Failure

This page is a collection of links to articles about problems and mistakes: how and why things have failed or can fail. It covers some near misses as well.

Contents

Articles

• “Are there examples of lean startup ideas going wrong or being misunderstood and leading startups straight to failure?” The Lean Startup author Eric Ries answers the question (2015).
• “Beating the CAP Theorem Checklist”. A humorous checklist of reasons why someone’s idea of how to beat the CAP theorem is wrong.
• “CWE/SANS TOP 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors”.
• “Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis, The”. “What’s an engineer’s worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designed for a skyscraper like Citicorp Center are flawed—and hurricane season is approaching.” (1995).
• Goiânia accident. An abandoned radiation source is stolen, contaminates hundreds and kills four.
• Hierarchy of hazard controls. A system used to minimize exposure to hazards.
• “How Complex Systems Fail”. “(Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety)” (1998–2000).
• “How people come to believe that completely messed up practices are normal”.
• “Laws of infernal dynamics”.
• “List of inventors killed by their own inventions”.
• Mismanagement at Borland killed Delphi.
• “5 mistakes I made writing my first Clojure application” (2014).
• “Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake”. By Tony Hoare, who introduced null references in ALGOL W in 1965.
• Plane crash survival stories.
• “PSYOP Mistakes”. How military psychological operations have gone wrong (2004).
• “Social networks: It’s worse than you think”. As the number of messages in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls.
• “10 Things We Forgot to Monitor”. Metrics that are less obvious than memory usage (2014).
• “Thinking about why Solaris has failed here” (2012).
• “When a bad day gets worse – getting hacked twice in one day”. Chris Poole on how 4chan got hacked (2014).
• Who sank Nokia. A Hacker News comment argues that by 2010 Nokia was already doomed.
• “Why our startup failed”. “A good product idea and a strong technical team are not a guarantee of a sustainable business.” (2014).

Ask HN

Discussion threads about business failure on Hacker News.

• “Tell me about your failed startup.” (2011).
• “What are your failed projects / ideas?” (2012).
• “When do you know your startup has failed?” (2015).
• “What startups were refused from YC but became successful?” (2015).
• “Early signs that a company is failing?” (2016).
• “Who is firing?” (2016).
• “Why did delicious.com fail?” (2017).
• “Which YC companies failed badly?” (2018).
• “Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?” (2018).
• “Why did your startup fail?” (2019).
• “What are some of your recent failures?” (2019).
• “What’s your latest failed side project and why?” (2020).
• “What’s a side project you built to make money that hasn’t?” (2020).

Sites and collections

• Autopsy. A list of failed startups with reasons for and links to articles about their failure.
• Blockchain Graveyard. An analysis of why this or that blockchain failed.