How does Club Penguin not fit the startup mythos? Started by a couple of guys to solve a problem they had and figured other people must have (not enough for small children to do online). Made the product themselves based on some Flash stuff one of them had been building. Huge viral growth, big acquisition. Sounds like a classic startup success to me.
The startup mythos as interpreted by Arrington (and, to a lesser extent, HN) does not involve non-whiz-bang stuff. Social bookmarking? Yes, that's great, it's got an API or something right? Flash video games for kids not old enough to ride the bus alone? Not cool enough. Not hackery.
You may be right about Arrington, but that's not how I see HN. I haven't noticed any prejudice here against things like Flash video games for kids. On the contrary, patio11 and his bingo cards (surely a lower bound for whatever definition of 'cool' you're talking about) are kind of local heroes.
OK, that's not how you see HN. I wasn't writing about HN originally. Every sentence fragment began with "TechCrunch." :)
On HN, you have a slew of TC-style masturbatory stories about funding and then you've got a handful of less exciting "hard luck" cases that touch people because they're like orphans who sing and dance.
Like that post about the plumber -- it's Puritan Work Ethic pr0n.
Most HN readers seem to think they're going to end up with the funding (the former), but at the same time they want to hear from those heartwarming orphans (the latter).
