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

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301–310 of 462 posts

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

#301
post #185

The 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…

> 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...

Your source doesn't say school shootings are down from previous highs nor that they're very rare; it specifically only deals with shootings where _4 or more students were killed_ excluding the shooter. That's a very different things from "school shootings", where the mean number of fatalities is 3. If you define "school shooting" as "people being shot at school", then use the same data as in your source, you see 247 people shot in 64 incidents during the 2000s, and 555 people shot in 213 incidents during the 2010s. (It's worth noting that Fridel & Fox came under some scrutiny for choosing their definition of school shooting, because the standard definition used--by the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and by Fox himself in previous studies that conflicted with his new one--is four people _shot_. )

What we're seeing is a large increasing in the number of school shootings, but a decrease in the average success of each school shooter. Is it surprising that the average shooter has become less effective when schools are spending a lot of time and money preparing to deal with them? Shooter drills, established lockdown procedures, buildings being designed with escape and hiding in mind[0], staff training, employment of security guards, etc.

The data you're citing states it plainly: there are more shootings at schools now than 10 or 20 years ago, and more people are being shot at school than 10 or 20 years ago. 50 people killing 3 kids each isn't somehow safer than 25 people killing 4 kids each.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/08/22/new-high...

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

#302
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who? Whom do you think I'm talking about?

Well I as an innocent bystander have no idea what you mean either, unfortunately.

I'm also an innocent bystander!

ryacko is perfectly clearly stating that Electron reduces the amount of training that developers need. This is different from making them develop faster. It just makes them more replaceable.

I have no idea how to parse twobat's question. The "or" is especially confusing. I'm not surprised that ryacko is baffled by it.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is eating the world. In many measures, Python is slower than Ruby.

Python is just a very nice interface to a large amount of optimized C code.

Don't neglect the Fortran code!

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

#304
post #77
post #5

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

> - 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. The latter half of this one didn't come to be. Rule of law is weaker and civil liberties have declined.

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

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

#305

What’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.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Microsoft prediction is even more off...

You have to remember that in 2010, Windows was still saving its reputation from Vista, Office was stale, and OneDrive didn’t exist. I don’t think Azure did, and if so it was more enterprise focused. Nadella’s excellent pivoting of MS into a cloud and services focused company saved Microsoft from a stagnant or declining state.

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

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

#307

What’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…

> Netflix is still the dominant streaming platform. Netflix didn't start streaming until 2011. So it wasn't a streaming platform at all in 2010.

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...

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

#308

Earlier 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...

Your source doesn't say school shootings are down from previous highs nor that they're very rare; it specifically only deals with shootings where _4 or more students were killed_ excluding the shooter. That's a very different things from "school shootings", where the mean number of fatalities is 3. If you define "school shooting" as "people being shot at school", then use the same data as in your source, you see 247…

Hang on. If you're counting things where only one or two people are shot, there is very often no intent to shoot more than that. You can't use that data point by itself to talk about the "success" of school shooters. And those smaller incidents are definitely not what I think of when I hear the words "school shooting".

> 50 people killing 3 kids each isn't somehow safer than 25 people killing 4 kids each.

But you have to treat people killing 2 kids in a completely different way from people that are killing 20. Drills, lockdown procedures, almost all gun limitations... those don't do anything against a single murder.

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

#309
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, definitely Bitcoin

Bitcoin isn't really all that cool though. It replaces trust with massive resource consumption and doesn't do a good job of being digital money (it is hard to use safely, it is hard to use anonymously).

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....

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

#310
post #21

> Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. Glad this didn't happen. Also it's weird to me to equate functional & dynamic like that.

They halfway did. Other languages took the interesting parts of functional languages (Java and C++ have lambdas, now). The the dynamic bit, Python has type annotations now, and Go, a replacement for Python in some ways, is statically typed. Except for the spread of Javascript. No one said backend JS would be a thing.

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