> Remote Work [...] I thought [in contradistinction to the graph] that Hacker News would have been more ahead of the trend on this one.

> For each topic I counted how many times it had been mentioned in a post title

I suspect that's the problem. A lot of trendy discussion happens in comments; I think that's going to be particularly true for a topic like remote work.

People are going to extol its virtues when it's tangentially related to a submission, but especially pre-pandemic there's only so many stories you could submit about it? 'Company goes full-remote'? 'How we handle remote working at Company'?

It'd be interesting to search comments too I think. hn.algolia.com supports it.