

Ask HN: What would you do with 4 lisp hackers and a designer somewhere in central europe? - nick_a

Q1: Suppose, hypothetically, that a tech company somewhere in central europe (in a country that is poor but belongs to the EU) went bankrupt and suddenly 4 seasoned common lisp programmers and 1 graphic designer who all knew each other and worked well together and spoke fluent english suddenly were looking for work. What would you have them do if you could afford to pay them to work on it for 6 months?<p>Q2: If you had this idea but not the cash to pay them to do it how would you fund the idea (besides YC/Seedcamp/etc, suppose hypothetically they aren't interested in relocating)?
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menloparkbum
_What would you do with 4 lisp hackers and a designer somewhere in central
europe?_

I'd watch them try to replace a lightbulb and take notes on all the hilarious
punch-lines that ensue. Alternatively, you could see what happens when they
walk into a bar.

~~~
robfitz
hire one more guy and make a human pyramid

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Spyckie
Q1: I would leave them alone for now. Sorry, but unless I know what my
relationship is within the group, I would treat them like outsourced work
(which means, I would avoid). There's just too many things that can go wrong -
they may have gone belly up for a very good reason (ie - they maybe can't read
the business trends or have no sense in user interface design).

If I were to do anything, I would help them find contract or consulting work
and keep in touch to learn their capabilities - no need to rush into things.

Q2: Again, I would leave them alone, or I would give them the idea to work on
(while leaving them alone). This is sounds like a recipe for disaster to me -
a group of 4 people being given some work to do by an outsider, and the group
of 4 doesn't like the idea enough to sacrifice for it...

If I'm missing some information that would change my views, please feel free
to give it.

~~~
nick_a
hypothetically I've worked with them before and know all of them. and
hypothetically they didn't go belly up as a group, they belonged to different
parts of a large company that died because of... stuff that happened in
japan... :-)

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bayareaguy
With cloud computing becoming popular I think there is a very good opportunity
in the future for a big lisp system whose primitives kept ugly clustering
issues hidden from a typical developer.

With that in mind, I would have them choose a few kinds of applications
suitable for EC2 and then give me a proposal on how they would build a
platform for other non-guru lisp programmers to easily run lisp programs that
would make good use of as many EC2 instances as were available. It's no good
if they come up with something only they can use - whatever they propose has
to be usable by someone who may have only read SICP or the little schemer.

Should the selected application area have reasonable market potential, I'd
then try and find some potential customers or partners. Ideally these would be
indifferent to how their problem was solved but could understand why lisp+this
platform is a good fit for their problem.

If no idea produced by the team made sense to any potential customer, then I'd
give up on them and go find some other team.

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stcredzero
I'd do a Lisp operating system. The Lisp VM would be a part of the kernel.
User Mode C programs would compile to Lisp bytecode and would all run
sandboxed. Then I'd add support for languages like Ruby and Python by
compiling them to Lisp.

~~~
gizmo
After 6 months you'd have a rushed prototype. What good is that? Building a
Lisp operating system may be interesting from an academic point of view, but
it fills no need. A waste of 6 months.

In 6 months you can only do something mundane. For instance, adapt SBCL so it
flawlessly interacts with CPAN and remove all the legacy lisp stuff. Then
you'd have a clean lisp with a great library environment. People could
actually -use- it. Still not a great business idea, but it has a small chance
to rock the world. Especially since Ruby and Python are slowly becoming
popular the ahead-of-the-curve guys are getting edgy. They want to move on to
the next big language, and they want that language to be Lisp.

~~~
stcredzero
A "rushed prototype" might still be a good start. What was the business need
filled by the Linux kernel when it was at 6 months?

Your mundane suggestion has quite a bit of merit. However the Lisp OS would
rock the world in a much bigger way. What I described would actually be
capable of running Linux apps, but would also open the door to advanced kernel
hacking to ordinary application programmers. It would be capable of competing
against a commercial version of Singularity. It would further enable
innovation with regards to security and programming models. It would be in a
position to become the Linux/BSD of the next generation of F/OSS operating
systems.

It would hardly be a waste.

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mechanical_fish
Plan A: Stage a programming contest in which the 4 CL programmers compete for
the honor of being your cofounder. The graphic designer can act as judge.

(You may have better luck with 2 teams of 2. That's the conventional wisdom
around here, at least -- better for everyone to have a cofounder.)

Plan B: For extra credit, try the _Ender's Game_ version of Plan A. Make the
contest be "building a product that people want" and have each of the CL
programming teams work on its own project. If, at the end of six months, any
of the projects is attracting users or (praise be) making money, offer to
invest more money in those projects.

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hopeless
Hire out the designer and use the money to retrain the lisp hackers to do
something useful?

I'm guessing that punchlines aren't what you were looking for though. You seem
to be looking for a problem (a startup idea) that requires a particular
solution (4 x hackers with a lisp and 1 x chilled-out designer). That seems
the wrong way around to me. And frankly, if ideas are the easiest thing about
a startup, you should worry if you can't come up with your own to be
passionate about.

~~~
npk
I disagree. If I had three great hacker friends, I'd brainstorm to find an
awesome problem to work on. It's hard to find talent; especially hard to find
talent in people I like to work with.

Anyway, I can't think of any good ideas. Good luck.

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bjclark
Q1. Throw up a portfolio site for them and hire them out at 2x what you have
to pay them.

Q2. Taken care of in Q1.

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redorb
honestly your best bet is freelance work , that could perhaps turn into a saas
model...

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blender
The next new new thing?

