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A comment on Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News posts and linked webpages. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News pos... by dang on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @11:18AM (#26793404)
People love to pick out the comments of the past that seem most wrong now, because—let's be honest—it makes us feel superior. But if you go back and look at that original 3-comment Bitcoin thread, what you find is that those 3 comments span an entire spectrum: elated, skeptical, and bewildered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852.

The first cryptocurrency thread on HN—about 9 months earlier—was even more interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253963. It contains another skeptical comment: "The bigger problem is that everyone has a incentive to run their computers day and night cranking out solutions, which burns up lots of natural resources and processor time for a zero-sum result." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999), which seems astonishingly prescient now, even though the objection is still hotly (no pun intended) debated.

Cherry-picking the wrongest-seeming skeptical comment from that collection of data points is a case study in survivorship bias. (I don't mean to pick on you personally! This is common of course.) The infamous Dropbox comment from 2008 is similar in that it has gotten repeated out of context in a way that is unfair to the original commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275). When we repeat these things, it says more about us than it does about the thing we're repeating.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News pos... by julienchastang on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @12:05PM (#26794316)
What this also shows to me is just how difficult it is to predict the future. Here is another thought experiment: There is probably a wonderful technology / opportunity, perhaps lying in plain sight, that we will be kicking ourselves in ten years for not having gotten involved in. But what is it? "Every day brings new opportunities to become very rich, most of which we are bound to miss" [1]

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/missed-teslas-12-551-rise-dont-...

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Re:Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News pos... by derangedHorse on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @06:31PM (#26800268)
Not really a superiority thing for me. I just think it’s funny how much perceptions change over time and how reasonable assumptions can be proven wrong
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Re:Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News pos... by myth_drannon on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @01:47PM (#26796230)
It's just humbling. Others and me, everyday we miss out hundreds of opportunities, it's a good reminder of life complexity. Things like that should be printed and posted on an office wall.

Also from a creator's perspective it's important to see these cases of once in a generation invention (good or bad) and the comments on it.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News pos... by notional on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @11:40AM (#26793838)
Ho boy looking up Xinjiang then reading this comment was a trip. Any ways Dropbox is pretty great and seeing the differences in sentiment towards TSLA stock compared to Bitcoin over the years has been great. Can't pick all the winners.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News pos... by lotsofpulp on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @11:31AM (#26793645)
> People love to pick out the comments of the past that seem most wrong now, because—let's be honest—it makes us feel superior.

I like to see wrong “obvious” predictions to humble myself, even if not from me.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News pos... by dang on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @11:58AM (#26794174)
Ok, you get a pass. I'm generalizing from myself of course.
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