Regarding your conclusion: > My conclusion: Hacker News is typically ahead of the mainstream, often by a few years, but you would need to be paying very close

Regarding your conclusion: > 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. HN also tracks front-page history: news.ycombinator.com/front. To go back to a particular date all you need to do is give the date, i.e. news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-08-24. Seems to go back to 2006-10-09.