\nAs many of you know, I’m a big fan of Paul Graham. He’s the guy who got me interested in Lisp and, by extension, Emacs. There’s a bit of irony there considering that Graham is a Vim user and his writings are the proximate cause of me leaving Vim for Emacs.\n<\/p>\n
\nThese days, he apparently thinks of himself primarily as an essayist. You can check out many of those essays here<\/a>. I just ran across another of his essays\/posts<\/a> on Y Combinator<\/a>. It’s a sort of history of reddit<\/a> as told from the Y Combinator point of view.\n<\/p>\n \nIt’s an engaging tale. One surprising aspect of the story is that Y Combinator hated the first proposal from the two founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and rejected it. But both Graham and his wife really like them and encouraged them to come up with another idea. Graham apparently suggested the reddit idea because of his experience with Delicious, a site that was a distant cousin of what reddit would become.\n<\/p>\n \nThe rest, as they say, is history. Within a matter of weeks, reddit starting gaining users who regularly returned to the site. If you have a couple of minutes to spare, reading Graham’s post would be a good use for them. As I say, it’s an engaging tale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Paul Graham. He’s the guy who got me interested in Lisp and, by extension, Emacs. There’s a bit of irony there considering that Graham is a Vim user and his … Continue reading