alt Hacker NewsThere's value in being early - in the right thing.
- If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return
- If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now
- If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush
Of course, you could just as well have
- become an ActionScript specialist as it was clearly the future of interactive web design
- specialized in Blackberry app development as one of the first mobile computing platforms
- made major investments in NFTs (any time, really...)
Bottom line - if you want to have a chance at outsized returns, but are also willing to accept the risks of dead ends, be early. If you want a smooth, mid-level return, wait it out...
Replies
A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid.
I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!
Wow, shots fired here for me.
I was ahead of the game with my intimidate expertise in ActionaScript and Silverlight! I made 3D engines in browsers well before WebGL was a spec.
It was quite profitable for a few years, then poof. Dead end lol
> If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return
Except you would've probably sold it at any of 1.5x, 2x, 4x, or 10x points. That's what people keep missing about this whole "early bitcoin". You couldn't tell it will 2x at 1.5x, you couldn't tell it will 4x at 2x, and so on.
> - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now
> - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush
I disagree:
Concerning the first point: how neural networks are today is very different from how they were in former days. So, the knowledge of neural networks from the past does only very partially transfer to modern neural networks, and clearly does not make you a very sought-after specialist right now.
Concerning your second point: the success of mobile games is very marketing-centric. While it is plausible that being early in mobile games development when the iPhone was released might have opened doors in the game industry for you, I seriously doubt whether having this skill would have made you rich.
Almost everyone chasing those returns would be better off investing in index funds.
Crucially those are all investments. Just like creating AI or buying data centers to run AI is an investment. Whereas merely using AI feels more like being in the general population of consumers. The shape of the outlay for it is un-investment-like. A monetary investment is a big charge up front, not a monthly fee. A skills investment looks like effort spent learning, but I mean how difficult is it to type reasonably precise English? Conclusion: you're a customer, not an investor, so you can start any time.
Some of those things involve a bit of money as a gamble; others require some time learning tooling that can be repurposed (mobile game developers can obviously do mobile apps), and others would be dedicating years of your life into something that may be a dead end.
There's really no need to be "early" for something like this. I've seen coworkers who've never used agentic coding pick it up and know everything that need to in ~2 days. The people who really dive in and are running orchestrated agents overnight are in general not building much of real value.
None of those examples are useful.
1. 2016 was years after Bitcoin was developed. So you could still make 200x returns without being early adopter.
2. Is this even true? I'd bet scraping experts or people who can fine tune LLMs have easier time finding a job than classical ML academics.
3. Candy Crash was released when iPhone was on its 5th iteration.
If anything, you just added to OPs points. Being an early adopter gives limited advantage.
I should've started registering a bunch of two and three character and generic .com domains in the early 90s when registration was free.
In all fairness I was an actionscript specialist, and up until 2010 or so I was making REAL good money doing contract flash work -
Luckily I was also doing frontend work alongside, so when the time came to transition to html+css+javascript, it wasn’t much of a move at all, it was just putting down AS and focusing fully on JS
There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting.
My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along.
Deciding whether something new is the right path for me usually takes a little time to assess where it's headed and what the impacts may be.