Ask HN: Predicting Future from HN Submissions | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Predicting Future from HN Submissions

6 pointsyogrish6 comments

Today, an intriguing idea crossed my mind. As an avid follower of the HN community for several years, I have had the privilege of witnessing groundbreaking technologies, significant events, and medical advancements long before they gained widespread recognition or entered the spotlight. Examples include witnessing the emergence of Blockchains, Cloud, 5G, LLaMA, ChatGPT, mRNA, and many more before they captured the public's attention. In my eyes, the HN community stands as technology Gurus, possessing an exceptional ability to predict the future of any technology that holds the potential to benefit humanity. I wonder, could HN potentially utilize an AI model or have a simple word cloud to forecast the upcoming buzz well in advance?

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When it comes to tech HN tends to be bearish on some useful things just because they also happen to be hyped up (Kubernetes, machine learning), and overvalue tech which is rarely used in the real world (obscure programming languages).

> the HN community stands as technology Gurus

It's a more polite reddit with some focus on tech, and maybe startups. It's nice but you don't need to put people on a pedestal, anyone can post here.

Have you checked for a confirmation bias? HN predicts a lot of things -- as any self-selecting outspoken public group of nerds would -- but at what success rate?

Go back and look at the predictions for the next decade made at the start of 2020[1], none of them seriously mention Covid, there were only a few "there will be a plague somewhere" near misses of the thousand+ predictions.

Thus, HN doesn't seem to be a good predictive tool.

It is, however, a great source of wisdom and analysis.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

And in terms of technology specifically, HN is too cynical and curmudgeonly to ever find itself ahead of the curve, or even aware of the state of the art much of the time. Most of HN's predictions are obvious extrapolations, wishful thinking or blithe dismissals of whatever the kids think is cool.

HN submission is simple to understand: Hype the underrated, and blame the overrated.

My gut tells me that sentiment analysis of all sentences containing keywords for certain regions/nations/commodities/technologies would pay off more than doing it for companies/derivatives.

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