EDIT: this is a fun one:
I predict lots of people will make predictions, but we'll never go back to check and see if they were right. — the reckoning has come, tlrobinson!
> I predict that within 2 years the iPhone OS will allow you to run unapproved apps provided you click through enough, "Hey, we're warning you! Don't come crying to us when you manage to blow up your dock connector", messages.
-DannoHung (2010)
I'm so sorry Danno. We're still waiting.
> I predict within 2 years no one will even hear about an Nvidia GPU in an Intel-based laptop (unless we're talking $2000+ machines - maybe).
-higherpurpose (2015)
(this is probably about AMD CPUs?) Looks like it's going to be wrong for many more years.
> I predict the sun will run out of steam and we are all gonna die.
> After being signed by the President of the European Parliament and the President of the Council, it will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union and will start to apply six months later.
>> I predict the sun will run out of steam and we are all gonna die.
> -the-dude (2020)
> I dunno about that, sun looks fine to me!
I'd call that one half-right. The sun is almost certainly devoid of all gas-phase H2O. Well, maybe a quarter-right, because it didn't "run out" of something it didn't have.
I guess it's just a little fun site, would've been nice however to have a voting system in random scrolling to provide some highlights (while keeping predictions unvotable in the ranking to avoid typical crowding).
>I predict that the ready supply of instant gratification will be as or more harmful than fast food and the obesity epidemic.
Yet to be widely acknowledged and acted on, but sure seems lsd5you was ahead of the curve on this in 2010.
And we went from 30 minute TV shows on global/national/local channels to 30 seconds clips on finely tuned personal feeds with granular data from billions of users optimizing for watchtime.
I know it's a fear as old as books, but it's hard to ignore the different paradigm that the Internet brought to the table.
Is it more harmful? Contrary to popular belief, attention span is not declining (there is not even a singular value for attention span, it is dependent on activity). That we just can’t enjoy long-running ads anymore is just the media becoming more efficient/better at cuts. At least, according to most researchers: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp
Anyone else surprised by the caliber of the legal disclaimer on the site? I can't decide if that's part of the joke or if this is a serious result of the author consulting a lawyer and coming up with this. Maybe I should be more concerned that someone might take some random sentence I wrote out of context and use it as investment advice*
> We still don't know when it will be safe for freelancers and small companies to drop IE 7 and other dinosaurs. But I predict that day will come much sooner thanks to Google.
Technically, that did not really happen yet ( although I agree with that prediction as likely ). We had one instance of mass shooting in an affluent Chicago suburb, but there is no indication it was done to 'target rich people'.
I am typing all this as I recall that I saw 'eat the rich' meme on Imgur the past few months semi-consitently ( to be fair though; Imgur has become oddly politicized as a platform ).
Would be nice to be able to select by things like year (predictions made in 2022 are not so interesting yet).
Found this one from 2007: https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=2849 "I predict because all major businesses will be interacting through Facebook, a new form of currency will begin to emerge." --jimream. Sounds like a popular prediction at the time, given wechat. Although, were wechat payments a thing then already?
189 comments were posted in the thread. Their predictions included:
- Ubiquitous mobile internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods
- Ebooks defeating real books
- Rampant piracy
- Common electric cars
- Driverless cars
- China bubble will burst
- Google will go downhill
- Microsoft will become like IBM and have to sell off parts of the business
- Smartphones & cloud computing will make PCs redundant for most people
Of all these 9 predictions, I'd say first 8 were mostly false and the 9th was correct in spirit but still iffy in fact - Statista says that 3/4 of American adults own a computer.
In general, there seems to be a severe bias toward change. Either people were very optimistic about the changes we’d see by 2020 or they were quite pessimistic about the present trends & companies, calling them bubbles or unsustainable. In both cases, a prediction of "trends will stay the same" would have been more accurate than a prediction of "things will change drastically off-trend".
That said, it's a bit unfair to say that stasis/current trends continue is a better prediction, as it has the advantage of entropy. There is only one way for things to stay the same, but many ways for them to change. So even if things are likely to change, predicting stasis can still outperform any specific prediction of change, even if a prediction of any change would be best.
Here’s what actually changed over the 2010s, as I see it.
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.
- Drone delivery didn’t happen.
- Flexible electronics didn’t happen.
- Nanotechnology didn’t really happen.
- Graphene didn’t happen.
- Ubiquitous 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.
- Mass outsourcing of software jobs didn’t happen.
- Linux didn’t take off.
- Prediction markets didn’t happen
- Dynamic pricing didn’t really happen.
- Micropayments didn’t really happen.
- Most of what was growing in 2010 continued to grow, most of
what was shrinking in 2010 continued to shrink.
I think functional programming has a larger presence in JavaScript/frontend now, given ES6 APIs like forEach/map and interfaces like higher-order components in React. I notice much more FP in modern frontend docs, like CodeMirror 6, Lit web elements. So, we’re not all using Haskell, but its certainly benefited my programming to have a better understanding of FP concepts.
It missed that thread by a few weeks, but I think it's fascinating how little the iPad (announced January 27, 2010) and other tablets have impacted our computing lives, despite a lot of excitement at the time.
They still exist, they're nice, but instead of supplanting anything, they're mainly just tertiary devices owned by a relatively small number of people.
To compare currencies, it's probably better to look at market capitalization and number of owners. The market cap is currently at $0.5T and there are about 100 million Bitcoin owners, which makes it a small currency (comparable to Swedish krona in terms of market cap), but it has certainly "took off".
It would be nice if users could mark predictions as true.
I would love to see how the predictions trade on prediction markets like https://manifold.markets/. Could you automatically create an entry for every prediction?
These are all really atrocious predictions, and the newest ones don't really seem any less stupid than those whose time has already come to pass. People also seem to have a weird inability to construct grammatically correct sentences that start with the phrase "I predict."
Nothing too remarkable. [This thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68111) envisions the rise of music streaming, but the prevailing attitude is that it'd enable p2p sharing and piracy, not forestall it (also see comments on the article itself).
Good but needs more work. you need to contextualize using the original response and original post. I can see the value of this though. On similar lines, you could probably organize all software / product / business ideas people mention in comments also. Good luck.
I dunno, it seems like the tide is turning a bit. Mazda and BMW both say they're going to cool it with touch screens, and I assume others have too. This might be related to the chip shortage, but then again I've seen a bunch of articles about how much people hate this technology in cars. The original prediction doesn't include a timeline, I note. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part?
For the driver a touchscreens is dangerous. For passengers or for configuration is OK.
I got the radio controls on my steering wheel. I would be dead or I won't be using the radio if they were on a touchscreen. Closing a phone call is on the touchscreen and I'd like to be able to do it from the steering wheel. The less the eyes leave the road the better.
The obvious one to me was how COVID came in 2020 and put the world into quarantine making and actual change in how people work remotely. The technology was there in the 2010s, but something external changed our usage. Of course, it looks like it is trending backwards again with companies forcing workers back to the office, at least partially.
Politics across the globe seems more insane than ever. Maybe I wasn't paying attention 10 years ago.
Maybe you were not paying attention but it doesn't matter: the world did change a lot with Covid and especially with the war in Ukraine, at least in Europe. It's definitely different than up to early 2020.
My pet peeve: predictions not associated with probabilities or odds.
It's impossible to verify or score accuracy without that. Nobody predicts anything at 100 % certainty (otherwise it wouldn't be a prediction, it would just be stating inevitable facts), so there's always an implicit level of confidence.
It's just that when people don't say what it is, their predictions become meaningless to anyone but themselves.
A prediction without a probability is also not open to critique, because the way we settle differences in beliefs about uncertainties is through betting against each other. But a bet requires odds to price it with.
What do you mean? Adding odds defeats the purpose of the prediction since you can't confirm it to be true or not.
If I predict with 99.99% odds something will happen and it doesn't, my prediction could still have been correct as that fits in the remaining .01%. Whereas if I predict something will or won't happen after some time, you can confirm if it did or didn't happen after that time.
All predictions come with uncertainty. That's what makes them predictions.
Even if someone says "there will be an ice cream shortage in France in the summer of 2025" they don't mean they are 100 % certain of it. They mean they find it somewhat likely -- but exactly how likely? That's what they have to tell us, because we don't know.
For an individual prediction, you can never tell whether it's true or not, because individual predictions always come with some level of uncertainty.
What you can do, if you know at what confidence level it was made, is
- Score individual predictions. One made at 99.9 % certainty that doesn't come true gets a heavy negative score, while if it would have been made at 60 % it gets penalised much less.
- Verify the accuracy of a collection of predictions. If I predict five things at confidence levels of 0.8 0.7 0.9 0.5 0.5 then I should get roughly 3--4 of them right. If I don't, my predictions aren't very accurate.
Predictions and probabilites seem unrelated, except in mathematical models which attempt to make "predictions" through probabalistic models. Perhaps you've spent so much time reading about machine learning that you've gotten the concepts confused. I would go so far as to say that a prediction that comes with a probability is not a true prediction, but an estimate masquarading as one.
Quite the opposite! A prediction is an estimation of the most likely outcome in a binary event.
I mean, I get that just saying the above seems to confirm your "too much machine learning" hypothesis, but I guarantee you that's not the case. At my own peril, I'm too old fashioned to have read much about machine learning.
What I can say is that when making strategic and tactical decisions that affect a lot of people, I have found it incredible to know things like "I am 85 % sure we will not make the next release in time" (an actionable prediction) compared to "there's no way we'll make the next release in time" (when in fact there's still a 15 % chance we will, if we take proper action now.)
It most definitely is not. Confidence and predictions are orthogonal concepts outside of stats and ML. A gambler makes predictions, but may have no confidence in winning. A scientific model may produce predictions with no associatel claims of probability or even validity. It is perfectly grammatically and semantically correct to say that someone made a prediction that they themselves do not believe to be the most likely outcome.
Any gambler that makes a prediction without internally associating it with a probability is one that's most likely losing money. You simply cannot consistently make positive-EV bets without considering the probabilities of your predictions. (Heck, EV is the linear combination of probability and payoff.)
A scientific model almost always includes a very specific kind of probability: the p value. The best scientific models are also validated externally and have the results of that experiment reported -- as probabilities: false positive and false negative rates are common concepts to discuss that.
I completely agree that one can predict something that one does not believe to be the most likely outcome. But in order to even say that, you have to be implying that there is at least a partial order from "least likely" to "most likely" and that order is commonly referred to as probability.
(Edit: oh, I see where you got the "most likely" from. By convention, in a binary prediction, the prediction itself is stated in terms of the most likely outcome, with a confidence between 50 % and 100 %. It is of course possible to state the other side of the event with a confidence level < 50 % -- it's just not the way these things are usually presented.)
> Any gambler that makes a prediction without internally associating it with a probability is one that's most likely losing money.
The very fact that this idea is expressible proves that you're combining two different ideas in your head. You're seeing the utility in making accurate predictions then, despite being perfectly capable of talking about predictions which aren't estimates, pretending that they're the same concept.
I of course don't need to appeal to your own confused words, because we live in a world where dictionaries exist.
Sure, I feel like that's what I've been trying to say all along: you can make a prediction without saying at what confidence level, but it doesn't mean anything to anyone other than perhaps to yourself, because only you know how strongly you believe in it.
Right and it's specifically for action that we need to know the odds. To pick one set of actions in advance of an uncertain event we need to know three things:
- The cost in case the event turns out bad,
- The upside in case the event turns out good, and
- The probability that the event turns out good.
We can summarise the two first ones as "the payoff function of the event" and simplify the situation into requiring knowledge about the payoff and the probability.
But without the probability we cannot take informed action.
(Unless the payoff is structured such that the probability doesn't matter -- but then it's also not much of a difficult decision.)
I predict Amazon's rank in the top500 is about to improve.
-rbanffy (2010)
That wasn't a bad one. It was at 100 in Fortune's 500 in 2010. However, as people have said, the context determines the quality of the prediction. If this was said in reply to "I'm going to buy all my DVDs from Amazon from now on," it wasn't such an interesting opinion.
I came across a quote from myself on the third refresh!!
Any chance you could add links to the original comment? I'd like to see what I was talking about in 2017. From the quote:
"I predict it's abandoned within the year"
I was almost certainly talking about a Google product, but I can't remember what. I thought it was Stadia, but apparently that was announced the year after.
What the heck petercooper, first link I got on this site: https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=3007 and he predicts an oil crash in the next year which then happens spectacularly. I hope he put some money on that and not just some HN karma.
- Filter by "before year", so I can see predictions from earlier years which are more likely to be resolved. Most of the random results I got are in the 2020s.
- Make the url contain a seed, so you can copy/paste the URL and get the same prediction (EDIT: my bad, looks like there is already a "share link" button)
I like the idea of being able to vote on whether the position turned out to be correct. Would be cool to see it as a histogram over time, so you could see whether predictions started becoming more correct.
Also, typical narcissistic me wants to see any predictions that I might have made.
too bad this site (which encourages it) and most of the comments so far are focused on (poor) singular predictions without taking the next step and wondering whether the mean(s) of these predictions are fairly accurate. i'd suspect that with enough samples, the mean of any given prediction would be fairly accurate[0], but instead, it's lot of shallow criticism.
for instance, i had been saying (since at least 5 years ago) that full self-driving was at least 15 years away. looking at the state of the tech, i was probably too optimistic, but i'd love to know the mean prediction of the population to see how far offbase i was.
[0]: this is the central thesis of the book wisdom of crowds, and of the many prediction markets it spawned.
The phrase "The fact of the matter is..." is only ever used dishonestly. If I had a talk show, any guest who used this phrase would immediately have his/her mic cut and out the door they go.
Even in 2017, this was more stating the status quo than really predicting.
Already plenty of comments throughout 2017 of people searching reddit for more "human" recommendations because of Google getting overrun with corporate spam.
Arguably the difference between then and now is that astroturfing Reddit has become more profitable and hence more common as people adopt that mindset, so searching reddit is less valuable now than in 2017.
I don't even need context. Always applicable.
https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=3337
EDIT: this is a fun one: I predict lots of people will make predictions, but we'll never go back to check and see if they were right. — the reckoning has come, tlrobinson!
https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=247