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What Ideas Are Trending Among Tech’s Biggest Influencers?

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Y Combinator, one of best-known Silicon Valley accelerators, has an impressive track record of success. With well-timed investments in Dropbox, Stripe, and Airbnb, the startups in the company’s portfolio are now worth an aggregate of $600 billion in market capitalization.

While Y Combinator has made a clear impact on the tech sector, the company also launched an internal side project in 2007 that would end up becoming highly influential in a different and surprising way.

Its user-powered news aggregator called Hacker News, which is now visited by 20 million people per month, has become a mainstay for entrepreneurs, tech professionals, and venture capitalists around the world. Using a Reddit-like interface, users can upvote and downvote articles that they think have the most relevance to trends and issues affecting the tech sector.

Data Mining For Trends

Today’s charts come to us from Variance Explained, and they help to paint a picture of what topics have been trending on Hacker News over the last 3.5 years.

Using data from over 1 million subject lines, we can see which topics are being mentioned with increasing frequency by the site’s community of technology influencers.

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As you can see, words like “AI”, “artificial”, “bot”, “deep”, “neural”, and “learning” are key terms that have growing interest within the community. It shows that the buzz around AI and deep learning is widespread and happening on multiple fronts.

Donald Trump was also a hot topic of debate in Hacker News, as evidenced by the increase in mentions.

Cooling Off

Here are some of the words in the community used with decreasing frequency over the same 3.5 year timeframe:

The fastest-declining words in Hacker News titles

Over time, as the rubber hits the road, we get to see which ideas have staying power.

Google Glass, as cool as it was, ended up not directly revolutionizing how we use augmented reality. Likewise, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA and surveillance seemed to have also dropped out of discussion.

On the flipside, some of these concepts also seem to have transitioned to the mainstream. Bitcoin and other altcoins, for example, are now more popular than ever before with a market capitalization of over $100 billion. Likewise, iPads, Gmail, and Kickstarter are pretty ubiquitous, but it could be argued that discussion on these topics is now pretty staid for the idea-hungry folks that frequent Hacker News.

Blockchain vs. Bitcoin

It’s also interesting to see the contrasting popularity of two related terms among Hacker News participants.

Bitcoin-related talk, at least on Hacker News, was hot in late-2013 after the price skyrocketed for the first time. The blockchain, on the other hand, took some time to pick up steam among influencers.

The popularity of Blockchain vs. Bitcoin on Hacker News

Fast-forward to today, and the concept of the blockchain is much more fleshed out.

It took time, but the blockchain is now considered to be a foundational technology that is affecting everything from how how stock markets work, to the proof of ownership for digital assets.

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AI

Visualizing the Top U.S. States for AI Jobs

Nearly 800,000 AI jobs were posted in the U.S. throughout 2022. View this graphic to see a breakdown by state.

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Visualizing the Top U.S. States for AI Jobs

Much ink has been spilled over fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will eliminate jobs in the economy. While some of those fears may be well-founded, red-hot interest in AI innovation is creating new jobs as well.

This graphic visualizes data from Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm, which shows how many AI-related jobs were posted in each state throughout 2022.

In total there were 795,624 AI jobs posted throughout the year, of which 469,925 (59%) were in the top 10. The full tally is included in the table below.

RankStateNumber of job postings% of total
1California142,15417.9%
2Texas66,6248.4%
3New York43,8995.5%
4Massachusetts34,6034.3%
5Virginia34,2214.3%
6Florida33,5854.2%
7Illinois31,5694.0%
8Washington31,2843.9%
9Georgia26,6203.3%
10Michigan25,3663.2%
11North Carolina23,8543.0%
12New Jersey23,4472.9%
13Colorado20,4212.6%
14Pennsylvania20,3972.6%
15Arizona19,5142.5%
16Ohio19,2082.4%
17Maryland16,7692.1%
18Minnesota11,8081.5%
19Tennessee11,1731.4%
20Missouri10,9901.4%
21Oregon10,8111.4%
22Washington, D.C.9,6061.2%
23Indiana9,2471.2%
24Connecticut8,9601.1%
25Wisconsin8,8791.1%
26Alabama7,8661.0%
27Kansas7,6831.0%
28Arkansas7,2470.9%
29Utah6,8850.9%
30Nevada6,8130.9%
31Idaho6,1090.8%
32Oklahoma5,7190.7%
33Iowa5,6700.7%
34South Carolina4,9280.6%
35Louisiana4,8060.6%
36Kentucky4,5360.6%
37Nebraska4,0320.5%
38Delaware3,5030.4%
39New Mexico3,3570.4%
40Rhode Island2,9650.4%
41New Hampshire2,7190.3%
42Hawaii2,5500.3%
43Mississippi2,5480.3%
44Maine2,2270.3%
45South Dakota2,1950.3%
46Vermont1,5710.2%
47North Dakota1,2270.2%
48Alaska9700.1%
49West Virginia8870.1%
50Montana8330.1%
51Wyoming7690.1%

The following chart adds some context to these numbers. It shows how the percentage of AI job postings in some of the top states has changed since 2010.

We can see that California quickly became the primary destination for AI jobs in the early 2010s, presumably as Silicon Valley companies began developing the technology.

California’s share has since declined, with a significant number of jobs seemingly moving to Texas. In fact, many tech companies are relocating to Texas to avoid California’s relatively higher taxes and cost of living.

The 10 Most In-Demand Specialized Skills

Lightcast also captured the top 10 specialized skills that were required for AI-related jobs. These are listed in the table below.

SkillFrequency (number of postings)Frequency (% of postings)
Python296,66237%
Computer Science260,33333%
SQL185,80723%
Data Analysis159,80120%
Data Science157,85520%
Amazon Web Services155,61519%
Agile Methodology152,96519%
Automation138,79117%
Java133,85617%
Software Engineering133,28617%

If you’re interested in a career that focuses on AI, becoming proficient in Python is likely to be a good first step.

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