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

12 points by nick_a ↗ HN
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?

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)?

20 comments

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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
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... :-)
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.

blender
The next new new thing?
redorb
honestly your best bet is freelance work , that could perhaps turn into a saas model...
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.

Hexstream
They don't seem to have huge amounts of time and money to invest in a complex project I'm not quite sure how to monetize.
mechanical_fish
Serious question for the Lisp wizards in the audience: Hasn't this been done? What aspect of this did the Lisp machines lack? (Disregarding the obvious fact that the specific languages "Ruby" and "Python" hadn't been invented yet, back in the Lisp machine's day?)
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.

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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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.