"My conclusion: Hacker News is typically ahead of the mainstream, often by a few years, but you would need to be paying very close attention to catch the early

"My conclusion: Hacker News is typically ahead of the mainstream, often by a few years, but you would need to be paying very close attention to catch the early mentions of a new tech trend. Most of the linked posts and comments have very few upvotes and probably wouldn't even make it to the front page." That's a long way of saying "no".