That last point is something i hadn’t fully considered but is absolutely valid here. I have watched so much content at 2x speed that I would never have cared about in the slightest at 1x. The human brain is strange like that.

account42• 5 years ago

+ 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.

I'm pretty certain there were third-party players that could do increased playback speed with unchanged pitch before Windows 7.

baptlac• 5 years ago

Genius Scan. I never used a scanner ever again.

mam2• 5 years ago

CMA-ES for black box optimization. Insane.

francisofascii• 5 years ago

wireless headphones

revel• 5 years ago

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?

dougSF70• 5 years ago

California DMV services going online are 100x

thesumofall• 5 years ago

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

apples_oranges2• 5 years ago

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.

dale_glass2• 5 years ago

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.

atonse2• 5 years ago

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_glass2• 5 years ago

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.

bombcar5• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

+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

boring_twenties4• 5 years ago

LVM. The old MBR way of partitioning is just awful.

Just wait until you find out about ZFS!

gautamcgoel3• 5 years ago

Honest question: can you explain the practical advantages of ZFS over LVM + Ext4? I understand that ZFS combines a filesystem and package manager, but why should I, a humble OSS user, care?

bobosha• 5 years ago

As a mac user: Cleanshot and Alfred. Very well thought out products, am a happily paying customer.

majewsky2• 5 years ago

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".

aquodyssey2• 5 years ago

Which specific software do you use for configuration management?

majewsky2• 5 years ago

https://holocm.org

deliriousferret2• 5 years ago

- Amazon Prime - VLC - Netflix - Slack

Farbklex2• 5 years ago

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

kleer0012• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

Macha2• 5 years ago

- 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.

brokenmachine3• 5 years ago

It doesn't meet minimum requirements of consumer law in places such as the EU or Australia.

I'm in Australia. What consumer laws do we have about games?

swaggyBoatswain2• 5 years ago

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

Loughla3• 5 years ago

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.

Nition3• 5 years ago

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.

anderspitman4• 5 years ago

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.

AdmiralAsshat• 5 years ago

- 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.

Farbklex2• 5 years ago

Oh yes. Been there.

GiveOver• 5 years ago

Still have all my ISOs backed up somewhere, and a .txt file with the serial codes in. You never know!

12ian343• 5 years ago

thanks for reminding me about DaemonTools!

poushkar• 5 years ago

Thanks for reminding me about this! I've just experienced a huge nostalgia rush! Oh, I wish I could go back 15-20 years back just for a day!

alexchantavy• 5 years ago

Ha, and you'd have to sometimes turn on DaemonTools' securom defeat. CloneCD was also probably the best way at the time to reliably make isos.

Slightly related, but moving from doom9.net dvd-rip tutorials (make vob, encode to DiVX for decent size) to simply using Handbrake and h264 was awesome.

no_one_ever• 5 years ago

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.

jeswin• 5 years ago

While it helped as a conversation starter here, the 10x rule is hollow punditry.

jbob2000• 5 years ago

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.

bombcar5• 5 years ago

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

Lichtso4• 5 years ago

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

dmarcos• 5 years ago

Nice. I’ve been always curious but also worried about alienating myself. Any communities of GA users out there to feel connected?

Lichtso4• 5 years ago

I think the biggest gathering is: bivector.net

It has a discourse and a discord.

splittingTimes2• 5 years ago

Do you know 3D computer graphics libraries that use GA?

Lichtso4• 5 years ago

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).

ajkjk2• 5 years ago

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?)

Lichtso4• 5 years ago

> 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 über-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?PaperID=...

ycom13__• 5 years ago

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..

abetusk• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

dopeboy4• 5 years ago

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.

skanga• 5 years ago

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...

12ian343• 5 years ago

Strong disagree. It was slow, had barely any features compared to, say, the Nokia N95. Sure, it made leaps with certain key mobile features, e.g. voicemail and the chat-like SMS interface, but it was a big step down from the N95 overall in almost every other area.

rektide• 5 years ago

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/

imagine99• 5 years ago

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™. I post here because I'm curious to discuss, not just to share and read isolated opinions.

pramodbiligiri2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

bombcar5• 5 years ago

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).

ator• 5 years ago

git, alarumist (trading alerts)

Thristle• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I agree with this but Python is far more dynamic than JS.

teddyh• 5 years ago

It’s just as dynamic, but its typing is stronger.

abought• 5 years ago

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.

kipchak• 5 years ago

Password managers for me.

drwicked• 5 years ago

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.

AnimalMuppet3• 5 years ago

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.

dr_kiszonka• 5 years ago

I am guessing such a long feedback loop required proofreading your code very carefully before submission. Do you still have this skill now when the feedback loop is so much shorter?

I noticed that some very senior programmers check their code for much longer than rookies like me, who just keep banging "Run" until there are no more warnings ;)

AnimalMuppet3• 5 years ago

Why keep it? If you can find a typo with an hour of inspection, or with a minute of compiling, why do the hour of inspection? Save that for the bugs that will take a day to track down...

nobozo• 5 years ago

This was a while ago, but Borland's Turbo languages were revolutionary.

jenkstom• 5 years ago

Delphi.

fnord772• 5 years ago

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.

aphextron• 5 years ago

+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.

hodgesrm• 5 years ago

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.

bhaak4• 5 years ago

Java saved me from having a C++ career. And that was the 90s C++, not the C++ of today. I dodged a bullet there.

AnimalMuppet3• 5 years ago

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++.

blunte3• 5 years ago

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?"

zz8653• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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

gfxgirl4• 5 years ago

Java got it wrong IMO. There are many things that need the same management. C++ allows this vis destructors. You can auto-manage memory, auto manage locks, auto manage files, auto manage GPU resources, auto manage video players, audio players, etc.. etc ...

Java you can only auto-manage memory. All the rest you can't.

Yes I get that C++ has too many foot guns but Java's solution is half assed. There's so much more to resource management than just memory.

fnord772• 5 years ago

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.

the__alchemist• 5 years ago

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!

DevKoala2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I assume you mean k8s (kubernetes)?

DevKoala2• 5 years ago

Correct.

13415• 5 years ago

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.

ronald_petty• 5 years ago

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).

bizzleDawg• 5 years ago

If you like ctrl^r, you'll _love_ https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

callesgg2• 5 years ago

If you like that you should try the fish Shell. Not great for automation but amazing for general use.

vehemenz• 5 years ago

It's also Undo in Vim. Cheers!

exdsq• 5 years ago

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.

tootie3• 5 years ago

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.

atwebb• 5 years ago

A bit, but hosting providers were around long before AWS. You could do multi-tenant web / database deployments in the 90s.

jasode4• 5 years ago

, 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.

cardanome2• 5 years ago

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.

tootie3• 5 years ago

$5 hosting is absolute not enough for most big businesses. The times I've actually gone for simpler solutions, they're usually built on AWS (ie Heroku or Netlify)

nlh• 5 years ago

+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.

sam_lowry_• 5 years ago

AWS? Peuh. Hetzner made it possible to host websites with many millions of pageviews per month without robbing a bank.

jrvarela56• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

Joeboy• 5 years ago

Ripgrep.

zz8653• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

zz8653• 5 years ago

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.

_carbyau_• 5 years ago

I was 18 and moved to Univeristy where I "met the Internet".

And yet I find it hard to recall life before having mobile phones to easily coordinate meeting friends, google maps to navigate, banking apps for account and bill management.

Clearly I had a life before internet. Clearly I coped. I just can't recall how.

deckard1• 5 years ago

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).

zachruss92• 5 years ago

I miss Firebug. Simpler times...

Minor49er2• 5 years ago

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.

aerovistae5• 5 years ago

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.

scubbo3• 5 years ago

What do you miss from Firebug that's missing from the built-in tools in any major browser?

thow-011873• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Firebug was the same speed, but Chrome got faster and websites felt comfortable piling on more JS as a result.

girishso2• 5 years ago

For whatever reason Firefox decided to write it's own Dev tool. I remember Firebug developer(s) saying why are you not integrating Firebug itself in Firefox?

sfblah• 5 years ago

You didn't like debugging with window.alert()?

crimper2• 5 years ago

this gave me a vivid image of young me flailing around in the dark trying to understand why undefined is not a function

sdesalas• 5 years ago

I remember filling js files with alert messages back in 2004. Imagine the joy debugging a 15k line js codebase back then.

prepend3• 5 years ago

I remember running in a frame set just so I could document.write instead of a million window.alert. Fun times.

eyelidlessness7• 5 years ago

For anyone still/stuck with console debugging, “pro” tip:

JS ignores the value of every statement in a comma-separated expression except the last one. So you can do trash like this:

    const foo = (bar) => (
        console.log(bar),
        someComputationOf(bar)
    );

And log-debug without restructuring your otherwise pure function.

DaiPlusPlus6• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

This didn't really help with the DOM or CSS, though. The developer toolbar that worked with IE6 was sorely lacking.

diegof792• 5 years ago

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.

aspnet_dev4• 5 years ago

WebForms is still one of the quickest things to actually build intranet applications with and it still does it incredibly well.

If I wanted to have a editable table (datagrid) control it literally took about 20 minutes and I had something working and people could use it.

The problem with it (much like Angular which btw is basically webforms for JavaScript) is that it required you learning how the event lifecycle worked properly. Whereas other things at the time were web scripts and you could just hack against.

It of course had a lot of problems (like everything on the web at the time) but for what it was actually intended for, it was actually really good.

jcheng• 5 years ago

Whatever happened to Joe Hewitt (one of my developer heroes back in the day)? Did he retire after Facebook?

x0x03• 5 years ago

He grows fruit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyALl2EILQk

mattmanser• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

pwdisswordfish03• 5 years ago

Do you realize that Firebug was the successor to the Venkman debugger and the original DOM Inspector for Mozilla/Netscape?

<https://web.archive.org/web/20051223164847/https://www.mozil...>

<https://web.archive.org/web/20050206082145/http://www.mozill...>

<https://web.archive.org/web/20050206185242/http://www.mozill...>

(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. PS: shame on Mozilla for breaking those links. Do you even know how to Web?)

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?

jonwinstanley• 5 years ago

At least Firebug was attached to a good browser. IE6 was terrible to use so being able to develop in Firefox with a decent debugging experience improved web development

cookiengineer• 5 years ago

As a user of both Firebug and IE's Devtoolbar I can state this is simply not true.

While I agree that IE's devtools had more features regarding xpath integration, you'll also had the problem that it was based on libxml (yes, the reason trident was exploitable for decades, and probably still is).

IE's devtools didn't have access to the DOM and only had access to the HTML/SGML/actually XML representation _before_ it was parsed into the DOM.

This gave you hundreds of error scenarios where debugging user events was simply impossible if they caused the DOM to change, something like adding a node or debugging a parentNode was impossible in trident.

And oh how often have I seen bugs in websites that were relying on specified flow roots that behaved differently in trident. Something like an unclosed <p> in the wrong place could easily mess up everything in trident and switch it to quirks mode.

Remember IE was exploitable via a parentNode.remove(parentNode), too? The hooks for devtools was the underlying reason.

I am not sure why you claim that IE had superior devtools experience. You must have done a lot of ActiveX related development, because everything else was impossible to debug in my opinion.

The best thing MS did was to create the Edge team that tried to refactor trident, and soon realized that it's impossible and instead started over from scratch.

radley2• 5 years ago

10 times better than the second best option

It's not who was first, just who seemed 10x better than the next best option.

tolmasky• 5 years ago

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.

hinkley2• 5 years ago

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.

Shorel4• 5 years ago

Yes. Web technology has advanced so much that now I can do what I was able to do in FoxPro 25 years ago, in just twice the time.

still_grokking6• 5 years ago

Yes. Web technology has advanced so much that now I can do with a Web-based GUI editor and some DB-to-JSON-Rest framework, what every child was able to do in VB6 25 years ago, just in 10x the time. We're finally almost there.

guidoism• 5 years ago

This.

I worked at Amazon during this time on our custom web server and before that I had been using telnet to hand type my commands or various perl scripts I wrote to emulate a browser's requests. And... ugh, tcpdump to figure out what exactly browsers were sending before they got to apache.

Firebug was like magic!

BrissyCoder• 5 years ago

Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about.

Have been a professional developer since 1999 - no idead what you're talking about.

gfxgirl4• 5 years ago

As someone that was used to Visual Studio's Debugger, that Firefox had one was an (oh, they finally caught up to 1995)

To be clear I mean that Visual Studio had a C/C++ debugger but outside of that most languages that I used in any other situation were missing good debuggers.

yread• 5 years ago

Debugging safari on ipad issues without a mac is still like that. ilibmobiledevice stops working all the time

ryan-allen• 5 years ago

Prior to Firebug, when I was unfortunately writing ActionScript in Flash, there was Charles [0].

It's still really good!

[0] https://www.charlesproxy.com/

blunte3• 5 years ago

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.

omosubi2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I have never witnessed somebody tripping over a laptop charging cable - does that happen a lot for others?

omosubi2• 5 years ago

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

semireg• 5 years ago

On the second day of ownership of the first MBP w/out MagSafe my father in-law tripped on the cable and it yanked the new MBP off the table and the force of the MBP bent the USB-C plug something nasty.

The only way I’ll ever forgive Apple is if one of their C-suite exec personally calls me and tells me why on earth they did this.

And we all know why... because MagSafe wasn’t Ive’s idea and since people loved it, he hated it.

machiaweliczny• 5 years ago

My cat often pulls the cable and in panic it could destroy whole laptop (did not happen though).

stefanfisk• 5 years ago

I completely wrecked my PowerBook G4 by accidentally getting my leg on the wrong side of the cable when getting up from the couch in a hurry. It flew up in the air and landed on the floor at a weird angle, and after that it was forever bent...

jakub_g• 5 years ago

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.

arpyzo• 5 years ago

Infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation). I can easily manage 10x the infrastructure once this is in place.

AlexB138• 5 years ago

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.

anderspitman4• 5 years ago

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.

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

Initially everything was OSS. Then Gates and Jobs came along and started doing closed source software. But in 50's and a good chunk of 60's people programming those frameworks would freely exchange software.

rudyfink• 5 years ago

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.

bombcar5• 5 years ago

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.

Sohcahtoa829• 5 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj2• 5 years ago

I feel like automated kernel module compilation when updating to a new kernel (DKMS) is in a very similar ballpark for me as a user.

xenocratus• 5 years ago

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...

Sohcahtoa829• 5 years ago

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.

datavirtue3• 5 years ago

Yep, and you could clone it with xcopy.

zyemuzu• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

urthor• 5 years ago

I'm the opposite, I've come me to rely on auto completion so much I cannot spell English. I've had to toggle it off.

HomeDeLaPot• 5 years ago

You gotta do WYSIWYG right, though. It seems like I break MS Teams once a week and have to start formatting part of my message over again. It's like someone stopped in the middle of implementing its Markdown support. I also frequently find myself trying to get the cursor out of the end of a block of formatting and back to normal formatting. I vaguely remember hearing complaints about Slack's editor at one time, too. There has to be a better way

legulere• 5 years ago

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.

roadbeats2• 5 years ago

Kindle

Arrath• 5 years ago

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.

passivate• 5 years ago

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.

swaggyBoatswain2• 5 years ago

shareX is a godsend, I wish MacOS had as good as it

Minor49er2• 5 years ago

I've never used a more stable, feature-filled, and affordable DAW than Reaper. Making music with it is a lot of fun

rubyist5eva• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

Loughla3• 5 years ago

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.

Sohcahtoa829• 5 years ago

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.

nightowl_games• 5 years ago

I also hated steam on day 1. I just wanted to play counterstrike! But obviously Gabe was right!

high_byte• 5 years ago

Sysinternals never ceases to amaze me.

Shorel4• 5 years ago

Copy-Paste the Steam folder to your new system to move your entire game library.

Can't do that. I don't own a hard disk big enough to hold my entire game library.

So I have the most frequent games in an SSD, other games in several HDDs, and so on.

artificialLimbs• 5 years ago

I've been deploying Everything to anyone who loses their documents on our employee workstations. It's a wonderful tool; how Windows search should work.

tfehring• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

and ggplot2 for R graphics. just. wow.

shireboy• 5 years ago

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.

vitorbaptistaa• 5 years ago

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/

sails• 5 years ago

Agree, this was a huge improvement on workflow in analytics.

e12e• 5 years ago

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.. .

typhonic• 5 years ago

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.

haolez• 5 years ago

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.

dopeboy4• 5 years ago

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.

scubbo3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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...

Nition3• 5 years ago

It's still around: http://www.experts-exchange.com

chx• 5 years ago

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 ...

petepete2• 5 years ago

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.

skinkestek2• 5 years ago

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.

This might make someone here angry that they weren't aware of it (or make them smile):

This is how they did it:

The answers were always visible if you just scrolled far enough down the page.

At least that is how I experienced it - and I thought every oldtimer knew! :-)

Mandatum2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't give them 10x, but certainly 2-3x for junior developers compared to predecessors and 1.2x for others. Which is still incredibly significant and nothing to sneeze at.

jimbokun• 5 years ago

Their weekly podcast where they discussed progress on building the site that week was fascinating too.

billfruit• 5 years ago

Its closest competitor has been Quora for several years.

tape_measure• 5 years ago

Stack Overflow is much better than Quora. Quora has gone downhill over the last few years with paid contributions and modal nags. It sea they will also sign me in after I click a link in their email digests. I don't know how that can be secure

bps44842• 5 years ago

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.

Aperocky3• 5 years ago

I feel it's usefulness has ran its course though. The spirit lives on through ES6.

saalweachter4• 5 years ago

Boost for C++ likewise. It was a necessary bridge in the long wait for C++0x, but once the language started updating again it's no longer as necessary.

bps44842• 5 years ago

Absolutely it has run its course. There are a now a litany of javascript frameworks to suit the variety of projects being done in javascript (both server and client side), and browsers are now far more compatible (I think partially because browser makers realized with the popularity of jquery how in demand that was) but I was only recognizing what an innovation it was at the time.

1970-01-01• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

In a similar vein, Napster was also a game changer for mp3 distribution.

ta12345678902• 5 years ago

Kazaa

flukus• 5 years ago

For me napster was a game changer that got me into music period. Before that discovering and learning what music I liked was tedious and low signal/noise along with high cost that I never developed any interest in music until napster existed.

paxys3• 5 years ago

Pirate Bay, Napster, Limewire etc. are what dragged us into the digital media age. Might not seem like it today but had studios and record companies had their way, Netflix or Spotify would not exist.

hackmiester2• 5 years ago

True, but Spotify was another 10x improvement. You click on ANY song, and, WELL under 1 second later, you are listening to that song. Closer to a quarter of a second. In 2010 or so, when I first used it.

benibela6• 5 years ago

And libgen/scihub for ebooks

quickthrower22• 5 years ago

BitTorrent too the underlying protocol with less nonsense than download sites that often want to tease you in to a paid subscription. Torrents are as good as it gets but malware and pretend movies linking to the aforementioned sites are sometimes a problem

asidiali2• 5 years ago

Limewire

aerovistae5• 5 years ago

7zip. God winrar was annoying.

dgellow• 5 years ago

MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) was a complete game changer.

aerovistae5• 5 years ago

Zocdoc. It is SO easy to find good doctors now compared to what you used to have to do.

ihnorton• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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

jonplackett2• 5 years ago

Showing my age: windows 95 being able to play FULL SCREEN VIDEO

mogrim• 5 years ago

The Weezer video it included! Still love that song!

jonplackett2• 5 years ago

YES! That’s the one I was thinking of exactly. Such a great video anyway but even more amazing on a 14 inch monitor that has only previously barely seen 256 colours moving about slowly.

mikewarot2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Picassa was the best thing miss it so.

saalweachter4• 5 years ago

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.

Loughla3• 5 years ago

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.

saalweachter4• 5 years ago

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.

bad_username• 5 years ago

I found the 0.0001%. Mint could not reliably connect to my run off the mill BW Brother wireless laser printer. I had to reboot often to get printing. Same problem on 2 different PCs.

Laerthd• 5 years ago

For me it's the microsoft office suite. I used to make documents in LaTeX and continue in some cases for text heavy or math heavy final documents. Since using powerpoint however, I cannot image going back to either LaTeX or libre office for either presentation or quick intermediate reports. LaTeX is too cumbersome and libre office is just a pain to use (one part of me still hope that I am just using it wrong). Apart from that, gaming is also a reason for my personnal computer.

dopeboy4• 5 years ago

You're giving me flashbacks to when I had to compile my own kernel for ubuntu on a macbook.

All to get suspend working.

bradford• 5 years ago

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.

elihu3• 5 years ago

I remember the old days of having to run a program to generate proper modelines to get XFree86 working with whatever monitor I was trying to use.

Though to be fair, having explicit modelines was once also useful when modifying a BNC Trinitron monitor that ran at one very specific resolution to connect to VGA.

It's nice that monitors mostly just work these days.

naveensky2• 5 years ago

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.

rajacombinator• 5 years ago

Python. The productivity and elegance of it are way more than 10x.

naveensky2• 5 years ago

I guess torrent clients were pretty useful to share large files :P

schappim• 5 years ago

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)

cosmodisk• 5 years ago

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.

vram223• 5 years ago

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.

yosamino2• 5 years ago

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_hn3• 5 years ago

And all that without having to learn the amazing m4 macro language so you can ‘easily’ configure Sendmail

Spivak2• 5 years ago

If you ever start thinking that m4 is the solution to any problem you have just shred the drive and start over.

thow-011873• 5 years ago

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"

ta12345678902• 5 years ago

Notarize.com - I was blown away by how easy, simple and fast it was to get documents notarized.

f00zz• 5 years ago

tmux

dimal• 5 years ago

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!

mikewarot2• 5 years ago

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.

aksss6• 5 years ago

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.

analog312• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

grumple• 5 years ago

I remember when plug-and-play was a big deal, good one.

thraxil4• 5 years ago

- 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.

henrikschroder• 5 years ago

apt-get.

I saw a joke the other day that went something like:

"What, is your grandma so senile that she can't type ./configure; make; make install" ?

Installing software on linux truly sucked before package managers.

vmception3• 5 years ago

That joke persists in the DeFi / yield farming space right now, except with sillier names because the main services have names like Sushi and Pancake

emilsedgh• 5 years ago

When I installed my first Linux (Red Hat 9) I was trying to install Gaim on it. I was trying different methods and I managed to install it by source compilation but not through rpm.

devjam• 5 years ago

Installing software on linux truly sucked before package managers.

Although UN-installing software was possibly even worse!

raffraffraff• 5 years ago

Not just packages managers, but repositories. When I started using Linux, I was still downloading or building RPM files, and manually working out dependencies. The idea that you could suddenly netboot a tiny image and `apt-get install xfce4-desktop` was amazing.

devchix• 5 years ago

Who you calling grandma! :)

Ahh, reading the Makefile to find switches you need or don't; documentation, ain't nobody got time for README, yah I'll take the default switches; also moving where the binary will be installed, sometimes an obscure library will not be in the path, have to find it, oops, wrong version, upgrade lib, oops, breaks backward dependency of something else, revert, put new lib in different place, mod path, make clean ... First time I used yum, I thought, my God, my barbarian life!

Also, kernel patching roll-back! If you put in a kernel patch that broke stuff, go get the LiveCD and make some coffee and call your spouse, you gonna be there a while.

Network booting, that too. I mean, is network booting 10x local boot? I can't say, but you're not going to make a data center filled with tens of thousands of nodes if you can't network boot.

Shorel4• 5 years ago

Good for you, but I personally don't want to read or edit any Perl code again if I can avoid it.

unsignedchar• 5 years ago

Joke's on you for trying to read code in a write-only language!

thraxil4• 5 years ago

I haven't really written any Perl in probably 15 years now and I mostly avoid it if I can. But put yourself in my shoes back in 1996 or so as a student. Didn't own a computer of my own but had access to random computer labs on campus and an account on the university unix box that I could telnet to. My options for programming were to try to get a spot in the one computer lab that had Java and C++ compilers (and carry around a stack of floppy disks with code I was working on). Those were always booked solid and not open at odd hours (I was a Physics major, not necessarily taking a CS class that would grant me priority access). Or, I could find any any Mac or PC in any computer lab, including the 24/7 library ones, telnet in, and write real, useful programs in Perl. The Perl man pages were available right there (and extremely well written), everything was stored on the server, the Perl standard library was pretty comprehensive compared to what was included with most other environments at the time, and my editing environment (pico at first, then vi and emacs as I learned) was consistent no matter what computer I was on. As much as I wouldn't chose Perl for a project in 2021, it was really a game changer for me in 1996 and I'm not even sure if I would've transitioned from Physics to programming if it weren't for Perl.

dkarl2• 5 years ago

- Perl

For me, Python. I knew Perl was the "leet" language and was determined to add its power to my toolkit. I made several (three, I think) weeks-long intensive efforts to master it. Every time, I read the book, read PerlMonks every day, did exercises, and got to the point of writing useful scripts using pretty powerful features. I'd think "I've finally got it!" and would be a Perl programmer for a while, but eventually a few weeks would go by without any need to use Perl, and it would turn to mush in my mind, and I'd have to start over again at the beginning.

One day in 2000 I was yet again failing to do things in Perl that had felt easy six weeks ago, and I thought, "Huh, I think I remember how to do this in that language Python I fiddled with for a few minutes once after reading some blog post." I started typing Python and was very quickly able to get it working.

I didn't really want to write such easy, bland, straightforward code. I wanted to be a wizard who could do amazing things with a few cryptic characters. Writing Python was like doing a magic trick while simultaneously explaining exactly how the trick was done. It reduced my style points to zero. But I liked how easy it was, and Perl kept brutally showing me that I wasn't cut out to be a wizard.

Twenty years later, and Python is still an important part of my toolkit.

thraxil4• 5 years ago

Yeah, I switched to Python in 2002-2003ish when I started noticing that all the interesting new things I was seeing were using it (and I had to do some scientific/graphics stuff where Numpy and PyGame were much nicer than any of the Perl options). I probably haven't written any Perl in 15 years now, but I have to respect it for what it was at the time. When I learned Perl in 1996 or so, I didn't even own a computer; I just had access to a shell account on the university's unix server that I could telnet into from any computer lab. I basically got started by reading manpages. As hard as that was, it was far more accessible to me than figuring out how to get whatever weird C compiler there was on there working or getting a machine in the one computer lab that had a Java IDE installed on the desktops.

The "wizard" aspect was part of what eventually drove me away from Perl as well. I was never really into the whole JAPH/golf thing and I worked hard to write Perl that was well structured and readable, and there were plenty of other Perl programmers like me. But there was also always that part of the community that wanted things to be as obscure and obfuscated as possible and they were very visible. Python's complete rejection of that was really refreshing.

bitwize• 5 years ago

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.

raverbashing• 5 years ago

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

0xbadcafebee• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

jbpnoy6fifty• 5 years ago

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

danielrhodes• 5 years ago

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.

ace2358• 5 years ago

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!

CyanDeparture• 5 years ago

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.

Hjfrf• 5 years ago

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.

stunt• 5 years ago

VIM and VIM key bindings on other software (e.g., Vimium extension for Firefox and Chrome)

kureikain• 5 years ago

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?

bluescrn• 5 years ago

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.

pjc50• 5 years ago

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.

bozzcl• 5 years ago

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.

dejv• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Link to the Ruby on Rails demo for anyone wondering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

banga• 5 years ago

Using a terminal instead of punch cards. That was liberating.

lurker619• 5 years ago

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.

willmacdonald• 5 years ago

Launchbar for Mac from obdev.at. Makes using a mac so much quicker and simpler.

jaxn3• 5 years ago

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.

dpcx2• 5 years ago

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.

jedberg• 5 years ago

Breaking the 640K barrier.

aantix• 5 years ago

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.

meowzero• 5 years ago

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.

tuyguntn• 5 years ago

* Redis and Memcached

* MapReduce

* Column stores

marton_s• 5 years ago

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.

vendiddy• 5 years ago

What makes you feel MacOS is 10x better. I am a Mac convert myself but felt like it was more of an incremental improvement for me. Maybe 1.5x?

poyu• 5 years ago

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.

cadr• 5 years ago

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.

visarga• 5 years ago

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.

rekoros2• 5 years ago

Erlang

spc476• 5 years ago

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

stblack• 5 years ago

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).

andrecp11• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

ddux• 5 years ago

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.

poniko• 5 years ago

Not a single mention of Spotify, the first version was magic, click a song and there were no lag, started to play instant ..

sabas123• 5 years ago

sci-hub

abraxas• 5 years ago

Prisma ORM. It's an ORM done right and makes storing in an RDBMS fun and convenient

diegof792• 5 years ago

* 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.

015a• 5 years ago

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/

jng• 5 years ago

vim - when I started using it around 2004, switching from UltraEdit and Visual Studio. Haven't stopped using it to this day.

nicbou• 5 years ago

1. 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.

2. GOOGLE PHOTOS

No more moving photos around with cables and SD cards. No more tagging anything in Lightroom. I can type "pug" and I'll see every photo of a pug I've taken.

There are no logistics around taking pictures anymore, and it's much better that way.

3. MAPS

Google Maps, but also Open Street Map. Cartography is an incredible blessing, and we take it for granted.

m463• 5 years ago

What I like about docker is that everything comes from one Dockerfile

vincent-manis• 5 years ago

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!

Aperocky3• 5 years ago

Ah, a simpler time that I have not experienced.. since 10.

It's unbelievable how fast technology has progressed. barely 20 year has passed, and while my favorite tool is about my age (vim) the technology that you pioneered has transformed the way of life of everyone on this planet beyond imagination.

Bravo. Salute.

marianov2• 5 years ago

Wireshark. I've saved countless enterprise problems that nobody could debug by intercepting traffic and guessing, or looking at the raw data nobody knew was there.

Python list comprehensions + ipython: it changed how I approach all compley python code. I iterate over the data until I get it right, then use that as the basis of the program/script.

Youtube: I can learn anything now. It's the real world The Matrix

Aperocky3• 5 years ago

Interesting use of wireshark.. I'd assume they'd at least allow you access from at least one end.

marianov2• 5 years ago

last time it was: install tcpdump on java server doing nasty things. save pcap. Analyze with Wireshark, find out the JAVA app was doing insane things against the Oracle DB even after vendo said they had "optimized" database access. Th good thing is the same technique applies to REST apis, sockets, load balancer problems, other databases. You probably can do a better job using each specific stack debug facilities, but a .pcap and wireshark is the swiss army of debugging.

Also: strace for reading what anything in Linux is trying to do when failing.

saalweachter4• 5 years ago

Re: YouTube, the internet as a whole has gotten pretty for "How do I X?" queries.

My favorite anecdote was the time I ripped a hole in the side of my house, then googled "How do I frame a rough opening for a window?" ... and that story turned out fine, with my house having a new window at the end of the day, and not a gaping hole with a tarp tied to it.

inasio2• 5 years ago

Black

Black [0] has been 10x for me. Automatic code formatting frees up a whole bunch of cycles that would otherwise be spent trying to comply with someone else's style guide, or trying to convince someone to write their code in the approved style. I don't have to anymore.

[0] https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

prepend3• 5 years ago

Single quotes are better.

xrd• 5 years ago

Svelte.

It's so much better than React or Vue. It's generally the same ergonomics as a developer, but the speed and simplicity when you push into the browser is revolutionary.

antipaul2• 5 years ago

`dplyr`, the data manipulation library in R.

Some prefer base R or data table, or python pandas, but for me, dplyr is essentially a _perfect_ data manipulation library for small to medium data, and nothing comes close.

Given that for a data scientist, data cleaning is “80% of the work”, and in a world where science is increasingly data science, means that dplyr has done a LOT of good.

Honorable mention goes to ggplot2, the plotting library, and the rest of the tidyverse.

juliend22• 5 years ago

I use OpenRefine for that (I don't use R though). How comparable is it according to you, apart from the fact one is a lib for a language and the other is a GUI?

mtbkrdave• 5 years ago

Amazed not to see markdown listed anywhere (or textile before it)... major step forward when it comes to inline and in-situ documentation!

aszen• 5 years ago

Nixpkgs and the nix build.

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

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

wombatmobile3• 5 years ago

Ctrl-Alt-Del

wombatmobile3• 5 years ago

del.icio.us

aladine• 5 years ago

Emacs: its versatile and easy to configure code editor. If you are fan of Org mode, then you have to use Emacs.

cmrdporcupine• 5 years ago

Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA. Using it since about 2004, it was slow as molasses and unstable for my codebase but it was the first widely available refactoring IDE for a mainstream language, and it rocked and it and its offshoots still rock today. They didn't invent automated refactoring but they made it excellent and accessible in a way that VisualAge and similar tools weren't.

NotPavlovsDog• 5 years ago

Apache and *nix, for some applications LAMP was a game-changer for rapid web solutions for me, back in the day.

Started with FreeBSD for my servers and box, then GNU/Linux on my boxes and laptops, as the hardware support got better on GNU/Linux. Apache, but really the whole stack, what a 10x!

No clicking, no checkboxes, no go to this or that website to download, just run a command or a shell script and pull in software you need, configs, etc ...

Of course I wish we had Lisp machines, but this is what I have to work with. Having *nix, learning it over 30 years ago, and it's still at the core of what I do. So much time saved over the years not re-learning the fads. I shudder to think how much time I would waste on the other platforms and their quirks, planned obsolescence, etc.

Was saved relatively early (enough), an iMac I got as a gift & tried to update to the next OS got fried, was perhaps a bug, some say malevolent design by apple to get consumers to buy new machines. Don't care, done with that platform. Though I did buy an iPad 2 for peanuts, to read on. It's cheap because people can't update it anymore, so there's that.

I suppose I saved about a year of man-hours at this point in life, just using the *nix stack that just keeps on truckin'

& Common Lisp for rapid idea implementation.*

technological• 5 years ago

i know this is unpopular choice but I would say Whatsapp, it completely change the text communication especially in country like India, where from elders to teens were able to use it without any learning curve.

aksss6• 5 years ago

* FaceTime - of course VC has been around a long time, but FT made it all better, usable even for old people, and expected.

* Windows Subsystem for Linux - for what I do with Linux (no GUI, some coding, some admin) it's a 10x improvement over using Gnome/unity as a daily driver GUI, VMs, dual booting, or using a Mac (just IMO).

* Postman - I don't know if it was first, but it made debugging requests 10x easier for me.

knightofmars• 5 years ago

FT was a major leap forward in Video Chat. It completely changed the game.

sehugg• 5 years ago

My first 3DFX Voodoo card.

And maybe jumping from a 286-12 to a 486DX-33.

louiechristie• 5 years ago

Prioritisation

juliend22• 5 years ago

Time Machine on Mac OS + the Time Capsule router.

I admit that it was my first real automated backup setup. But I guess it was also the first for many other people.

And the UI for recovering lost files by scrolling back in "the past" was just like magic.

mavelikara• 5 years ago

- GMail

- Google Suggest

- IntelliJ IDEA

- Ruby on Rails

- TiVO

- iPhone

- Roomba

- Napster

- TurboPascal

honopu• 5 years ago

Ngrok for webhook testing, along with postman. The replay feature in ngrok is amazing.

elihu3• 5 years ago

Moving to Linux from Dos/Windows 3.1 in the 90's. (An OS that's both free and comes with development tools? I don't have to shell out a hundred dollars for Borland Turbo C++? What an exciting time to be alive.)

The Internet / world wide web.

Also in the late 90's I had a summer job at HP and was able to use their cad tools (ME-30 and Solid Designer) which put Autocad, which I was familiar with, to shame. Unfortunately, they were very expensive programs that ran on very expensive computers.

Switching to ML-style functional programming (Ocaml and later Haskell) over C and Perl.

Switching to Wikipedia over the top Google results for a search query as a source of basic information. (These quickly converged to be the same thing.)

elihu3• 5 years ago

Also, one more I forgot: bittorrent. Overnight we went from "oh no, everyone else is overloading the ftp sites, I won't be able to download the new Ubuntu / Mandrake / Whatever for a couple weeks until the demand dies down" to "hooray, everyone is dowloading the same iso file I am, I'll be able to get it quick!"

jrmg• 5 years ago

Interface Builder in particular, and the NextStep/Cocoa (Mac OS X) system generally.

blt• 5 years ago

Github. There are downsides to centralization, but it's still amazing that you can get a hosted and integrated bundle of version control, bug tracking, CI, patch submission, and Q&A (recent) for free.

tau255• 5 years ago

1. Automatic driver installation and device discovery. IIRC Windows Me could install my first flash drive without resorting to fumbling with mini cd drive disc.

2. Steam Proton, most of my library of games just works and it is in easy and convenient format.

3. Norton/Midnight Commander style of file managers.

4. Live CD distributions.

5. Password managers (Keepass)

pfarrell• 5 years ago

Sinatra.

The Ruby framework was a game changer for me to quickly prototype API concepts, experience what the client developer experience would be like, and learn best practices.

guiambros• 5 years ago

Here's my top 10. Each of them was an "oh sh*t" moment.

1. Pong

2. First BBS connection (on a 300bps modem)

3. Mosaic

4. Altavista

5. Napster

6. Gmail

7. Google Maps

8. iPhone 1 (followed by the first homebrew apps, a full year before AppStore launched on iOS)

9. Patreon (ok, this one is not sw related)

10. Bitcoin

Bonus (both sw and hw): Oculus Quest 2. 10x compared to DK2 or other early VR prototypes I tested in the past decade.

exacube• 5 years ago

VS Code's Remote Development. I'm not sure how many folks rely on this, but its been amazing for me.

nospy4312• 5 years ago

While it's amazing, they made the remote extensions proprietary. So projects like VSCodium (which is VSCode minus the telemetry) cannot use it. Very crappy move by Microsoft. I think they are extending that behaviour to other parts of VSCode - I think their python LSP has proprietary bits now.

csa• 5 years ago

I made a basic CRUD app that 10xed the productivity of a group I was working with.

The big differences between my app and other solutions that they had used were:

1. I talked to users not only to get the work flow right, but also to refine it. This also helped with buy in once the app started being used.

2. I made it easy to use for the user base (most were not very tech-savvy).

3. Related to 2, I made it hard for a user to fail.

mokus• 5 years ago

Saleae Logic. Their USB3 “pro” analyzers are fantastic and the software is clean, fast and user-friendly. Using host RAM for capture buffer is great and completely changed my workflow. I can capture hour or days of trace and sift through after a fault occurs.

We have the usual other test equipment from the usual big names, stuff that costs 40x as much. For many jobs, I’d rather have the Saleae.

subpixel• 5 years ago

Friendster was an amazing product for the first year or so. No dark patterns, just sign up, find or invite your friends, and explore their friends in a process that felt quite revolutionary and seriously fun at the time.

gabruu• 5 years ago

surprised no one mentioned Ipod Nano, spotify, and then Iphone (for everything)

vmception3• 5 years ago

Parse.io which I got burned by when Facebook shut it down

but similar services like Firebase are okay, I guess.

for me they were really a jumping off point to doing similar things myself slightly more manually

Misha_B• 5 years ago

Notion. It's the first organization tool that can effectively tie Todo lists, project and time planning, and knowledge management. It's the first Todo system that stuck for me since it allows you to work with higher level goals, scheduling and hierarchy.

marshray• 5 years ago

In chronological order of my experience:

  Interactive terminals (over punch cards)
  PLATO
  Macintosh
  Windows 3.11 (over DOS)
  C++ (over C)
  The Internet (over BBSes)
  Windows 95 (over Windows 3.11)
  The World Wide Web
  Perl (over shell and C)
  Python (over scripting alternatives)
  Rust (over C++)

lowbloodsugar4• 5 years ago

Laptops. Ok, I know thats hardware, but I write software, and they made a 10x difference.

lowbloodsugar4• 5 years ago

Mathematica

Even just using it to simplify equations was worth the asking price.

lowbloodsugar4• 5 years ago

The GNU C/C++ compiler. Working on a game console with a proprietary compiler that let you pick: a) 16 floating point registers and 32 bit pointers or b) 32 floating point registers and 64 bit pointers. And also a shitty solution for a cpu bug. Or, GNU compiler! I'll have all my floating point registers, but 32 bit pointers, oh, and can we handle the bug without just adding a nop every bloody time it might happen? Thanks! It had been around a long time by that point, but it made a 10x difference on our project.

asragab• 5 years ago

SPARK:

At the time there were some motions towards a "better MapReduce," Scalding (ooh weee that had a learning curve) comes to mind, but I feel like Spark really lowered the bar for getting big data tooling and the ecosystem into mid level and pre-ipo orgs.

lowbloodsugar4• 5 years ago

Roon.

Roon is a home audio platform. It plays on all the devices in my house.

The 10x difference is during parties. The iPad with the interface on it gets passed around and people queue up music they like, but also get to read about what is playing. It gets magical when people pipe up "Well, if you like that then try this..."

I don't know why make such a difference compared to an iPad with Apple Music, or Spotify. My guess would be the music reviews, and its "take music seriously" presentation, encourages people to think about the music as more than just background noise? Anyway. Very happy.

astuyvenberg• 5 years ago

Easily AWS

johnwheeler• 5 years ago

Jetbrains products

optimiz3• 5 years ago

Not software but financially, option spreads. The ability to construct risk/reward defined outcomes completely changed the effectiveness of my investing.

These never used to be realistically available to retail trading, but are incredible financial tools if you take the time to understand the mechanics.

vic20forever• 5 years ago

Edit and continue, Visual Basic 3, 1994

After adding a major piece of new functionality to my app, I would step through the new code, fixing each bug as it appeared, and then continue stepping. Being able to produce bug-free code after only one run-through just blew my mind.

georgewsinger• 5 years ago

I literally (as in 30 minutes ago) just fixed a bug in 10 minutes that I thought was going to take me 3 days to fix using https://pernos.co/ (a "timeless" debugging tool that wraps Mozilla's `rr`). This is a factor of speedup on the order of 100x+, not 10x.

I highly recommend checking this tool out if you value your time.

mishraprince• 5 years ago

Didn't see this mentioned, but Wordpress and Drupal have had a huge impact on my early career.

Wouldn't count them as developer tools per se, but as a software provider, I could serve a lot more customers with ease and confidence thanks to hundreds of thousands of man hours put in by the Wordpress and Drupal developers.

Mandatum2• 5 years ago

REST/modern interface specs and DX tooling is probably a 2x over SOAP for me. Not 10x, but the reduction in interface and validation issues has led to a vast improvement in consuming APIs from other organisations.

eitland2• 5 years ago

Maven: not having to hunt dependencies in bookshelves, on file shares, on vendor web sites or sourceforge.

Actual extensions for Firefox (no, not the awful watered-down thing we have to live with today):

Back when Firefox created the extensions API they had two competitions with (I think) rather huge sum of cash as prizes for the three top spots.

The quality and ingenuity of those early extensions were nothing short of astounding IMO.

Later extensions were also brilliant.

(To fully understand just how powerful the early extension API was consider this: Firebug, for all practical concerns the precursor of todays developer consoles, was just another Firefox extension! Same with adblocking! Yes, ad blockers still exist, but only because of that legacy, no way someone would have proposed and gotten away with implementing that if the extension API had been invented today IMO.)

ddulaney• 5 years ago

This is a little further from the beaten path, but Wireshark, especially with custom per-project plugins, is a complete game changer for network application debugging.

p1mrx• 5 years ago

The Microsoft Intellimouse. When I was in school in the '90s, I had to de-gunk mouse rollers almost every time I sat down in a computer lab. A low cost optical mouse for generic surfaces made all that work just evaporate.

(I guess that's not strictly software, since it needs a basic digital camera.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliMouse

TuringNYC• 5 years ago

Stack Overflow x1000

analog312• 5 years ago

I've experienced some 10x jumps, mainly because I tend to wait until something comes along that's 10x before switching. Not that I'm smart, but stubborn.

- Turbo Pascal. My dad knew nothing about computers, but the Wall Street Journal ran an article about TP, and he knew I was interested in programming, so he got me a copy for my birthday. It allowed me to program almost as quickly as BASIC, but with half a chance of my programs working. (Yes, 50% chance was a 10x improvement). Not to mention, a motivation to learn more disciplined programming.

- HyperCard and then Visual Basic. I never had to learn the guts of a modern OS and its API just to write usable software.

- "Scientific" Python stack. The quality and breadth of the language, tools, and libraries is just stunning to me. I looked into Python because it was getting a lot of "buzz" when I first joined HN. Thanks, y'all.

- Arduino and the higher powered microcontrollers that it supports, for making it easy and quick to whip up applications. But even pre-Arduino, a number of 10x improvements came along for me on the hardware / electronics side, starting with microprocessor interfacing in BASIC, EEPROM based microcontrollers, decent C compilers for embedded.

suchsciencewow• 5 years ago

Definitely "find -exec"

RobertRoberts• 5 years ago

- Git

Single handedly let me both reap the benefits of SVN but opened up shared code, and a greatly simplified setup and management.

- Linux (Linux Mint - Ubuntu)

After years of crashing Windows and Mac's, finally getting on Linux was a dream. App installs, native tools (git), server and database support being top-notch, etc... (ie, my desktop environment was the same as my server!)

- VScode

After years of struggling through various editors, I found one that focused heavily on webdev, integrated with Git by default, and was super fast and open source.

- OpenSSH Server (not sure this is the right name)

Having private key shares between computers made accessing remote resources so effortless.

- Ansible

My latest find. This has probably done more than 10x the value invested in learning and setting it up. Managing multiple servers, computers, setting up new environments, migrating between computers, has become FUN because of Ansible. Setting up a fantastic ansible playbook is like a game or satisfying puzzle.

- Macromedia Fireworks

Combined vector and bitmap graphics, had symbols (like shared library resources), non-destructive effects, live editable vector masks, native file format was web accessible PNG. Wiped Photoshop's fanny for doing web and interface design.

juanuys• 5 years ago

Oh man, Macromedia Fireworks was great. Folks made the most beautifully unique websites with it. I wish the app, and those design sensibilities could have survived. The web and app ecosystem today would be less monotonous and more fun to make.

Macromedia made the web a fun place on so many fronts. I really do miss Flash development (and Flash) too.

In an alternative universe we're all just using Macromedia tools and are being very productive and happy.

cromwellian2• 5 years ago

Steve Jobs once said "don't make your users do shit work", or something to that effect. To me, that boils down to three things:

1) managing resources manually, be it memory, storage, organization, etc 2) giving information that the computer already knows 3) waiting

So I count as 10x innovations, things which massively reduce those three:

1) Plug-n-Play, DNS, and all forms of auto-configuration.

2) WiFi, LTE, and Broadband. Seriously, I started on 300bps modems in the 80s, and my first internet access was at 2400baud in the late 80s over dialup. It's hard to remember how long I used to have to wait, for pretty much everything.

3) Web vs "install". Web Surfing created a new stateless paradigm: Always up to date, effortless changing, like TV channel surfing, and as soon as you leave the site, you can forget about it. No "uninstalling", no shit-work created for later cleanup. The Web Cache eliminated the need to INSTALL. Regrettable, Steve Jobs reintroduced this paradigm back, which I think is a huge step backwards. Phone apps should stream in as needed and be cached, and be evicted when space is needed. I should never ever have to visit my phone's storage page and delete stuff.

4) Automatic information organization. Search. Web Search, Gmail bundling/auto-folders/priority/spam detection, Google Photos. Google Photos is the latest example. I take as many photos as I want. I never organize them. I don't make albums. I don't do anything. Peace of mind. My stuff is there. And When I need to find that photo of my daughter with a panda and a yellow raincoat, it finds it.

Don't waste my time with uploading and organizing my photos.

5) Service economy. Uber, Doordash, Amazon. I need something, or I need to get somewhere? It's incredibly easy to get it, and get it quickly, compared to what it was 20 years ago.

6) the iPhone. I was an early adopter of smart phones for years. PalmPhones, Nokia Communicator, iPAQ, etc. It wasn't until the iPhone combined a full-screen touch interface with a REAL Web browser, not XHTML Mobile, or WML, but a REAL browser experience, combined with fast WiFi, that the phone truly turned into a usable mobile experience for me. Sorry, but even expensive Nokia smartphones, and Java Personal Profile, and Wifi-enabled feature phones, or XHTML Mobile on Opera Mobile, couldn't hold a candle to this. The iPhone 2g also had usable YouTube and Google Maps out of the box. It was a quantum leap.

7) The Voodoo1 3DFx. It's hard to describe, but the Voodoo1 + Quakeworld was a tipping point, to me it marks the dividing line in history between gimped, and shitty wannabe 3d accelerators, and the first one that had enough power and capability to run a real time multiplayer first person shooter. (Also, hats off to Carmack's ping compensating netcode)

8) Linux. I started out on BSD (FreeBSD), and before that on IRIX, HPUX, and Solaris at college, but there's no denying that Linux was the inflection point for widespread adoption of Unix everywhere. And that widespread adoption meant anything else you wanted to do was much easier. In the 80s and 90s, whenever I downloaded Unix software, getting it to compiler was an exercise in frustration, patching, Configure scripts, compiler errors from incompatible .h files or libraries on your system, etc

9) Containerization. Enough said.

10) git / hg, github. If you grew up on CVS and SVN, you know why.

I mean, there's lots more, but I would say all of the innovations boil down to reducing or removing cognitive burdens and lost time. If you can do something for me without me having to worry or work on it, and/or wait for it, you might be 10x.

Don't ask me to do stuff. Don't make me learn stuff. Figure out what I need to do, what I want to do, and help me do it, getting what you need by osmosis, or by asking for a minimal amount of information.

oh, and if other people have already done it, making it really easy for me to find and reuse, or to share.

xallace• 5 years ago

I have an 0.1x example, every os is using a file explorer instead of orthodox file manager like "total commander"

ralphc2• 5 years ago

I'll give a shoutout to the Microsoft Foundation Classes and Visual C++. That, along with the documentation was a VASTLY better way to write Windows apps than the previous C code and WM message loops.

hanniabu2• 5 years ago

Ethereum vs Bitcoin

whitepoplar• 5 years ago

1. what.cd

2. auto-update feature on Google Chrome

3. Uber/Lyft

4. ZFS

5. Cheap VMs (R.I.P. Slicehost; DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc.)

6. Ruby on Rails

7. Postgres

8. Spotify

9. 1Password

10. Arq backup

11. Dropbox

12. Wireguard

JanisL• 5 years ago

Distributed version control was such a huge win that I really couldn't imagine not using it now. I think this is a fairly common sentiment.

gilfoyle• 5 years ago

React Native/Expo

Mobile app development used to take a lot of effort with separate builds for iOS/Android and low code reuse. React Native changed the game and made building mobile apps easy and much less expensive.

gorgoiler• 5 years ago

This is really dumb but I was watching my pupils using a REPL yesterday. They didn’t know about readline so I showed them what up, down, ^A and ^E did.

I felt like I had done them a disservice for not sharing this sooner.

Readline is fantastic. I wish even more OS components were standardised (e.g. Firefox tabs and Inkscape dialogs just being windows; let my WM handle the layout.)

nXqd• 5 years ago

Datomic database

supernova87a• 5 years ago

I would love to hear people's thoughts on what hardware saw 10x improvements too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26485925

prenagha• 5 years ago

Safari hooked up with Messages to prefill MFA codes sent via SMS

TrackerFF2• 5 years ago

From a musicians standpoint, the everything today is 10x of what he had just 20 years ago.

If I wanted to record a halfway decent sounding guitar 20 years ago, I had a couple choices:

1. Go to some studio, spend probably at least $1k, get the stems and transfer them to my computer.

2. Purchase recording gear (microphone, preamp, etc.), which would minimum cost around $1k, and on top of that, have a computer and audio interface. Again, $$$.

3. Purchase some early modeller, some audio interface, DAW, etc. Probably $1k just in that.

Simply put, there weren't any really affordable or efficient method, that didn't sound like a$$.

Today, it's a breeze. Free plugins, free DAWs, extremely affordable audio interfaces.

As far as cost, quality, and efficiency goes - everything is 10x of what we had 20 years ago. And almost everything boils down to the software products involved.

still_grokking6• 5 years ago

Could you point to some professional grade plugins or DAWs that are free? Never heard of that.

Also a decent professional grade audio interface is still quite some $$. It's not like $$k like in the past, but you still have to pay a few hundred bucks.

Compared to say 50 years ago everything audio got really cheap, sure. It was in the tens of thousands range, now it's in the "a few thousands" range for semi-professional studio equipment.

Audio is actually one of the remaining software niches where they still call prices in the "a few hundred bucks" range for a end-user license. Other things around got much cheaper much faster.

TrackerFF2• 5 years ago

As far as free options go, there's def. a lot of tweaking to be done, and more than anything, the end result (IMO) rests A LOT on whether or not you use decent cab impulse responses.

Lepou is one option: http://www.grebz.com/simulator_freeamp_poulin_eng.php

As for audio interfaces - there's no free things there, but if you're only interested in recording one or two tracks, like any stringed instrument, any used $50-$100 interface from the past couple of years will do. No, it will not sound like a $xxxx setup, but good enough for recording demos and even amateur records. Obviously depends on the music you're going for, too.

Now, just for the discussion - let's say you own a guitar or bass, and a computer, and you want to record something for as cheap as humanly possible, one setup could be:

instrument -> audio/microphone input on computer using ASIO4ALL -> Reaper or Cakewalk -> Freeware plugins like LePou amp plugins -> IR loader + Free cab IRs -> built-in effects in DAW.

Obviously will not sound like pro quality, but could do the work, if money really is the pressing issue.

(Another option would be "free" plugins via pirating, but that's another discussion...though many pro-grade plugins offer free trial periods, or heavily stripped down plugins)

mackrevinack• 5 years ago

there might be something on this list that interests you: https://github.com/ciconia/awesome-music

reaper is another DAW that is not free but its only 60 or something so its practically nothing compared to others. i used it for 3 or so years without paying and the only drawback is you have to wait 5 seconds for the nag screen at the start to close.

i don't want to sound like im on commission for reaper but i really love how fast it is to open a project and get started (once you have a licence that is), it has no bs logins that need to connect to a server before it will work. its insanely customisable and its also portable so you can run it from a usb drive. you can also have different versions that can run side by side and be set up in different ways with different settings etc. there's really nothing like it!

dmingod6662• 5 years ago

10x is too web 2.0 - we're now on 200x -- get on with the buzzwords if you want to remain in the 200x category.

bcoates• 5 years ago

1. Windows 95, as opposed to Win3.x/DOS. 100% worth the hardware/software compatibility pains for GUI/multitasking/multimedia/PnP that just worked, an amazing thing at the time (and honestly, in retrospect, giving the preposterous unstandardized diversity of PCs & their peripherals and software in that decade)

2. SQLite, vs fopen and hand-parsed files for any random data storage that didn't rate a full blown remote DBMS. Never using sscanf again!

3. NodeJS. Memory Safety, Thread Safety, No Deadlocks, No build system nonsense, credibly scalable I/O concurrency, and only ~an order of magnitude slower than C? Absolutely worth the nightmare syntax and (then) lack of decent libraries. As soon as npm came on the scene (0.6?) Java ceased to have any reason to exist.

4. Uber. It's like a taxi, but the UI doesn't suck, and they tell you when the car is coming, and the car actually arrives, and they'll pick up in areas other than the 30% of the city and 50% of the day and 60% of the population that taxis are willing to cover in LA!

5. Linux network namespaces + associated tools. So many things I used to have to do on dedicated boxes/VMs, or multiple network interfaces, or single-purpose network equipment. Worth it for per-process ovpn tunnels alone, but you can scale it up to crazy elaborate SDN schemes if you need to. Blows away almost every middlebox and hypervisor networking tool.

6. AWS. There were lots of stick-a-host-on-the-internet services before, but nothing like this: software provisionable, software networking, reliable host-to-host and host-to-storage networks, no lead times... There are credible competitors now but it was a gamechanger for anyone working at the servers > fingers > datacenters scale.

7. This one's kind of goofy, but TimeSnapper. It just takes a screenshot of my display. Every 10 seconds. And saves it into a time-and-keyword searchable database. You can't remember exactly how you fixed that thing 5 months ago that's broken again? I can. The best productivity tool you can get for $40 with the possible exception of 1440 post-it notes.

agleason• 5 years ago

I'm just here with my popcorn waiting for the responses on NodeJS

speedgoose2• 5 years ago

You can still have deadlocks in NodeJS, when you play with promises and are not careful.

MichaelMoser123• 5 years ago

a few of my favorite things: shellcheck when dealing with bash scripting; pylint for python scripting; package managers (yum, pip, brew - all of them); valgrind for c/c++ development; intellij for java development; unit testing; stackoverflow, github code search, google + duckduckgo; libgen;

s1mon• 5 years ago

Lots of good ones mentioned so far, but no one got Calendly.

Instead of a dozens of emails and/or texts, phone calls etc. to find a time when someone (not in my organization, so they can’t normally see my calendar) can meet, I just email a link and they pick. It will add call info or zoom links as appropriate. Tons of control over scheduling (synced to all your calendars, or even several people’s; buffers; limits to meetings per day).

Basically it eliminates needing a secretary or recruiter or admin person to arrange meetings.

bdcravens• 5 years ago

ColdFusion - it's derided now, but in the mid-late 90s the productivity gains it gave you over other options was amazing.

radley2• 5 years ago

My list is more digital-creative than hacker:

- Photoshop layers (non-destructive editing)

- Bryce (3D for consumers)

- Flash (easy rich media web apps)

- Flash video (online video explosion)

- Plex (easy digital media collection)

- Traktor DJ Studio (digital DJing)

- Wordpress (self-hosted CMS)

- Pacemaker (auto-DJing app)

euske• 5 years ago

For those who mostly work on terminals, GNU screen/tmux is truly a blessing.

Also, if this isn't considered as cheating, Python. Now I can automate everything without worrying the quirkiness of shell scripts.

My work setup hasn't changed much in the last two decades.

vood• 5 years ago

1. Specifically AWS RDS and Aurora. It is incredible how much time it saved for me in the past 7 years.

2. Resharper from Jetbrains and all IDEs from them. Using something like Eclipse was such a pain and nightmare.

3. Cloud and SaaS as a concept. Everything just became 10x better when moved to SaaS.

kamaal• 5 years ago

Perl.

Before JSON, XML and other standardised data exchange standards became a norm. And Java was still playing the catch up game with libraries. Perl was the the go to tool for achieving over a weekend what projects done in other languages took months to achieve. This was true as early as 2012.

Those days are behind us. But it was some thing like a magical tool back then.

ChicagoDave• 5 years ago

AWS and DynamoDB was a revelation. C# Generics .NET Linq

Imagenuity• 5 years ago

VLC Media Player

It just works. No more dealing with codecs, or having multiple players installed for different media types.

bryananderson• 5 years ago

Firefox! Oh my god, there are tabs! I had never used anything but Internet Explorer. Browsing the web was never, ever the same. 30 minutes in and I didn't know how I'd lived without it.

icsa2• 5 years ago

VisiCalc, Turbo Pascal, WATCOM Compilers, Perl, Mathematica, C++ STL, Memory Mapping APIs, cURL, clang/LLVM

3np• 5 years ago

- terraform. Declarative, centralized, cross-platform configuration. There's no way I'd be able to manage the amount of stuff I am without it (or some comparable alternative like pulumi)

mandaputtra• 5 years ago

VPN servers and client, I don't know how to build one. There are many opensource VPN like wireguard, I just don't understand why this and that. And how do I makesimole VPN, how do they intercept our request etc.

ojciecczas• 5 years ago

Ubiquity plugin for firefox, it treated the web as API, sending the request to forms without opening the webpages first.

rjstreur• 5 years ago

Gotta say, Google's pioneering and Facebook's shamelessness in the personal information harvesting space has been, for me, the single most valuable feature of any website on the internet. If they had been even slightly less brazen, I may never have been convinced to opt out as hard as I have. Removing the most addictive and exploitative sites from my life has cut my time online and improved my quality of life dramatically. Could not recommend more.

tonymet• 5 years ago

  - collaborative docs like google docs, google sheets, quip. 
  - cloud sync like dropbox (also evernote, icloud, google drive)
  - group voice chat
  - open source package management (all of rpm, yum, dpkg, ports, npm , cpan , etc, etc ) – at a high level, run 1 command , get all the deps you need (and a license to use them) to build your software.

sriram_malhar• 5 years ago

1. Hot reloading in Java. I wasn't aware of Erlang at that time.

2. Erlang. It was a 10x boost after doing a whole lot of CORBA/J2EE crap. I was quite late to the party even in the mid-90's.

3. Google search, maps compared to offerings from Altavista, Excite.

4. Turbo Pascal compared to anything else before it. I don't think I have experienced that level of programming pleasure since then.

5. HotJava on the browser. It was sad how Microsoft neutered the whole Java on the browser initiative.

6. Git. So much faster and pain-free compared to SCCS, RCS ..

quickthrower22• 5 years ago

Bitcoin for money you as an individual control and cannot be seized. There is no alternative so it’s infinitely better (altcoins don’t count due to governance or tokenomics issues).

Yenrabbit• 5 years ago

First example that comes to my mind is Jupyter Notebooks with NBDev - a game changer for some kinds of software development. Coding feels way more efficient, even without all the extra gains that come with having tests, documentation website, CI, package management etc built in. (https://github.com/fastai/nbdev)

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

Using the Palm Tx.

It was one of the first small devises that connected to the Internet. I was in Goodguys when it was closing down. They had a highly crooked third party liquidator selling off the merchandise.

I’m not into games, buy saw Halo 3 Collector’s edition for 5 bucks each. There was 500 games for sale.

I took my beloved Palm Tx to the library across town. It had free Wífi up to 9 pm. (No password—just connect.) I got a rough idea what the retail on the game was going for.

I went back and bought all the units. Sold all for $30-50 on eBay, and it felt great. So many mothers emailing me, “I have no idea what you sold my son, but he hasn’t left his room, and loves the game.

I remember thinking I will make a fortune with this devise.

This was just when the internet was getting reliable, most people just had a dumb cell phone.

I blinked, and it seemed like everyone had smart phone.

Anyway, I really liked Palm products. The quality of the hardware was outstanding. The software was just ok, but for the time, I thought great. I once tied a gps to a Palm tx, and took a river trip down the Rogue River. I could tell when the class 4-5 rapids were coming up.

It’s to bad what the company has turned into.

aristofun• 5 years ago

+ Ruby

I never thought programming could be so enjoyable and eloquent.

+ Ruby on Rails

I never thought building web app from scratch could be so quick and fun.

grupthink• 5 years ago

How come everyone is talking about boring software from 10 years ago? Check out Zombo.AI or LightSpace. We are living in the future.

danybittel• 5 years ago

I hope I don't get downvoted for this:

Internet Explorer 4.0

As somebody who wrote web apps back in 2000ish, IE4 was lightyears ahead of Netscape 4. Basically IE4 was close to what we have now, and NS4 (or opera), could barely switch a color with JavaScript. While lot's of the standards were already defined, NS4 would crash constantly (when doing JS). That was at a time when NS4 was the beloved browser and IE4 tried to catch up (remember the lawsuit because they tried to bundle it with windows). Well they also made the much better browser. Enough robust to built the first web apps.

danielscrubs2• 5 years ago

I’d say the little known pricespy. I barely even check product reviews any longer because the popularity ranking will always have the highest score for the best product and the filters are almost always spot on.

Before I’d spend weeks researching things, making my own spreadsheets. Now it’s just a five minute ordeal to find the best gift.

EmoSupportEmu• 5 years ago

+ ZeroTier

+ Homebrew

+ (DIY) Aliases in my shell profile (.bashrc, .zshrc, etc)

sennight• 5 years ago

ZFS, so many problem got solved for me all at once: no more having to spend money on hardware RAID cards, or having them end up being the single point of failure... so having to spend more on RAID cards. zfs-send really streamlines the backup process as well - so it actually happens. It basically made it possible to build an enterprise class SAN that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise afford. So not technically a 10x, more like a 10(x+1).

liuxiaopai• 5 years ago

iPhone in 2007 is 10x better than other "smart phones".

krueger71• 5 years ago

Tab-completion in the shell

aas1957• 5 years ago

Dropping off social media.

jerome-jh• 5 years ago

As SW developer, the 10x improvement for me is having the callstack on a crash, like in Java, Python or C with Valgrind. In combination with memory safety, so many bugs can simply be fixed with only the callstack.

10x is quite much so please excuse if I am a bit conservative.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

Cryptocurrency over banks. Having your own money, in digital form on your own device, was a paradigm shift for me.

lumenwrites• 5 years ago

Going from traditional polygon to zBrush.

Reading books on an iPad.

React.

Discord for any interactive online communication (text/voice/video chat).

whalesalad2• 5 years ago

AirPods are a 10x in terms of my day to day life. I’d say they count.

jhiggins777• 5 years ago

Webflow & Zapier

ArtWomb• 5 years ago

First time I imported data and ran a query in Google Cloud BigQuery ML / AutoML was an absolute, 100x eye opener. An honest to God revolution. So fast, precise and automated. Many talk about "democratizing AI" but there it was. And every time I recommend or demo it, it gets the same stunned reaction.

Terrific list and discussion! I especially like the old school visual debugging tools: firebug, wireshark, physx / nsight, etc. Really brings back the memories and really believe in general having a picture of running processes is 10x more helpful than console output alone ;)

masswerk• 5 years ago

Breaking out of the 80 cols × 25 rows box. WIMP interfaces in general.

gsej• 5 years ago

git - compared with previous source control systems.

dusted• 5 years ago

Firefox when I was still using Internet Explorer, it had tabs, which IE did not, and ran om Linux.

mcjkrw• 5 years ago

Using a tiling window manger over traditional desktop environment. For instance, I use I3. I have it set up with 10 workspaces. w1 is for the browser, w2 is for notepad, w3 is for code editor, w4 is for file manager, w5 - misc stuff, w10 - terminals. I can switch between them immediately with Super+(1-0) - no clunky animations, no waste. It's more convenient to work that way on a single monitor than using 2 monitors.

nt2h9uh238h• 5 years ago

Hire engineers to fix the root cause instead of hiring "employees to do job X". Engineers can automate almost anyone away by fixing the root cause. Lemonade is doing a great job at this.

caffeine• 5 years ago

WhatsApp relative to everything else at the time

benibela6• 5 years ago

Twenty years ago, GUI designers like Visual Basic or Delphi. You drag-and-drop the controls on a form to create a layout, then you compile it instantaneously and had a complete GUI app. Nothing else has come close to that productivity since

icsa2• 5 years ago

+ Compiler Explorer + Jasik Debugger (68000 Macintosh) - One of the best pieces of software that I have ever used. It could still compete today.

runawaybottle• 5 years ago

VLC.

TearsInTheRain• 5 years ago

Although i started a while JQuery was dominant, I have to imagine JQuery was a 10x improvement over vanilla dom manipulation and dealing with cross browser issues.

forgotmypw17• 5 years ago

One of my interests is browser history, so I'll list these. Before I begin, shout-outs to Perl, GNU, Windows 2000, Windows 95, Norton Commander, Windows Commander, Linux, BSD, Digg 1.0, irssi, and, of course, HN.

Mosaic, the original "best viewed with" browser, which brought us inline graphics.

Netscape 3.0, the first "to the masses" browser, which made not only browsing, but authoring too, accessible for anyone and everyone.

Internet Explorer 3.0, not quite 10x, but it was the first browser with a truly beautiful UI/toolbar, still one of the nicest looking ever in my opinion.

Lynx, one of the oldest browsers, allowing Web access to countless individuals otherwise in countless scenarios and situtions.

Opera 3.0, the super fast browser which tried to stick to standards. Along with my own add-on to give it status-colored tabs, this was my first "better than mainstream" browser experience.

Internet Explorer 4.0, the first browser which had true DOM, true dynamic HTML, if you coded carefully.

Netscape 4.0, the fastest browser for a long time, one I stuck with longer than most gave up. Proper caching, and blazing fast rendering of uncomplicated HTML.

Internet Explorer 6.0, with reasonable standards support, DOM, CSS, and embeddability with full DOM access from the parent app, a breakthrough in scraping abilities.

Opera 12.0, even today one of the best standards-supporting rendering engines, fast beyond imagination, fully Acid compliant, stable, and one of the first single-key shortcut supporters.

Mozilla Suite and Firefox 1.0, the best browser of its day, not only fast and flexible, but allowing previously unimaginable UI improvements and enhancements, spurring an era of creativity in development.

Vimium/VimFX, a new level of keyboard accessibility in browsers.

Links, and Links2-GUI, a new level of rendering prowess and accessibility in the console

w3m, the console browser beast for nerds, with even better accessibility (albeit with a learning curve) and customizability.

And, last of not least, the King of hacker-friendly browsing as of today, qutebrowser, a whole new level of stability, accessibility, and clean design, albeit with a week-long learning curve.

sorisos• 5 years ago

ripgrep or silver searcher for searching large code bases.

ingqondo• 5 years ago

ggplot2.

The 10X was not just that it made it easier and faster to make exceptionally beautiful plots. Rather it was that it made me realize for the first time that software was, fundamentally, about an implementation of ideas. That the underlying idea, together with how well it's communicated through the API design and documentation, really matters. Reading Wilkinson's description of the grammar of graphics, and then seeing that translated to a code library... That was amazing. It defined what I think software is, as someone who was new to the world coming from an engineering background where coding was just an easy way to do linear algebra.

sethlivingston• 5 years ago

DOS - high memory and expanded memory. It allowed games (OK, and maybe some productivity apps boooorrrinnggg) to take giant leaps.

wkmeade• 5 years ago

1. Power Query/Pivot Tables/Power Pivot Directly connecting to SQL from Excel for data exploration 10x for me. Personal record is 77,000,000 rows in Excel via Power Pivot. Lining up count vs count distinct on year-week is my go to garbage data detector. Weather data suppliers have an unseemly habit of over as well as under reporting. :-) 2. SYGRAPH, the data visualizer Lee Wilkinson to accompany SYSTAT, before he wrote THE GRAMMAR OF GRAPHICS which we now now as ~ggplot2 3. NT 3.51 - the first vision of what a stable workstation could be 4. SSDs "20 times faster" but non-users can't process the meaning of those 3 perfectly good English words

robalicious• 5 years ago

Webflow - have been using it recently and it is excellent

bobbydreamer• 5 years ago

First 10x would be floppy drives to CD drives. In 99, I used to copy games from internet centres using floppy which is 3.5MB using pkzip to multiple floppies and extract it in MSDos on my windows 3.11 computer and later came the CD drives cd writers with 700MB.

Notepad++ with tabs and keeping the tabs session saved.

c6401• 5 years ago

* jinja2 as general purpose templates * org mode * yaml (sorry but I like it and write it without more errors than the other formats) * docker / docker compose * rss * rofi -dmenu * .http files to keep requests * sentry * ansible * atom hydrogen - the most comfortable programming environment where I can execute my code as I write it, there are other solutions but they are worse for me * spreadsheets * vuejs works as compiled framework, but integrates everywhere - userscripts, jupyter notebook, app prototypes, etc etc

Jraf• 5 years ago

Package manager :

- apt

- maven

- npm

You can't imagine the pain not having them.

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

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