Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

Obvious addition:

5. 1 != 6

I have doubts about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013?

If you know any history, #4 is how many new areas of technology go. A couple ordinary guys built the first working airplane in their bicycle shop. Intel was founded with less than $1M, and fabbed its own chips. Vs. what would be the ante, today, to get into either of those industries?

> I have some doubt about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013?

Yes but big tech got bigger. Google had a 4th of its current workforce for instance, Meta a 10th, etc. It got much easier to get into those companies.

>The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.

Indeed, for me it is: whats the point of working in some random ass startup making yet another crud app and/or with 100 users when you can go to faang and work at giant scale or go to work in semiconductors and work on very interesting, deeply technical stuff?

Sure, there are interesting startups, but they usually dont go big like uber for x and so on

I believe the main change is just that Hacker News went from being a very specific subset of the population to becoming much more mainstream. Ten years ago it was, at least in my opinion, mostly early adopters of internet technology and in general people who had enough funds that they could fail without being devastated. Nowadays, in addition to the traditional VC route, there's also the indie hackers movement. Those founders typically aren't friends with old money, so they will bring a different perspective on financial risks.

> What's changed?

Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much.

But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups. That broader group was always there, of course, just its proportions relative to the hard core of entrepreneurs has changed.

I'd love to see some objective analysis of how things changed after the twitter and reddit kerfuffles, but I don't believe the article's thesis that the zeitgeist is the cause.

PS I could live without the stories that violate the precept of "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." ... but it's still pretty good here.