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I was going to post this standalone, but will post it here. I was recently reading the Hacker News initial reaction to Facebook acquiring Instagram in 2012:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840

One of the commenters says it will be the equivalent to Google buying YouTube. To which another commenter replies "bookmark this comment, see you in 2022". And here we are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818055

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Such confidence while having no way to know if they would be right (because, no matter the arguments, they were trying to predict the future).

If they were wrong, the comment would have continued rotting away unnoticed. But they got lucky and were right -- confirmation bias is a wonderful thing.

Nitpick: this is technically survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Right? I do think Instagram was one of the acquisitions of the decade.

My favorite part is that a comment thread further down convinced that 'we're in a 2nd bubble now more than ever.'.

A decade later, nothing much has changed it seems.

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