>Facebook will be gone in 5 years
>>Probably the best prediction I've read on this thread.
Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
331–340 of 462 posts
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pointe…
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.
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> escalation of school shootings Bubble thought. School shootings are down from previous highs and are actually very rare [0]. COVERAGE and willingness to use any incident to promote a very specific narrative are up. [0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...
"No Way To Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...
They've moved the goalpost from this to "the deaths are statistically insignificant".
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Jobs was alive in 2010.
Yes I know.
As in the saying. Hindsight is 20/20.
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#335"Tech is changing faster than ever." 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 po…
Good writeup!
But for my situation and requirements, SSDs still didn't get cheap.
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#336What’s amazing is how little changed. - 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…
> - Apple and Google are still the only two mobile operating systems that matter and they are still in relatively the same position. I don’t think this was a sure thing in 2009. Symbian still had half the market. BB had a larger share than either iOS or Android. WebOS was cool.
BlackBerry was already going downhill by 2010.
https://business.financialpost.com/technology/personal-tech/...
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think Electron's advantage is to shorten training time, not development time.
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.
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#338The most striking thing about the thread is how little of current importance was even mentioned: - Bitcoin would become the decade's best investment by far - the President of the US would conduct foreign policy through Twitter - electric scooters would become a billion dollar business (Bird, Lime, etc.) - the sharing economy would threaten the taxi and hotel industries (AirBNB and Uber) - escalation of school shootin…
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.
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's pretty fast [1]. 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. [1] I'm not a fan of linking to benchmarks, but that's the best I can do: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... / https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benc…
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.
Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
#340The most striking thing about the thread is how little of current importance was even mentioned: - Bitcoin would become the decade's best investment by far - the President of the US would conduct foreign policy through Twitter - electric scooters would become a billion dollar business (Bird, Lime, etc.) - the sharing economy would threaten the taxi and hotel industries (AirBNB and Uber) - escalation of school shootin…
One more to add: - Hong Kong's protests on scale that world has never seen
And the collapse (in a matter of weeks) of Chile as the most prosperous, richest, free/open society in Latin America.