Nice. The Hacker News archive contains a wealth of great information. I've previously performed similar extractions like OP but with grep and SQL. I've also looked for people who have accurately predicted the stock market (I did identify one pro investor. He's now into NFTs). I've found so much cool stuff, spending whole nights looking for interesting users and reading their entire post histories and being blown away by many insightful posts. I've been considering making a blog consisting entirely of insightful HN posts that I come across.
i think someone should start a fund that exclusively invests in startups that get torn to shreds on HN, “Why would anyone use this, I could build it in a weekend!”.. often means the startup goes on to reach a billion dollar valuation.
here's my idea: understand the sentiment of HN comments using BOW models on successful startups already lunched, invest in the next ones.
Sounds like an IFF fallacy— sure, HN hates some thing that turn out to be successful, but lots of things HN hates really are terrible (or turn out to be successful for unrelated reasons, like the team was great and they managed to pivot away from the terrible idea).
Anyone technically minded used FTP back in the days. So why is there a need for Dropbox (at that time).
That is what makes it hard to invest if you think too much or "know" too much. You get blinkers that prevent you seeing what become obvious successes because of UX improvements for the non-technical crowd.
It’s not like… that’s precisely the scenario being referred to. The problem is that’s always the example, which suggests that the dropbox event is likely closer to the exception than the rule. And it’s existence is used to deflect all criticisms, which is generally an indefensibly dumb strategy.
Knowing the subject well may put blinders in some situations… but what’s the alternative? Know the subject poorly, flail about wildly and hope you land something by pure chance? Obviously knowledge isn’t the problem here; you need it to qualify if it’s a good decision or not. It’s the over-specialization, combined with the lack of empathy for the average user that derived the dropbox event.
