It's a complete misconception that HN got Dropbox wrong. It's more accurate to say that HN is a major reason Dropbox succeeded. There were a couple skeptical comments but it was very heavily upvoted and shared. Thousands of HN users signed up for the beta.
Drew Houston even said in an interview (can't recall which) that the response from HN was all the motivation he needed to keep going. It's almost certainly the biggest reason his YC application was accepted, after having been rejected on his previous project and shewed out of the office when trying to demo Dropbox to Paul Graham.
The ones that HN was wrong about are the ones that got ignored. Airbnb is probably the biggest example IIRC. Keep in mind that it's somewhat difficult to judge vote counts historically because of how much the site has grown over time.
Drew Houston even said in an interview (can't recall which) that the response from HN was all the motivation he needed to keep going. It's almost certainly the biggest reason his YC application was accepted, after having been rejected on his previous project and shewed out of the office when trying to demo Dropbox to Paul Graham.
The ones that HN was wrong about are the ones that got ignored. Airbnb is probably the biggest example IIRC. Keep in mind that it's somewhat difficult to judge vote counts historically because of how much the site has grown over time.