11 ms·

+ 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

• account42 6y 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.
• narrator 6y 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.
  • dragonwriter 6y 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.)
    • jaxn 6y ago
      And Matt's Script Archive was mid-90s.
    • wnissen 6y ago
      I know what you're saying but the discoverability of such tools, especially on DOS, was poor. Everyone I knew was buying compilers or, ahem, downloading them from other than authorized sources. It was unreal when I was able to buy a RedHat CD-ROM for a few bucks (from Tucows?) and get access to a full tool suite. You couldn't get huge software packages over 56K modems from BBSes.
    • narrator 6y ago
      I did not have access to a unix machine, the internet or the GNU toolchain in the early 90s. I was coding on macs and DOS PCs using Borland compilers and Think C on the Mac.
  • benibela 6y ago
    I do that, because I use a not popular enough programming language.
  • hondo77 6y ago
    Let me introduce you to comp.sources.unix: https://www.krsaborio.net/unix-source-code/research/1987/0810.html https://www.krsaborio.net/unix-source-code/research/1987/081...
• davio 6y 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.
  • csteubs 6y 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 :^)
    • Hammershaft 6y ago
      Interesting concept, but my gut says it could lead to some malicious use cases.
      • csteubs 6y ago
        You're spot on, and that's something I think about daily. Satellite-based incumbents have an average revisit rate (assuming good weather) of roughly 2x/day, so hundreds or thousands of passes/day poses serious privacy and operational risk. We rely on guidance from EthicalGEO and other consumer privacy orgs when drafting standards, but the path to the type of hyper-revisit we're envisioning will need to be tread very cautiously.
        • wombatmobile 6y ago
          How might this work? Could you give example of privacy heuristics you are considering?
          • 6y ago
• anderspitman 6y 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 6y 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 :/
  • flemhans 6y ago
    For me, Google Maps got slow some 5 years back.
• murph-almighty 6y ago
  I cannot imagine a period of time where the STL didn't exist, which perhaps outs me as a younger dev
  • robotresearcher 6y ago
    There was arguably a worse period than non-existence, which was when it existed but didn't work very well.
  • Sohcahtoa82 6y 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.
    • jschwartzi 6y ago
      We had to write our own Scanner class in our Java classes because the version of Java we were using didn't have that functionality yet. It came out in the middle of the course.
  • CodeGlitch 6y ago
    Many video games still don't use the STL due to performance concerns.
    • rurban 6y ago
      They rather use the proper C counterpart, the CTL, written by a game dev. Nobody should ever use set and unordered_map, and many despise string. btree and the various open hashtables are 10x better than the STL parts, (fuck pointer and iter stability), string only recently got improved via string_view.
• aynsof 6y 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 6y 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.
    • Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      > Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest. They'll still use Chrome or Edge/IE, but will use NordVPN or ExpressVPN after seeing their favorite YouTuber claim that the VPN protects their data and gives them privacy... ...while still not using an ad blocker, which makes the VPN almost entirely worthless from a privacy perspective. At most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're doing.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        > At most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're doing. In fairness, that is a nontrivial privacy win for a decent number of people.
      • weird-eye-issue 6y ago
        That's not totally fair. They also hide your IP from sites you access. So if somebody sent me a link to an IP logger and I clicked it, they would not know what city or state I actually live in, for example.
• vram22 6y 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 6y 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.
    • thirdusername 6y ago
      It was so light weight that when they did user tests, the user didn’t start typing. They just waited there waiting for the rest to load. So they added the copyright notice in the footer. According to Marissa Mayer Copyright never has to be declared, and I think in many ways Google is responsible for websites having copyright in footers not realising it’s not a legal requirement.
    • vram22 6y ago
      Ha ha, yes. So streamlined.
• datavirtue 6y ago
  Using google search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the search results were than in 2021
  • speedgoose 6y ago
    To their defense, SEO was not as developed. The average website was not a scam like today.
    • romanhn 6y ago
      The SEO was there, just optimizing for different things from what Google cared about. Remember pages of keywords with the same color as the background?
• Psychlist 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
    • Psychlist 6y ago
      > Freezing and archiving the VMs used to build a particular release is also a pretty nice trick. An essential trick if you have long-lasting products. I've been able to (and asked to!) make fixes in ~2015 to code that was written in Turbo Pascal 6. With firmware for embedded devices it's more necessary and often also harder, because often the hardware to flash the firmware doesn't work with new computers. Or you end up with a chain of USB-Serial adapter to serial-to-weird adapter to "programmer board" to actual device... but I knew that when I carefully packed everything into an antistatic bag 10 years ago :)
• jarek83 6y ago
  Funny how Google went from user's hero to zero.
  • crazygringo 6y 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.
    • still_grokking 6y ago
      Google is gas-lighting people into using Chrome… Ever used for example YouTube with an alternative browser? It's buggy, it's slow (and that's on purpose; Google puts regularly quite some engineering effort into using web features that don't work well in the last independent competing browser). But those Google pages have a big banner saying it will work better in Chrome, and asking the users to "try". That strategy works very efficiently as Google controls the sites most average people use the whole time. That's one of the reasons why Google's monopolies need to be broken by regulation. Actually they're over-due for a break-up.
      • bmn__ 6y ago
        > [Youtube is] buggy, it's slow (and that's on purpose; Google puts regularly quite some engineering effort into using web features that don't work well in the last independent competing browser). https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/disable-polymer-youtube/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/disable-polymer-you... Yes, it's a work-around, not a long-term solution and does not help with the underlying problem. Spread the word and enjoy it while it lasts.
      • drstewart 6y ago
        That's not what gaslighting means.
      • brokenmachine 6y ago
        I don't mind using Youtube on Firefox over here, and I don't find it slow. With adblocker I have nothing to complain about.
• shakezula 6y 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.