[blasterford]

I think the dislike is warranted personally.

The amount of exposure they get is extremely out of proportion to what they are and do. They do have it down to a fine art. Even this blog post is designed to get people talking about them - which it's succeeded in doing.

They created ruby on rails, which a few people use, and they make a few webapps. They're not a startup. They give (IMHO) fairly poor startup advice, most of which would only work if you're them.

The 37 signals fanboyism all just gets a little bit too much sometimes. Best to ignore and move on though...

[john_flintstone]

>They created ruby on rails, which a few people use

A few people? Really? Now that's just petty.

[blasterford]

Compared to java, javascript, c, php etc?

[stephenhuey]

Jumping from "a few" to comparing against C and Java is quite a leap. The simple fact is that Heroku alone had over 60,000 apps 2 years ago, and based on other statistics I think it's safe to say that Rails is a tool used by millions of programmers.

http://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Ruby-on-Rails

You're entitled to not like 37 Signals or think they give poor advice, but you shouldn't downplay their contribution so much.

[hox]

Has Hacker News been reduced to postings that are relevant to startups?

I believe a lot of what they have to say is at least interesting to the hacker crowd at large, and as such, they have a place.

[ahoyhere]

* The amount of exposure they get*…

I believe you mean:

The amount of exposure HNers give them by submitting and upvoting their posts, and then the endless hours HNers spend debating them…

37S doesn't ask to be on the front page of HN. They don't even appear to submit their own posts. Certainly they don't have a secret vote-sharing group, because HN now has features to discount those.

So personally, I find it pretty hilarious that there's so much sturm und drang about what 37s "gets". Everything they "get" from HN, HNers give them, all on their own initiative.