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Ask YC: What's on your "Holy Shit" list?
- juliend2 18y agojQuery. "Modern" MVC frameworks. Regular Expressions.
- yan 18y agoVMWare was on my "holy shit" list when I saw how well they did virtualization
- Alex3917 18y agoThe X-Prize, because of the economic model.
- rudyfink 18y agoThat they funded the prize with an insurance policy was pure genius.
- shabda 18y agoHow did they do this? I cant find any such reference here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize
- pchristensen 18y agoPeter Diamandis talks about it in this Stanford talk (edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2002 ) (not loading right now). Basically, he paid $1m (I think) for a $10m insurance policy. He almost lost it because he couldn't make the payments. The Ansari family stepped in and paid the rest of the policy premium so he named it after them.
- brent 18y agoAren't most (all?) high dollar / low probability prizes paid with insurance?
- mhb 18y agoIsn't insurance just a different name for a high dollar / low probability bet? And, nowadays (e.g.,HMOs), low dollar / high probability bets.
- josefresco 18y agoQuake 2 was pretty tits when I first saw it. Half-Life too. Sub7 was definitely a holy shit moment for me in the late 90's.
- swombat 18y agoRails. "Holy shit, I can build the same stuff that I used to build, except it will take me less time than PHP and be more stable, clean, and maintainable than Java. How the hell did I live without has_many :through before???"
- there 18y agoi didn't find rails all that interesting when i first read about it, but when i saw dhh's screencast of database migrations and rails' console, that was the "holy shit" moment that made me want to start using it.
- dmoney 18y agoWith all the hype, when I finally tried it I was disappointed it didn't iron my shirts for me.
- tptacek 18y agoYou'll probably take shit for that one, but some of us will agree with you --- that screencast was excellent. Not sure has-many-through really prompted the "holy shit", though I appreciate it now.
- swombat 18y agoWho cares, I have karma to burn ;-) And yes, I'm referring more to the overall feeling... It was one of those things, when I first saw it I couldn't believe it was true. I thought, "if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn't true". So I didn't try it for about 8 months. When I did finally try Rails, it turned out I was wrong. It was true, and it is on a different level than what I was used to before (Java and PHP mostly). Quite the shock.
- arthurk 18y agoAlthough Django is my preferred Framework of choice, the first moment I heard about all those MVC Frameworks and what they do was definately a "HOLY SHIT"-moment.
- davidw 18y agoWhen I discovered I could talk to people on IRC on the other side of the world, sometime in 1993, that was a holy shit moment. Linux was pretty incredible too: I realized that with open source, the only thing limiting me was my own ability to hack it, which is a really great feeling.
- froo 18y agoWikipedia - when I first saw the potential for the ability to share and edit knowledge freely in what felt like a limitless way (that is gone now because of the deletionists) HD TV - the first time you get to fully see actors with all their flaws gave me one of those moments, and you realise they don't look as good as they used too. Adsense/Adwords - basically just a license for Google to print money really... Virgin Galactic - wow. Water on Mars - Double wow. The LHC EDIT - hmm, article is from 2002...
- tptacek 18y agoIt's funny --- I am so the exact opposite on HDTV: I have one, I've seen my friends HD pictures, and I've walked past the top of the line with the demo pictures in the store, and I do not get it. Is it possible that I was born without the part of my brain that is supposed to appreciate HD? If so, I feel lucky.
- froo 18y agosee, I suppose the difference is I dont watch TV all that much (1-2 hours a week at most?) so maybe I havent become too used to it.
- sysop073 18y agoThat's how I am, and I feel lucky too. I can watch things that are so low quality other people can't even tell what's going on, and I see no difference
- tptacek 18y agoIt's the same with music, right? 128 AAC sounds fine to me. The CD carriage and solid gold speaker cable set looks at me with pity. I just laugh. Suckers. I knew someone during the bubble who lived in Manhattan, right when Kozmo and Urbanfetch arrived. He found gift certificate hacks in both --- you could order things on Mastercard web certificates (0-balance valid Mastercard numbers) and get issued a $5 transferable gift certificate before the original purchase cleared. He had scripts that would literally generate money for their sites. The Kozmo and Urbanfetch delivery guys would meet every day in the hallway in his apartment, and apparently became friends. Anyhow, one of the things he did with them was have a limitless supply of Godiva chocolates delivered for him and his girlfriend. Eventually, the hack stopped working. Shortly afterwards, his girlfriend bought a package of Hershey's Kisses. "Bleh! Inedible!" He'd always liked them before, but had trained himself to hate them by eating nothing but high-end stuff. Chocolate, sound quality, picture quality --- and absolutely, positively, cars --- all suffer from the Godiva "Paradox". It's better to satisfice than optimize. This is also one of the key observations in The Innovator's Dilemma. Hulu is a bigger disruptor than HDTV is. I'll happily accept crappy picture quality if I can watch anything I want, whenever I want.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- richtaur 18y agoGameBoy. Super Nintendo. Nintendo DS (sorry, I'm a fanboy).
- prakash 18y agoRSS/Atom Google (not suffering from cognitive dissonance) Distributed Web Caching (Akamai) Ruby on Rails Sports on HDTV
- jrsims 18y agoUnix pipes, cron, ssh, VNC and IRC. Oh, and CPAN. A Slashdotter once posted an insightful comment about cron being the 'height of computing': http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=323287&cid=20922121 http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=323287&cid=209... Easy to take cron for granted these days, but I have to say I agree. As for unix pipes, I once explained how one of my shell scripts worked to a longtime Windows programmer and he literally said, "Holy shit!" when the pipes concept clicked.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoTiVo The Commodore 64 Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. Particularly the part where I learned what an RDBMS was.
- nostrademons 18y agoIt's funny, most of the ones people list, I didn't find all that exciting when they came out: * The WWW: "It's so disorganized. I prefer gopher." * Google: "Well, it gives good results, but Yahoo is 'good enough' for me * RSS: "Who reads that many blogs?" (I still believe this, BTW; RSS is a technocrats' technology) * Doom: "Why would I want to play a game where the sole purpose is to blow shit up?" Things that really were on my "holy shit" list: * Modems. "I can login to computers halfway across the world." * VMWare/VirtualPC/SoftPC. "You mean it's like a computer, running inside a computer?" * Napster. "Wow, free music." * Gnutella. "Woah, no server, anywhere." * Processing. "Those are awfully pretty pictures you just whipped up in the last 6 hours." * GMail. "A gig of storage space. And it's searchable. And it has keyboard shortcuts. And it's got this conversation view. Where's my invite code?" * Fanfiction. "Wow, hundreds of thousands of people trying their hand at writing stories." * OLPC. "This'll open up a market of literally half the planet." * Functional programming. "I'll never make a state error again."
- tptacek 18y agoYou didn't have to want to play the game to be startled by Doom. I may be biased, because I was also startled by Wolfenstein (I was in high school when it came out, though). Fanfic though? Really? Fanfic?
- qw 18y agoWhen I discovered that Playboy and Penthouse was FREE in early web days (around 1995 I think)
- aditya 18y agoFunny how nothing has blown his mind since napster! EC2 maybe?
- skmurphy 18y agothe post is from July 5, 2002
- briansmith 18y agoSkype
- tptacek 18y agoThe mbone ruined Skype for me.
- whalliburton 18y agoLisp.
- redline6561 18y agoHey Will, Whatever happened with the startup you were working on?
- pchristensen 18y agoHank Williams (http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com ) mentions KloudShare every now and then.
- whalliburton 18y agoHacking away day and night.
- twism 18y agojavascript
- defunkt 18y agoI can reiterate this. Specifically, "I've been using this language for 5 years and never realized it was a powerful language. Holy shit."
- twism 18y agoYes, and not DOM manipulation. Its the anonymous functions, closures, functional programming, scopes and contexts, etc... pair it with Rhino and the power of "dynamic scopes" and shared scopes and you have multi-threaded programming.
- tptacek 18y agoDoom. Large MP3 libraries. Ricochet. ISDN. Image Analogies. Software radio. Kozmo (bonus points for "WTF"). Hulu. ReplayTV. The first unlink-write4 heap overflow. My first default-free BGP4 router. The ball-and-string model (still makes me smile). Force-directed graph layout. Not: iPod, WWW, VMWare.
- snork 18y agoFelicia Day. mmmm....
- tptacek 18y agoWhat/when is Felicia Day?
- webwright 18y agoTomorrow is Felicia Day! Celebrate! Srsly, tho-- She's the female star from Dr. Horrible and (more obscurely) The Guild (a YouTube-only series about a WoW guild). http://feliciaday.com/ http://feliciaday.com/
- tptacek 18y agoI'm having a "holy shit" moment right now at the thought that there are WoW TV shows. Not sure it's the good kind though.
- arockwell 18y agoIts actually very well done and pretty funny if you are into WoW. I'm not sure if that makes the concept of a WoW TV show more or less scary for you :P
- webwright 18y agoI get downmodded for answering someone's question? Phew, tough crowd.
- webwright 18y agoI am so NOT an Apple fanboy, but I gotta say "iPhone". Everytime I pick up any Smartphone, I'm reminded what a game-changer it is. Add a keyboard and stop the crashes, and it's perfect. ;-) TiVO is up there for me too.
- streblo 18y agoNetBus Quake OpenGL Multiple Monitors
- natch 18y agoVMware snapshots. Before multiple snapshots, I didn't get the value of VMware. AWS S3 AWS EC2 Yahoo Music subscription service, back when it 1) existed and 2) ran on an OS I had (W2k). Moose xmavisx on wretch.cc
- brianmckenzie 18y agoMosaic. Since the first day I saw it, I haven't gone as much as a week without writing a computer program.
- antialias02 18y ago* Blogs: The fact that anyone could and would keep a journal online for the world to see was so exhibitionist that I could barely comprehend it. * Rails: Making web development so easy it hurts. * Valve Software's 'Steam': Digital distribution done right. * Microsoft Photosynth: Pure coolness. This is what the future should be like.
- sosueme 18y agoBright flash of light outside and a Nuclear Mushroom blowing up just behind the horizon.
- qqq 18y agoThe Fabric of Reality The Fountainhead The Myth of the Framework The Skeptical Environmentalist The Machinery of Freedom etc Ideas are what impresses me most.
- talboito 18y agoIf that's your reading list, you must often be disappointed.
- qqq 18y agohttp://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- tungstenfurnace 18y agoYes -- having a great list, it's hard to find worthy new material.
- jmatt 18y agoApparently this list will date me. It's in approximate chronological order. - Atari - At a friends house! Stunning. - Commodore 64 - LOAD "*",8,1 - 600 baud modem - CONNECT 2400 - BBSes and text based games! - email / fidonet - A huge change to the BBS scene. - telnet - Users could connect anywhere without long distance. - Mosaic - Doom ][ - IPX online play or modem-modem 2 person play. - Hubble Space Telescope - After it was fixed! - Lisp & Scheme - Atleast my understanding of it was huge. - Godel's incompleteness theorems - Understand and you'll never look at math the same way. - Wii - Finally a successful iteration of this user interface great idea.
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoLOAD "*",8,1 A buck to anybody who can remember what the parameters meant
- jmatt 18y agoFrom memory: * -> last program you ran 8 -> the floppy disk. I vaguely remember using different devices with different numbers. 1 -> it's compiled - not BASIC. After a quick Wikipedia stint I found a better definition: In the following example, where ' * ' designates the last program loaded, or the first program on the disk, '8' is the disk drive device number, and the '1' signifies that the file is to be loaded not to the standard memory address, but to the address where its program header tells it to go—the address it was saved from. This usually signifies a machine language program, as opposed to a BASIC program. LOAD "*",8,1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_peripherals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_peripherals
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoGreat wiki link! What a walk down memory lane. The dollar is yours, email if you want it.
- jraines 18y agoIn chronological order in my own life: * Satellite TV * The WWW * PASCAL -- just because it was the first programming lang I learned * Doom * ICQ / Instant messaging * Napster * Cell phones * Broadband * Scheme * GPS Navigation / Google maps * Yahoo! Pipes / mashups * Ruby on Rails
- davi 18y agoIn reverse chronological order: * Looking at 200,000 x 200,000 pixel images of cortex, where each pixel samples 3.75 nm square (you see the wires and the solder) * Sparsely expressing green fluorescent protein in pyramidal neurons of the hippocampus in a compound microscope * Drosophila larva wriggling around under epifluorescent illumination, expressing green fluorescent protein in all its neurons * Dictyostelium aggregation * When, teaching myself how to program in Pascal on my Dad's Fat Mac, I wrote a program that drew circles of increasing radius centered on the mouse * Thinking about how all we are is particles * Looking at redwood trees for the first time, in person
- whacked_new 18y agoNobody thinks iPhone? I only used them at experience stores, but when I first did I felt stricken by lightning. I think, holy shit, this will be the first un-Japanese interface phone to become a hit in Japan.
- noonespecial 18y agoThe genetic algorithm. It programs itself?! Holy Shit!
- rms 18y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension
- halo 18y agoI very rarely get a "Holy Shit" feeling. I get "Oh, that's clever" or "that's neat" quite a lot though. I think perhaps the fact I'm young so take things for granted and the fact nowadays I see everything as it appears on the internet makes everything seem more like a progression rather than shocking. I do remember visiting Google Suggest and later Google Maps and being very impressed and knowing it would change the web - until that point JavaScript has largely been seen as a toy. Gmail also really changed the landscape when it came out too. The first time I used Opera's tabs in 2000 wasn't "holy shit" as much as a "well, that makes perfect sense" moment which are even rarer.
- sherl0ck 18y agofor me it's a nintendo, look one of those on my friends home, holy shit, the graphics is cool, the music is much more cool than my atari
- while 18y agoCouchdb. Easily scalable, understandable data storage using JSON and REST, built in Map/Reduce, open source, built in replication and doc revision, and it's not SQL!
- kaens 18y agoScreen, in addition to a lot of the other stuff already mentioned here. Recently, CherryPy.
- KevBurnsJr 18y ago- Number Munchers - Prodigy - Wolfenstein 3D - Grandpa's Flight Simulator
- aschobel 18y ago* USRobotics 16.8K HST connect sound, damn that was fast. Oh, and ATS11=40&W rox * Kings Quest 4 install, 10 mb seemed insane at the time * Google Guice, dependency injection rocks * Writing my first program in TP7 * Win 3.0 DOS Box, multitasking is cool. Never had DESQview
- tyler 18y agoQBasic. I got a BASIC programming book from the library when I was 11... despite not knowingly having anything to program BASIC in. Poking around in my MSDOS system files I saw this mysterious program "qbasic". Holy crap! It was there all along and I didn't know about it...
- pistoriusp 18y ago* git * jQuery * Python's decorators
- Herring 18y agoQQ. An entire fucking new world out there! -- and they LIKE flashy gifs!!
- thwarted 18y agoI carried around the Google sawzall whitepaper, printed out, in my bag for a month.
- tlrobinson 18y ago* Google (search, then maps) * iPod and iPhone * Programming
- csl 18y agoCloud computing, when I first learned about the AWS.
- bayes 18y agoBetting exchanges. "You mean I can bet on sporting events, and the people providing the infrastructure are don't mind me winning (because they get paid commission anyway)? And the commission is on my net winnings per market, so the transaction costs don't depend on how many bets I make? And I can name my own bid and offer prices, like on a stock exchange? And I can automatically place hundreds of bets per hour through a well-defined (and free) API? And all my winnings are tax free (under UK tax law)? Cool.
- 1gor 18y agoRuby ".map" with a closure, chained. Suddenly I could do tons of text/data manipulation, all with a single line of code.
- pavelludiq 18y agoThe first few months after i started learning python can be described as "The Holly Shit Trimester" Also when i learned that you can use paint to draw stuff(i was 8)