At least we moved past blockchain and crypto! But at what cost...

I suppose that demonstrates a third possibility, that the bubble will burst and the hype train will end. I'm personally more bullish on its usefulness than that, but again, I guess we'll see.

I too doubt it will pop the way crypto did. The difference being, if you ignore the weird financing and ya know, societal collapse from AI, it's doing something useful!

But it sure felt like every HN story for a bit was crypto/blockchain/NFT related.

Interestingly, HN by and large was extremely skeptical of crypto once it went from "cool technical project showing how you can implement a digital currency using shared consensus" to a bunch of speculation schemes. I recall numerous comments stating how "HN is biased against crypto" whenever someone pointed out all the problems with the tech.

Fair point, but at the same time, it didn't stop the flood of posts and stories.

One of my personal favorites was when Brian Armstrong got on here pitching his idea that eventually turned into Coinbase and everyone shit on him. Being a bit of a skeptic to crypto myself at the time, I was lukewarm on the idea, but man I wish I had joined him. For me personally it was a really good learning experience to stay open to technology no matter what my personal biases are.

That being said, when the AI stuff started making an appearance, I fully embraced it. This went against my gut feeling being a mid-level curmudgeon software engineer who had cut my teeth on code more nights than I can count until 4am.