Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 58 posts.

Startups
2026
34

The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder

A few years ago I met a guy, let’s call him Jim, who was trying to break in tech by going to a bootcamp to become a developer. In the meantime, he worked as a bartender and had been living off the support of his girlfriend, who was from a well-off family and Jim was her trophy boyfriend. He approached me because he…

43

Startup Anti-Patterns

An anti-pattern is a commonly used process, structure, or pattern of action that, despite initially appearing to be an appropriate and effective response to a problem, has more bad consequences than good ones.Simeon Simeonov first wrote an introduction to the value of startup anti-patterns back in 2013. To sum it up…

51

State of Show HN: 2025

I downloaded every Show HN post since the site was launched and ran them through a hierarchical topic model. I set out to discover what the Hacker News community finds interesting but in the process I ended up uncovering macro-economic trends, evidence of voting rings/fraud, and subtle shifts in behavior over the…