Would be fun to do similar analysis for HN front page trends that peaked and then declined, like cryptocurrency, NFTs, Web3, and self-driving cars.
And actually it’s funny: self-driving cars and cryptocurrency are continuing to advance dramatically in real life but there are hardly any front page HN stories about them anymore. Shows the power of AI as a topic that crowds out others. And possibly reveals the trendy nature of the HN attention span.
The last time I was looking for a job, I wrote a little scraper that used naive regex to classify "HN Who's Hiring" postings as "AI," "full time," etc.
I was looking for a full time remote or hybrid non-AI job in New York. I'm not against working on AI, but this being a startup forum I felt like listings were dominated by shiny new thing startups, whereas I was looking for a more "boring" job.
Anyway, here's:
- a graph: https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hn-whos-hiring-stats.html
- the filtered listings: https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hn-whos-hiring.html
- the code: https://github.com/dgoffredo/hn-whos-hiring
Surprised by how much job postings decreased, in the span of 3 years. Great Graph.
Thanks. I think 2021 was a high point, but my scaper doesn't go further back for some reason -- I think that one of my assumptions about how things are formatted doesn't hold before than.
Is cryptocurrency advancing dramatically? Maybe this is an illustration of this effect, but I haven't seen any news about any major changes, other than line-go-up stuff.
Ironically, the most prominent advances have not actually been in cryptocurrencies themselves but rather in the traditional financial institutions that interact with them.
For instance, there are now dozens of products such as cryptocurrency-backed lending via EMV cards or fixed-yield financial instruments based on cryptocurrency staking. Yet if you want to use cryptocurrencies directly the end-user tools haven't appreciably changed for years. Anecdotally, I used the MetaMask wallet software last month and if anything it's worse than it was a few years ago.
Real developments are there, but are much more subtle. Higher-layer blockchains are really popular now when they were rather niche a few years ago - these can increase efficiency but come with their own risks. Also, various zero-knowledge proof technologies that were developed for smart contracts are starting to be used outside of cryptocurrencies too.
No news is good news. A boring article like "(Visa/USDC) settles trillions of dollars worth of transactions, just like last year" won't get clicks.
on the commerce front, it's really easy to find small-to-medium size vendors who accept Bitcoin for just about any category of goods now.
on the legal front, there's been some notable "wins" for cryptocurrency advocates: e.g. the U.S. lifted its sanctions against Tornado Cash (the Ethereum anonymization tool) a few months ago.
on the UX front, a mixed bag. the shape of the ecosystem has stayed remarkably unchanged. it's hard to build something new without bridging it to Bitcoin or Ethereum because that's where the value is. but that means Bitcoin and Ethereum aren't under much pressure to improve _themselves_. most of the improvements actually getting deployed are to optimize the interactions between institutions, and less to improve the end-user experience directly.
on the privacy front, also a mixed bag. people seem content enough with Monero for most sensitive things. the appetite for stronger privacy at the cryptocurrency layer mostly isn't here yet i think because what news-worthy de-anonymizations we have are by now being attributed (rightly or wrongly) to components of the operation _other_ than the actual exchange of cryptocurrency.
You wont find net-positive discussion around cryptocurrency here, even if it is academic. It's hard to point a finger exactly how things got this way, but as someone on the engineering side of such things it's maybe just something I'm able to see quickly, like when you buy a certain vehicle, you notice them more.
Yes. No claims on social benefit, only evidence supporting thesis that cryptocurrency is advancing
- Stablecoins as an alternative payment rail. Most (all?) fintechs are going heavy into this
- Regulatory clarity + ability to include in 401(k)/pension plans
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What's the status on cryptocurrency tech and ecosystem right now actually? I did some work in that area some years back but found all the tooling tobe in an abysmal state that didn't allow for non-finance applications to be anything but toys so I got out and haven't looked back, but I never stopped being bullish on decentralized software.
If you want to build something not related to finance, why do you want to use cryptocurrency tech? There's already plenty of decentralized building blocks, everything from bittorrent to raft, that might be more suitable.
There's lots of building blocks for decentralized data storage and transmission, but that by itself is not enough to build a fully decentralized, self-funding application.
With blockchain/smart contract tech you can build an app that from the user perspective looks like any other web app but that has its state fully in the blockchain and all computation done by miners as smart contract evaluation, self-funding by charging users a small amount on each transaction (something that scares off most people but crypto users are used to it and the prize can be fractions of a cent). The wallet does double duty as auth, it's just a public/private key pair after all, and that is a big feature.
Another big thing it does for you is handle synchronization -- there is a single, canonical blockchain state, and maintaining it and keeping it consistent is someone else's job, paid for and overseen by an ecosystem that is much larger than what you are building.
A friend and I built a POC Reddit clone on top of Solana this way, as just a bunch of static html/js and a smart contract, without any servers/central nodes and without users needing to install anything or act as a node themselves. I'm not aware of any other tech that can realistically do this.
Unfortunately the blockchain is a very hostile, expensive and limited computing environment. You can farm out storage to other decentralized systems (we used IPFS) and so long as you're not a custodian of anyone's money you're not as worried about security, but the smart contract environment is still extremely restrictive and expensive per unit compute.
The integration situation is broke-ass JS/TS "breaking changes twice a week to keep them on their toes" hobby software shit. If you precisely copy the examples from the docs there may be an old version where it almost works. My friend also did Rust integrations where my impression is things are somewhat better, but that's not saying much.
Decentralization is a spectrum and we were pretty radical about it back then. The motives were more about securing universal access to critical payment and communications infrastructure against generic Adversaries and the challenge of achieving bus factor absolute zero than about practicality.
But that makes sense, technology makes headlines when it's exciting. Crypto I'd disagree there's been advances, it's mostly scams and pyramid schemes and it got boring and predictable in that sense so once the promise and excitement is gone, HN doesn't talk about it anymore. Self driving cars became a slow advance over many years, with people not claiming it was around the corner and about to revolutionize everything.
AI is now a field where the claims are, in essence, that we're going to build God in 2 years. Make the whole planet unemployed. Create a permanent underclass. AI researches are being hired at $100-300m comp. I mean, it's definitely a very exciting topic and polarizes opinion. If things plateau and the claims dissappear and it becomes a more boring grind over diminishing returns and price adjustments I think we'll see the same thing, less comments over it.
maybe I'll do that next :)
You forgot Erlang and Poker bots.