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 question2015.
• “Beaker Browser is now archived”, Paul Frazee2022. 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”—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 wrong2004
• “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 usage2014
• “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 hacked2014
• 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