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Ten predictions (2004)

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Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#131

One weird thing. Site is hosted in sites.google.com, and content is published on 2004, however Google sites launched in 2007, which came from acquisition of JotSpot, which was launched in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sites

My bad, JotSpot existed in 2004, so this might be legit. Spooky accurate predictions though..

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#132

Does anyone know why XML was so hyped when it came out? I remember reading article after article about how great it was and how it was going to revolutionize everything. Looking back on it, it all seems kind of silly.

> how it was going to revolutionize everything

I think it did.

The Java->XML->XSLT->HTML or Java->XML->Webservice framework was pretty big news in 2001. It meant you could transfer data between any number of services using the same data set. You could take that XML and send it to a java servlet or you could render it to html using xsl and give it to the users. You could also flat out dump XML and have other services use it. It was the first generally accepted webservice standard done over http.

Before XML exploded information was transferred between companies (that I worked for) by moving CSVs around, then putting the csv into the database, then reading the database back out... compared to that xml was an absolute godsend.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#133

Status of these predictions in 2013... 1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. What has happened to this idea? 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. github? 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. go? node? 4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. clojure? scala? 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most po…

2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. github?

Wordpress.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#134
post #84
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, mainstream social networks are new.

Yeah, if you're living a decade ago. By 2005, MySpace was such a big deal that if you were a student without one, you'd feel like you were missing out on something important socially, and by 2008, Facebook had pretty much everybody, including grandparents, as a user. Nowadays the center is shifting again, and most of the people I know have started using Tumblr as their social locus, but it probably won't overtake FB.…

Read the title, this is from 2004, which makes it incredibly prescient. Even Zuckerberg didn't realize what a big deal FB was in 2004.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#135
post #4

This really is an impressive display of foresight. It appears that all the reading Steve mentioned doing paid off. The act of discussing his predictions here on HN is foretold in prediction #6. And those that were off, were still pretty warm.

Funny, HackerNews is what came to my mind for that point. I assumed by 'you and I' he meant developers/entrepreneurs/hackers.

If he was in fact referring to the mainstream, then Twitter would be another great example.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#136
This is really impressive. Soooo close on the XML database thing - just substitute JSON (which hardly anyone knew anything about in 2004) for XML and he nailed it. Just one great call amongst many here.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. I think github is the most notable example. 3. Gotta reread that. 6. Oh come on, facebook, youporn, whatever. As I said, too vague.

Github is not an open source webapp. It's a closed source web app that hosts other people's open source apps (web and not).

Github hosts git repositories.

Git is open source.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#139
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A tautology if I ever heard one. Consider this set of programmer "skill levels" where most (80%!) are above average: {10, 10, 10, 10, 1}

If we take your very narrow definition, the chances of any programmer to be (exactly) average are zero, if we relax a little bit we're back at tautology.

No, it's not a tautology at all. For instance, one sensible interpretation of the prediction would be that > 50% of all developers are within a range of += 10% of the average performance score. This may or may not be true.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#140

1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. Github is cool but with all the cheapskate web devs (no offense, I am one of them) I don't think it is _that_ profitable. 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really.…

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Thank god we dodged that bullet. I'm just glad people see XML for what it really is (useful, but not that useful). > Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore. The problem is multi-threaded has never really took off, even with all the cores we have today. There is still no silverbullet to harnessing parallelism. > Apple's lap…

> A tautology if I ever heard one. In fairness, that statement was clarified: "In five years' time, most [future] programmers will still be average [by today's standards]."
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