subfay
The communication about his leaving though, was subpar (to use a polite wording) and seems just off. No strong appreciation/thanks for his time neither from YC's LPs nor Graham. Also his next challenge sounds not like something significant, rather like a rushed filler.
So, this feels like an overnight decision from whomever and doesn't leave a good taste on YC either. That's just not the way to say goodbye (after five years of being together).
However and again: this happens everyday but Sam should have had a communication pro on his side framing the situation properly.
Sam, I wish you all the best and hope to hear from you soon again!
In their Slack channel they orchestrate organized upvotes of such post like this one, they collectively downvote people like the parent and post fanboism through several accounts.
Elixir is a solution without a problem.
besides, writing a n64 emulator, yes! fixing a decades old Sun, Xerox or VT terminal, yes! emulating old 8bit cpus in JS yes!
but who wants to understand/explore a floppy drive?? no offense, curious what's so interesting about floppy drives compared to typical retro tech stuff I mentioned above?
Good advices: React (but check also Vue if you don't like JSX), CRA is awesome, all batteries incl with a great dev experience
finally check Docker, and check css in js solutions like Tachyons paired with React which is amazing and changed entire workflows
re typescript: there are a lot of different opinions. if you are in a big team and code maintenance is crucial then you need TS if you are solo, it might slow you down despite vs code's ide support (while TS is good it also takes a lot of JS' dynamic nature which lets devs prototype fast)
as a rule of thumb, don't invest time in stagnating or decling stacks, not that they are bad but it makes a difference if the current frontrunner can choose between 30 frontend cutting edge libs like React or just 2. Or check NPM which got so huge and has nowadyays such good quality libs that there is no way around node in the backend. Everything is there and relevant stuff is actively maintained.
Edit: Just saw in another comment that the website has problems for 2h. How can a submission from a for 2h down server be on number one at HN?
Why the downvote, I made a valid point, just reply and tell what I got wrong.
Why should anyone test a format which is used by just two browsers with a very small market share and which will be never adopted by the company with the biggest market share (because Google has WebP). JPEG-XR is DOA and nobody should care and waste time on this (except the OP gone astray).
I like that there is a tl;dr right at the beginning though.
Aligning all logos on eg a client list re color and hue is normal and tolerated.
What you should not do is to mod learned GUI elements like sign-in buttons, eg FB Connect.
Just finding a SVG logo is not that hard. Wikimedia has them all and you find them with Google when searching for '<something> logo svg'.
The things I pointed out in my first post are not that off.
But I don't want to discuss these ridiculous cruises further, I find this topic and the article, yes I have to admit, super boring and on something like HN so off-topic. We all know why this cruise article was posted here (read on).
Re HN and depression, suicide and related topics. Just check HN's search and you will see what I mean. Compared to any other forum HN has a quite large share of such posts. This annoys me, HN is full of great people, great topics, content at the cutting edge. This stuff is not why I drop by. Hence my aggression against this article posted here.
Btw, till now I got four downvotes for my second comment in it has not been flagged yet. This is why I assumed earlier that HN or some of their mods helped. We know why this might have happened and we know that this should not happen.
Happy to hear now your, hopefully more balanced, view.
The only thing you will learn is that if your friend could create a $25M company you can do this too. This is how we grow--by imitating our closest peers and we start as babies imitating our parents and siblings. Creating a $25m company is btw not that hard, creating a multibillion company is.
Everything else, stuff you will see and his advices won't help you because once you are in the situation yourself you won't be able to use that stuff. Long story, I'll tell why another time.
Found a company yourself now and let him coach you/make intros to investors and let him check your overall pitch. If you don't have any ideas for a business ask him. This will be your first mission.
Shadowing a CEO without having a clear mission is douchy.