Summer Founders

At least two of Y-Combinator's Summer Founders companies are now online.

Reddit is a user-driven popularity contest for URLs.

All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers. You decide what appears on your front page and simultaneously, which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity

They seem to be using mod_lisp, TBNL and CMUCL.

At first I thought that a single thumbs-down from me was enough to banish even the #1 link from the front page, but then I figured out that reddit just didn't show me links that I didn't like, and if I logged out I could still see it on the front page with a slightly lower score.

Brain Guppy is basically Am-I-Smart-or-Not, which I have to admit doesn't look like a hit to me. At least with Amihotornot.com you're making superficial evaluations of other people's superficial characteristics. Rapid fire rating of oddly cropped photos of midriff-baring 18-year-olds is its own reward while ranking some nerd's intelligence based on how they answered the question “What's the most surprising thing you've discovered recently?” is at best a chore.

Stuff Guppy seems related.

I think Stuff Guppy and Brain Guppy are both using Ruby on Rails.

Later: Rams points out that ClickFacts, with software to help clients of pay-per-click advertising systems detect click fraud, is another Y-Combinator summer startup.

Even Later: Marc Hedlund says, with inside knowledge, that “At least half of the startups in the program are seriously cool and all of them made a ton of progress on very little money and in very little time. Paul Graham and his partners clearly have good selectors for finding talented, motivated people...” Lucas Carlson, in his post “Y Combinator’s 2005 Summer Founders Program: A Complete Dud”, says that “Some of the sites made during the 24 hours of Rails Day were better than what these guys came up with.”

Most latest: I forgot to link to this comp.lang.lisp post, in which Steve Huffman of Reddit talks a little bit about the Lisp aspects of the site.

Posted by jjwiseman at August 10, 2005 05:35 PM