It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of people expect to gain lessons about what'll w

It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of people expect to gain lessons about what'll work in the future by studying the past. They'll point to successful product X, and then build product Y that tries to replicate all the good parts of product X, and not realize that there are a lot of subtle interactions between a product and the social & environmental conditions of its audience that lead to it taking off. If you build the same product but the environment is different, you get different results. Similarly, it's a lesson to pay very careful attention to what's going on in the environment today, and index more on that than what has worked with the environment of the past. That's why good VC presentations always have a slide for "What has changed? Why is this a good idea now when it wasn't in the past?"