> Comments are not predictive of future business success etc
But the comments are somewhat predictive concerning whether the product will be liked or disliked by "hacking-minded" people. This is still very valuable because such people are typically intelligent, outspoken and (if the product seems to be interesting) early adopters of new software offerings.
Ok, I'm talking about this claim in the top level post:
> As an aside, odd to see people here are so pessimistic about the idea
I suspect people in the comments are pessimistic about the idea because 1) they've seen a lot of AI hype [1] or 2) they don't know who karpathy is. His YouTube videos (which are tutorials about AI) consistently garner praise from "hacking-minded" people (the first post of his I read was hackers guide to nn [2])
I don't think negative comments founded on those reasons have any predictive power about anything.
How does this align with the idea that HN misses billion dollar successes? Are you saying that there's some, albeit weak, predictive power in HN comments?
> Are you saying that there's some, albeit weak, predictive power in HN comments?
I do claim that there is at least some (though far from perfect) predictive power whether a product or service will be liked or disliked by "hacking-minded" people. Also, because such people are sometime more vocal than the general population, I can imagine predictive power to exist whether some (planned) product or service will tend to cause controversies (in the future).
But it should be obvious that this is all about a specific market segment and target audience: there exist quite a lot of commercially successful products and services for which are not particularly liked by hackers.
I only barely agree with you, but if you're coming up with this conclusion by looking at the quality of these comments then I don't know what to say.
Thoughtless, low hanging critiques. Tangential rants. There's little salvageable here but if you think it's just "loud hackers", then idk what to say. The signal here is just too low. If that's what "loud hackers" say then I'd rather read Nextdoor.
But the comments are somewhat predictive concerning whether the product will be liked or disliked by "hacking-minded" people. This is still very valuable because such people are typically intelligent, outspoken and (if the product seems to be interesting) early adopters of new software offerings.