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".
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.
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.
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.
Everytime that comment is referenced, people forget that the rest of comments were mostly positive plus constructive criticism or challenges they'd face.
Yes, and BrandonM'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").
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.
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".
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.
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!
> Alternative take, people didn’t like Dropbox because it was the repackaging and close sourcing of existing solutions
It wasn't. Even the famous comment just pointed it was possible to replicate with existing tools. And apart from one person the thread was actually pretty welcoming.
That comment was just a grandfather of the very popular "Why should I use this instead of [completely different solution]?", that is also so very often also used against open source projects themselves.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.....'
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.
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.
Timing is the >one billion question. Markets aren't predictable because they are dynamic so any measurement and analysis affects the behavior of it's agents.
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.
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.
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....
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
It's just another speculation scheme. "Protect your money from inflation" means "make a bet that our token's price will go up".
If you want to safeguard your savings against inflation, the way to do it is to invest it in vehicles that are backed by something, like corporate stocks, government bonds, real estate, or commodity money, not a vacuous line on a digital ledger supported by nothing but people's hope that it'll be worth more tomorrow.
Valiu's claim that they're backed by USD is dubious at best. Tether was running a similar scheme, we now know that they only have 2.9% of the money that they claim to have in reserve, the rest having been traded away to mysterious LLCs in the Caymans, and many of their coins printed out of thin air.
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.
"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".
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)
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Would you get the same result if HN is a popular content marketing forum that’s frequently used to promote new businesses and products? Also, I skimmed the graphs and only concluded that HN contributors have a short attention span. I must lack the sophistication to interpret the results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Yes. And what I tried to point out, albeit not very clearly in retrospect, was that hedging is not only applicable and useful in cases that are plainly speculative in nature. E.g. I would like to hedge against the case of Forex fluctuations when doing a large international deal, or delivery delays, or bad harvests, etc.
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 ;)
285 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadAnd that is okey.
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".
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.
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.
> 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/dropb...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27068148
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999
Hacker News is good about surfacing new technology; Hacker News is bad about figuring out how that technology will be leveraged.
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.
It wasn't. Even the famous comment just pointed it was possible to replicate with existing tools. And apart from one person the thread was actually pretty welcoming.
That comment was just a grandfather of the very popular "Why should I use this instead of [completely different solution]?", that is also so very often also used against open source projects themselves.
(I do this consistently myself.)
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.
That's a long way of saying "no".
2. This only looks at successful things. We must examine unsuccessful things to see if there is any real predictive ability.
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
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-23/evergrand...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/business/economy/china-ev...
/s
Framed that way, it's less a prediction than a statement of the cyclical nature of economies, but it can still grab headlines!
:D
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.
Crashes don't have to be big and the recovery doesn't have to take years or even decades.
Wait, there are significant sources that don't acknowledge the existence of a deep and sharp pandemic related downturn?
I started paying attention to market crash predictions in 2009.
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....
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.
We don't make such jokes about seismologists though. Why not?
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.
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?
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.
Edit: for those downvoting, here’s the data:
https://slidemodel.com/remote-work-key-trends/
Often encouraged by people selling tools, books, coaching, etc. related to the digital nomad lifestyle.
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.
I also recall getting an ISDN line in the late 90s, but I was working in an office at the time.
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.
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).
Reminds me of punks who'd shop at Hot Topic.
2. There is nothing wrong with “punks” shopping at hot topic, whatever you mean by punk.
What would that proof need to look like?
If you want to safeguard your savings against inflation, the way to do it is to invest it in vehicles that are backed by something, like corporate stocks, government bonds, real estate, or commodity money, not a vacuous line on a digital ledger supported by nothing but people's hope that it'll be worth more tomorrow.
Valiu's claim that they're backed by USD is dubious at best. Tether was running a similar scheme, we now know that they only have 2.9% of the money that they claim to have in reserve, the rest having been traded away to mysterious LLCs in the Caymans, and many of their coins printed out of thin air.
Separate BTC/ETH/XMR/etc from random shitcoins and NFTs.
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.
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...
Speculation is not business, high prices are not proof of utility, and the purpose of currency is not to hodl.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, the infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I think it was more of a catalyst.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
I am curious, what's your job? Are you involved in finance in any way?
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.
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.