# 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?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9369606) _The Lean Startup_ author Eric Ries answers the question (2015). - ["Beaker Browser is now archived"](https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/blob/master/archive-notice.md), Paul Frazee (2022). A cofounder tells the story of how Beaker failed to achieve product-market fit. He talks about the strengths and weaknesses of the peer-to-peer networking model and the difficulty of departing from how the Web does things. He explains his "Percent Easy" framework for evaluating a project's prospects and shares other lessons he learned from Beaker. - ["Beating the CAP Theorem Checklist"](https://ferd.ca/beating-the-cap-theorem-checklist.html)---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"](https://www.sans.org/top25-software-errors/) - ["The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis"](http://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm)---"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](!W)---an abandoned radiation source is stolen, contaminates hundreds and kills four - [Hierarchy of hazard controls](!W)---a system used to minimize exposure to hazards - ["How Complex Systems Fail"](https://how.complexsystems.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"](https://danluu.com/wat/) - ["Laws of infernal dynamics"](!W) - ["List of inventors killed by their own inventions"](!W) - [Mismanagement at Borland killed Delphi](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648699) - ["5 mistakes I made writing my first Clojure application"](https://adambard.com/blog/five-mistakes-clojure-newbies-make/) (2014) - ["Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake"](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/)---by Tony Hoare, who introduced null references in ALGOL W in 1965 - [Plane crash survival stories](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19205360) - ["PSYOP Mistakes"](http://www.psywarrior.com/PSYOPMistakes.html)---how military psychological operations have gone wrong (2004) - ["Social networks: It's worse than you think"](http://meta.ath0.com/2020/12/social-notwork/)---as the number of messages in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls - ["10 Things We Forgot to Monitor"](https://word.bitly.com/post/74839060954/ten-things-to-monitor?h=2)---metrics that are less obvious than memory usage (2014) - ["Thinking about why Solaris has failed here"](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/SolarisWhyFailed) (2012) - ["When a bad day gets worse – getting hacked twice in one day"](https://archive.fo/CL0tD)---Chris Poole on how 4chan got hacked (2014) - [Who sank Nokia](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663993)---a Hacker News comment argues that by 2010 Nokia was already doomed - ["Why our startup failed"](https://oncletom.io/2014/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."](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2088330) (2011) - ["What are your failed projects / ideas?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4469081) (2012) - ["When do you know your startup has failed?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392780) (2015) - ["What startups were refused from YC but became successful?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9413204) (2015) - ["Early signs that a company is failing?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373794) (2016) - ["Who is firing?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12851987) (2016) - ["Why did delicious.com fail?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15493212) (2017) - ["Which YC companies failed badly?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665233) (2018) - ["Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011332) (2018) - ["Why did your startup fail?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20023520) (2019) - ["What are some of your recent failures?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20960384) (2019) - ["What's your latest failed side project and why?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22397720) (2020) - ["What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25580637) (2020) ## Sites and collections - [Autopsy](https://getautopsy.wixsite.com/failed-startups)---a list of failed startups with reasons for and links to articles about their failure - [Blockchain Graveyard](https://magoo.github.io/Blockchain-Graveyard/)---an analysis of why this or that blockchain failed ## Page metadata URL: Published 2021-06-20, updated 2023-11-30. Tags: - bookmarks - business - failure - programming