wow crazy you found this comment.

Fwiw, I agree about supercompilation.

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.

Do you have any resources on this you could recommend?

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?

Even more framework and abstractions.

npm and is_odd comes to mind.

There surely is a lot of frameworks, it almost make more sense to have less.

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.

I can see that happening in the second half of this decade as Google continues to grow and absorb more and more of the Internet.

Guessing you meant cease to exist here, but also seizing the intellectual property of Bell Labs seemed to work out in the 1956 consent decree:

The Bell System was obligated to license all its patents royalty free, and it was barred from entering any industry other than telecommunications.

...

Although the 1956 consent decree was not effective in ending market foreclosure, it permanently increased the scale of US innovation.

https://voxeu.org/article/how-antitrust-enforcement-can-spur...

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.

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.

Ballmer: Called Linux "Cancer". Literally.

Satya: "We are all in on open-source"

Not just that, but their core business is strong. Even with the rise of Apple and Google OSes, Windows and Office is still a humongous market.

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.

If you're tracking them, so are other people. (Though, as we all know, the real, proper privacy fix is not having a phone.)

Hey, does your child have rfid implant for easy id and tracking?

Well then every SaaS is just consulting. That’s pretty pointless then.

I heard someone recently describe the value proposition of enterprise cloud like IBM and Azure as “not having to talk to a sales guy as a service”.

Yes I know.

As in the saying. Hindsight is 20/20.

Saying he'll step down due to his health isn't just closer. It's what happened. He resigned a bit over a month before his death.

I don’t disagree that was the situation at the time - but it doesn’t change how incorrect the prediction was :-)

these time travelers are getting cocky

Agree, particularly this bit describes the blockchain hype...

"various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us all about it"

AI was hot too before winter came

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.

The genie is out of the bottle....

Eh, bitcoin is still a cool proof-of-concept. It's just that as it often happens, people took it to production when they shouldn't.

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.

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.

Edit: spelling

Neither virtual assistants nor deep fakes can be considered "the next big thing". They're in their infancy.

Crowdsourcing / the ‘sharing’ or gig economy are huge.

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.

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.)

neural networks are not new

Doesn’t really qualify as unknown and unpredictable. We’re in about the third AI bubble right now, and I doubt it’ll be the last.

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.

Real world performance was the opposite story, with Safari's super efficient bytecode VM out performing V8s JIT: http://www.satine.org/archives/2008/09/19/squirrelfish-extre...

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.

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.

What it does show is that being a web standard trumps everything else.

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.

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?

JavaScript will last. There's no question there at all.

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.

Don't neglect the Fortran code!

This has a habit of creating impedance mismatch problems though.

Julia does this by being able to call Python, R and Fortran libraries.

Just wait until we hit the 2040s and get to compare Kurzweil’s predictions.

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.

I think the point of the prediction is that the new, slower language would be more expressive. More natural-language-like. That doesn't describe JS.

People who have seen more than I have: how much slower were JavaScript in IE6 vs V8?

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.

Well Moore's Law had pretty much ended then, but it was less visible.

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.

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.

The same goes for julia as an answer to R/pandas.

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.

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.

Those are both typically faster than Ruby, tho. Ruby (especially pre-1.9) probably does represent the mainstream peak for tolerance of slowness.

JS and Python are not to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, though.

So, for the uptake, you can see a large list of companies here: https://www.rust-lang.org/production/users

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.

If you run your data centers where electricity is cheap, you're using electricity but not emitting very much carbon dioxide.

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.

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.

Maybe the progression is actually bash -> awk -> perl -> python -> raku ? One can wish :-)

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.

Energy is gonna keep on getting cheaper.

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.

Hack, right? I'm curious as well.

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.

Training for developers, presumably, especially web developers who want to build native apps. If retraining was free, Electron would have approximately no market.

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.

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.

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"

Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart

and golang (Go)

That was shockingly accurate, really. Thanks for linking it. Who is this IsaacL and which year did he come from? ;)

IsaacL is still around it seems:https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=IsaacL

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!

Yes. Most of these are not related to politics at all, 99.9% of cases in China is the same as the west, traffic, violence, contract breach etc.

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).

https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/Home/Reports

Rule of law seems to be mainly improved on economical related area, not outside of that.

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.

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.

(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.

> 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.

And even more surprisingly, WoW in 2019 released an 2006 version :D

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.

Yes, pretty close... too bad we can't comment on old threads but at least I upvoted him =)

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.

IsaacL nailed it the best

Curious if the "wisdom of crowds" works with these future predictions or if only a few were on target.

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.

Also jacquesm on Jan 1, 2010 [-] ...

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.

- You still won't be able to talk to your fridge

This is wrong too.

It's interesting that it's so far down the page, too. Popularity and accuracy were inversely correlated from my reading of that thread.

Someone just started one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

Yeah basically the entire state of Florida. The Villages is pretty exceptional though.

Oh man this is fun. So many prediction we blew past and so many have had 0 progress.

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

10 years before that one commenter guessed!

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.

We’re the best, but we’re still not good.

Elixir is off chortling somewhere...

That read to me like someone who views programming paradigms as simply fashion choices, rather than having actual pros and cons to them.

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.

It was already a thing, Node launched earlier in 2009 and there had been quite a bit of talk about it on HN already.

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.

Sad, but accurate.

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?

He will win 2020 unfortunately.

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).

Good thinking. I'll be happy to supply expertise recovering data from old disk images if this is the case :-)

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 lost it all in the Mt. Gox hack... sobs quietly

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.

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.

My takeaway from reading the top voted 2010 predictions is that people are terrible about predicting what's going to happen 10 years later.

A few of them are correct (cheapish high density displays, commercially successful ebook readers, self-driving cars) but most are terribly inaccurate.

Left the same comment but with some fun, probably wrong predictions, over on the other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941512.

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).

Quick search result in that time frame https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1...

Space successfully launched their first rocket on 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1#Fourth_flight However spacex workhorse Falcon9's first flight was in mid 2010.

Google will be the Microsoft of 1990-2000: scary, dominant, and increasingly hated (by nerds at least).

That one strikes a certain chord..

I was working on things adjacent to data journalism at the time, which helped!

If anything, this has come much more true than I anticipated. I hadn’t got as far as Cambridge Analytica.

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.

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.

The EU? David Cameron?

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.

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

Fully immersive VR tech will become the future of gaming.

Lots of demographics problems in the western world and hopefully we get ahead of it, unlike our track record with climate change.

Over priced an entire generation of computer gaming culture. Probably didn’t help getting to 4k content either.

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.

before anyone makes some new ones for 2020 - 2029, i urge you to read this great article:

http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-futurism-has-a-...

it has something special somehow, I always come back to it

All: this thread is about predictions that HN users made 10 years ago. Note the year in the title above.

If you want to make a new prediction, a new thread has gotten started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278.

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.

And Nokia as well...

Even after buying Nokia's phone business.

I was streaming from Netflix in 2007.

they used to have discs for many platforms (e.g. PS3, Wii) where you could install Netflix and play online content before the app was released

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.

Netflix was a streaming platform in 2007.

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/01/8627/

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.

https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-compatible-video-devices-c...

Hindsight is 2020... err that article is 2016.

It was! It grew from ~4% at the beginning to ~22% at the end.

2020's 2030 prediction thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

Somebody hit up tlrobinson on Twitter and let him know https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748

Jacquesm's comment on Musk is quite accurate

"

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.

"

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.

Feel free to provide me an email at @gerikson on Twitter (DM) and I will send you an invite!

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.

(Context: I am the admin of Lobsters.)

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.

Wow reading all those predictions sound so foolish! Most were way off, goes to say why long term predictions is so hard.

Like some kind of justified war?

I figured climate change would be that moment but we have an entire side of the political aisle essentially denying it's even happening.

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.

Kinda weird how no one saw Cannabis liberalization coming.

I don't think it's the RMS

I ranked all of these, and gave the rate of correct predictions. I might have missed one or two, though.

----- Winners:

'icefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026549

ChromeOS. Based on Linux kernel. Entirely different security system/deployment/upgrades, no legacy applications.

3/3 percentage correct: 100%

'jaquesm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025696

Pretty sure all are correct, though can't find statistics for the first on hand.

5/5 percentage correct: 100%

'jacquesm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025709

laarc, though laarc failed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'adw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703

No explanation needed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'slashed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025702

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

No explanation necessary.

'jeromec https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026044

Correct. Would have been incorrect if U.S. didn't come back into Iran to start another war. Details a bit blurry.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'jsz0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026022

No explanation needed.

2/2 percentage correct: 100%

'antirez https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025765

No explanation needed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'rms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025758

This happened, despite being far away.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'slvrspoon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025943

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.

4/7 percentage correct: 57%

'IsaacL https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093

Facebook successful.

Facebook IPO happened in time allotted.

Twitter became profitable.

Microsoft didn't go anywhere.

Microsoft grew, claim of shrinking denied.

Desktop market shrunk.

Internet Explorer went away. Point denied.

Mobile phones have more or less replaced computers for most average users. Point denied.

Mobile phones did cause most of the big changes during this decade.

More successful startups.

Startups with Facebook/YouTube proportions didn't happen. Point denied.

Huge startups built on phones and web tech did happen.

Startup ecosystem has gotten worse. Point denied.

"Startup instead of college" has gotten more intense.

Languages slower than Ruby caught on. Was not because of Moore's Law but because developers have the attention span of small rodents. Point denied.

Moore's Law is dead.

Deal to limit warming did happen, though it was in six years, not five, and far less than what is claimed here. Point denied.

Traditional retail gave way to delivery; large shops weren't impacted as much as small, and the incentives were wrong. Point denied.

China made no attempt to become democratic.

Rule of law in China got stronger, though civil liberties did not increase. Point denied.

Internet crackdowns have continued and increased in China.

12/21 percentage correct: 57%

'iamwil https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025885

Eugenics dating service from Harvard students was announced just a few days ago.

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'DaniFong https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026260

Solar and wind are now cheaper than alternatives. Is not sold to customers "when they want it, how they want it."

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'bioweek https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026279

Ubiquitous free internet did happen, wasn't a meshnet.

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'borism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025861

Web did not cease to be the delivery platform of choice for applications, it's gotten worse. Point denied.

Internet has become more restricted.

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'zitterbewegung https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025906

PMCs have gotten more prevalent. Have not gotten more popular.

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'brfox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025855

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).

2/5 percentage correct: 40%

'tommorris https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025771

GNU/Linux on the desktop didn't really happen, but Linux on the desktop did (ChromeOS).

Widespread adoption of LISP by developers sort of happened (Clojure), despite much adoption, still limited reach.

Cheaper hardware happened, and is the only thing I'm giving a full point for.

The rest didn't really happen.

1/6 percentage correct: 16.7%

----- Losers:

'varjag https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025740

Didn't happen.

0/1 percentage correct: 0%

'10ren https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026574

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).

0/4 percentage correct: 0%

'erikstarck https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026088

Nothing accurate barring possibly the Google example, though not even it is really right.

0/3 percentage correct: 0%

'mojuba https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025706

Entirely wrong, unfortunately.

0/a-bunch percentage correct: 0%

'lallysingh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025783

No substantial change in political bases, slight left-swing for demographic mentioned.

0/1 percentage correct: 0%

'artagon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025790

Entirely wrong.

0/6 percentage correct: 0%

'andrewcooke https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025727

None of this was correct, though AMD did make steps in that direction, and so did IBM/Sony.

0/2 percentage correct: 0%

'samuel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025853

It hasn't yet.

0/1 percentage correct: 0%

----- Honorable mentions:

'paraschopra https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025736

Half-point given because tablets rose to prominence and serve as partial e-Book readers, though they also killed dedicated ones.

.5/1 percentage correct: N/A

'Scott_MacGregor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026255

1. His company failed.

2. Didn't happen.

3. Half-point given; free for everyone, usually privately-funded.

4. It's gotten worse.

5. No explanation necessary.

6. Didn't happen.

7. It's gotten worse.

.5/7 percentage correct: N/A

'zacharypinter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025867

All claims basically correct, though flawed. Not taking into final % calculation or ranking for that reason.

4/5 percentage correct: N/A

'motters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025738

Both predictions correct with large picture, both wrong on most details. Half-point awarded for each.

1/2 percentage correct: N/A

'motters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025817

Problems with pensions happened, were not as bad as claimed.

.5/1 percentage correct: N/A

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.

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.

- 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.

I fear you may be right.

We would never know if he is right

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.

TikTok is gonna go down in flames by dec 2023

Scott Adams did, but not quite 10 years in advance. Check out his blog about a year before the election.

Edit: here's just one example. It goes earlier than this. https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/09/23/the-reason-for-tru...

I suppose an army of inept bots could throw me off.

Edit: I meant that they got that wrong, but it wasn't an unreasonable prediction.

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.

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.

People will start moving en masse to EV's.

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.

Obligatory: https://youtu.be/WSLMN6g_Od4?t=85

Now just to predict what will be the big thing in 2030 so I can get rich :)

I think many economists would argue it'd have gone _up_ rather than down due to the counterintuitive nature of capitalism.

In any case, many economists argue over this question :)

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.

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.

[1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rank...

Where did they get that idea from? [1]

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)

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism