The Aha Moments That Made Y Combinator Possible • Hacker News Board

Re: The Aha Moments That Made Y Combinator Possible

#41

Post by nwenzel » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 4:52 AM UTC

jpau wrote: post #40

ph0rque wrote: post #19

Over the years, evolving in its own way, Y Combinator has continued to grow at an astounding rate. It is valued now at $13.7 billion, with the clear potential for further growth. Ignoring the mistake of valuing YC at $13.7B instead of its companies, here's a crazy idea: I wonder when we'll see YC go for an IPO?

For me, it wouldn't make sense taking YC itself public. I can't see much of an upside to the partners for taking the company public. Please, correct me if you see otherwise. What would be fantastic though, is for YC to incorporate their holding of each individual year (older than, say, 3 years) into a fund, and then take those public (and continue to do so). An annual YC ETF. PG, has an annual YC ETF crossed your min…

WeFunder has something like that. You can invest one lump sum in a group of YC companies.

Re: The Aha Moments That Made Y Combinator Possible

#42

Post by sashagim » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 6:33 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #34

robmcm1982 wrote: post #25

I am disappointed by this article. It made such a big deal about PG hating to work with Windows, and reduced the innovation of web applications to a way to not work in Windows. Really? Clearly the whole point was to get away from developing desktop applications, and realizing the single-source, rapid development nature of web apps. Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doi…

Have you ever worked with MFC or Win32 GUI API proper? I have, and I can't imagine anyone who'd want to go back to those days.

Well, actually I used to develop UI intensive MFC applications for quite some years, and absolutely loved it! Not that different from developing for Android, and as I remember it the Visual Studio was (may be still is? haven't used it for years) a far better development environment back then than the Android Studio is today. But may be I just remember being 10 years younger :) Disclaimer - I'm still a Windows user.

Re: The Aha Moments That Made Y Combinator Possible

#43

Post by loumf » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 3:44 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #27

robmcm1982 wrote: post #25

I am disappointed by this article. It made such a big deal about PG hating to work with Windows, and reduced the innovation of web applications to a way to not work in Windows. Really? Clearly the whole point was to get away from developing desktop applications, and realizing the single-source, rapid development nature of web apps. Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doi…

> Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doing it on Linux. - Many Windows-only concepts (registry) hold key configuration data. - Lack of a proper command line environment (somewhat covered by Cygwin, but not ideal). PowerShell is interesting, but, again, is very alien to non-Windows tools. - No select-middle-click copy/paste (it's an incredible time-saver). - Limited numb…

In 1995 it would have made no sense to develop a commercial desktop app for anything other than Windows.

If you didn't make Windows apps at the time, it probably seemed really complicated. It really wasn't. Most of the issues were with C/C++, and the complexity that brings. VB and Delphi were decent alternatives -- there were some 4G languages that worked ok as well.

Making viaweb a web-app instead is obvious in retrospect. But not because making Windows apps is so hard -- it's the deployment that the web brings, not the ease of development. In 1995, there was no super-easy way to make web-apps -- PG and RTM had to invent that too.

Re: The Aha Moments That Made Y Combinator Possible

#44

Post by the_watcher » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 3:28 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #30

robmcm1982 wrote: post #25

I am disappointed by this article. It made such a big deal about PG hating to work with Windows, and reduced the innovation of web applications to a way to not work in Windows. Really? Clearly the whole point was to get away from developing desktop applications, and realizing the single-source, rapid development nature of web apps. Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doi…

Actually it was no exaggeration.

I'm curious, does anyone use Unix for day to day use anymore? Or have Linux, OS X, and other Unix-like systems taken over the hacker preference?

Re: The Aha Moments That Made Y Combinator Possible

#45

Post by binarycrusader » Fri, Nov 01, 2013, 3:23 PM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #44

pg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it was no exaggeration.

I'm curious, does anyone use Unix for day to day use anymore? Or have Linux, OS X, and other Unix-like systems taken over the hacker preference?

Actually, OS X 10.9 was certified as UNIX by the OpenGroup (as were earlier versions such as OS X 10.6):

  http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3602.htm