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.
"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???"
i 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.
You'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.
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).
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.
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))
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
> [...] 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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
Yeah. Functional programming. I "understood" it for a good while before, rather suddenly, something clicked and I realized what the big deal was all about.
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.
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.
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
* 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.
94 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadSub7 was definitely a holy shit moment for me in the late 90's.
"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???"
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.
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))
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
Google (not suffering from cognitive dissonance)
Distributed Web Caching (Akamai)
Ruby on Rails
Sports on HDTV
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...
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.
The Commodore 64
Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. Particularly the part where I learned what an RDBMS was.
* 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."
Fanfic though? Really? Fanfic?
"Me too" - I remember that every time I think about trying to predict the future.
Whatever happened with the startup you were working on?
Not: iPod, WWW, VMWare.
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/
Add a keyboard and stop the crashes, and it's perfect. ;-)
TiVO is up there for me too.
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