Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#101

Post by philplckthun » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:08 AM UTC

haunter wrote: post #5

IsaacL nailed it the best https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093 And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#102

Post by adw » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:08 AM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #40

> 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703 This poster saw it.

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.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#103

Post by wyxuan » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:08 AM UTC

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.

"

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#104

Post by CoolGuySteve » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:10 AM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #54

haunter wrote: post #5

IsaacL nailed it the best https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093 And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

> - 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.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#105

Post by adw » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:11 AM UTC

wheelerwj wrote: post #2

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.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#106

Post by contingencies » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

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

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#107

Post by chubot » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

HN will split.

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

Didn't happen! Kudos to @dang and the HN staff for keeping the site going for a decade !!

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#108

Post by cambalache » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:17 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#109

Post by jtolmar » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #54

haunter wrote: post #5

IsaacL nailed it the best https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093 And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

> - 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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#110

Post by icebraining » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

pakitan wrote: post #31

haunter wrote: post #5

IsaacL nailed it the best https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093 And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

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.