[HN Gopher] Is Hacker News a good predictor of future tech trends?
___________________________________________________________________
Is Hacker News a good predictor of future tech trends?
Author : drpancake
Score : 303 points
Date : 2021-08-24 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jamespotter.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (jamespotter.dev)
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Basically, no one knows what is going to catch in until it has.
| As one poster mentioned, false positives could be plentiful.
| Also, for companies or brands such as Tesla, their PR machine
| will be working harder than HN to spread the word, so not a good
| data point.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I think a lot of people on HN are already working remote (I've
| been 100% remote since before the pandemic). It's a business
| process and business management issue that doesn't really come up
| on Hacker News except in productivity discussions.
| [deleted]
| jbverschoor wrote:
| For cloud storage and collaboration (Dropbox) -> Nope
|
| Blockchain -> Nope
| yodsanklai wrote:
| HN is certainly a source to know what is trendy. I'd be
| interested to see a list of trends based on HN top posts and
| comment.
| f154hfds wrote:
| Two things I learned on HN before they became mainstream:
|
| * Rust
|
| * Covid
|
| For the latter I remember thinking that it was going to become a
| big deal soon but no one seemed to be paying attention except for
| those paranoid HNers.
| chubot wrote:
| Hm never saw this thread about "fixing RAZR" as a pre-approved YC
| idea (pre-Android and pre-iPhone), but it's pretty interesting:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Of things which are "interesting," absolutely. But to the
| stickiness of these things I'd say the record is mixed. If you
| lurk here chances are you'll hear about any single tech topic
| earlier than most other places. But that the ones you hear about
| here (or are most upvoted here) also tend to be the ones with
| greater stickiness is not clear to me at all.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Yes, if JavaScript is a future trend ;)
| asciimov wrote:
| No. This is just confirmation bias.
|
| The author didn't control for what was on the front page, how
| many points the article received, or the amount of discussion on
| the topic. Not to mention the myriad of technologies that are on
| Hacker News that fizzle.
| esjeon wrote:
| As backed by this post, HN isn't precisely good at prediction. It
| simply has far less noise than the general internet, making it
| easier to notice the upcoming trends.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I find that when Hacker News really likes a piece of highly
| technical SaaS technology it's usually pretty good. The best
| example I can think of is Datadog which got rave reviews here
| years ago and has continued to be enormously successful.
| Particularly for enterprise tech as there tends to be less herd
| behavior up-market. If I'm diligencing a technology I'll often
| actually look at HN to see the opinions.
| nix23 wrote:
| No, pretty much the opposite.
| [deleted]
| bpodgursky wrote:
| LOL
|
| Hacker News is where you to to learn that self-hosted rack-mount
| servers in your own basement running a LAMP stack provisioned
| with self-generated bash scripts is the future.
| afavour wrote:
| Feels like a great case study in confirmation bias: you only
| looked at the topics that ended up being successful. How many
| tech trends did Hacker News hype up only to have them go nowhere?
| Without that info we don't really know what HN's success rate is.
| rkangel wrote:
| That was my first instinct but I'm not sure it's actually true.
|
| If my priority is to know about interesting topics so I can be
| informed on them when they take off then this is the right
| methodology. HN might be a bit inefficient in time, but this
| suggests that new tech trends will generally not arrive without
| having had some advance warning on HN. This is what I need - as
| a consultant it's useful to know what the client is talking
| about when they bring up something cutting-edge, and useful to
| know about cutting edge things to recommend as relevant.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Exactly. Or at last a comparative analysis with similar news
| feeds. Would reddit tech posts not yield similar results? If
| not then perhaps one has an edge in term of early discovery
| future trends.
|
| The variety of tech subjects submitted by hacker newsers is
| very large, and mostly about the most innovative and
| financially rewarding domain: tech.
|
| So sure, hacker news does predict every upcoming trend since
| someone will be posting something about each and every
| plausibly promising thing.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| > How many tech trends did Hacker News hype up only to have
| them go nowhere?
|
| Do all of these graphs taken into account actual "hype" or just
| the existence, and number, of posts on hacker news? I would
| like to see the graphs adjusted for discussion. Take number of
| comments into account, analysis of sentiment in the discussion,
| etc. Are they actually being hyped?
|
| For instance, the description above the Bitcoin graph gives a
| link to the very first mention of Bitcoin[1] but the link goes
| to a post with no comments.
|
| I guess number of posts and timeline of posts could indicate
| trend but should we call it "hyping" those trends? I would
| imagine that would come from the averaged response sentiment of
| the discussion on those posts.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793
| beardyw wrote:
| Understanding what will go nowhere would be so much more
| useful! Following trends can be valuable, but old ways still
| work. Chasing wild geese is catastrophic.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Yeah you don't want to react blindly ..
| rewtraw wrote:
| This data also doesn't gauge sentiment.
|
| HN talks about Bitcoin/crypto frequently, but the overwhelming
| opinion for years has been that it's pointless.
|
| That will certainly be a huge miss, similar to the dismissal of
| easy file syncing. DeFi/crypto/NFTs seem to be gaining real
| traction and HN hasn't accepted it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| HN has predicted 281 of the past three major tech
| breakthroughs!
| [deleted]
| mempko wrote:
| This! Since people have limited time, if HN leads more more
| often then not on some tech goose chase, then it doesn't matter
| if some tech trend is mentioned early on HN and has interest.
|
| But ultimately what makes something successful is investment in
| that thing in both time and money. HN is very VC heavy tech
| crowd and of course it should lead in trends where VC tech
| crowd creates out of pure effort and money.
|
| Telsa and 3D printing is an interesting example. If it isn't
| strictly a digital good, HN might not be ahead given the
| audience.
| bena wrote:
| Not only confirmation bias, but also they're essentially
| polling a very specific subset of the population.
|
| This is a segment of the population that would be replete with
| model train enthusiasts, RC plane hobbyists, and HAM radio
| operators back in the day. So, yeah, things of interest in the
| tech space would be of even more interest to people on HN.
|
| But yeah, they also picked the "winners", they really have to
| filter for all topics discussed by HN and then find out how
| many of those became "future tech" and how many fell by the
| wayside. Because if it's 1 in 100, it's not a really good
| predictor.
|
| And if something becomes mainstream, then of course it'll be
| talked about. That's kind of how it works.
| mFixman wrote:
| > For each topic I counted how many times it had been mentioned
| in a post title, then calculated a 0-100 index, where 100 is the
| month with the most mentions.
|
| This is not really useful data then. A time series with a big
| spike will "lose" against an identical one without the spike.
|
| Maybe the amount of days when a certain word was in the front
| page would be a better comparison metric on the HN side?
| timbaboon wrote:
| Hacker News causes success of future tech trends :P
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Hacker News, like any news aggregator, pops up new stuff all the
| time.
|
| The hardest part is keeping an open mind for jumping on early.
| Hard because 99% turn out to be dud anyway, not to mention our
| crowd are skeptical bunch.
|
| My biggest "regret" is ignoring Bitcoin/Ether.
|
| Saw Bitcoin posts when it was $5.. nah it's a scam.
|
| Oh it's gone up to $10.. nah it won't go up further.
|
| Went up further.. nah won't buy bcoz already too expensive.
|
| Ether announced.. lolz nobody going to buy another coin since
| there's already Bitcoin..
|
| Ether goes up.. WTF.
| handrous wrote:
| I picked up 0.1-and-some-change Bitcoin, largely from "faucets"
| and a tiny amount of collaborative mining. Basically free, a
| few hours of screwing-around being my only real "investment". I
| neglected the wallet, since it wasn't worth anything anyway,
| and lost the file in a format-and-reinstall at some point. Did
| something similar with Doge, later. Whoops.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I guess there's 2 ways to approach something that appears to be
| a scam. One is to avoid it. The other is to get in on it.
| langitbiru wrote:
| So what are you going to do with NFTs? :)
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yes, crystal balls are in short supply.
|
| That said, unless you were a True Believer, if you bought
| bitcoin at $5 you probably wouldn't have any left by now. You
| likely would have sold at $100. Or $1,000.
|
| I know a lot of people that got in early. But only one made
| millions because he thought it would be the next big thing.
| Everyone else jumped ship at some point because they weren't
| True Believers.
| modeless wrote:
| HN is the best way of learning about future tech trends before
| they happen. But it's not because there's any kind of prescient
| consensus here. The important stuff is a small minority. You have
| to do your own filtering.
|
| I was ahead of the curve on Bitcoin, VR, and deep learning
| because I read about them early here, but they weren't the most
| popular things at the time. HN hates Bitcoin to this day. But I
| learned about it from HN and decided that HN was wrong about it.
| When lots of people are wrong about something, I see it as an
| opportunity.
| bdcravens wrote:
| The Bitcoin ecosystem today is so different from what it was in
| the early days, that it's barely the same topic.
| gnulinux wrote:
| It's not clear to me if this is predictive. E.g. HN has been
| right about AMD. Years ago when people were talking about AMD
| it was worth peanuts and look at it now. I don't think it's a
| case of a group of people being right/wrong, it has more to do
| with since you're fed all the perspectives, you can find the
| right/wrong ones yourself and take action accordingly.
| modeless wrote:
| Yes, I'm not saying HN is wrong about everything. HN isn't
| opposed to my other examples of VR or deep learning (though
| there are certainly people who argue strenuously that deep
| learning is a dead end and GOFAI is the way forward). I'm
| just saying that _when_ the consensus about something is
| wrong, that 's an opportunity to get ahead of the curve. And
| reading HN is a great way to gather the information you need
| to decide whether the consensus is right or not. But you have
| to figure that out for yourself.
| bdcravens wrote:
| How do you measure what is wrong? In the example of
| Bitcoin, if the measurement is price, I think that's a
| misunderstanding of what people are criticizing.
| modeless wrote:
| The criticisms have changed over time. But I'm pretty
| sure the early criticisms were mostly wrong, and I'm
| certain that the people who criticized it early missed
| big opportunities, even if Bitcoin itself ultimately
| fails (which is of course still a possibility).
| jedimastert wrote:
| Egdelord opinion time: I think HN has way too much of a hivemind
| to really think outside the box enough to catch trends.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Anybody talking about the hivemind gets downvoted by the
| hivemind.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The hivemind practices humility.
| luffapi wrote:
| I think it's more that many of the "leaders" of this community
| are investors and entrepreneurs who have vested interests and
| use this site and community for promotion or strategic
| purposes. This site's contents _and_ commentary are mostly ads,
| thus not good at prediction.
| lvl100 wrote:
| This place is pretty right leaning and mostly front-end.
| yuchi wrote:
| Only tangential but still interesting.
|
| During the infamous leap second fiasco of Java in 2012 which
| brought down all JVM servers by saturating the CPU, I saved the
| day because I was reading about it here on HN while my colleagues
| were struggling to undestrand why all our environments stopped
| working.
|
| It took me a few minutes to realize that we were indeed hit by
| what I just read, look at ten of my colleagues each closely
| inspecting logs at different ssh sessions, and gleefully give
| them a precise description of the problem, an approach to verify
| it and a solution, adding "it's all over the news guys, you
| should keep yourself updated".
| lend000 wrote:
| I've read about an indie trading algorithm that works like this.
| It's basically a PageRank for professional forums, which
| apparently did quite well for the author. A more fundamental-
| based form of sentiment analysis.
| brundolf wrote:
| I would say it's more a good radar for what (software, mostly
| web) technologies are entering general awareness. If something
| _might_ be successful one day, you 'll probably find out about
| it. And then lots of those things will sputter out, but not all
| of them.
| privatdozent wrote:
| Cool analysis!
| New_California wrote:
| Bitcoin was completely and totally missed by HN and more broadly
| by Silicon Valley.
|
| Only recently the SV/HN community is catching up and waking up to
| cryptocurrencies - and still hesitantly.
| drpancake wrote:
| I suspect the folks over at Coinbase would beg to differ.
| New_California wrote:
| Coinbase is successful b/c it went _against_ the HN crowd
| wisdom. On the very HN thread Brian Armstrong announced his
| Coinbase idea the participants widely expressed skepticism.
| throwawayFries wrote:
| But he probably first heard about Bitcoin from something he
| read on HN.
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| It wasn't missed, I still remember checking the sourceforge
| source circa 2009. I was not really that interested in it and I
| am still not.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
| fastball wrote:
| So... you're admitting that you are a bad predictor of future
| trends?
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| We cannot predict future trends in technology, if we could,
| then Bitcoin would have today 0 value because it is boosted
| only by FOMO (fear of missing out) feelings, not because it
| is useful.
|
| In 2009, I was starting with Scala, which had functional
| features way beyond what was achievable in other languages
| at that time. Scala was a game changer, it rode later on
| the Big Data (Spark, Kafka) wave (circa 2015). Many
| academic things that Scala proved to be production-ready
| were backported after to Java, JS, etc. I have built
| systems with Scala that were actually useful for people and
| organisations, while Bitcoin as a technology... I am just
| glad that I have predicted worse in this case.
| moreshadow wrote:
| Bitcoin's value partially derives from permissionless
| transactions on an immutable ledger, if you'd _actually_
| been following it from 2009 you 'd know that (but you
| don't).
|
| > Bitcoin would have today 0 value because it is boosted
| only by FOMO (fear of missing out)
|
| An incredibly tired take (but it's cute that you spelled
| out "FOMO" _and_ abbreviated it). Compared to 2009, 2021
| is the future, where the value of BTC is not 0. We don 't
| have to speculate incorrectly as you do when you say
| "Bitcoin would have today 0 value," we know what value it
| is.
|
| You completely failed to predict the effect of BTC and
| cryptocurrency on the global financial market, which
| supports your idea that "we cannot predict future
| trends." We can make educated guesses though.
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| > Bitcoin's value derives from permissionless
| transactions on an immutable ledger
|
| The imbecilic way of saying supply and demand?
| fastball wrote:
| No, that is a fairly straightforward explanation of
| Bitcoin's utility. Bitcoin did two fundamental things:
|
| - it was actually useful for people transacting things
|
| - it introduced the world to blockchain as a general
| technology, which at this point _many_ new things (which
| people find useful in ways more complex and more varied
| than the above) have been built atop.
|
| The idea that BTC would be worth $0 without speculation
| is just poor reasoning. It misunderstands the past,
| ignores the present, and doesn't even look to the future,
| so not surprised you didn't pick up on this particular
| trend.
| moreshadow wrote:
| No, supply and demand is an economic theory, it would be
| imbecilic to confuse the two, the way you did.
|
| Do you even know what a "permissionless transaction" or
| an "immutable ledger" are? Do you believe Bitcoin has
| achieved both?
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| Every "permissionless transaction" is an action of
| supplying and demanding, the "immutable ledger" is the
| proof that the action happened in the past. The price of
| Bitcoin, as the price of anything in life, is determined
| by supply and demand. Stop glorifying stuff using
| specialized language because people will actually believe
| you are the opposite of gifted. Reading "Thinking Fast
| and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman will do you good. The price
| of Bitcoin will remain forever volatile as the system is
| inherently flawed and nobody has faith in it.
|
| Usually I block trolls, but in the lack of such a
| functionality on HN take this comment as my last
| interaction with you.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| RaketenStadt wrote:
| > Every "permissionless transaction" is an action of
| supplying and demanding.
|
| Of course it's not, it's simply a transaction; it doesn't
| need to be between two separate parties. I don't think
| you understand Bitcoin as well as you believe, you have
| it confused with an economic theory.
|
| Reading "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"
| will do you good.
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| The way you express yourself makes me think you have just
| switched accounts.
| RaketenStadt wrote:
| Good to know. Can you explain the difference between a
| permissionless transaction and the economic theory of
| supply and demand?
| bdcravens wrote:
| Only if by trends you mean things that can be traded on
| unregulated markets.
| fastball wrote:
| Not really. By trends I mean... trends. Bitcoin and
| Blockchain are clearly one of the biggest trends of the
| past decade, it's not even close.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| From the thread: " Well this is an exceptionally cute idea,
| but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have
| any faith in this currency."
|
| I love reading these sort of things from the past.
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| When Elon was doing the leap of faith, he kind of stopped
| somewhere in the middle. I don't know, just saying. Parent
| arguments still hold.
| agitator wrote:
| I mean, has that sentiment changed? It's still a cute pump
| and dump scheme that went viral.
| moreshadow wrote:
| I applaud the originality of the statement, but there's a
| good deal of trust in the cryptocurrency ecosystem
| compared to 2009. I understand if you're personally still
| a skeptic.
| thehappypm wrote:
| The comment is still valid, I think. You can't really
| trust crypto to hold its value in any way that a currency
| should. To use cryptocurrencies you need to tolerate
| anything from a 50% drop to a doubling, all in extremely
| short time scales. If that's what trust means to you,
| that's interesting.
| JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote:
| Compared to 2009?! You don't trust Coinbase in 2021 any
| more than you did Cryptsy in 2013?
|
| PS if you want to do the whole "volatile prices!" fear
| mongering you can do WAY better than 50% price drops. You
| also accidentally criticize the US dollar here, USD saw a
| 30% decline in the early 2000s and analysts predict a
| possible decline of 30-35% in the broad dollar index
| soon. Is that how a currency "should" hold its value?
| thehappypm wrote:
| I don't trust it now, and wouldn't have in 2009 either.
|
| I trust the US dollar because it is very stable. There's
| a crisis now because we're looking at roughly 5% year-
| over-year inflation compared to a goal of 2% -- meanwhile
| crypto swings 10% every damn day!
| JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote:
| The dollar crashed 30% in the 2000s (and the 80s, and the
| 70s, and probably the '10s). Soon it will be because of
| trade wars and losing value to the euro and the yuan
| though.
|
| To your point, remember when the crypto market had a net
| loss of almost 3000 points in a single day in March
| 2020?! Oh wait, that was the Dow, sorry.
|
| So you don't trust the stock market or the assets that
| back it either, do you? It swings 10% or more some days!
| thehappypm wrote:
| I also would not trust stocks as currencies. And how
| exactly are you arriving at a 3000% loss?
| JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote:
| Oh you just said "crypto," you never mentioned a
| currency. Do we get to include the overcollateralized
| stablecoins or are we just cherrypicking volatile ones?
|
| Do you have any experience buying or using cryptocurrency
| in the last 10 years?
| [deleted]
| prewett wrote:
| HN is pretty good at identifying trends. I generally read some
| comment here way before I hear about it somewhere else. Does HN
| accurately predict where the trend goes? Not necessarily. But if
| something actually does trend, I will have heard low-level
| chatter about it on HN for a long time.
|
| Remote work trended because of the pandemic, for example, but
| there was constant chatter about remote work anytime the topic of
| employment came up, and the monthly job match-making posts even
| post whether the job / worker is open to remote. Functional
| programming has had low-level chatter from the beginning (given
| that PG viewed it as one of the reasons for the success of his
| company), and indeed, functional programming has grown more
| mainstream. I started exploring Python for my Perl-type tasks
| because it kept getting good mentions on HN.
|
| I don't think any of the above ever got to the point where it got
| so many mentions it would hit a strong 100 in his methodology
| compared to Google trends. I'm also not sure you could identify
| successful trends early on, but I think you hear chatter on HN
| long before other places.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| For news related to programming trends, the Venn diagram
| between here and r/programming is pretty much a circle.
| keewee7 wrote:
| The mood on Hacker News (and reddit/twitter) has become too
| pessimistic to be a good predictor of the future.
|
| The long-term trend is that the world is becoming a better place.
| Pessimistic people are biased against that fundamental trend that
| other trends will develop on. Groups of pessimistic people will
| not be good predictors of the future.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| Oddly, this strikes me as one of the most pessimistic posts
| I've seen on HN.
|
| - What is your definition of "long-term"?
|
| - Can a certain industry or geography get worse while the
| broader world becomes a "better place"?
|
| - Aren't optimists just lying to themselves in the opposite way
| as pessimists?
|
| - Is any group of a single type a good predictor of anything?
|
| - Is everyone on HN exactly the same with the exact same
| outlook?
| Toine wrote:
| Define "better place" ?
| marcusverus wrote:
| Fewer people in extreme poverty. Hunger is falling. Child
| labor is on the decline. People in developed countries are
| working less. The share of income spent on food is down (in
| the US). Life expectancy is rising. Child mortality is down.
| Death in childhood is down. Guinea worm has almost been
| eradicated. Teen births are down (in the US). Smoking is down
| (in the US). Violent crime is down. Nuclear weapon stockpiles
| are down. More people are living in democracies. Literacy is
| up. Internet access is increasing. Solar energy is getting
| cheaper.
|
| Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-
| poverty-health...
| mateo1 wrote:
| As with all online communities HN is suffering from it's
| increased popularity. If you remember how Reddit was a good 10
| years back, on every thread there would be 1-2 actual experts
| posting substantiated and well-sourced commentary on news
| relevant to their field. Usually undergraduates and young
| professionals passionate about their field. At some point this
| was discovered by journalists and for a brief period of time
| major news organizations would rely on reddit users for sources.
| Many if not most discussions would be done in good faith or at
| least with solid arguments. The userbase was usually 18+. As it
| got more popular it got worse, mainly because of the "eternal
| september", altering userbase due to smartphone proliferation and
| changes in ranking algorithms and business model.
|
| HN is not the same as reddit and isn't doomed to the same faults,
| but as as a forum gets more popular, experts reduce in
| percentage, they're more reluctant and careful on what and how
| they comment, the "populism" of the voting system becomes harmful
| and all the attention creates financial incentives for bad
| actors.
|
| As for using it as some kind of blackbox betting algorithm for
| startups and trends, that's just a bad idea. I'm certain that you
| will get the same graph structure for all things that never
| became popular.
|
| Obviously any forum focused on leading edge technologies will
| discuss advancements long before they become a subject of
| interest in the general populace. But they'll also discuss
| everything that will fail or never reach the mainstream sphere.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Cue in joke about that Dropbox thread comment
| username91 wrote:
| I'm not aware of HN doing any predicting at large. If you mean
| 'will the average person later act like a given segment of HN
| people do now?' - then it depends on how good you are at
| selecting your segment, which makes it no better or worse than
| using any other sample of people for prediction.
|
| Less abstractly, productisation is what takes things from
| obscurity (e.g. HN) to mainstream audiences, so future trends
| might grow out of stuff that you see here, but the people who can
| figure out whether certain tech can become a product (would-be
| predictors) -hopefully- also have the means to turn it into a
| product themselves.
| wetpaws wrote:
| Dropbox folks would smile at this post
| salynchnew wrote:
| This is a great example of survivorship bias! A+ work. :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#As_a_general...
| throwawayFries wrote:
| This is a great example of an HN comment (and also in general
| why reading HN comments as opposed to the posts, is a poor
| predictor of anything).
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I like to see analysis like this that sheds light on the
| collective 'mind' of HN. Are there more of these out there?
| peter303 wrote:
| A class project would be to use machine learning on these graphs
| to spot trends. HN has lots of data examples.
| Razengan wrote:
| On the contrary. The very nature of vote-based forums like Reddit
| and HN means that you must agree with the masses and uphold the
| status quo to even be seen at all let alone heard, so it's very
| rare that you get a glimpse of upcoming disruption or anything
| new at all.
|
| TL;DR: No, most people here are sticks in the mud. If you
| listened to them you'd think that future laptops would still have
| parallel ports and floppy drives and communicate via IRC.
| leugim wrote:
| I'd say no. Lots of (successful) ideas have been dismissed by
| this community.
|
| And that is okey.
| [deleted]
| davemp wrote:
| Can't forget the famous dropbox dismissal:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| [deleted]
| chaostheory wrote:
| Here's one on bitcoin
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
| dang wrote:
| This one (on bit gold, a few months before the Bitcoin
| paper came out) is even more striking:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I think that example really exemplifies HN's biggest
| blindspot. A lot of successful companies are built around
| taking an existing technology, then packaging it in a way
| that drastically reduces the frictions for the user. The
| typical HN user doesn't understand those pain point, because
| they're technically sophisticated enough that they're mostly
| invisible.
|
| So, you take something like Dropbox. Yeah, it pretty much is
| just mounted FTP. And the average HN is looking at that and
| thinking "I could do the same thing with a bash script,
| what's the big deal".
| sumtechguy wrote:
| It is a blind spot of knowledge. Sure you can make a script
| that does it. But most people can not do that. Heck just
| yesterday something in my hacked up system did something
| odd. It spit out an error that I will now have to research
| (probably find nothing) and then have to dig out the code
| on. Then spend several days probably reverse engineering
| some tech API that I have never seen before, in a style
| that will be different than what I am used to. But if I had
| bought a product that did the same thing. More than likely
| 50 other people would have the same issue and a few dozen
| work arounds. If those failed I could have a shot at just
| taking it to whoever sold it to me and saying 'fix it'. But
| as I hacked together something on my own. I own it, warts
| and all. I enjoy doing that but most people have zero idea
| where to even begin in fixing something like that. Buying
| something that 'just works' solves so many issues (and
| creates others).
|
| Probably the biggest one that sticks out in my mind was
| when the iPad came out and all the tech boards like this
| were down on it. But it was what _most_ people wanted to
| use a computer for. Most people did not want a computer.
| They wanted a media device. For many years the only way to
| get that was to get a computer. Now you can get that media
| device without most of the headaches of a computer.
| guessbest wrote:
| I think Dropbox is only a blind spot because it took a
| syncing tool and combined with running a user application
| with root privileges in the 2000's era of computer security
| applications and gamification for user acquisition.
|
| > Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named
| Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple 's radar
| screen when he reverse-engineered Apple's file system so
| that his startup's logo, an unfolding box, appeared
| elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had
| been able to do that.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/drop
| b...
| luffapi wrote:
| It's not a blindspot for many people. It's open source and
| open protocols vs closed source spyware. SCP is _far_
| better than Dropbox if you value privacy for instance.
|
| A lot of resistance to things like Dropbox come from the
| experience of being screwed over by closed source software.
| If you look at the state of Dropbox today, those initial
| comments look pretty spot on.
| gjulianm wrote:
| Everytime that comment is referenced, people forget that the
| rest of comments were mostly positive plus constructive
| criticism or challenges they'd face.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, and even Brandon's comment was constructive criticism.
| He was trying to help Drew with his YC application (that's
| what "app" meant back then) and clearly wanted it to
| succeed ("I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak
| preview of some of the potential criticisms you may
| receive. Best of luck to you").
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27068148
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
| long_time_gone wrote:
| Almost like the people claiming "bias" actually have their
| own biases.
| mywittyname wrote:
| But new trends are typically discussed here, before they hit
| the mainstream, even if they are dismissed.
|
| Hacker News is good about surfacing new technology; Hacker News
| is bad about figuring out how that technology will be
| leveraged.
| rafale wrote:
| They missed crypto and NFTs. For some reason HN doesn't
| appreciate the potential of these tech. Even when some prominent
| Silicon Valley investors do. I wouldn't have expected this from a
| technical and freedom minded audience.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Both crypto and NFTs are strugging to find productive real
| world applications; predicting those are like predicting which
| toy will be the "one to get" this Christmas or the Beanie Baby
| fad.
| whitepaint wrote:
| > are struggling to find productive real world applications
|
| You can lend and borrow on compound.finance, aave. You can
| play no-loss lotteries like PoolTogether. You can bet on your
| beliefs and hedge your investments on markets platforms like
| Polymarket. You can gamble. More on:
| https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
|
| Remember, anyone can use all of this without any arbitrary
| restrictions imposed by governments or companies.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Financial shenanigans and gambling aren't really
| productive.
| whitepaint wrote:
| > Financial shenanigans
|
| I am curious, what's your job? Are you involved in
| finance in any way?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| No. I'm also curious, do people in Finance think various
| forms of gambling (and hedging of speculations) are
| productive for society.
| fisf wrote:
| At least the latter (hedging) is useful, and not only in
| terms of speculation but also for international trade /
| market events in general.
|
| Wether risk reduction as financial instrument is
| productive for society can remain open to interpretation.
| However, it, without a doubt, has value.
|
| Tbh, finance in general seems to be a major blind spot
| when it comes to discussions on HN.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > Wether risk reduction as financial instrument is
| productive for society can remain open to interpretation.
| However, it, without a doubt, has value.
|
| That's my original point, I don't believe speculation
| (and tools to reduce the risk of speculation) is
| productive. At best, it's a hovering up of the value
| delta between two actors with differential information.
|
| They CERTAINLY have value, for the financial actors using
| them. Just it isn't a productivity gain for society as a
| whole. Certainly gambling isn't.
| kkdaemas wrote:
| In case of NFTs these were called "Colored Coins" much earlier.
| dqpb wrote:
| Now do the other study - where on the Internet were these things
| first talked about.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Would be interesting to see the prefix "meta"
| justinzollars wrote:
| It looks like interest in Bitcoin has peaked on HN and in
| decline; We could extrapolate the same will happen on google in
| two years.
| slingnow wrote:
| Using total number of mentions as a way to predict future tech
| trends seems dubious at best. I understand coming up with a
| better metric would be difficult, but this one seems useless.
|
| For example, with this metric, how can we tell the difference
| between people constantly dismissing Bitcoin or people constantly
| praising it? Just because you mention it doesn't mean you're
| mentioning it in a positive light.
| yiyus wrote:
| I think the point is noticing the trends, not agreeing with
| them. If people were criticizing bitcoin in hn in 2013, it
| means the community was aware of its importance. And they were
| before the rest of the world did.
|
| That does not mean this is the perfect (or even a good) metric,
| but I do not think that predicting tech trends is the same
| thing as embracing them.
| hnbad wrote:
| HN commenters famously dismissed Dropbox when it was first
| posted. I would love to see a variant of this based on
| sentiment analysis and whether the conclusion would turn into
| "yes, but not the way you think".
| xx511134bz wrote:
| A lot of people fall into the trap of negativity = IQ. Your
| brain can spit out a reason that DropBox will succeed or
| fail, but the failure case sounds smarter.
| luffapi wrote:
| Alternative take, people didn't like Dropbox because it was
| the repackaging and close sourcing of existing solutions.
| It was more polished and financially successful but that
| doesn't mean it was good for tech. It's corporate software,
| yes it became valuable but it definitely represents an
| anti-user trend that actually would best have been
| resisted. You should _never_ give closed source software
| root!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Underappreciating simplicity and mass appeal is easy for an
| elite group.
|
| (I do this consistently myself.)
| OJFord wrote:
| > Remote Work [...] I thought [in contradistinction to the graph]
| that Hacker News would have been more ahead of the trend on this
| one.
|
| > For each topic I counted how many times it had been mentioned
| in a post title
|
| I suspect that's the problem. A lot of trendy discussion happens
| in comments; I think that's going to be particularly true for a
| topic like remote work.
|
| People are going to extol its virtues when it's tangentially
| related to a submission, but especially pre-pandemic there's only
| so many stories you could submit about it? 'Company goes full-
| remote'? 'How we handle remote working at Company'?
|
| It'd be interesting to search comments too I think.
| hn.algolia.com supports it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Both the selection (survivorship bias) and weighting (mentions
| rather than votes/discussion) are problematic.
|
| Discussion itself can be a very poor metric, as when there's a
| great deal of general agreement there's frequently little (or
| at least less) as when compared with highly contentious topics.
|
| Research methodology can often be restricted by data
| availability. Finding novel ways to torture^W _explore_ data
| can be insightful, though raises its own risks (p-hacking, as
| an example).
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Agreed. This analysis would be more useful if it was done
| against comments.
| drpancake wrote:
| Author here. I agree with you but the only recent HN data dump
| that I could find contained posts and not comments. I suspect
| the trend lines would look similar though.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| Skimming the front page there's nothing on future tech.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| If something looks useful, I'll sign up day one. Even if it
| doesn't pan out. That's how you get early adopter status. Found
| out about: Figma, Airtable, Stripe, Coinbase, Robinhood, Alpaca.
| All through HN posts ;)
| p0nce wrote:
| Hacker News skews towards richer, more technical, and higher-
| educated and then makes systematic bias against pedestrian,
| working-class, and uncomplicated solutions. If it's too popular
| on HN I'd say it's a red flag.
| black_13 wrote:
| A lot of self involved bay area types
| artembugara wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
| mettamage wrote:
| From the top of my head (a very biased account):
|
| * Dolphin emulator progress reports (I love it when they show up)
|
| * Random posts on x86-64 emulation or emulating a gameboy or
| something like that. Fabrice Bellard is a hero.
|
| * People who post their very first side project ever made either
| via no-code solutions or some React/Bootstrap type of thing. In
| many cases, these things are job boards for a specific niche.
|
| * HN praising Apple for standing up to the FBI (or CIA?). HN
| hating Apple because of recent events with scanning pictures on
| iCloud and all that.
|
| * All the things the blog post talks about
|
| * Hardcore learning resources on many topics, one that I actually
| used: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/ (tons of books on
| Calculus as well, I remember a 1900 textbook called Calculus Made
| Easy)
|
| * The random physics or biological discovery
|
| * And so much more
|
| The way I see it: HN talks about tech (and interesting stuff
| outside tech), it's bound to cover tech that eventually becomes
| popular. But will the Dolphin progress reports become as popular
| as Bitcoin? I don't think so. It'd be interesting times if they
| would ;-)
| microtherion wrote:
| Another Apple perennial is blog posts about switching away from
| Apple to Linux/Windows/ChromeOS. This successfully predicted
| that 300% of Apple's user base is gone now.
| hnbad wrote:
| "My conclusion: Hacker News is typically ahead of the mainstream,
| often by a few years, but you would need to be paying very close
| attention to catch the early mentions of a new tech trend. Most
| of the linked posts and comments have very few upvotes and
| probably wouldn't even make it to the front page."
|
| That's a long way of saying "no".
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah. "HN _mentioned_ the future, but no one noticed even on HN
| " != "HN predicts the future".
| doo_daa wrote:
| (How) did you disambiguate Tesla as in Tesla Cars from Tesla as
| in Nikola Tesla from the either source?
| bane wrote:
| HN is fantastic for surfacing up and coming technologies. Reading
| HN daily is almost like a superpower.
|
| The HN community is...not so great...at predicting which things
| are exciting and the industry should adopt. If it were the
| industry would have settled on a LISP dialect long ago, the web
| would have adopted good readability standards (based on thousands
| of meta-complaints on virtually every top rated post on any
| topic), and mobile app development would still be a growing and
| profitable business (and Apple would finally be catering to niche
| HN reader needs).
| devops000 wrote:
| You forgot the "coronavirus" or "pandemic" in the analysis
| creaghpatr wrote:
| Love the visualizations, I would also want to compare against
| false positives though. From my time here, I feel like there's
| been a lot of flops that never broke into the public conscious.
| turdnagel wrote:
| What is the prediction being made? Whether or not something is a
| "trend"? What is the definition of a trend?
|
| > Can I convince myself that checking the HN front page multiple
| times a day is a useful and productive exercise?
|
| That seems to be a different topic entirely and should probably
| be the headline of the article. Also, it's clearly a bit cheeky,
| but confirmation bias abounds nonetheless.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 1. For things like remote work, it only became a trend because of
| the pandemic. You would have needed to predict the pandemic to
| predict that management would permit remote work. It was not
| really a trend, but rather an emergency measure that morphed into
| a desirable benefit.
|
| 2. This only looks at successful things. We must examine
| unsuccessful things to see if there is any real predictive
| ability.
| OJFord wrote:
| > You would have needed to predict the pandemic
|
| It's rather short of that of course, but after hearing about an
| outbreak of flu in China on Canadian television in a hotel
| lobby on holiday from the UK, very early January 2020, I think
| the 2nd [*] - I heard approximately nothing about except via
| HN, which included 'this will be bad/global', until March.
|
| [*] (For a while I remembered, because it was notably earlier
| than UK newspapers kept claiming as a start date, or 'detected
| in China', in their charts from March. I didn't claim to know
| the correct date, but obviously that was an upperbound!)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Point 2 notwithstanding, I wonder what's really the threshold
| of "predicting" for point 1. I've been reading and
| participating in conversations about remote work on HN for many
| years before the pandemic; hell, HN is how I discovered this
| concept in the first place, and what helped me become a remote
| worker some 3 years before COVID-19 hit the news. REMOTE tag in
| the monthly "Who is hiring?" / "Who wants to be hired?" threads
| has also been established before the pandemic.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| To me predictive power must be actionable. Is there something
| in 2018 that would have made you think "I have got to buy
| Zoom stock"?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's a good heuristic, thanks.
|
| Ironically, not only nothing made me think "I have got to
| buy Zoom stock" in 2018, IIRC around 2019 there were plenty
| of reasons to _short_ Zoom. I wonder if they 'd have
| survived if not for the pandemic.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Before the pandemic, zoom was a starting to gain market
| share over a bunch of the legacy conference software
| vendors, like cisco webex. They had their act together on
| the enterprise sales side and were getting traction via
| their freemium model ... just dropbox/box got enterprise
| traction even when companies already had things like
| SMB/CIFS or sharepoint. The UX was better for the same
| reasons many an HN didn't understand what advantages
| Slack has over IRC.
| em500 wrote:
| Regarding point 2, an old joke comes to mind: "economists have
| successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions".
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I am constantly seeing articles about how a market crash is
| coming and have been seeing them since 2014.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I am constantly seeing articles about how a market crash
| is coming and have been seeing them since 2014.
|
| I've been seeing them nonstop since the early 80s, and I
| suspect I would have seen them earlier except that my media
| consumption before elementary school was fairly
| constrained.
| pvarangot wrote:
| And then when a market crash happens articles say "we don't
| know what's happening". Look at finance news from 2008 and
| early 2020.
| da_chicken wrote:
| And then a year later there are articles saying, "Oh, it
| turns out that the regulation we created 80 years ago
| that was specifically designed to prevent exactly this
| situation was repealed 40 years ago."
|
| And then a year after that there are articles saying,
| "Why isn't Congress fixing this obvious thing that only
| makes the very rich richer and always leads to economic
| disaster?"
|
| And then a year after that, there are articles saying the
| next crash is coming....
| dazc wrote:
| At least you can't say you were not warned.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| crashes happen every ten years or so. Predicting them
| shouldn't be so hard.
| nsonha wrote:
| Yes I remember the 2017/18 recession
|
| /s
| RotaryTelephone wrote:
| Found the millionaire.
| smt88 wrote:
| Every prediction I see is: a crash is coming but we know
| with 100% certainty that no one can predict when. It might
| be tomorrow or 3 years from now.
|
| Framed that way, it's less a prediction than a statement of
| the cyclical nature of economies, but it can still grab
| headlines!
| id wrote:
| There was a crash last year. The only reason it's not
| really acknowledged as such is that the recovery was
| unusually quick.
|
| Crashes don't have to be big and the recovery doesn't
| have to take years or even decades.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Recovery could also prove to be further papering over
| serious problems. Time will tell how robust a recovery it
| truly is.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| This scares me. Here in Canada, the government scrambled
| to put "printed" cash into motion, and inflation is
| already having real impacts... Particularly on poor
| people. I worry we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg,
| so to speak. The same thing happened in the USA, but I
| suspect our economy here is less resilient to
| fluctuations.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The only reason it's not really acknowledged as such
|
| Wait, there are significant sources that don't
| acknowledge the existence of a deep and sharp pandemic
| related downturn?
| dragontamer wrote:
| Nah, I think you haven't been following the permabears.
|
| A lot of them talk about crap like the price of gold, the
| use of BTC as a hedge, PE ratios, "technicals",
| candlesticks, simple moving averages, charts, commodity
| prices, QE, negative bond rates, near-zero interest rates
| and the like. Some get political even, talking about
| presidents or policies they don't like and why they'll
| cause a crash.
|
| Its pretty easy to weave a story around ill-defined
| feelings, because none of these things determine the
| market trajectory. You can be 100% correct in your facts
| and/or analysis of the present but still make terrible
| predictions of the future.
|
| The permabears always have a good story. They're really
| good at making stories for why the crash is going to
| really happen this year.
| legulere wrote:
| They might not be wrong though. Irrationally high
| valuations are signs for a bubble, but do not help
| predict when the bubble will burst.
| [deleted]
| akoncius wrote:
| better formula would be "in next 20 years we will have
| economic downturn"
|
| :D
| atlgator wrote:
| Long term near-zero interest rates have fueled unlimited
| growth for companies. Unlimited growth means no ceiling to
| stock market prices. A correction will come when the Fed
| raises interest rates. We started to see it in 2017 but the
| Fed curtailed. It's inevitable though. But to your point,
| no one has called it correctly yet.
| qnsi wrote:
| I think part of this is media enjoying amplifying clickable
| stories. A lot of people (myself included) just can't help
| but click about news like "market crash is comming"
| "housing prices are about to crash" etc. Current media
| business models sadly are driven by sensational news.
|
| See also: all those revolutionary stories like cancer cure,
| that happen to only work in mice for now and will probably
| never work in humans, but we still click on those
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I agree. I think The Great Recession of 2007 created an
| ongoing paranoid that marketing folks capitalize on.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| I think it's that people realize that the underlying
| issues that caused the financial crisis haven't actually
| been fixed, and the Fed has been experimenting with
| policies that have never been seen before to prop up
| markets. While it's worked so far it still feels like
| there are structural weaknesses that could cause massive
| problems, and just because things have been good doesn't
| guarantee they won't eventually fail, but timing is
| notoriously difficult.
| majormajor wrote:
| "Policies that have never been seen before" seem to
| describe a good part of the last century, which has
| certainly had booms and busts, but the novelty has been
| more of a constant. We just don't have that long a
| history of modern economics. We've been flying by the
| seat of our pants the whole time.
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Sure, but also, there's a generation of us finance folks
| who learned how the pipes break. So that when they see
| something like Evergrande, they go 'well it will probably
| get bailed out, but if it doesn't.....'
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-23/evergr
| and...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/business/economy/china
| -ev...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I have seen articles about an imminent market crash since
| 2009.
|
| I started paying attention to market crash predictions in
| 2009.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| I used to be really into a youtube channel that would go on
| an on about the coming economic collapse of civilization
| (back in 2014) and how everyone needed to buy gold to
| protect themselves. I never bought gold, but I found the
| channel interesting and some of the 'economists' they
| brought in were pretty convincing. Then nothing happened.
| They started shifting the narrative to why the economic
| collapse was pushed to 2015. That's when I stopped
| watching. I wonder if they're still around.
| jbay808 wrote:
| It's a lot like predicting earthquakes right? You can measure
| strain and know that you're due, but you still don't know
| precisely what the trigger will be or when it will happen.
|
| We don't make such jokes about seismologists though. Why not?
| robotresearcher wrote:
| We are accustomed to their predictions being shaky.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| It's more like predicting Y2K. There was no countrywide
| carastrophe from Y2K, therefore the computer scientsists
| and engineers who predicted it were wrong. And by
| extension, computer science and engineering are bogus.
| Right?
| injidup wrote:
| I had to break up with my Seismologist girlfriend. She kept
| pointing out all my faults.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| But we do make such jokes about meteorologists.
|
| I suppose it's the matter of media exposure: unlike
| economists and meteorologists, seismologists aren't
| constantly on TV telling us bad times are coming soon.
| jbay808 wrote:
| If the meteorologist says it will rain on Saturday and be
| sunny on Sunday, and in fact they happen in the opposite
| order, my weekend plans are ruined.
|
| But the seismologist is just saying, "I don't know
| exactly when but it reeaaally looks like we're going to
| get a big earthquake someday soon better make sure your
| building is up to code and you have your emergency
| supplies ready". And we nod, and check our emergency
| supplies and upgrade our infrastructure, and when five
| more years go by without an earthquake, and the
| seismologist is saying the same thing, nobody says "silly
| seismologist, predicting twelve of the last three
| earthquakes!"
|
| But when an economist says a crash might be coming soon,
| and you'd better make sure you have emergency savings set
| aside, people do make those jokes.
|
| What's different about these scenarios?
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| Maybe one difference is with the economy there is a lot
| more obvious benefit to be had for almost any person to
| expect (pretend?) there won't be a crash. For
| earthquakes, challenging the seismologists only benefits
| the niche group of real estate developers. While the cost
| of worrying about earthquakes is relatively little
| ostensibly.
|
| I'd heard some argument that humans inherent tolerance
| for risk is much lower than it rationally should be today
| because it was evolved in an environment where we were
| much more likely to get killed. I think human discourse
| is constantly grappling with that biased instinct.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Seismologists don't try to imply that there's "news" every
| 6 hours worth reading.
| mech422 wrote:
| for 1.. I'd say it was a trend...just a much smaller one.
|
| I've been 100% WFH in tech for 20 years, and it got easier
| every year even before covid. What you had to predict, wasn't
| the pandemic but what tech would be hot enough employers
| wouldn't care where you worked.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| This would have been a better analysis if it ignored headlines
| and used comments, perhaps in combination with some sentiment
| analysis. Also, nfts, Tesla, etc aren't really tech trends but
| rather consumer and valuation trends. They should have tested
| for specific technologies like programming languages,
| paradigms, frameworks, and libraries. Or specific hard tech
| danjac wrote:
| > It was not really a trend, but rather an emergency measure
| that morphed into a desirable benefit.
|
| Do you have data to support this? Anecdotally (from own
| experience and tech workers I know) I feel that remote work has
| been growing steadily over the past decade, with a an increase
| in job ads mentioning remote (even if they went out their way
| to say "office only") but I don't have data either way to back
| this up. It feels that long-term changes in tech as well as
| management culture were making remote more common in the long
| term, and the pandemic accelerated a trend (much like the shift
| in the movie industry from cinemas to home streaming).
| staplers wrote:
| 3. Hacker News comments have been vehemently anti-
| cryptocurrency for a decade. I remember being shocked how out
| of touch with actual hackers this place is.
|
| Reminds me of punks who'd shop at Hot Topic.
| yann2 wrote:
| Actual punks or just punks?
| hannasanarion wrote:
| "actual hackers" use cryptocurrencies because they are easy
| to steal and launder. Despite the name, most of the people on
| Hacker News are not interested in the criminal part of
| "hacking".
| edgyquant wrote:
| 1. We still don't have any proof crypto isn't just a huge
| ponzi-like scheme. In fact a lot of them have been shown to
| basically be just that.
|
| 2. There is nothing wrong with "punks" shopping at hot topic,
| whatever you mean by punk.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| 1. Its continued success is proof enough, as people conduct
| legitimate business with it.
|
| Separate BTC/ETH/XMR/etc from random shitcoins and NFTs.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| The only "legitimate business" anybody's done with crypto
| is buying lots of it and hoping the value keeps going up.
| Nobody is actually using BTC/ETH/XMR/etc to do business
| or conduct commerce, it's all just speculation.
|
| There is no compelling reason to believe that
| cryptocurrencies are anything other than digital beanie-
| babies. At least beanie-babies had inherent value as a
| toy.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > The only "legitimate business" anybody's done with
| crypto is buying lots of it and hoping the value keeps
| going up.
|
| Yes, and HN kept telling everyone for years _not_ to do
| that. And the value kept going up.
|
| I wish I had a bitcoin for every "don't buy bitcoin"
| article that hit HN frontpage...
| exdsq wrote:
| > 1. We still don't have any proof crypto isn't just a huge
| ponzi-like scheme. In fact a lot of them have been shown to
| basically be just that.
|
| What would that proof need to look like?
| hannasanarion wrote:
| A successful venture using cryptocurrencies for anything
| other than speculation would be a good start.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'm pretty sure overlaying Google Trends onto keywords in HN is
| more of an informal analysis than a rigorous decision process.
| True predictive value needs a more rigorous model, but these
| sorts of data explorations are a great way to motivate folks to
| dig deeper.
| Naac wrote:
| Regarding point 2, isn't it pretty common ( or at least was )
| for comments to disparage potential projects?
|
| For example, the infamous Dropbox comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > You would have needed to predict the pandemic
|
| That was not difficult to do, even in Late December. Most
| discussions were taking it really casually, and believed that
| none of that would happen, which is exactly why it happened and
| how I predicted it. People are be filled with unfounded
| optimism, overestimate their skills, and underestimate their
| bad lack.
|
| Combining the three with the belief that most humans are
| incapable of understanding exponential and autoregressive
| processes, it became clear.
|
| But all of this is anecdotal evidence and could very well be an
| instance of a bear predicting a depression, after all, bears
| predicted 10 out of the last 3 economic crises.
| BjoernKW wrote:
| Pandemics have worked as an accelerator or even as a catalyst
| for technological change since at least the Black Death and
| this one certainly is no exception.
|
| However, remote work didn't become a trend because of the
| pandemic, it became the default scenario for many jobs that
| don't actually require on-site presence but that due to
| cultural inertia nevertheless often still happened in a
| colocated office pre-2020.
|
| Remote work has been a trend since long before 2020. With the
| pandemic the proposition in many cases now simply was "Either
| work remotely or see your company go out of business.", which
| had many companies reevaluate their ways rather quickly.
| luffapi wrote:
| Remote work was definitely a trend, the pandemic just
| accelerated it.
|
| Edit: for those downvoting, here's the data:
|
| https://slidemodel.com/remote-work-key-trends/
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Thank you for this.
|
| I am actually surprised as it seemed that with IBM, Yahoo,
| and various other companies dragging everyone back to the
| office in 2017-2019 that remote work was in retreat.
| devin wrote:
| I was surprised to see you downvoted. Did people forget that
| "digital nomad" was trending years prior to the pandemic?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I always interpreted digital nomad to be a Tim Ferris type
| person working 4 hours a week and living off relatively
| passive income or some kind of online self employment, not
| employees.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Did people forget that "digital nomad" was trending years
| prior to the pandemic?
|
| Often encouraged by people selling tools, books, coaching,
| etc. related to the digital nomad lifestyle.
| nsonha wrote:
| And often are self-employed/freelance
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It was definitely a trend, fully remote companies were coming
| into vogue long before the epidemic.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| To point 2., This article seems like a great example of
| selection bias. Hacker news discusses many new ideas in the
| tech world. I'd also like to see things HN didn't like and see
| the success rate on those services (the famous Dropbox
| comment[0] comes to mind)
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| amelius wrote:
| But Dropbox is already losing marketshare, as OS vendors now
| implement their own cloud solutions. So you could say that HN
| was right in the long run.
| speby wrote:
| As someone who has been remote, hybrid remote, and almost every
| other version distributed teams and remote/asynchronous working
| over the past 13 years, I assure you there was and still is a
| remote working trend well before COVID. COVID only poured
| gasoline on an otherwise very long-term "how we work" trend.
| COVID probably condensed 10 years of where remote work probably
| would have ended up in the span of 18 months.
| devin wrote:
| As someone who has worked on exclusively remote teams for
| around 7 years, the pandemic _accelerated_ the trend. It was
| already very much headed in that direction.
| kqr wrote:
| Why is your work situation relevant? If you meant it as a
| "this is what my bias is" then it further weakens your
| argument, which may or may not be desirable for you.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Because remote work isn't new and was on an uptrend before
| the pandemic.
| breadzeppelin__ wrote:
| My dad likes to remind me that he was 'working remote'
| (had a dial up modem and two factor auth in to whatever
| he was doing at AT&T/Ameritech) back in the early 2000s
| enobrev wrote:
| I started working remotely over DSL at the end of 2001.
|
| I also recall getting an ISDN line in the late 90s, but I
| was working in an office at the time.
| raarts wrote:
| I started working remotely end 1994. An analog line ran
| to my office had two analog 19k2 modems on it and I
| worked remotely on the server which was connected to the
| internet using a 10mbit fiber.
|
| Worked from home before that '90/'91 but not online. Had
| an IBM cash register in my bedroom for which I wrote a
| POS application.
| nsonha wrote:
| "It exists and is growing" and it being a trend are very
| different. I think it is an irreversible trend now but it
| wasn't before the pandemic. There are just way more
| people like myself didn't even think of it seriously for
| many reasons (I did know it existed) and they all have
| woken up now.
| malloci wrote:
| Remote work seemed to be declining in the Bay Area pre-
| pandemic. My company and many others were pushing for
| more in-office work over remote work as they felt that
| employees were able to be more creative and productive if
| they were able to collaborate spontaneously which in
| their eyes could only happen if everyone was in the
| office. This really seemed to take off in the area after
| Yahoo had implemented their no remote work policy.
| nsonha wrote:
| if course it declines in the Bay Area, a place that
| people famously move into for work. It'd be silly to move
| to the Bay only to then work in a shitty rental
| appartment.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Growing is most certainly a trend. It doesn't make it a
| permanent trend but that is definitely a trend.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sometimes people share their bias in the interest of just
| being transparent. This is mostly because not every
| discussion is necessarily adversarial, and having more
| contest is helpful for their companions. However it also
| makes them appear more trustworthy, adding informal weight
| to their subsequent statements.
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| Not sure if it is true in general. But from the perspective of
| the software industry, our company has been remote-first since
| its inception. We do encourage coming to the offices, but it
| has never been mandatory. I think there is a fine balance in
| this. Personal time saved vs. the social aspect. And of course
| some problems just get solved faster in front of a whiteboard.
| rkagerer wrote:
| _For things like remote work, it only became a trend because of
| the pandemic_
|
| I think it was more of a catalyst.
| alexnapiernomad wrote:
| I AGRII JAMES. BTC AND NFT ARE THE FUTURE! BUT Y NO DOGE?!?!
| littleweep wrote:
| If so, we might have (actually) seen the year of the Linux
| desktop.
| yablak wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
| andruby wrote:
| Upvoted because I also immediately thought of survivorship bias
| when reading the post.
|
| You might want to elaborate a little bit instead of posting
| just a link to wikipedia.
|
| I think they should have also looked at trends that peaked on
| HN but didn't (yet) peak on google.
| [deleted]
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| No really. Unless you think the ONLY future tech is certain
| niches in software.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1497/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Also relevant: https://xkcd.com/1827/
| throwthere wrote:
| This is a good start. It does not do much to answer the question
| of "predicting" trends. You would need to quantify false
| positives somehow. That is, tech that is big on HN but not
| elsewhere. I'm thinking of all the JS frameworks of the day, for
| one. For instance, Meteor JS was the bees knees for awhile.
| OJFord wrote:
| You'd have to also somehow decide that they're 'past it' too,
| and it's not merely that HN is _still_ ahead on them! Easy with
| a JS framework that 's been discontinued say, hard in general,
| especially if you want some kind of objective rule for it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| resheku wrote:
| no, it isn't
| drdrey wrote:
| The serverless post on the Scoble blog is not even about what we
| think of as Serverless now, just good old cloud. As in "you don't
| have any physical servers?"
| reducesuffering wrote:
| If you payed attention and believed in HN, you would've invested
| in:
|
| AMD, Square, Cloudflare, Fiverr, Apple, Nvidia, TSM, Twilio,
| CrowdStrike, Zoom, Atlassian, Moderna, and Shopify.
|
| Maybe a 5 year 500% return compared to the general market's 100%?
|
| I'd say your fat stacks of $ would have you believing it's a
| pretty good predictor of something.
| sbussard wrote:
| Remote work is so obvious to the hacker news crowd that there's
| no need for it to trend here. What's artificial is going to an
| office to use a computer there. There better be food to make up
| for the traffic.
| bdcravens wrote:
| It's barely an indicator of what's currently popular, skewing
| heavily to subsections of the tech world
| shotta wrote:
| This only looked at submissions it seems. I gather a lot more
| useful information lurking the comments. I think discussions in
| the comments here are far ahead of the mainstream.
| globular-toast wrote:
| The Android example is from a comment, not a submission.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > I gather a lot more useful information lurking the comments
|
| I don't know if it's a good thing or not, but I've definitely
| gotten into the habit of opening the comments of a post before
| the link itself.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Considering the prevalence of clickbait, it is an effective
| way to prevent wasting time if someone has already identified
| it.
| jedimastert wrote:
| It definitely catches a lot of clickbait, but there's a lot
| of false positives if the post goes against the hivemind
| mellavora wrote:
| As an old slashdot user, I've almost never done anything else
| :)
| jasondigitized wrote:
| +1 on this. All the good stuff is in the comments.
| gnulinux wrote:
| It's a bad habit since it encourages commenting before
| reading the submission. But I do the same thing as well, and
| it's not clear to me how someone could do otherwise without
| spending extraordinary time on HN. I find HN a very valuable
| source, so scanning some amount of comments is more important
| to me than reading all the submissions.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I think discussions in the comments here are far ahead of the
| mainstream.
|
| Discussions on HN and the articles they comment on can buy into
| the hype of the day to just as large a degree as anywhere else.
| Go back a few years. How many people were confidently
| predicting that widespread door-to-door autonomous taxis were
| just 2 or 3 years out?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I do not know how many, but I do not remember that being a
| popular position. If I recall, the simple answer to someone
| proposing that was "we will see when they start testing
| outside of pristine Arizona/California weather."
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| If you are lucky, for every technical subject discussed on
| Hacker News, you will find at least one expert commenting
| in the discussion. Here the issue with the pristine weather
| is directly linked to the difficulty of making LIDAR works
| under the rain something I remember someone knowledgeable
| with LIDAR posting very early here.
|
| Sadly my feeling is that during the past few years these
| posts have been becoming rarer and are less upvoted that
| they used to be. Controversial or very assertive comments
| seem to have more success. I fear that Hacker News is
| slowly turning into Reddit.
| [deleted]
| jsnell wrote:
| One thing worth nothing is that HN didn't launch publicly until
| 2007 February. There is some older content in the DB, but it
| looks mostly like very low volume manual testing. So the data set
| definitely shouldn't be extended that far back, and is affecting
| a few of the be graphs.
| enriquto wrote:
| if it was, everybody would be coding in rust using neovim, which
| does not really seem to happen
| m1117 wrote:
| Hacker News's a great source of rage.
| vmception wrote:
| Just find whatever is being ridiculed on HN and that's the alpha
| bet
| drexlspivey wrote:
| What is currently being ridiculed on HN (other than crypto) ?
| Asking for a friend
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| Node.js (by Deno fans and JavaScript haters)
|
| Deno (by overly invested Node.js users)
|
| Clojure (ClojureScript) (by type-driven programming
| aficionados)
|
| Scala (by keep-it-simple squad)
|
| C++ (by literally everyone else that does not develop in C++)
|
| Rust ("why don't you rewrite that in Rust?"-jokes squad)
|
| Docker (by the "I still use a simple VM to boot
| SkyNet"-crowd)
|
| TypeScript (by "don't pollute my JSDoc annotated codebase
| with types"-crowd)
|
| Kubernetes (by the "I still haven't installed Docker"-crowd)
|
| JVM, CLR, WASM (by the "metal"-people)
|
| Bitcoin (by reasonable people)
| handrous wrote:
| > C++ (by literally everyone else that does not develop in
| C++)
|
| Also, those who do.
| vmception wrote:
| Nothing pops out aside from crypto, to me, like you said.
|
| But for anyone passing by, crypto assets are like 20 distinct
| sectors and ever expanding, with many solutions and competing
| services providers in each sector. HN typically gets stuck on
| surface level arguments such as limitations in the "currency"
| concept and the merchant use sector. It also gets reliable
| stuck on environmental impact, as well as surface level use
| of NFTs. Solutions providers in oracles, insurance, IOT,
| yield farming, yield farming aggregators, SaaS products
| (information, tax), marketplaces and many more entire sectors
| are almost completely ignored. All alpha bets.
| [deleted]
| jpswade wrote:
| No, it predicted Dropbox would be dead.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I would say no. I made the first post on Bitcoin here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
| lamontcg wrote:
| this suffers from survivorship bias though and isn't looking at
| stuff that hacker news yaps about but never happens.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-24 23:02 UTC)