It's weird that HN is now a thing to be gamed (in this case, poorly). I remember when this was just a forum for people to post links and talk about stuff, and wasn't nearly influential enough to be worth astroturfing and manipulating.
It's not just this post either - I've seen first-hand other startups try to manipulate HN. It can be as mild as getting your colleagues to upvote a story, and it can be pretty loathsome like astroturfed comments.
Re: the list though, I see a lot of FNACs here (Feature, Not A Company). I love a useful product as much as the next person, but are products that have no visible revenue potential really startups?
Even though we're in this list (HeyCrowd), I don't get why everyone gets so angry when seeing a list of startups and calling them "junk". It's just a lazy thought process to do that. It's true that most of them will probably fail anyway, so what's the point in destroying them when they're trying their best to bring a vision to life ? Personally, I have discovered a bunch of interesting products there.
Get used to it. It takes an incredible amount of work to build a "crappy" startup, but less than zero to post a snarky comment to HN that makes one feel superior.
Very true. I hope everyone who is trying to build something and want to show it to HN realize this very fact and keep working regardless of the kind of comments.
Let's be honest, people: a lot of these are junk and aren't going to be around in 6 months? Another Twitter client??? An application that finds me resorts??? Haven't seen that idea before!
Half of these are coming soon pages, the author of the article doesn't sound like he's tried any of the services in private beta, he's just made a list of what might be cool.
Also is the eye-drop app a startup or a side-project?
I realise that I may be adding to the background noise, but this is ridiculous: http://imgur.com/F7wkO