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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry. It's relevant to hn beyond the fact that it's a YC alum that coufounded it...

Not really. It's a flight-booking company. If Kayak or something got closed, it'd be deemed off-topic for HN. Kayak and Hipmunk do virtually the same thing. The difference? One was by a YC founder, the other has T.V. commercials.

I disagree - it was a really great product, something to be emulated. When it came out, there was nothing like it, and it truly felt like a step change compared to the existing sites. It was not quite the same impact, but felt like a shadow of the feeling when you first used Google instead of Altavista.

One thing the HN community values is really good, well-executed products, and it's instructive to learn what killed this great one. I'm sorry to see that it was mostly antitrust shenanigans and competitors catching up (flights.google.com is very good now) that made the gap between Hipmunk and others fade.

Hipmunk however has made searching for flights better than if it had never existed at all, and I am thankful for that. I still don't think the UI of Google flights is quite as good as it TBH.

I think this is a fair and balanced argument. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with it, but you make a good point. This has definitely swayed me a bit.

> If Kayak or something got closed, it'd be deemed off-topic for HN. Kayak and Hipmunk do virtually the same thing. The difference? One was by a YC founder, the other has T.V. commercials.

Um, what? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759841

I'll admit I worded that poorly, intending for it to be qualified with "and marketing copy was posted to HN," however, I think that post is a poor example: being acquired for a billion is rare and newsworthy. A failed startup shutting down is not. Something like 96% of businesses close down.

Oh, is your point that YC-funded companies get more coverage on HN than non-YC-funded companies? And that this is bad?

There are many reasons why this could be the case, only one of which is naked self-interest on the part of YC to promote itself somehow. For example, it could also be correlative: YC funds interesting companies; HN covers interesting companies; thus you would expect that HN covers YC companies frequently.

Hipmunk was not just "a failed startup shutting down"; it was founded by a YC alum, as you note, but it was also design-focused with a distinct UX, good at PR, taking a somewhat combative approach in an industry popular on HN, etc., etc.

Most of that 96% of business do not have even one or two of those things?

> Oh, is your point that YC-funded companies get more coverage on HN than non-YC-funded companies? And that this is bad?

In a perfectly fair world, companies would get attention based on the value they are providing to society, not on the level of VC funding or particular affiliations.

In particular, labor rights, non-profits, legal technology, and governance are generally under-reported despite their larger potential impact on society, largely because they aren't attractive to VCs looking for out-sized returns on investment.

That's just... not how HN works at all?

Companies don't have to have any relationship with YC to be linked or discussed on HN. Just... look at the front page. Plaid, for instance.

I know how HN works pretty well, I think, and I understand the front page pretty well, too. Hipmunk isn't intellectually interesting on its own, and plenty of companies in the flight space close down daily; they're rarely relevant to HN. This is a marketing post, filled with marketing speak, and contains no substance. Under no circumstance would this be counted as intellectually interesting were it posted by any non-YC company (or one of 'patio11's I guess) as tiny as Hipmunk is. A quilt company in a town close to me closed down a few years ago; they made yearly what Hipmunk was purchased for. Didn't see their press release on HN, and it wouldn't be relevant to HN.

Plaid's posts were third-party articles, and they got purchased for a billion. This is ad copy. Users would not have upvoted this, because it's not on-topic, were it by a non-YC company.

I didn't even intend to be implying relevancy was required on HN (my submission history is filled with articles that aren't relevant to much of anything) with the original comment; my statement was intended to give context. The second comment, though, was devil's advocacy that I'm still going to stand by: it's nothing but silly to act like ad copy is relevant to HN inherently.

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