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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

Small, dominated by techies. Isn't that pretty much what HN has become, minus the porn that was on Reddit from early on? It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. They get an outsized influence because of who runs it and where it came from, but they're still a small percentage of the content.

Reddit was only founded 15 years ago, but I'm pretty sure HN is actually larger than the reddit of 12 years ago, when I joined.

/u/Deimorz (former Reddit admin, prior to that foudner of r/Games, which was one of the more successful attempts at doing a "same topic but more serious" competitor to a sub that ended up meme filled) is also trying his own competitor at tildes.net for more general purpose. Notably it's not a "free speech zone" like Voat and other attempted alternatives, so shouldn't be full of nazis when more reasonable users are looking for somewhere to migrate to.

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Part of the problem is that all of us who have Reddit nostalgia are also 15 years older, largely set in our careers, and oftentimes have families and other demands on our attention.

Reddit was founded at a specific moment in history, and a lot of what made it special was what was going on in that moment of history. It was right when the web became useful and mainstream and it became possible for a few guys to put together a website and change the world. A lot of the excitement of that time period was around "What else is about to change in the near future that we could take advantage of?" The early Reddit userbase was often 20-somethings and a few late teens, right around the age range when peoples' futures are most fluid and eager to jump on the next thing.

There are a bunch of similar exciting developments happening right now, with similar exciting communities. DeFi, drones, self-driving cars, robotics, EVs, a lot of climate tech. Curiously, most of them get dismissed when they're posted on Hacker News, much like how most 40-somethings dismissed Web 2.0 when it happened. Maybe it's more a function of the age than the community or tech.

You’re one of the people on HN whose comments I follow. I’d be curious to hear your opinions on

DeFi: Sounds really interesting but feels like something really niche not like the next Reddit.

Drones: Drones are really cool and programmable. Fully agreed.

Self driving: Potentially transformative in 10-15 years. There’s not much most of us can do to be a part of it. It will be dominated by Tesla, Waymo.

Robotics: The eternal dream. But right now it’s hard to even make a robot that prepares Amazon packages. Might definitely change at some point.

EVs and climate tech: Very important work but it’s hard to get rich quickly off of it. That reduces interest.

DeFi: Very interesting long-term, but the infrastructure isn't there yet - Ethereum (or alternative) needs to scale, and there need to be better ways of representing real-world things on the blockchain. I'd say at least a decade off, and could go the way of the 2000-2005 P2P boom (note though that that boom had some very lasting effects: Bittorrent, Skype & VC, DVCSs like git, and Bitcoin). We'll probably have periodic bubbles and busts until then. May get some help from Fed policy. If it succeeds it will revolutionize everything - the financial sector is 25% of American GDP and our primary export, features a lot of moral hazard and grift, and smart contracts enable some forms of commerce we haven't seen before.

Drones: My 3-year-old will ask me "Daddy can you fly the drone now?" and absolutely loves chasing it. Great toy now, starting to find some industrial uses with insurance/forestry/firefighting/etc. Will absolutely revolutionize warfare when the next war happens.

Self-driving: Another wartime technology. I think this will limp along in niche markets until then, and then explode (no pun intended) when we need to maintain logistics networks under armed threat. Likely to be a cornerstone of post-war transportation networks, but not in the form they are now. Rather than struggle with sensor algorithms, we'll likely build the sensors & coordination into the road infrastructure and ban manual driving.

Robotics: This is like AI in that when it succeeds, it's no longer called "robotics". It's already used very extensively in manufacturing and logistics (have you ever looked up airport baggage handling systems on YouTube?). We aren't going to get general-purpose robots, but we might see a wave of micro-manufacturing appliances a la 3D printing (put in raw materials, get back a product made to your specifications, distribute products digitally) as well as descendants of today's household appliances (we already have this with Roombas, robotic lawn mowers, robotic tractors, etc).

EVs: Will probably go mainstream around 2023-2024. If you're already a top-notch electrical engineer you can likely get very rich on this right now by founding a company and letting a SPAC take you public next year. For the rest of it the excitement will be in buying one and upgrading our solar panels, power wall, power grid to support it.

Climate tech: Will likely ultimately fail in stopping global warming but will invent lots of useful innovations that might be applied to other industries in the future (sort of like how microwave ovens came out of radar and computers came out of artillery guidance). If you have good skills and a long time horizon, the play is to go work for one of these companies, learn everything you can, spend your time researching, and then ride it until it goes bankrupt and then apply the technologies toward something more mundane.

I'd agree that we're not in 2005 now - it feels more like 2002-03, where you can tell that there's interesting stuff going on but nothing's really ready for primetime yet. We had stuff like Friendster, Kazaa, LiveJournal, BaseCamp, then - all precursors to really important stuff, but the specific successes hadn't yet happened.

Drones: Haven't drones already been used in wars? Like I remember a huge furor about drone strikes during the Obama presidency?

Self-driving: Can you elaborate on this a little more? You mean having self driving trucks on supply routes makes it much harder to break supply lines?

EVs: I think this one is already mainstream. Not in the sense that most people already have or are buying EVs but everyone from car manufacturers to bureaucrats are on the train already and it is only a matter of time.

Drones: They have, but this is like how in WW1 the role of aircraft was to spot targets for the army & navy, while in WW2 air power was the decisive factor in the war and the army / surface ships would come mop up after your bombers had flattened the enemy forces. Right now we use drones as support craft for reconnaissance & assassinations. It's likely that the next "big" war will be fought almost entirely between drones & robots and humans will come in afterwards to mop up after one side has a decisive advantage (or get hunted down by a rogue AI gone wild - personally I think that outcome is more sci-fi than real though). Armenia/Azerbaijan gives us a taste but the drones in use there are still largely manually-controlled consumer craft rather than fully autonomous swarms.

Self-driving: Right now, the biggest problem with self-driving car adoption is that when anyone dies at the hands of a self-driving car, there's a huge press outcry and the whole program gets shut down. That calculus changes dramatically if the other side is actively trying to kill you. Then, it becomes a huge advantage to not even send drivers into the war zone, and resupply with automated logistics lines. Instead of becoming an invention that potentially kills people, it becomes an invention that saves lots of people, because the baseline shifts from "nobody ever dies young" to "young people are actively trying to kill each other". It also gives a huge advantage to the side that adopts it, because they can resupply as quickly as they can build materials instead of losing costly human lives in the effort, and the vehicles themselves can often follow evasive routes that wouldn't be practical for a human crew.

Drones: Interesting. But I think the very nature of drone warfare precludes any sort of big war. I think drone warfare, like nuclear warfare becomes an arms race and countries will quickly realize its futility. Adversaries will continue to use more mundane techniques like propaganda, misinformation etc like we have seen in the past decade. Autonomous drones will be useful in guerrilla-style warfare though because of their suitability to reconnaissance.

Drones (like nuclear weapons before them) make war a lot more expensive. I guess only the top 5-7 armies in the world will have the technology and expertise to maintain drones. So a conflict like the one in Iraq will have a swift conclusion, but the calculus among the big nations will remain mostly unchanged IMHO.

Self-driving: I think the biggest problem with self-driving in this scenario is the very moniker "self-driving". But it is very likely there are vehicles being tested today that are programmed to avoid minefields, use sophisticated path planning algorithms to avoid detection, minimize fuel consumption etc. Sort of a jeep-sized roomba that traverses a region instead of your living room.

> Drones: My 3-year-old will ask me "Daddy can you fly the drone now?" and absolutely loves chasing it. Great toy now, starting to find some industrial uses with insurance/forestry/firefighting/etc. Will absolutely revolutionize warfare when the next war happens.

The next war already happened btw. The Azerbaijani government used a large number of Turkish-supplied attack drones (self-destruction drones too iirc) against the Armenian forces.

> It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups.

I hope so! That was the intention behind its name change in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.

HN feels more like a single subreddit than reddit as a whole. There is far greater cultural diversity on reddit.

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