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

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201–210 of 462 posts

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

#201
post #169
post #5

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

Fair, but OP (DanielBMarkham) was only 2 days off on his prediction that "major changes will happen in Iran."

The way he phrased pointed to an internal change, not something like this.

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

#202
By 2030: 1. Nigeria and/or Kenya's GDP will surpass that of the UK. 2. Global births will rapidly decline in all but the poorest nations. Data will show that "Peak Child" is near and will occur around 2040. 3. 4 day work weeks for salaried employees will be commonplace amongst large corporations. 4. A new search engine disrupting our commonplace search behaviors will be on its way to disrupting Google 5. The average Bachelor of Science degree in the USA will cost >$180,000 at a public university

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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…

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.

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

#207
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But nobody would quite imagine that Microsoft didn't control an iota of mobile computing operating system.

Honestly it doesn’t matter. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made $23 billion in profit from Android from its inception to the start of the trial and t still has to pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS. Apple has made a lot more in mobile from Google than Google has made from Android. For awhile, MS was making more in patent fees from Android OEMs than Google…

> still has to pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS.

That is not the way to think about it - Imagine if Android didn't exist or faltered like Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile etc. Google would have been paying way more than 8 billion. Android is definitely worth more than the money accounted towards it.

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

#208
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it doesn’t matter. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made $23 billion in profit from Android from its inception to the start of the trial and t still has to pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS. Apple has made a lot more in mobile from Google than Google has made from Android. For awhile, MS was making more in patent fees from Android OEMs than Google…

> still has to pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS. That is not the way to think about it - Imagine if Android didn't exist or faltered like Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile etc. Google would have been paying way more than 8 billion. Android is definitely worth more than the money accounted towards it.

Not really. The Android market is really not worth that much. Statistically it’s made up of consumers who aren’t willing to spend that much compared to iOS owners. The high end non Chinese Android market is minuscule. They just aren’t as attractive as iOS users to advertisers.

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

#209

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

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.

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

#210
post #90
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The next big thing will be something totally unknown and unpredictable now, as user-generated content and social networking were in 1999. However, when it does appear, various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us all about it. It will still be really cool, though. I think this basically describes AI.

Nah, the rise of cloud, Shirley?

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.)
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