
Ask YC: What's on your "Holy Shit" list? - jdale27
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2002/07/05/your_holy_shit_list.html
======
nostrademons
It'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
You 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?

~~~
icey
I think you underestimate the power of James T. Kirk in a fursuit.

~~~
mroman
or in drag :O

~~~
mroman
Here I thought this was genuinely humorous

------
jrsims
Unix 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=209...](http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=323287&cid=20922121)

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.

------
qw
When I discovered that Playboy and Penthouse was _FREE_ in early web days
(around 1995 I think)

------
yan
VMWare was on my "holy shit" list when I saw how well they did virtualization

------
davidw
When 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.

------
swombat
Rails.

"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???"

~~~
arthurk
Although 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.

~~~
whatusername
I'd heard about them for a while before actually getting in there and using
them. The first time I setup the django admin site was definately a "HOLY
SHIT" moment...

Others: * Google Sketchup (This was only last week --> It's so simple!) * VM
Snapshots * ITunes library/playlist structure (Don't laugh... The unified
library showing every song was a revelation after mucking around with winamp
playlists and folders.. Also - I remember winamp really sucking on the mac at
the time) * HTML - "You mean I can publish stuff on the Internet and people
can read it from across the world?" (I was about 11 at the time ('95))

------
jmatt
Apparently 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
LOAD "*",8,1

A buck to anybody who can remember what the parameters meant

~~~
jmatt
From 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>

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Great wiki link! What a walk down memory lane.

The dollar is yours, email if you want it.

------
brianmckenzie
Mosaic. Since the first day I saw it, I haven't gone as much as a week without
writing a computer program.

------
webwright
I 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.

------
josefresco
Quake 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.

------
bayes
Betting 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.

------
sosueme
Bright flash of light outside and a Nuclear Mushroom blowing up just behind
the horizon.

------
natch
VMware 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

------
Alex3917
The X-Prize, because of the economic model.

~~~
rudyfink
That they funded the prize with an insurance policy was pure genius.

~~~
shabda
How did they do this? I cant find any such reference here,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize>

~~~
pchristensen
Peter 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.

------
halo
I 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.

------
whacked_new
Nobody 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.

------
davi
In 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

------
pistoriusp
* git * jQuery * Python's decorators

------
froo
Wikipedia - 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
It'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.

~~~
sysop073
That'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
It'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.

~~~
evgen
> [...] He'd always liked them before, but had trained himself to hate them by
> eating nothing but high-end stuff.

He did not train himself to hate the low-quality product, he came to
understand the difference between a high-quality product and a low-quality
product. The same effect could have been discovered by tasting the two side-
by-side. In a similar fashion, if you were to put an HDTV and a standard TV
side by side in your living room for a while you would find yourself not
watching the standard TV after a while.

Exposure to a superior product does that to you...

~~~
tptacek
So, I see the logic of what you're saying, but the simple fact was, he was
happy with the low-quality product. Very happy. They were Hershey's Kisses!
But after 6 months of nothing but Godiva, he couldn't enjoy them anymore.
Presumably, he now has to pay a Godiva premium to get the same level of
happiness out his chocolate purchases.

~~~
stcredzero
I recommend See's. They are cheaper than Godiva, but just as good. Consumer
Reports did taste tests that corroborate this a few years back. In regards to
the freshness of certain ingredients, like nuts, they rated them superior.
Godiva charges a premium and puts some of that into fancy boxes and marketing.

I used to be quite happy programming in C. Now, I find I am quite spoiled by
the absolute dynamic power, full closures, magical seeming debugger, and
everything is an Object environment I have in Smalltalk. I get paid more, but
I also "pay" a premium in terms of fewer choices in places of employment.

Maybe there is some wisdom in choosing just not to know. But there is
something in me that just wants to know no matter what. Even if I would've
been happier otherwise.

------
antialias02
* 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.

------
tptacek
Doom. 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.

------
tyler
QBasic.

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...

------
mechanical_fish
TiVo

The Commodore 64

 _Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing_. Particularly the part where I
learned what an RDBMS was.

------
aschobel
* 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

------
whalliburton
Lisp.

~~~
redline6561
Hey Will,

Whatever happened with the startup you were working on?

~~~
pchristensen
Hank Williams (<http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com> ) mentions KloudShare every
now and then.

------
briansmith
Skype

~~~
tptacek
The mbone ruined Skype for me.

------
jraines
In 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

------
while
Couchdb. 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!

------
pavelludiq
The 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)

------
1gor
Ruby ".map" with a closure, chained. Suddenly I could do tons of text/data
manipulation, all with a single line of code.

------
rms
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension>

------
KevBurnsJr

      - Number Munchers
      - Prodigy
      - Wolfenstein 3D 
      - Grandpa's Flight Simulator

------
thwarted
I carried around the Google sawzall whitepaper, printed out, in my bag for a
month.

------
Herring
QQ. An entire fucking new world out there! -- and they LIKE flashy gifs!!

------
kaens
Screen, in addition to a lot of the other stuff already mentioned here.

Recently, CherryPy.

------
aditya
Funny how nothing has blown his mind since napster! EC2 maybe?

~~~
skmurphy
the post is from July 5, 2002

------
richtaur
GameBoy. Super Nintendo. Nintendo DS (sorry, I'm a fanboy).

------
csl
Cloud computing, when I first learned about the AWS.

------
streblo
_NetBus_ Quake _OpenGL_ Multiple Monitors

------
sherl0ck
for 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

------
prakash
RSS/Atom

Google (not suffering from cognitive dissonance)

Distributed Web Caching (Akamai)

Ruby on Rails

Sports on HDTV

------
noonespecial
The genetic algorithm.

It programs _itself_?! Holy Shit!

------
twism
javascript

~~~
defunkt
I can reiterate this. Specifically, "I've been using this language for 5 years
and never realized it was a powerful language. Holy shit."

~~~
twism
Yes, 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.

------
tlrobinson
* Google (search, then maps)

* iPod and iPhone

* Programming

------
snork
Felicia Day. mmmm....

~~~
tptacek
What/when is Felicia Day?

~~~
webwright
Tomorrow 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/>

~~~
tptacek
I'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
Its 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

------
juliend2
jQuery. "Modern" MVC frameworks. Regular Expressions.

------
qqq

      The 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
If that's your reading list, you must often be disappointed.

~~~
tungstenfurnace
Yes -- having a great list, it's hard to find worthy new material.

