Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
Peter Thiel has written about the "10x rule" for startups, where your innovation has to be 10 times better than the second best option [1].
Have you personally experienced such 10x improvements in your own interactions with software? What were they?
[1] - https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2015/07/13/the-10x-rule-for-great-startup-ideas/
817 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] thread1. Ride hailing apps like Uber, Lyft
2. 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.
(Thiel actually quantifies it in the examples he offers in the original text, if I remember correctly)
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-...
`clang-format` saves a non-trivial chunk of time during code reviews, eliding a very banal topic.
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.
- fibre
- email
- Smartphones
- gpus
- starlink will be one
More personal:
- language servers/linters
- Package Management
- a mouse
- dictation
- Multi-Core CPUs which enabled switching between applications pretty much instantly.
- Solid State Storage
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] http://objective.st/Publications/
[1]: https://github.com/kalessil/phpinspectionsea
Heck, it'd be great if clipboard history was baked into the OS.
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.
The first thing I turn off when I get a new TV is motion smoothing. The second thing is HDR.
When the entire screen can be pitch black, and a single pixel can be fully lit up, that's when HDR really shines.
All of the LED/LCD HDR solutions look like shit, in my opinion. Even the screens touting a hundred different lighting zones. Nothing compares to OLED.
Being able to have TRUE blacks with no light bleed anywhere is amazing. Yeah, you've got TVs with a hundred zones as you said, but that just means you get blocks of grey when there's something on top of true black. Depending on the scene, that compromise can look even worse than just allowing all the black to be grey from the backlight.
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.
For those who don't remember: That was around the time when Yahoo offered 6MB, some others only 2MB.
They say 2 MB Hotmail, 4 MB Yahoo. Gmail went straight to a gigabyte.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070708004553/http://richard.jon...
http://libgmail.sourceforge.net
https://pramode.net/articles/lfy/fuse/pramode.html/
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.
Looking at my password manager I've got ~260 logins right now and keep in mind that I don't do social media and try to avoid creating accounts as much as possible (and delete the ones I don't use for a long time), so the average user is likely to have a lot more accounts.
Even if each one of these companies only spammed once a week (most will do more frequently if you let them), that'll already significantly outnumber the amount of legitimate e-mail I receive.
I've never cared for invite only stuff, but Gmail really was a total revolution when it came out.
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.
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.
No.
Gmail did not suck badly enough to be merely 10× better than Hotmail.
Gmail was lightyears beyond other early free webmail services.
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.
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.
Email before always looked like how Twitter threads do today.
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.)
The response was:
Although some may argue that SORBS is a bad system, anyway.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.
Very, very influential reading back in the day, and still interesting.
Then Google dropped their MapReduce paper: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Which quite literally paved the way for modern data processing, and works extremely well with the Google Filesystem architecture
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.
I don't even speak italian!
Someone will have the idea and sign up for 5-6 things all in one burst, which usually inspires my outreach.
That's still true for gmail, but the time is more reasonable at two years.
Best April Fools joke ever.
oddmail was bought by yahoo
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.
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.
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.
In Australia, a taxi usually costs between 1.6ish - 2.3ish times as much as an uber or didi.
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.
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.
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.
Yes we also have cross compiling in C/C++ but the extra tooling that cargo/rustup provide make the 10x difference.
Having one place with documentation for every library is just amazing. Cargo as standard layout for all projects is such a force multiplier.
Prior to this everything was based out of tech manuals, now I can find good information fast, and memorize pointless trivia far less.
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.
Thinking of when "Paste with style" became the default. :P
Option+Shift+Command+V to paste text without any formatting.
https://superuser.com/a/512502
That level of VM to host integration is though 10x innovation.
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.
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).
There is now a lot of opensource ones, usually not so fancy on the visual side. Elastic APM, Pinpoint and so on.
- Wolt (vs. Lieferando, Germany)
- Hey (vs. Gmail, Fastmail)