Item — HN Reader

"In no specific order".. but at #3 you'll find a company you've never heard of listed beside Facebook, Stripe and Instagram. Oh and they wrote the post. Alphabetical (listed at the very bottom of the article) or founded-year order seems a far better "no-particular"(* apparently benefits author) order.

On the other hand.. if this really only took 100 hours to compile, that's impressive.

1 comments

That's really too bad, as there was interesting material in there otherwise.

It's really important to avoid anything that feels to readers like a bait-and-switch. It's ok to write about / include your own startup in a post, but you should be really explicit about it and you should do it up front, because readers feel misled if they encounter it later.

I have some notes that I send to startups who are trying to write for HN, explaining various pitfalls including this one. If the OP or anyone else wants a copy, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll send it.

Hey, original author of the article (only just discovered it was shared on HN). I really appreciate both your comments about how we can improve the post, have added it to my to-do list to update this to put them in a better order and to make the self-referencing part about OpinionX more transparent (outside of the list of 99 companies, I think).

As much as the original order was indeed mostly random, I also placed them so that each 'pair' side by side were roughly the same length, purely for aesthetic reasons. I think alphabetical order might just make more sense.