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Comment by nocman | Hacker News Reader

When he said "Whatever happened to that Lisp clone?" I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp.

The discussion was not about writing a new Lisp or Lisp-like language, but a clone of Reddit.

The fact that HN is a site that performs a function very similar to Reddit, and happens to be written in a dialect of Lisp is completely coincidental :-D (unless there has been some comment by pg about his motivations for making HN that I missed, but I kind of doubt it).

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I believe pg stated that HN was supposed to be what reddit was originally.

>I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp.

Yep, spot-on. It's the same with those guys who wanted to make a Facebook clone focused on privacy or whatever. Lots of talk and then you never hear about the project again.

You mean Diaspora? (or maybe there's another clone I missed out on). The founder of Diaspora committed suicide. I think the project mostly died with him.

Wow, I didn't know about this suicide :(

Is the project really dead though? I have no personal experience, but these stats show a growing number of active users: http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/

Oh interesting. I didn't know it was still moving along. It had a lot of momentum a few years back, but hasn't been making nearly as much noise since. Not sure if the founder's suicide actually correlated with the dropoff in media attention.

Didn't know about Diaspora or the suicide. Sorry to hear that it happened :(

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