Regarding escalation of school shootings, it seems plausible, but only because (here is an unpopular opinion that will get 20 downvotes) the rich want to disarm the poor and use school/kids/safety as an excuse. And that's understandable: if I was rich enough to afford private schools for my kids in a classy neighborhood, I'd want to keep weirdos with guns far from my family, while at the same time Id have 24/7 former-marines guards armed with full auto weapons.
Your source doesn't say school shootings are down from previous highs nor that they're very rare; it specifically only deals with shootings where _4 or more students were killed_ excluding the shooter. That's a very different things from "school shootings", where the mean number of fatalities is 3. If you define "school shooting" as "people being shot at school", then use the same data as in your source, you see 247 people shot in 64 incidents during the 2000s, and 555 people shot in 213 incidents during the 2010s. (It's worth noting that Fridel & Fox came under some scrutiny for choosing their definition of school shooting, because the standard definition used--by the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and by Fox himself in previous studies that conflicted with his new one--is four people _shot_. )
What we're seeing is a large increasing in the number of school shootings, but a decrease in the average success of each school shooter. Is it surprising that the average shooter has become less effective when schools are spending a lot of time and money preparing to deal with them? Shooter drills, established lockdown procedures, buildings being designed with escape and hiding in mind[0], staff training, employment of security guards, etc.
The data you're citing states it plainly: there are more shootings at schools now than 10 or 20 years ago, and more people are being shot at school than 10 or 20 years ago. 50 people killing 3 kids each isn't somehow safer than 25 people killing 4 kids each.
Hang on. If you're counting things where only one or two people are shot, there is very often no intent to shoot more than that. You can't use that data point by itself to talk about the "success" of school shooters. And those smaller incidents are definitely not what I think of when I hear the words "school shooting".
> 50 people killing 3 kids each isn't somehow safer than 25 people killing 4 kids each.
But you have to treat people killing 2 kids in a completely different way from people that are killing 20. Drills, lockdown procedures, almost all gun limitations... those don't do anything against a single murder.
On that thought, is there any way to prevent shootings without making guns harder or impossible for citizens to own?
Seems many will not disarm in the US, so should we be exploring other options rather than repeatedly saying the US should be more like other countries?
Last I checked, cars do not require any licensing to own. They require special licensing and often times yearly taxes to operate on public roads (but merely possessing them on public roads does not).
You need to register the car, and that often requires proof of insurance, which requires a driver's license. Either way, my point still stands. You're quibbling over semantics. So few people want to buy a car just to not drive it, that we don't even consider it a problem.
Not at all. He’s accurately reflecting gun laws and car laws. You are willfully hand waving the fact that cars are entirely unregulated except for use on public roads. As where guns are regulated in every facet of their existence.
You are doing this because you read on a liberal site and heard the liberal talking points that guns are easier to get than a car with is wrong.
> and often times yearly taxes to operate on public roads (but merely possessing them on public roads does not).
In my jurisdiction one may not "move" or "leave standing" upon a public road an unregistered vehicle, in addition to not being permitted to "drive" it.
Wow, you can't tow an unregistered vehicle? That definitely sounds off, but then I've seen even more silly laws in the past (such as one that forbids minors from playing pinball).
> Is it so bad to make guns as hard to own as a car?
The ONLY people that say this are the ones that would be (fucking) horrified if we treated guns like cars.
Ok. You are proposing I should be able to buy any gun I want whenever I want regardless of size or capacity, automatic, or loud or silenced for cash without any checks or regulations at all? That the only requirement to use it in public is that I need a license - BUT - that carry license is good in all 50 states?
... that sounds good to me! Let’s do it.
Yours is an argument based entirely in ignorance of gun laws. And maybe car laws too.
> Ok. You are proposing I should be able to buy any gun I want whenever I want regardless of size or capacity, automatic, or loud or silenced for cash without any checks or regulations at all?
But that's how loosely cars are regulated, and you said you wanted guns regulated like cars. I think what you meant to say is to regulate guns much more strictly than cars.
Amusingly... it was likely their opposition. This is why you should hold yourself and those you align with to high standards. It only stengthens your position...even if you are completely wrong (although only a little bit)
Paris was the mass shooting I was referencing. 184 dead irrc.
Norway, School summer camp in 2011. I suppose it’s not exactly what you think of when you think of skin shooting inside a school building, but the people killed were almost exclusively children. Perpetrator use a rifle that has not been legal in Norway for civilians.
It wasn't a school summer camp - it was organized by a left-wing political party - and most of the people killed were adults.
He used a Ruger Mini-14 and a Glock pistol for which he had a legal license as a civilian (for hunting and sport shooting respectively), purchased in Norway - the country with the second highest legal gun ownership rate in the EU - after he failed to illegally acquire guns in Prague.
> He used a Ruger Mini-14 and a Glock pistol for which he had a legal license as a civilian
You have a source for that?
I understood neither of those guns are to be civilian legal.
Also... to the topic. If Norway’s extremely strict (draconian) gun laws didn’t prevent this shooting which was worse than any in US history; why would US benefit from them?
There's a weird thing that happens here with language: school shootings mean multiple things. So, if someone is shot at a school at an after-hours drug deal gone awry, that counts just as much as parkland, even though there is a very distinguishable difference between the two.
I think the only thing worse than lying about incidents to improve your statistics, is ignoring reality in arguing for policies and regulations that further instead of solve the problem.
I don’t think this should be downvoted. The facts are the facts. It’s also the case that even 1 shooting is a tragedy and should give us pause for how we can fix it (whether that is gun control or something else).
people tend to make optimistic predictions. A lot of predictions were correct, and many of them were right on subject, but predicted the positive instead of the negative turn of things. Interesting views regardless, but i cant help to notice that tech progress was nothing like 2000->2010.
I feel like enormous cultural and technological hardware advancements were made between 1990-2010 that affected people on a national or global level. The advances were revolutionary. I have a hard time associating the last decade the same way. To me, the 2010-2020 decade has been stagnant.
My overall sentiments, more or less:
1990->2000 we went from very few people owning personal computers to wider adoption of PCs and broadband was gaining traction (I personally had @Home cable internet in 1998).
2000->2010 mass adoption of cell phones, starting with the flip phones to pocket PCs to the first iPhone in 2007. Social media (MySpace, The Facebook). Peer to peer networking, piracy (The Pirate Bay). Laptops. The first tablets.
2010->2020 mild improvements on the stuff from the previous two decades
EDIT: I'll give the last decade Uber (although I've only used it once) and AirBnb since that was a huge shift as well, but my overall feeling remains the same.
I am surprised with no mention of Smartphone. Which is arguably the most important innovation in modern history.
2010s, Smartphone ( iPhone 3GS at the time ) went from niche to 4B users ( iOS, Androids and KaiOS ), that is nearly every person on earth above age 14 in developed countries. I dont think there has ever been a product or technology innovation as important that spread faster than Smartphone. And it changes everyone's life. The post mentioned of Google, Facebook and Amazon empire, all partly grows to this point because of Smartphones. Technology companies together now worth close to 10 Trillions. The whole manufacturing supply chain exists and became huge in Shenzhen because of Smartphone. It was the reason why TSMC managed to catch up to Intel in both capacity and leading edge node. It was the reason why we went from 3G to 5G in mere 10 years because of all the investment kept pouring it. It was the reason why everyone went on to the Internet and had Internet economy. It brought a handheld PC and Internet to a much wider audience.
I would even argue it was the Smartphone innovation that saved us from the post 2008 Financial Crisis doom as it created so much wealth, innovation and opportunities.
Chile is much better when compared to Brazil in terms of equality. Brazil is ranked 8 most unequal (tied with Botsuwana) whereas Chile holds the 26th position in the GINI index [1].
We can expect Chile to drop positions since its economy is going downhill creating massive unemployment. Inequality will increase as people from lower middle class will move into poverty as we've seen in Brazil since 2015.
Not much. The thing about inequality is that it makes the top more powerful politically. The amount of money held by the top 0.1 percent is irrelevant to moving the income/wealth needle for the rest of the population.
There is a reason those who don’t like inequality had to come up with new measurements to highlight it. There is little impact on the mean, median, and mode if the rich get richer.
How does your list not include climate change as a thing of current importance? It wasn't mentioned much in the original either - though i saw one comment calling it "FUD" - but they were making forecasts ;)
> Hopefully network analysis/data mining laws/politics will be handled with a little less FUD, a little less grandstanding, and a little more efficiency than we're seeing with climate change politics...
They were clearly describing the handling and discourse (I suppose on a large public scale) of climate change as FUD, not climate change itself.
> - As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time.
Interesting how plausible this one is, yet turned out to be terribly wrong: the newer hyped languages that got some uptake were largely compiled ones like Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart.
One thing that always really bugged me about the "the language will figure it out" philosophy is the complete disregard towards carbon footprint.
Like yeah, you can make an interpreted dynamic language that's pretty neat, but you can also make something like go, swift, or Julia that jits and also captures 90% of that ease of use while significantly reducing your hosting costs/energy consumption.
Going forward I think static compiler inference will be the future of language design. Either for safety like in rust or for convenience like in swift.
And we can already see pitfalls in the interpreted world of python where the wrong implementation, like using a loop instead of numpy, can lead to devastating performance impacts. Looking forward, something like this seems as outdated as having to manage your 640k of executable space in DOS: an unreasonable design constraint caused by the legacy implications of the day.
My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap.
I'm actually pretty amazed at what the Javascript VM people have done in the past decade. It's way more than I ever expected.
As far as the carbon footprint, well, yeah, it depends. At Google I remember a friend talking about how he cringed whenever he added more code to the pipeline that ingests the entire internet. He said that he wondered how much extra carbon was release into the atmosphere just because of his stupid code.
As for numpy, we are seeing that loops are stupid and Iverson and APL were right. :-)
> At Google I remember a friend talking about how he cringed whenever he added more code to the pipeline that ingests the entire internet. He said that he wondered how much extra carbon was release into the atmosphere just because of his stupid code.
I wish companies were under more financial pressure to actually track and mitigate this. (hint hint, carbon taxes)
>My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap.
Funnily enough someone said that exact same thing 10 years ago in that thread:
>* Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.
While pithy, that's not actually an interesting rebuttal.
You should elaborate, especially since "huge corporations", namely Apple, Google, and Mozilla (I guess?), are the ones pushing Swift, Go, and Rust, respectively.
Huge corporations always push for languages which are brain dead and make developers be as fungible as possible. Unfortunately not all software has been invented yet and writing in such a language is a nightmare.
So what happens is that people gravitate towards languages which are pleasant enough to work on to try new ideas in.
The progressing of bash -> awk -> perl -> python happened for a reason. Hell we're even seeing people use lisp like languages unironically for the first time in decades.
Enabling developers of different talents and backgrounds to be productive and contribute successfully, and to scale up in number of separate teams, is a hard problem and doesn't deserve the kind of dismissiveness you give it here.
More powerful languages enable talented developers to be more productive individually, but it's hard to teach all the other developers about the new and interesting abstractions that the powerful languages enable, and it's impossible to hire for them directly. This limits velocity.
And it's not just huge corporations, it's any company which is trying to scale from 10 to 100 developers; where you're hiring continuously, where there are too many other developers to efficiently rely on ambient learning.
Not so sure our energy problems are going to come to a head in the form of all-out energy poverty. More likely I think: the convenience of energy being instantly available at all the right times and places will diminish.
Cloud spot pricing is I think one example where things that can be batched and deferred will be cheap even in a energy-decline future.
This is assuming we don’t sink so far as to lose our productive capacity for energy infrastructure altogether. Depends how bull/bear you are about the whole thing I suppose. In that scenario, there’s also gonna be no market to sell whatever you’re coding to.
I think the new languages are about developer productivity, but in a different way. It allows you to make more robust software via a better typing system, or more robust multithreading via rust's borrow system. In the past, our machines couldn't handle such strict languages as well because they have a high compile time cost.
In overall total effort needed to make something robust, something like rust will beat something like ruby, because the dynamic language-ists compensate via a larger test suite.
Most setups and most hardware isn’t efficient enough for language to really matter. So the solution to carbon footprint isn’t to stop using python, it’s to stop burning coal.
The sad thing about Python is that it shouldn't need to be interpreted. People don't use it for that reason. Remove one or two obscure meta-programming features that nobody uses (or shouldn't be using) and you could in principle remove GIL and make it JIT just as good as Javascript.
JS really shows what's possible in this field with some benchmarks even outperforming c++. This space of expressive yet fast languages is a gap that remains to be filled and will probably be by 2030, sadly it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation because you don't only need a good syntax to become popular, also a healthy ecosystem around it. What we will see is probably not any new language but rather that existing languages from both sides of the spectrum converge more towards the middle ground.
I mean, JavaScript and Python have definitely become much more popular for many more things than they were in 2010.
I doubt Swift replaced much besides other compiled languages, and Kotlin just compiles to Java anyway. Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still.
I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the emergence of Rust.
> Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still.
Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that today's Flutter development is highly dependent on the niceties the Dart VM provides, and newer Dart releases improved upon them.
In terms of language design, it seems like swift and julia are the most forward looking.
I personally don't think swift will ever escape the Mac ecosystem, just like Objective-C never did, but something with the same DNA will.
In the same way that Objective-C and Ruby both implement the philosophy of Smalltalk, I think that philosophy has yet to be fleshed out in a simple syntax that is natively jit'ed/compiled.
> I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the emergence of Rust.
In some sense Rust is in that same vain - reducing certain errors and the need for tools like Coverity, which in turn makes programmers more efficient.
Electron isn’t just JavaScript, else I would have said JavaScript. Electron is front and center in the movement to shorten development time by consuming more PC resources at runtime. I feel that’s the spirit of the prediction.
I don't agree. I've implemented GUIs with raw Xlib, Tcl/Tk, Qt, GTK, MFC, SDL, XUL, and DHTML. Of all of these, DHTML is the most productive for me, and by a significant margin. The Tcl/Tk topic in Dercuano goes into those experiences in more detail, if you're interested.
Training for developers, presumably, especially web developers who want to build native apps. If retraining was free, Electron would have approximately no market.
ryacko is perfectly clearly stating that Electron reduces the amount of training that developers need. This is different from making them develop faster. It just makes them more replaceable.
I have no idea how to parse twobat's question. The "or" is especially confusing. I'm not surprised that ryacko is baffled by it.
Electron gives you a UI and some standard library stuff. That's pretty obviously a totally separate issue from training an algorithm... I think? Am I missing something?
I still think asking "what or who?" with no other elaboration is really confusing. It's such a vague question that you have to guess how to answer, and it's super easy to answer it in a way that doesn't satisfy what the asker actually meant to ask.
Because it's not Moore's Law that matters here, but rather the subset that is the performance of single cores. And that subset stalled out pretty badly.
We're adding more and more cores, but more cores don't help you write a program in easy mode. Easy mode doesn't multithread.
It's also been quite a decade of growth for old stodgy languages. In 2010, it seemed like C++, Java, and Javascript were never going to change, but they've all significantly cleaned up their acts.
I think the prediction still had a kernel of truth to it though - every edge that chip manufacturers and JIT developers can give us has been burned away on slower and slower client-side rendering frameworks.
And PHP. PVP 5.3 was the newest version in 2010 and as the years wore on many thought HipHop by Facebook would start to take over for serious PHP applications. PHP 7 completely changed the course of the PHP community and took the air out of HHVM’s sails.
HipHop was a cross-compiler which facebook abandoned for HHVM, a rewrite of the PHP engine with faster internals. It always had compatibility issues, but the improved performance made it interesting (afaik nobody outside facebook really got that much into Hack the language). PHP7 was a rewrite of the internal data structures which put it on close enough performance footing. Because HHVM was never a drop-in replacement for PHP and moved further away over time the community ended up sticking with PHP7 and now pretty much only facebook uses HHVM, with the big players that moved to HHVM all transitioning back to PHP7.
Rust and Dart hasn’t seen that much “uptake” by the broader market, it’s hyped by geeks but that’s about it. Swift is becoming popular because if you want to develop for iOS, you don’t have a choice. Kotlin is getting some uptake.
Rust has seen lots of quiet uptake. What you don't see is hiring for people for Rust because most organizations don't experience a whole-sale shift to Rust, and you just retrain people on the inside.
I'd wager there are lots of people like me - writing small tools at work in Rust, but the employer would never hire for Rust.
I think we'll see broader market adoption in the next 2-5yrs though, in terms of people actually hiring Rust developers. There's still a little maturing to do in a couple areas to clean up some papercuts.
Disclaimer: I really like Rust am a little biased.
The not hiring but using bit is based on not seeing Rust jobs despite companies actively using Rust, and many anecdotes of "I wasn't hired for rust, but we use it" over in reddit on r/rust when people ask how to get a rust job.
I was thinking that exact same thing. Rails was hitting its peak in 2010, and the idea that programmer time is more valuable than CPU time suggested dynamic languages were the future.
I mean, that’s not entirely wrong — Besides JS, Python is arguably the most dominant language across all domains. Python is also faster than Ruby, though, and 3.x added static-like features to the language. It doesn’t seem like there’s much appetite for languages any slower than what we have now.
I wasn't trying to assert that ruby is faster, just trying to correct the notion that python is an inherently faster language than ruby.
If I look at a composite benchmark like debian's and don't see one leading by an order of magnitude, I file that away as "probably about the same speed, depends on your use case"
> - The next big thing will be something totally unknown and unpredictable now, as user-generated content and social networking were in 1999. However, when it does appear, various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us all about it. It will still be really cool, though.
It replaces trust with massive resource consumption and doesn't do a good job of being digital money (it is hard to use safely, it is hard to use anonymously).
It is cool because it really disintermediates powerful entities. Maybe the first iteration of digital money/assets is not that efficient, but that could also be argued for many other innovative technologies.
What is groundbreaking is the concept of P2P value exchange. And that's what bitcoin really is, still a young PoC that will surely evolve or get superseded by a 2.0 tech.
I suppose that partly depends on exactly how novel the blockchain part is, but broadly speaking the world of efforts to combine some of electronic money, cryptography, proof of work and decentralisation was not a new one in the late 2000s. For example Ecash had been hot once https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash , while later on Hashcash got a fair bit of attention as a possible solution to the spam crisis. In 2007 (early 2010 is another story) it was definitely more of a deep cut than AI or cloud, though.
definitely Bitcoin/Blockchain. I wouldn't say it will actually disrupt traditional banking empires, but it was the next big thing and 'experts' definitely came out of nowhere and its still pretty cool.
AI wasn't totally unknown: basically every coastal university during the 1970s and 1980s were filled with people working on AI, and it didn't die off, it just became embarrassing to work on.
Neither was user generated content (that's what the original web was) or social networking (irc, email, bulletin boards, etc). Making it useful and usable beyond an academic and techie niche was new.
> Neither was user generated content (that's what the original web was)
The fall and return of the cat picture still amuses me. In the early days of Web adoption when people would put up a personal home page just for the thrill of having one, stereotypically the only bits of content they would be able to come up with for it were a list of favourite bands and one or more scanned-in pictures of their cat. So for years and years afterwards cat pictures were a synechdote, a punchline for jokes about the naïvety of the early Web. Then phone cameras and low-effort social media became big, and ...
And more, the AI hype-cycle was definitely on the upswing again already by the beginning of 2010. The Netflix Prize and the motor-vehicle DARPA Grand Challenges were all 2000s events, for instance.
Regarding deep fakes, I don't think you're wrong, just early. I think we are just getting a glimpse of what is unfortunately possible as this decade closes out, they could introduce some real chaos as in this new decade.
Not at all unforeseen by the end of 2009 though. The GMail beta dates to 2004, while EC2 was announced by 2006, and that's aside from all older precedents or predictions. (That said, not everyone 'got' EC2 at first.)
In my experience (very large contact center multinational), what killed IE6 in the enterprise was PCI and other security compliance standards. Large companies do whatever it takes to stay compliant to a lot of these standards because having that "stamp of approval" is the only way to keep other equally large companies as clients.
> if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.
The dynamic languages slower than ruby prediction didn't hold up either. The past ten years have just seen nibbling around the edges for dynamic languages, without any compelling ideas about how to make them fundamentally more expressive.
Doesn’t that describe the rise of JavaScript? I haven’t done or seen any specific benchmarks, but I gathered that JS was among the slowest of languages.
Like others have said, major Javascript engines are much than Ruby implementations, owing to the huge effort Firefox, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have put into those engines. In principle, I'm not sure if there's reasons that make one intrinsically harder to optimize.
But even if Javascript were slower, it wouldn't mean the prediction was right. Javascript didn't do something super amazing that let you write beautiful code (the way Rubyists feel about Ruby, or Python folks feel about Python). It just ran the web so we used it. Over time, it's morphed into a language that's about as expressive as any other good dynamic language, also with some warts. But it's not a leap ahead, which is what the original post predicted.
The only language I've felt that way about was Prolog. When it works right, it's amazing. Too bad I can rarely make that happen.
I am convinced there has to be a way to leverage the expressive power of a language like pure prolog without the strain of the 'hints' you need to give it when the depth-first algorithm can't solve the problem. My bet is that if the interpreter 'knows' enough algorithms to solve common calculations, it could leverage these to compute 90% of problems (without needing to have one algorithm for each problem). For the other 10% you would have to supply the interpreter with the necessary algorithms yourself.
JS is pretty much the fastest of the popular dynamic langs, if only because JS interpreters see highly-competitive investment from well-funded companies with armies of developers thanks to the web.
Chrome and V8 were released in 2008, and Node.js (which leverages V8) in 2009. V8 was already considered fast back then. Mozilla and Apple also focused on optimizing their JS stack in the following years.
Google’s marketing for Chrome and V8 was incredibly effective. We’ve basically forgotten that Mozilla, Adobe and Apple were pushing JS perf long before V8 was released. Memory usage of early V8 was atrocious and real world performance was barely improved over Safari and Firefox but Google dominated dev mindshare for a decade.
No, Mozilla and Apple didn't release their JIT engines until after Chrome (though I think at least Apple was working on theirs) and so when Chrome came out JS immediately got about 4x faster, which was a bigger improvement than had happened over the entire previous lifetime of JS. Popular web pages didn't immediately get 4x faster, because they had carefully avoided doing anything in JS if its performance mattered, but JS did. It's true that V8 used a ridiculous amount of RAM, and still does, but its existence made it possible to do things in JS that previously required native code.
As for Adobe, they never did much for JS; they tried to get people to use ActionScript instead, which was a statically-typed language with syntactic similarities to JS.
Apple built the Sunspider benchmarks in 2007, and along with Mozilla, they made dramatic real world performance improvements before Chrome was even publicly announced.
Macromedia (later Adobe) funded a whole bunch of JIT research as the Tamarin Tracing project, which was shared with Firefox as TraceMonkey. The NanoJIT assembly backend was actually shared code.
I guess you're right that TraceMonkey was announced before Chrome was released on 2007-09-02, one day after its inadvertent public announcement. TraceMonkey was announced, though incomplete, more than a week earlier, 2008-08-23: https://brendaneich.com/2008/08/tracemonkey-javascript-light.... SFX, however, was announced later, 2008-09-18.
I don't want to piss too much on SunSpider, but unsurprisingly V8 did better on V8’s benchmarks, while SFX and TM did better on SunSpider, once they were eventually released. That's because V8 was written to do well on its benchmarks, presumably, not because the benchmarks were rigged. Certainly they were in accordance with my experience at the time.
When Chrome was released, V8 was way ahead of the other browser JS engines at JS performance, partly because it had the first JS JIT. But the other browsers took a year or two to catch up, which they had because it also took websites a few years to move most of their functionality into browser JS.
I don't know why you keep emphasizing this “real-world” thing. Are you saying you think nbody and fannkuch are especially realistic benchmarks?
You're right though that Tamarin was a JS engine, not just an AS engine. We regret the error.
The point is Mozilla, Apple and Adobe did enormous work on JS before Chrome was released.
nbody and Fannkuch are meaningless for real world performance on a client side JS app. V8s benchmarks were widely considered to be unrepresentative of what browsers actually do. Sunspider and derivatives were the most realistic tests at the time and Chrome wasn’t a dramatic improvement.
Chrome’s marketing was incredibly successful in getting more people to use a browser better than IE but it didn’t have a dramatic improvement over FF or Safari.
> The point is Mozilla, Apple and Adobe did enormous work on JS before Chrome was released.
That's true relative to the work they had done on, for example, Gopher support, but it's not true relative to the work they did after Chrome was released. As I said, JS performance from 1995 to 2008 hadn't increased by even a factor of 4; then Chrome was released in 2008 and it immediately increased by a factor of 4, more than it had increased in the entire previous 13-year history of JS. It's true that there existed other optimization efforts. But they weren't successful, probably because not nearly enough effort was devoted to them. Tamarin Tracing/TraceMonkey was eventually discarded and is not part of SpiderMonkey today, although a different JIT strategy is. (LuaJIT uses the tracing-JIT strategy very successfully, though.)
> nbody and Fannkuch are meaningless for real world performance on a client side JS app. V8s benchmarks were widely considered to be unrepresentative of what browsers actually do. Sunspider and derivatives were the most realistic tests
I mentioned nbody and fannkuch because they are in SunSpider, so it seems that you are contradicting yourself in addition to, as demonstrated previously, mixing up the historical sequence of how things happened.
I had just written a parser generator and an experimental functional language that compiled to JS when Chrome came out, and the performance improvements I saw were in line with the Chrome benchmarks. My experience is not part of Google's marketing.
Safari perf had already improved more than 4x with the move from AST Interpretation to a register based bytecode VM with SquirrelFish. This happened before Chrome.
I’m working on a tracing JIT for Ruby at the moment partially inspired by LuaJIT. Fingers crossed it’ll be published research this year!
Right, but the Sunspider benchmark also tested strings, regex and date manipulation. V8s original benchmarks didn’t. Performance on stuff like a parser generator was way up, but it didn’t run jQuery based Ajax sites any faster.
No, it really wasn't. You had to use it in really specific ways and it had all sorts of gotchas. One I vaguely remember is that if an array got too big performance would tank like crazy.
Did anybody predict the slow death of jQuery or the rise of giant monster JavaScript frameworks? 2010 is when jQuery was a cult of personality. It was everywhere and any criticism of it was quickly met with desperate mob violence.
Did anybody predict a typical corporate web page would require 3gb of JavaScript code from frameworks and thousands of foreign packages just to write a couple of instructions to screen?
Applications written in JavaScript tend to be hideously slow (and getting worse) but this is more of a community problem; the language itself is now rather fast by dynamic language standards.
JavaScript is now both faster and less productive than Ruby, so it doesn't match his prediction that a slower and more productive language will become popular.
Raku (formerly Perl 6) basically sits alone as the successor to the slower-and-more-expressive throne. It's a great language to study for the gee-whiz-they-thought-of-everything factor.
But, nobody is paying attention to it. Some of that is because of the Perl 6 baggage, but just as much is probably because this past decade was so heavily entrenched in proliferation of the web-cloud-mobile paradigm that new scripting systems weren't part of the hype cycle. If it didn't get the backing of the FAANGs, it didn't register.
I can imagine a day coming where scripting shines again, though. It might actually be closer than we think. There is always a need for glue code, and glue code benefits from being a kitchen sink of built-in functionality.
We've reached a point where package ecosystem eclipses the importance of language features (which, in brand new languages, typically only offer incremental improvements these days).
It's not good enough to build a slightly better language any more. People won't learn a new language without their favourite packages (or equivalents).
Sometimes fractured and all over the place is a sign of success. Python is used by a huge variety of different communities for a myriad of use cases, which is pulling it in different directions. That’s not a bad problem to have, as long as it’s managed well and the core webs seem very tuned in to this issue.
Also the community migration to Python 3 is done now. Yes there are massive P2 code bases out there still, but for new projects P3 has been the clear choice for a long time now. It’s over.
> Now that Google is advertising Chrome on billboards here in the UK, all that can be safely predicted about the browser market is that it'll be extremely competitive.
It's rather interesting to see how the web went from IE dominating, to Chrome doing essentially the same. Looks like predicting such a growth was farfetched.
Funny to see that the prediction of IE sticking around was mostly right. I long for the day that IE11 will mostly be gone.
Internet Explorer 6 could have been the dominant browser essentially forever if Microsoft hadn’t zeroed its investment into it. Its incentives weren’t aligned with a robust web platform. Google’s incentives are definitely aligned for Chrome to dominate.
> - China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase.
The latter half of this one didn't come to be. Rule of law is weaker and civil liberties have declined.
Civil liberty and rule of law are orthogonal mostly. China has used a decade to make most court cases publicly accessible through internet, all corporation and their holding/debt status similarly accessible, a host of other governmental information available. While there are still a significant amount of corruption, the law enforcement would have been at most transparent in history. Civil Liberty is on a different track however, with laws obstructing such being enforced.
Most court cases yes, the ones that actually matter from a political and civil liberties perspective, no not at all. China is ruled by Xi Jinping and the Communist Party, not the law.
“China Must Never Adopt Constitutionalism, Separation of Powers, or Judicial Independence“ - Xi Jinping
According to the World Bank's metric, China's percentile ranking on rule of law improved somewhat from 2010 to 2018 (eyeballing the chart, looks like it moved from 40th to 48th). This is of course not quite the same thing as an absolute increase in rule of law; if rule of law is worsening everywhere, then the ranking change could still be a decrease (though globally worse rule of law isn't my impression).
My gut response to his thought of MS pivoting to consulting a la IBM was way off but after thinking about it for a minute you could kind of make a case that Azure is a form of "self-serve operationalized consulting", he was just off on it's impact and success by a factor of 50 or 100.
There was one comment in the thread about what Steve Jobs will do at the end of the decade. As a ghost I suppose? (Another says he will step down due to his health, which is closer.)
My favorite is the joke that Zuck will buy Portugal.
You have to remember that in 2010, Windows was still saving its reputation from Vista, Office was stale, and OneDrive didn’t exist. I don’t think Azure did, and if so it was more enterprise focused.
Nadella’s excellent pivoting of MS into a cloud and services focused company saved Microsoft from a stagnant or declining state.
This is why I like to stick around HN and just read. The minds here seem to be much more brilliant compared to other parts of the web. That dude nailed it!
- As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time.
The fact that in 2020 we still don't really have CPUs that are significantly faster than those released in the middle of the decade in terms of single threaded perf (which is still the paradigm that most programming languages today operate under for the most part) kind of put a nail in the coffin of that prediction.
I can totally picture new languages as described doing well today if we had exponentially more single threaded processing power/watt at our disposal than we actually do.
I think there is still opportunity for languages that offer huge leaps in expressiveness w.r.t handling concurrency even at the cost of raw single threaded performance. Though I would not label a language like that as "slower" as it'd allow us to actually make much better use of our computing resources than we reasonably could today without blowing through most of our complexity budget, resulting in faster programs in practice.
You could argue that it's JavaScript. JavaScript had terrible performance even in 2008, can't remember now what it was like by 2010, but I would guess V8 was still pretty lacklustre back then.
I read it such that if, for arguments's sake, Ruby is 10 times slower than Java that people would start using a new language that is 10 times slower than Ruby. I'm not sure that ever described Javascript, and it certainly didn't as the decade progressed with the advancements that have been made in executing it.
I feel like that one simply missed the mark. If anything, there was greater emphasis towards languages that were more performant, even if less productive for banging out a working product.
It definitely did. IE6's JavaScript was super slow. You cannot even imagine how slow it was if you never worked in it.
Remember, IE6 was the dominate browser for years, so very slow JavaScript was the norm.
For example round about 2008 I made a client-side pivot table for a web app, tried it in JavaScript first, even trivial tables would take 10 seconds despite all the optimization I tried (in IE6, IE7 + Firefox).
I rewrote it using XML + XSLT and it was instant. But it was truly gnarly code.
Maybe JavaScript libraries and frameworks? I haven't touched too many of the "batteries included" ones but I see them out of the corner of my eye at meetups and hackathons, they seem unwieldy enough to fit the bill.
If 6 out of 17 predictions correct with the only unambiguously correct predictions being trivial or vague is "nailing it," then I probably won't be taking stock advice from you any time soon. On the other hand, predicting the future is kind of hard. IsaacL made some really conservative predictions, sticking to things that seemed obvious. In fact, most of the wrong ones would be perfectly reasonable predictions for the next 10 years. It just goes to show how hard making predictions really is.
Below is how I calculated 6 out of 17 predictions correct
---
> Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years.
Correct
> Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.
Correct (profitable since last year)
> Microsoft will .. have shrunk and may have evolved into a consultancy company on the lines of IBM
Wrong
> Internet Explorer will shrink, but won't go away
Correct? (debatable, since software never completely goes away, but MS is no longer developing it and Edge doesn't use the same rendering engine)
> Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments. It will be most successful in places like cities that grant free municipial wifi access.
Wrong
> Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.
This was already true in 2010, so it doesn't even count.
> For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.
Wrong.
> In addition, at least one of the 'big' startups of the second half of the decade will have been possible with 2009 technology. By this I mean that people will still be discovering new potential for browser-based web applications built with current client-side technologies, which will remain ubiquitous, although new alternatives will appear.
Correct, but the predication that there will be at least one new web-based startup is not very interesting.
> It will be an even better time to start a startup in 2020 than it is now. One of the key drivers of ease-of-starting-up-ness will not be new technology, but new platforms - like Facebook and viral marketing, but better; or that solve other problems like micropayments, customer development, retention, and so on.
Wrong.
> Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".
Wrong.
> As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time.
Wrong.
> Having said that, Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.
Wrong, IMO (transistors are still on the curve, but the performance impact of adding more transistors doesn't matter the same way it used to; but he cited Moore's Law specifically, so he's wrong).
> An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.
Wrong.
> Increasing fuel prices, and green taxes or incentives, will mean large shops will begin to replaced by warehouses, as traditional retail gives way to home delivery.
Wrong, but only because he cited a reason. Otherwise, the prediction that brick-and-mortar stores will continue to be replaced would have been correct.
> China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase. Internet crackdowns will continue, and may increase in severity, and will still be rationalized by porn.
I want to say the civil liberties situation in China is the same, but I don't know enough about China to comment on it.
> Despite multiple new fads that purport to make software development ten times faster and error-free, it will remain a hard problem.
Correct, but trivial. Of course writing better software is hard.
> You still won't be able to talk to your fridge, and gesture-based HCI will remain a fun gimmick.
I'm counting this as wrong because of Alexa.
> Virtual worlds like Second Life will remain niche, but World of Warcraft will pass 20 million users and a Facebook game or similar will pass 200 million users.
Wrong.
> The next big thing will be something totally unknown and unpredictable now, as user-generated content and social networking were in 1999. However, when it does appear, various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us all about it. It will still be really cool, though.
Wrong, but maybe I'm forgetting about some big tech thing in the 2010s. It seems that the biggest disprupters was a modernization of cab companies and hotel bookings. We may be on the dawn of several actually unpredicted new things, like driverless cars and the use of neural networks for some kind of cool new applications, but there's been no killer app. These are hopefuls on the horizon, not profitable products and industries.
> (ChromeOS will grow slowly, then rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments) Wrong.
I don't know about that. ChromeOS did grow slowly, and has gained significant share of the entire US education space (K-12). Yeah, it's a niche market. But I think that fits the for "certain market segments" qualifier.
> (Virtual worlds will remain niche, but WoW will pass 20 million users, a Facebook-like game or similar will pass 200 million users) Wrong.
This is technically wrong, but in-spirit correct. Virtual worlds / MMO games did get the traction claimed, just not WoW specifically. (The MMORPG FF14 Online has ~20 million users, MMO Warframe has 50 million registered users, 'facebook-game' Farmville has 73 million users, and 'or similar game' Fortnite has 250 million registered users). Minecraft holds similar numbers.
And while WoW itself never quite hit those numbers, a different game from the same studio did. Blizzard's Hearthstone has over 100 million registered users today.
You can still take the 2010 approach and just run everything on Rails and Postgres. It’ll be a long time before any startup outgrows that stack, and by the time they do they’ll have the ability to rewrite like Twitter did.
Anyone who starts off with anything more than that (or Django or your favorite language’s equivalent) is just wasting time and effort trying to be trendy. Over-engineering a startup only serves to keep you from testing market fit, which is only a good plan if you’re trying to milk more investment money because you know you’re going to fail as soon as you launch.
that's a tech view only. Startup-ing is harder because incumbents in innovative business have built huge moats, in pharma, chemistry, web, mobile, etc. Big business are more ready to react to disrupting newcomers by pricing them out, lobbying for new rules, buying them out, etc. Incumbents are also reaching a global scale that generates in itself such an advantage...
> Now you “need” half of npm, react, backend, devops etc to get started.
Says who? You can literally spin up nearly any server computing infrastructure imaginable in a matter of seconds. Just because software is getting bloated under the covers, doesn't mean its any harder.
>> Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.
> This was already true in 2010, so it doesn't even count.
This definitely wasn't true in 2010. On June 1, 2010, Steve Jobs proclaimed that the post-PC era had arrived, and was promptly ridiculed for it by the industry and media. Massive social changes caused by mobile phones have only occurred this decade, as the gig economy has exploded and places like India have 10x'd the number of citizens with internet access.
>> For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.
> Wrong.
Huh? Of those 4, Facebook in 2009 was the most valuable at $10 billion. Now there are 20+ private unicorns with that valuation, as well as dozens more that have IPOd in the last few years. How is that prediction wrong in any way, shape, or form?
>> Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".
> Wrong.
>> An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.
> Wrong.
Again, this is correct. The US did enter the Paris Agreement, and has not actually formally withdrawn yet as it is not legally eligible to do so until November 2020. "Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action." is an especially cogent prediction.
>> China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase. Internet crackdowns will continue, and may increase in severity, and will still be rationalized by porn.
> I want to say the civil liberties situation in China is the same, but I don't know enough about China to comment on it.
Civil liberties have likely gotten worse, but the rule of law has indeed strengthened. Internet crackdowns being rationalized by porn is also correct, as seen in the UK and elsewhere.
As far as ChromeOS and video games go, maxsilver covered those pretty well already.
I remember Iran had very large scale protests in 2009 leading into 2010, so that was probably on their mind, thinking it would lead to some kind of radical change.
Half of those predictions read like "the thing that is a trend now, will continue to be a trend".
I can be a prophet too - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are not going to be displaced in the next decade.
> Half of those predictions read like "the thing that is a trend now, will continue to be a trend"
And yet, people regularly think "a decade is a long time, surely this trend will be finished by then". Recognizing that existing trends are still likely valid is worthwhile.
- Apple and Google are still the only two mobile operating systems that matter and they are still in relatively the same position. iOS still controls the high end where the money is and Android has the market share but the OEMs are not making any money.
- Facebook is more profitable and popular.
- Amazon is still the number one online retailer, the Kindle is still by far the most popular ereader but more importantly, the Kindle platform is still dominant.
- Google still hasn’t managed to diversify from its ad business and YouTube is still dominant for video.
- Netflix is still the dominant streaming platform.
I think Microsoft was the biggest surprise. In 2010 MacBooks were starting to become very popular, and it looked like Microsoft’s monopoly on consumer computing was coming to an end. It was common to think Microsoft was on a long decline in 2010.
It's interesting how none of the commenters envisioned Microsoft repositioning itself to adapt to technological and business trends. Everyone seems to have thought they would either fight them and lose, or contract to becoming an IBM-like consulting business.
Slack isn’t a “large player” they are nowhere near being profitable and are nowhere in the same league as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google or Microsoft.
The app ecosystem was growing like crazy in 2010. It was a year and a half into “there is an app for that”. Facebook had already pivoted to being big in mobile.
The same can be said about Uber. Once the companies have a profitable and sustainable business model that doesn’t involve burning cash then they can be considered a major player.
Regardless of profitability I think people are spending a lot more money on the internet today as they were 10 years ago. Subscription services, gig economy, and online retail have exploded in the last 10 years in a way that I don't think many people predicted.
Everyone saw online retail exploding by 2010. Amazon was already big and growing, Barnes and Noble was already struggling against Amazon and Apple/iTunes was the number one music retailer as bricks and mortar music retailers had started to close.
By 2010, streaming services were big, Apple was selling movies and TV shows digitally and had already started removing DVD drives from its computers.
Honestly it doesn’t matter. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made $23 billion in profit from Android from its inception to the start of the trial and t still has to pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS.
Apple has made a lot more in mobile from Google than Google has made from Android.
For awhile, MS was making more in patent fees from Android OEMs than Google was making in licensing and advertising.
Losing mobile was the best thing that could happen to MS so it could focus on Azure and making Office ubiquitous- where the real money is.
> still has to pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS.
That is not the way to think about it - Imagine if Android didn't exist or faltered like Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile etc. Google would have been paying way more than 8 billion. Android is definitely worth more than the money accounted towards it.
Not really. The Android market is really not worth that much. Statistically it’s made up of consumers who aren’t willing to spend that much compared to iOS owners. The high end non Chinese Android market is minuscule. They just aren’t as attractive as iOS users to advertisers.
Thanks, the 2nd link seems to show that iPhone owners spend way more compared to the amount of downloads here as well.
Personally, I have quite a few paid apps, but the majority I bought over the years and keep using them. The top grossing apps are all subscriptions and the only one that I have with one is OSMAnd (Open Street Maps app) which includes a donation to OSM/contributors.
> - Apple and Google are still the only two mobile operating systems that matter and they are still in relatively the same position. iOS still controls the high end where the money is and Android has the market share but the OEMs are not making any money.
You're badly misremembering or recontextualizing with hindsight bias. At the start of 2010, iOS had 32%, Android had 4.5%, and there were at least 5 other mobile OSs with >4% market share. Start of 2020 and we're looking at Android with 74%, iOS with 24%, and zero other OSs with >1% market share. These are very different situations!
By 2009, they had 12,000 movies up for streaming, and Netflix-compatible devices were advertised heavily in stores, with Best Buy including Netflix apps on their store-brand devices.
The big announcement when the iPad was introduced in March 2010 was that Netflix would have an app for it. It had been streaming for at least three or four yesss by then.
> Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.
That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
> Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.
Who's scalp was it? I don't know any politician who has been taken to task over network analysis and data mining. Fore sure not Obama, whose staffers have quietly chortled that they did far worse than Cambridge Analytica ever did. Definitely not Trump, his numbers are as even as they haev ever been. Maybe Zuckerberg? But he's still CEO of his company.
To me it seems obvious that Hillary Clinton was the one who pulled (or pushed) the victory in Trumps direction, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by some really interesting remarks about her core voters.
(Disclaimer: Not an American, don't like Hillary Clinton and definitely not Donald Trump.)
I can see how one would get that impression based on our media, but it would be an oversimplification to say the least. The history of Hillary Clinton is too complex and long to get into for the purposes of this discussion.
Suffice to say the Trump campaign made a concerted effort to use data to target ads at specific groups in the Rust Belt with the intention of de-legitimizing her as a Presidential candidate.
I believe the "taking the scalp" could also be a reference for its intended offensive power, not just the scandal of using it.
In that light, the answer is obvious: Hillary Clinton!
(And before someone complaints, which someone will definitely still do: Given the extremely close election, it is possible, even likely, that any single one of maybe a dozen issues had the potential to change the outcome: Just being a bit better as a candidate would have been enough. That e-mail "scandal" getting the same attention as the dozens of carbon copies of it since revealed in the Trump Cabinet, i. e. none, would have sufficed. Defences against Russian interference, or even just widespread knowledge of the attacks, could have been enough etc. etc.
Is the politics of information a liberal issue? Other than their complaints about Russia, it doesn't seem like there's many speaking out against the inordinate political power wielded by information overlords like Facebook and Google
I would say is held up until 2016. After the election of Trump and the ensuing Russophobia, mainstream liberals became allied with the security state (CIA, NSA, FBI), and quickly turned on former liberal heroes like Snowden, Assange, Manning etc.
What a fun read! The one that ended up being the most off in the thread:
> I predict (and hope for) a major turn back to simplicity in technologies. Multimillion-line software will go extinct like dinosaurs. Existing programming languages and platforms will gradually be replaced with ones so simple and elegant that one software component will be written and maintained by one to three developers and art designers and not a whole software company packed with managers and other unnecessary staff. Oh, and managers along with poeple who "understand" "software business" but not software will hopefully go extinct too.
If I can predict anything for 2030 based on this, it will be software being even more complex, with even more frameworks and abstractions.
I'd say that this prediction is describing current developments quite well. Newer programming languages (Go, Rust) and development tools are making the "software as lean independent components" vision more relevant than it ever was.
Someone really needs to crack simple generic type systems with native levels of performance to get all of this to work.
Performance comes from optimizing the usage of state against hardware, modularity comes from code satisfying the properties of composition which is best left stateless (and high levels of modularity must come from abstraction and conventional practice, incurring further debts on the programmer and machine.)
It's a tension that I haven't seen fully resolved but I'm very very very open to being wrong. Many languages seem to be experimenting in this space with some preference for one side of the equation for another.
> Someone really needs to crack simple generic type systems with native levels of performance to get all of this to work.
We know how this works, at least in broad theoretical terms. Zero-cost abstractions are quite feasible within a self-contained module/component, but their scope is ultimately limited by ease of building and deployment. Nevertheless the performance impact of having to support high levels of abstraction across modules/components is quite reasonable, even if not literally "zero" cost.
I'm thinking supercompilation might be another part of the equation as long as we're talking extended composition of modules and types whose behavior is totally closed. Having a pipeline that can supercompile when systems are pushed in production even if some compilation time is traded for performance at development (maybe "local" supercompilation for subsystems relevant to a development team?) would be an interesting thing. But I don't know.
Some have noted that JIT systems perform many of the same things as supercompilation, and it seems reasonable to consider that JIT is part of the equation for optimising performance when systems are pushed to production. We've been doing that for decades now, with increasing sophistication in the details. Profile driven, multiple stages of specialisation and optimisation.
Not quite to the levels of proof systems (and therefore supercompilation as envisioned) yet - there's plenty of room to get better at it - and we need to go there if we want those "zero cost abstractions" across modules that aren't designed for it, often with significant impedance mismatches.
He is quoting from 2010 and predicts the very opposite and I fully support the claim. Reasons:
* industry has either no interest or capacity in quality
* software flaws may cause severe harm but will play no role for the majority of the industry. it is a gamble just like vc business.
* pace of change/inonnovation will actually add even more harm
* excellence in the field will decrease because the baseline compexity is already too high, people will specialize probably in ML/AI/fin.
One chance I see is that the industry runs into a major HR crisis and some smart players understand that the complexity cannot be maintained by "developers" or "software engineers" anymore and come up with solutions other than opening up more positions.
I think inherent complexity can only be fixed by better monitoring. Visual tools, monitoring, real time feedback are all things humans can use to get a better grasp of the innards of things.
We could use a lot more of it in software.
Nothing can fix unnecessary complexity. It will continue to affect every tool used to maintain it.
Ditto for Javascript. When I first used React in 2015 I thought it might be a harbinger for unix philosophy tools in the web space. A lib with a simple API that solves a single hard problem with a good implementation under the hood.
What I never predicted was the sheer enormity of the useless cruft the community would build around it. I used to contribute to some of the React community places (particularly irc), and in the early days the discussion there was super interesting. Now it's just endless waves of "I'm building X and having Y problem with dependency Z" where Z is something I've never used because it looks shit, Y is something I haven't encountered in 3 years, and X is something I could build in my sleep with just plain old React.
I've always wondered if Java devs feel the same, or if they're happy drowning in whatever crap is in their ecosystem? Like, do they all love Java but hate every single code base they have to work on? Or is that a uniquely JS problem?
Framework and language complexity is just a cycle thing. Someone makes a new language/framework that's minimal, clean, and suited to what people need. Needs change, or people miss certain things, it gets bloated, and the cycle repeats.
Except for C and C++. C just gets better, C++ just keeps growing.
> if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.
-- jacquesm
Roadster was an extremely niche car for millionaires. Spacex had yet to have a successful launch I believe. So while not a crazy prediction, still impressive that I doubt many people who have bet on
Model S got unveiled on 2009, the Gov invested/lent in them in 2009 and I remember the whole buzz of having a Tesla. Seems like a lot of people betted on them (pre-orders, government, investors, etc).
Some of those are really funny, but the one by adw nailed it.
>adw on Jan 1, 2010 [-]
>Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.
>That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
Thank you! There are still lessons to be learned from the early data journalism community, which is what got me thinking about this at the time; Craigslist eating classified advertising and Facebook eating display created this kind of apocalyptic burst of desperate creativity which didn’t save news but pointed in a bunch of important directions which haven’t been fully followed up.
> * Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade).
> * Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
Thinking back to Satya Nadella's book, I still think its incredible that he was selected, and even after it was incredible that he the impact that he had. I guess where I'm getting with this is that to have been able to see and recognize that he had the potential to take Microsoft in the right direction and that he actually was able to take them there is pretty awesome. They could have hired someone from outside, or someone who might fit the look / character of a mega corp CEO but they took a risk with him and I'm glad that it paid off.
for what its worth, Ballmer was apparently a massive, massive sponsor of Satya all the way to the top. Satya wouldnt have happened without Ballmer. for all his flaws as CEO, he did one thing right.
betcha if there were prediction thread for another decade, people will post how Google will be turned into former bell labs and eventually seize to exist.
I disagree, I think anyone the put in charge would have done well. Satya came in during one of the biggest bull runs in history and just surfed the wave. Even Ballmer would have had a hard time to stop that.
Surface, Azure, Minecraft, Github, VSCode and the whole renewed developer focus... those seem like pretty strong shifts and not just 'surfing the wave'.
They are. Microsoft, especially under Ballmer, was notoriously anti-OSS (open-source). Not only did Satya make the decision to shift the company to be cloud focused, he represented a change of guard when it was critically important to make peace with the open-source community.
You don't become a $1.2T company by surfing a wave. Its stock price has more than quintupled. IBM's stock price is almost flat over 10 years. GE is down over the decade. Changing direction for a ship that large is very, very hard--a seemingly intractable problem but not for the model Microsoft has provided.
Or they sold it all in the 2013 bubble and now regret it.
(This happened to a friend of mine - he sold it all off to pay-off his student loans before the 2013 bubble peaked - it'd be worth over $10m at the end of 2017).
If you still have the old machine, it's not impossible that the deleted wallet is still on the disk and could be recovered using some sort of undelete tool.
I had something like 20 coins, but it was on a secondary computer that didn’t have backups and was long since recycled. You can believe I spent a few hours digging through all my backups to find the wallet back in 2017... ah well.
Or they did what I did - spent it. At the peak I would have had $8 million before taxes had I not turned it into cash to pay for the electricity my CPU was burning to mine it.
Oh well. Good thing I actually enjoy my current job.
Printing the keys and sticking them a safe would have done the trick - but you'd need the foresight to know that not touching it for 10 years is the plan.
That's the gotcha. If bitcoin hits $1M by 2030, the people reading your comment from the 2030 repost of this thread will have a good snicker.
Bitcoin's entire value, literally all of it, is just an index for how widely and strongly felt HODLology is across the globe. The sale of a bitcoin is a cult member leaving, the purchase is a baptism, however transiently intended the purchase is, because the purchase represents the new recruits own belief in HODLology.
Ok I make a prediction here for 2030: Bitcoin won't be at $1M at all, very far from it. Bitcoin will be between $0 and the cost of mining a single coin. Right now, this is around $7,000. Could be similar or less in 2030.
I don't expect it to go anywhere. It seems to have a niche purpose, but will never gain mass adoption.
I make another prediction: By 2030 not a single cryptocurrency will be used mainstream / have replaced fiat currency. The strongest will still be Bitcoin, but it'll be as weak or non-existent for normal people like it is now.
I predict that gaming could see a huge uptick in crypto-currency usage. Could you imagine a game like Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft utilizing a crypto-currency rather than an in-game artificial currency? You could create entire in-game economies with real life value. People could actually make a living by playing games full time as scary as that sounds.
Could you imagine the moral implications of someone robbing you of crypto-currency in a game like GTA or some survival game?
I just think there's some very creative use-cases for crypto-currency that will pop up over the next decade.
As for most proposed cryptocurrency use cases, it's unclear why your example couldn't just be a number in a database maintained by the game's producers.
BTW, people already do make real-world money grinding for WoW gold.
That is the wrong way around. The cost of mining a coin is influenced by it's market value, due to economics and the difficulty adjustments. If BTC becomes worthless, it won't cost anything to mine a coin.
Probably a good strategy is sell when you can retire off of it. Having $10m but not having gambled it for $1bn isn't a loosing position to be in, IMO. Alternatively you could have 4 allocations, sell one in 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050. Or 10 going over the next 100 years (pass them down to kids).
and no one really knew about it until it made slashdot on 7-11-2010. Mtgox started trading in 7/2010 and I think I bought my first bitcoin around 5/2011 for $10/each or around there.
This one came true: The post-PC decade. The evolution of SmartPhones, set tops, cloud computing and other mobile devices is going to make the PC redundant for most people. By the end of this decade I could see the PC being exclusively a business tool or power user tool.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026022
It's trending that way, but this decade still sold more PCs and laptops than the previous decade. 2018 sales were around the same level as 2006 or 2007.
They halfway did. Other languages took the interesting parts of functional languages (Java and C++ have lambdas, now). The the dynamic bit, Python has type annotations now, and Go, a replacement for Python in some ways, is statically typed.
Except for the spread of Javascript. No one said backend JS would be a thing.
The majority of programming today is not functional at all. I think Functional programming became sort of a tertiary elitist buzzword similar to drunken style kung fu. The effectiveness of the style is well known among practitioners and those that don't practice it look upon it as if it was a foreign and strange art.
What people don't realize is that functional programming is mixed martial arts. The art of combat brought down to the science of combat. I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream. MMA didn't become popular because it was the most effective art, it became popular because it was packaged up into entertainment.
> The majority of programming today is not functional at all.
That's probably true.
> I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream
That's demonstrably not, as React has basically gone full FP. I would argue that the majority of bootcamp students are now taught functional programming.
You could claim erlang isn't full fp because you have a stateful process attribute dictionary, and, while we're at it, access to network resources like a Postgres database, but that would be an almost meaningless statement.
With Hooks, react basically went full FP. You can still make an object component, but it is frowned upon.
nah not even going there. JS, is not functional therefore react is not functional. In all intermediary state in between interfaces to the framework you are allowed to have mutating state. So you actually have freedom to do any style in JS. I don't know react to well but I do know 100% that a function with this name is possible in react:
function closedFunctionThatdoesSomeImperativeAlgorithmWithMutatingInternalState(x: number): number
Right? This is totally legal and not even a niche use case so you can do whatever the hell you want in react. It's the interface to the framework that is supposedly FRP. This is NOT the case for most functional languages.
Also if you think all FP is just immutable state then you don't see the full picture. Immutable state creates an isomorphism between imperative programming and functional programming. Thus many bootcampers following the buzz end up just making all their variables immutable and thinking they figured it all out.
Yes, immutability forces the usage of higher order functions and recursion. This surface level knowledge also doesn't really provide any intrinsic benefit to programming. Recursion, map or reduce is not intrinsically better than a for loop or a while loop. Most of these beginners just subconsciously obey the buzz without ever realizing that that the buzz makes no sense. These guys don't even know what "function composition" means.
Because most of these programmers don't understand why FP is better, they don't use it properly and as a result this popularity of FP among react users is just a fad. Definitely not mainstream.
That's wrong. The "surface level knowledge" prevents huge classes of footguns, and that's why it's not just a fad. I can, have, and am about to take a junior and put them into prod without losing sleep far faster in FP land than I can in OO land. This is a real improvement that I as a developer who has complete ownership over a project care about.
You think OO patterns disappear in FP land? I can dependency inject my code to hell in FP just as fast as in OOP. I can pass first class functions around and effectively bring over all the problems from OOP land to FP.
It is a fad because FP issues new foot guns to blast your head completely off. FP without types and without understanding isn't a huge improvement over procedural programming or OOP.
You're already hearing about programmers not buying into the whole FP fad largely because of there experience with FP on react and other similar platforms.
Yep, but my guess is that Lobsters is probably around 1/100th the size of HN on any dimension you care to measure (some recent stats: https://lobste.rs/s/8yumgi/killed_by_google#c_ugdtol). We explicitly have a narrower scope and are not interested in trying to dethrone/replace/etc HN. But ultimately, "split" is too vague a prediction to be judged as accurate or inaccurate.
> The world falls into war, inclusive of even the most pacifist, post-military states. On the upside, a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter moves anthropogenic global warming to the back burner and spawns a generation of Mad Max-style entrepreneurs among the ten-million or so human survivors. Surviving software engineers relish the opportunity to rebuild lost infrastructure "the right way this time"---including a transactional, secure, well-formed, rule-based, semantic world-wide-web---while the less-gifted turn to secondary issues like clean water, shelter, food, energy, medicine, and transportation.
> Internecine fighting erupts amongst the software clans over whether certain symbols are separating or terminating and whether or not the name of the god of modification is spelled with two letters or five. The dehumanized masses turn on the dithering software clans and their IT crowd supporters, demanding to have their souls restored from failed exchange, facebook, gmail, and twitter servers. A small nomadic clan clad in denim and mock turtlenecks seeks the legendary Cupertino Stone in the wasteland of New Gorgoroth (mostly between the 85 and the 280), but finds only the unpublished "Objectivist-C Manifesto" and shiny discs inscribed "Dylan DR1".
Edit: if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.
by DrJokepu:
> Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
To me the interesting question is: What cool things were predicted and still don't exist, but could if someone from that thread had spent the past 10 years trying to make it happen?
I feel that overall much didn't change in the past decade in the tech world. Bitcoin is a great example of that, there was a big bubble where you could raise money just by mentioning Blockchain, and then just as quickly it faded away. AI isn't much different at the moment, it feels much more like a marketing buzzword than something that has changed my life.
Compare this to developments happening outside the computing-tech world (like Musk is doing) and the rise of green building tech. Today it is more than feasible to build a house that generates more energy than it consumes over the course of a year, even in cold climates like Northern Europe. The only thing preventing this from being more common is knowledge (builders keep building what they know) and it costs a little more upfront.
> Also, this decade sees the beginning of the "pension bomb" - the demographic bulge of post-war baby boomers crossing the threshold into retirement. It's fairly easy to predict that there will be pensions scandals, with some pensions companies going bust or paying out far less to recipients than had been originally advertised. Also I predict the beginning of large supermarket scale retirement homes/complexes/compounds, where economies of scale can reduce costs of elder care.
Both predictions were 100% correct. Many pensions were cut dramatically or eliminated. AMR is one that comes to mind immediately, but the pension benefit corp could only do so much for many others. Also, this problem now seems like an imminent problem for many companies and public entities. This is only going to get worse.
The Villages in Ocala, FL fit the second point, and I'm confident other places exist like it.
Predictions are a fun mental exercise, but they read an awful lot like horoscopes. They're just too subjective to be truly interesting. It's not really all that different than predicting the weather ten years out. It'll be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Things will be pretty much the same but different.
What changed in tech from 2010 to 2020? My take below.
Hardware:
Phones got way better and changed the face of modern human life. 3D TVs fizzled. VR has fizzled so far. AR fizzled. CPUs improved, but more slowly. HDDs improved, but more slowly. SSDs got cheap. Displays got way cheaper. Cars got better infotainment systems and other features, but never drove themselves. Wireless power didn't happen. Mesh networks didn't happen. Ultra cheap RFID didn't happen. Robots didn't happen. Telerobots didn't happen. T Dynamic pricing didn't really happen. Drone delivery didn't happen. Flexible electronics didn't happen. Nanotechnology didn't really happen. Graphene didn't happen. Ubiquitious computing didn't happen. Non-silicon based solar didn't happen. Silicon solar costs plummeted and installations went gangbusters. Wearable electronics didn't happen, except for smart watches. eReaders grew. FPGAs never took off. Chips are still mostly silicon. The top CPU makers are still Intel and AMD. The top GPU makers are still NVIDIA and AMD. The top video game console makers are still Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft. Home internet remained mostly cable, not fiber. Computers remained x86, phones remained ARM.
Software:
The dominant search engine is still Google. The dominant computer operating systems are still Windows and Mac OS. The dominant phone operating systems are still Android and iOS. The top video streaming site is still YouTube. The top map site is still Google Maps. The dominant office software is still Microsoft Office. The dominant social network is still Facebook. The top online retailer is still Amazon. The top cloud provider is still AWS. Internet Explorer died, and Chrome grew in share. Websites are lot better and slicker. Phone apps got way, way better. Cryptocurrencies didn't take off. MMOs didn't take off. Web anonymization didn't happen. Web identity didn't happen. Malware still exists. Spam still exists. Lag still exists. Functional programming didn't take off. Telepresence didn't take off. Remote work didn't take off. Mass outsourcing of software jobs didn't happen. Linux didn't take off. Prediction markets didn't happen. Video calls didn't really take off, but they happen. Most of what was growing in 2010 continued to grow, most of what was shrinking in 2010 continued to shrink.
What else happened? What narratives do you construct?
Interesting to see that many of the predictions weren't far off.
But one recurring prediction that was notably wrong was of Microsoft's declining prospects. It would have been difficult at the time to argue otherwise, but WOW did things turn out differently.
> -People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made.
Not an image search engine as much as whole governments but this rings eerily true.
The sad part is that I don't think this has caused people, on average, to become all that much more privacy-aware. Or, if they are, they still don't really care.
People don't have alternatives to using the internet, to their smartphones, and to electronic money, that let them still participate in interesting modern society.
I think deep down, anyone who thinks about it knows everything they do with their devices may be tracked, is probably being tracked and analysed, but the tools are too essential to life, so they can't afford to worry.
That said, I mentioned to someone recently that web servers keep a log of every request and the person was shocked! (Imagine if they could see the details kept by modern analytics and observability tracing!)
Privacy awareness is certainly not mainstream, if you see someone not using any Google service or so they'll probably be assumed paranoid and labelled a cypherpunk.
Funnily enough, my Dad asked me about what happens with data in the cloud the other day so that was interesting.
I think everyone likes to predict contrarian things which are actually unlikely to happen, in the hopes that they will be the only one who predicted it... just like investing/gambling
By itself hardly a bold prediction, but the top reply makes a caveat about mobile devices, which gets some nods about mobile taking much longer to transition to 64-bit.
Few might have imagined Apple would ship its first 64-bit phone only three years later, and a version of iOS before the decade was over that ended support for 32-bit phones!
32bit died on phones much quicker than on the desktop, in fact (though of course it died on servers first). Arguably, this should have been predictable; legacy software was a much smaller problem on phones.
I find that a little surprising, because one of the side effects of 64-bit address spaces is a lot of redundancy in pointer representations stored in RAM. 64-bit pointer-based data structures have more redundant zeros.
Much of the energy in a computer goes on communication between chips, so increased memory use means increased energy use. As well as more going on inside the CPU transferring all those redundant pointer bits around
You don't have to use full 64-bit pointers for your "pointer-based data structures". You can store indexes into an arena allocation. This is common in languages such as C++ and Rust, and will become increasingly so as 32-bit is less and less used.
I believe ObjC and Swift on 64bit machines use the upper section of the pointers to store reference counts. I'd guess that Android Java uses pointer compression like normal Java does, though I don't know for certain.
The 64bit transition on ARM also allowed an arch overhaul, with extra registers etc. ARMv8 cores were usually a good bit faster than their immediate predecessors, but it wasn't much to do with 64bitness. This also happened with x86, of course.
> Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods, with close to 100% coverage across the civilized world. A significant fraction of ordinary consumer goods simply won't work in "dark" zones.
I'm glad that this remains mostly false (as well as "all high street bookstores go bust"). Sure, you can get a wi-fi enabled toaster or coffeepot, but the basic versions are still available for sale.
I chose to live without wi-fi at home, and with no smartphone, for the past four months -- just to see how my life went without the distraction. Now the experiment has run its course, and I plan to order wifi again. But basically life went on as normal, and I feel I could do another four months if I chose.
I wonder for how long into the future such a choice will remain realistic.
The next decade will be the decade of survelliance. Nearly dust size receivers will cost nothing and will be generously used everywhere: from concrete blocks to clothes. The US will come up with a clever use case so people will buy this themselves (finding a matching pair of socks will finally become a trackable problem, thanks to receivers in all socks), while authoritarian countries will implant these chips in lieu of passports and credit cards. Paired with 5G, this will be a perfect always online monitoring system.
I don't think there will be any notable advancements in science: we won't create AI, we won't cure cancer and we won't switch to electric cars.
Actually do. Ireland. I do use it every day, and tapping is better than chip-n-pin. I barely remember scanning. But ultimately, it's not a huge change.
The first thing that comes to mind when I look back at these kinds of predictions is what is being said today (or during the last few years) about how AI is going to enslave and destroy humanity. The other one is how robotics (+ AI) will lay waste to human employment.
Some of the people championing doomsday scenarios ought to be humbled by the reality of not being able to predict almost anything ten years out.
Funny how many independent comments predict a Microsoft demise in one form or another.
In the context of 2009, Microsoft was obviously in disarray and most would just accelerate a current trend to make a prediction.
Turns out many important changes in the decade were not predictable that way (although it applies for the success of the smartphone in several comments too).
I'm going to go out on a limb and say 2035 at the earliest for full self-driving partly because A) software engineers never feeling quite done, B) the underlying software, firmware, and hardware won't be proveably safe enough and C) because something political will make self-driving EV's much more difficult.
By 2030:
1. Nigeria and/or Kenya's GDP will surpass that of the UK.
2. Global births will rapidly decline in all but the poorest nations. Data will show that "Peak Child" is near and will occur around 2040.
3. 4 day work weeks for salaried employees will be commonplace amongst large corporations.
4. A new search engine disrupting our commonplace search behaviors will be on its way to disrupting Google
5. The average Bachelor of Science degree in the USA will cost >$180,000 at a public university
It's common to own a laptop, iPad, a Kindle, and sometimes even a drawing tablet. They are have a tablet form factor, so these devices will probably converge into a single one.
Once the tech becomes good enough, it'll no longer make sense to own all these devices.
It's fun to see how some of these in general accurate, but others were very far off. For example:
> Facebook will be gone in 5 years, just like MySpace. Half a dozen companies will rise and fall in replacing it. The web will churn even faster than it did before. [1]
Love the reply to this one. "Probably the best prediction I've read on this thread." [2]
There's also [3]:
> * During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.
> * Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.
> * Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.
To be honest I don't know about pop to know if this is true, but it sounds to me like Katy Perry might've out-Madonna'd Gaga.
Even the original post has some that didn't turn out as expected:
> - Major changes will happen in Iran, one way or the other. The current trajectory they are on does not seem sustainable for a decade.
Little did they know, yes? Kind of, after the election of Hassan Rouhani and an eventual nuclear deal, although that particular milestone would be scrapped after a big change in government happened in the USA.
> - Ubiquitous computing will finally arrive, with smart cards/RFID on our bodies seamlessly interacting with computers in our environment. As you walk up to your refrigerator, for instance, you're logged in and presented with a customized display. Same goes for the car or the entertainment surface at the Dentist's.
Little did they know at the end of the decade this would be DOA after a series of scandals made people realize maybe privacy is way more important than logging into your refrigerator with a customized display. Also, as it turns out, dentist equipment churn, at least where I'm from, is incredibly slow and still lacking an "entertainment surface" beyond maybe a TV if you're lucky.
> Facebook will be the Google of the decade.
> Google will be the Microsoft of the decade.
> Microsoft will be the IBM of the decade.
The "decade" timeline doesn't quite fit but to be honest this wasn't a bad prediction [1].
> Facebook will be the Google of the decade.
This feels very accurate, down to the people. There's plenty of ex-Googlers at Facebook, including Sheryl Sandberg, who essentially built Facebook from "a really cool site" to the profitable ad business it is now.
Google bought YouTube in 2006, and now it's a huge economy of content creators. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, and it's now a growing economy of influencers. There's plenty of differences of course, but in the ad-tech space it's Google then Facebook, in Machine Learning it's Google and Facebook. What big companies are releasing cool open source software, adopted by millions of developers? Google and Facebook.
Miss-information, hate speech, political controversy and issues with publishers? Facebook and Google/YouTube. In terms of data-tracking only Google is comparable to Facebook— or rather only Facebook is comparable to Google? Virtually complete dominance of a key-part of the web? Google and Facebook. Number of users? I could argue only Android and Facebook are at point where they have to provide free internet to people to gain more users. Diversification into hardware? First Google, then Facebook.
The list goes on. Facebook is (perhaps too ruthlessly, and "breaking too many things") largely another "Google" in many ways. Not sure if this is what the prediction was getting at, but it's interesting to think about.
> Google will be the Microsoft of the decade.
Right now it feels like this is happening. Right now, Google is ubiquitous and feels unbeatable like Microsoft. It also has (1) platform dominance in web and OS and key services, (2) an incredibly diverse set of products and (3) anti-competitive behavior stemming from this dominance. It also has (4) a thick layer of middle-management fighting for relevance leading to (5) lots of product churn, worsened by (6) lack of focus due a "vision" vacuum in upper-management.
I'd suspect the next few years without Page or Brin will be interesting. It'll also be interesting to see if Google 1. Can pull of hardware (Pixel was a good start, but the latest iteration has a lot of reviewers disappointed) 2. Can focus (Android, Chrome OS or Fuchsia? Will they commit to a messaging service?) and 3. Can deliver new products that stick.
> Microsoft will be the IBM of the decade.
Up until Satya Nadella took over in 2014 and his changes started materializing later in the decade this largely sounded like it was the case— old stagnant company, held mostly by slow-to-change enterprise customers, and little in the way of new products.
> JulianMorrison on Jan 1, 2010: Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods, with close to 100% coverage across the civilized world. A significant fraction of ordinary consumer goods simply won't work in "dark" zones. The gap between 1st and 3rd world countries will widen as a result - take a modern computer into backwoods Africa and it's a paperweight.
It's not wrong. But I guess he didn't foresee the Internet of Useless Shit. It matters if you tablet doesn't work without Internet, but doesn't matter if it's your refrigerator, or so we hope.
> Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel: lower demand, lower profit, vendors go bust, less availability, monopoly prices, lower desirability. The gasoline economy is brittle because it has high fixed costs, a complex supply chain, and its power source isn't fungible. As with film versus digital cameras, the result is an exponential crash in the desirability of gasoline cars
Exponential crash? Didn't see it yet.
> Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads.
Not yet.
> DrJokepu on Jan 1, 2010: Still no fusion power.
Haha!
> During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.
The unsustainable early economic growth has came to an end and there was an economic crisis, but there was never a major "burst". And the power was not assumed by a younger group, but a more conservative group. Not sure if's populist or not though.
> Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela.
Still not completely fulfilled, but probably soon.
> Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade).
Accurate?
> Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
Accurate!
> adw on Jan 1, 2010: Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
Accurate.
> jacquesm on Jan 1, 2010: [...] the end of 32 bit computing for consumer pcs and server platforms. So all mainstream machines not being mobile or embedded devices will be 64 bits by the end of the decade (and plenty of those will be too, but you are right, not all of them).
Accurate.
> artagnon on Jan 1, 2010: [...] 3. By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer becomes insignificant.
It's wrong, it's more like Chrome has 66% and Firefox has 33% (just an example, the "real" number shows Firefox's market share is even less than that). While the death of Internet Explorer was certain, it was hard to imagine that Google Chrome would be a monopoly.
Progress with cancer happened, wasn't a big thing. Growth of a Chinese middle class with a voice and independence didn't happen. Nuclear detonation didn't happen. Achievements in energy tech happened. Wi-fi data collection on everything happened, though not main change. Internet and software a snore; happened. Privacy did become an issue for the common user.
Gene-therapy did become slightly more commonplace. Genome sequencing for chronic conditions is now commonplace (wouldn't have counted this if 'brfox didn't elaborate on the prediction in same thread).
Nothing right, though first two slightly mirror events that happened ("you inside" = VR; mobile devices have specialized processors like "organs in the body," though multi-core is far from dead).
It is going to be expected that most of these predictions were going to be wrong, that is OK. What surprises me is how almost ALL of them were. This is not better than how the average Joe in the street or the proverbial monkey with the typewriter would have fared. Well, perhaps they would have done it a little bit better.
Prediction: in 10 years we _still_ won't have self-driving cars on common roads nationwide. Tesla will refund the money charged for "full self driving capability" that was supposed to arrive "later this year" in 2019.
- The JVM running on a unikernal is the most ubiquitous backend deployment. Kotlin is the most popular backend language.
- Server-side rendering is ubiquitous. Previously, motivations for client side rendering were to minimise network bandwidth requirements and to avoid server-side statefulness, reducing RAM and CPU requirements. By 2030, memory and compute resources are so cheap that the inherent advantages of server side rendering make it a no brainer for the most part.
- Discovery of extraterrestrial life will occur in mid to late 2020s, most likely in the form of Martian microbes. The James Webb Space Telescope will likely acquire strong evidence of organic lifeforms on multiple exoplanets. Even more surprising discoveries may be made in this area.
- Anti aging therapies become mainstream. By 2030, people in developed countries can expect to live an additional 10-15 years in good health. Reaching 'actuarial escape velocity' becomes a serious possibility for many people alive now. Governments realise the time will come when they will have to step in and bail out pension funds who have unwittingly sold annuities. There will be a group of people who were old enough to get an annuity before they became prohibitively expensive/unavailable and who were young enough to reach actuarial escape velocity. They will be labelled 'the luckiest generation ever'. This may not become totally apparent until 2030s or 2040s.
- Real time ray tracing becomes standard by late 2020s. Games are indistinguishable from reality. A murder case where defendant claims 'they thought they were ingame' makes the news headlines.
- Spacex's Starlink constellation is a massive commercial success. Partly due to this, and partly due to ubiquitous aerial drone-based delivery, it becomes not only possible, but increasingly desirable for many people to live in remote areas.
- Development of space based industry is slower than people hoped. Full exploitation of cheap launch capabilities provided by SpaceX won't be seen until 2030s. Blue Origin will catch up with Spacex's capabilities by mid 2020s. Private space launch industry will no longer be a one horse race.
- Electric cars overtake ICEs in developed nations. Several incumbents who don't react in time will go bankrupt and be acquired by electric car manufacturers. As such, the brands won't disappear, the executive boards however will be out of a job.
- Cryptocurrency will remain off the radar for most of 2020 until, due to major war involving a wealthy, developed country, millions of people will rush to buy Bitcoin to save what they can of their wealth. Price of one Bitcoin will quickly exceed $100,000 during this period.
- People will become increasingly afraid to post their physical likeness (appearance and voice in particular) on the internet due to a surge in deep-fake powered identity theft.
- North Korea will not collapse. The West will reluctantly accept it as a nuclear armed state. It will gradually normalise relations with the outside world and may even follow the same path China took, becoming a prosperous country in the process.
Moore’s law will peter out and everyone will be forced to squeeze out more performance out of existing hardware.
The tide will turn hard against “the cloud” when companies figure out their cloud spend is many times worse than their own data centres cost them. There may be a new wave of “lean” cloud systems.
Fast programming languages will be in vogue again once the wastefulness of things like Ruby/Erlang is finally understood.
There will be a spectacular fire because of an improper electrical install that will become a huge news media event with people asking whether or not EV's are actually safe (despite ICE vehicles having gas tanks)
There will be a major continent-wide power outage either because of a natural disaster or a highly sophisticated and coordinated attack against the poorly secured power stations that at least span NA.
Valve will beat the ever-living daylights out of everyone else in the cloud gaming space.
If you want to make a new prediction, a new thread has gotten started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278.