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

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

#411

Post by goatlover » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:03 AM UTC

jaggirs wrote: post #237

crdoconnor wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've reached a point where package ecosystem eclipses the importance of language features (which, in brand new languages, typically only offer incremental improvements these days). It's not good enough to build a slightly better language any more. People won't learn a new language without their favourite packages (or equivalents).

A solution to this is leveraging the ecosystem of another language, like elixir (erlang) and all the jvm languages do.

Julia does this by being able to call Python, R and Fortran libraries.

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

#412

Post by goatlover » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:10 AM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #152

wycy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t that describe the rise of JavaScript? I haven’t done or seen any specific benchmarks, but I gathered that JS was among the slowest of languages.

JavaScript is now both faster and less productive than Ruby, so it doesn't match his prediction that a slower and more productive language will become popular.

What it does show is that being a web standard trumps everything else.

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

#413

Post by zifnab06 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #63

School-Cotton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone saw it coming in 2010 they are extremely rich now :)

Or they sold it all in the 2013 bubble and now regret it. (This happened to a friend of mine - he sold it all off to pay-off his student loans before the 2013 bubble peaked - it'd be worth over $10m at the end of 2017).

Or they did what I did - spent it. At the peak I would have had $8 million before taxes had I not turned it into cash to pay for the electricity my CPU was burning to mine it.

Oh well. Good thing I actually enjoy my current job.

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

#414

Post by kragen » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:18 AM UTC

jashmatthews wrote: post #384

kragen wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

Apple built the Sunspider benchmarks in 2007, and along with Mozilla, they made dramatic real world performance improvements before Chrome was even publicly announced. https://webkit.org/blog/152/announcing-sunspider-09/ https://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme... Chrome + V8 was already behind in real world performance, not ahead! http://www.satine.org/archives/2008/09/19/squirrelfish-extre... Ma…

I guess you're right that TraceMonkey was announced before Chrome was released on 2007-09-02, one day after its inadvertent public announcement. TraceMonkey was announced, though incomplete, more than a week earlier, 2008-08-23: https://brendaneich.com/2008/08/tracemonkey-javascript-light.... SFX, however, was announced later, 2008-09-18.

I don't want to piss too much on SunSpider, but unsurprisingly V8 did better on V8’s benchmarks, while SFX and TM did better on SunSpider, once they were eventually released. That's because V8 was written to do well on its benchmarks, presumably, not because the benchmarks were rigged. Certainly they were in accordance with my experience at the time.

When Chrome was released, V8 was way ahead of the other browser JS engines at JS performance, partly because it had the first JS JIT. But the other browsers took a year or two to catch up, which they had because it also took websites a few years to move most of their functionality into browser JS.

I don't know why you keep emphasizing this “real-world” thing. Are you saying you think nbody and fannkuch are especially realistic benchmarks?

You're right though that Tamarin was a JS engine, not just an AS engine. We regret the error.

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

#415

Post by goatlover » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:24 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #110

pakitan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just wait until we hit the 2040s and get to compare Kurzweil’s predictions.

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

#416

Post by jashmatthews » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 3:07 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #414

jashmatthews wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple built the Sunspider benchmarks in 2007, and along with Mozilla, they made dramatic real world performance improvements before Chrome was even publicly announced. https://webkit.org/blog/152/announcing-sunspider-09/ https://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme... Chrome + V8 was already behind in real world performance, not ahead! http://www.satine.org/archives/2008/09/19/squirrelfish-extre... Ma…

I guess you're right that TraceMonkey was announced before Chrome was released on 2007-09-02, one day after its inadvertent public announcement. TraceMonkey was announced, though incomplete, more than a week earlier, 2008-08-23: https://brendaneich.com/2008/08/tracemonkey-javascript-light... . SFX, however, was announced later, 2008-09-18. I don't want to piss too much on SunSpider, but unsurprisingly V8 did better o…

The point is Mozilla, Apple and Adobe did enormous work on JS before Chrome was released.

nbody and Fannkuch are meaningless for real world performance on a client side JS app. V8s benchmarks were widely considered to be unrepresentative of what browsers actually do. Sunspider and derivatives were the most realistic tests at the time and Chrome wasn’t a dramatic improvement.

https://johnresig.com/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/

Chrome’s marketing was incredibly successful in getting more people to use a browser better than IE but it didn’t have a dramatic improvement over FF or Safari.

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

#417

Post by AlchemistCamp » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

igouy wrote: post #363

mnutt wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think one can say that python is faster than ruby: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... I think the perception is there because of python’s scientific and ML libraries that have a lot of c bindings, perhaps? Both are drastically faster than they were a decade ago, so 2010-era python or ruby are still the high-water mark.

afaict until the 25 Dec 2019 ruby 2.7.0 release you probably could "say that python is faster than ruby". fwiw ruby 2.6.3p62 ruby 2.7.0p0 binarytrees-5 220.557 elapsed secs binarytrees-5 124.421 binarytrees-2 178.751 binarytrees-2 149.458 binarytrees-3 176.672 binarytrees-3 150.645 binarytrees-4 136.930 binarytrees-4 113.516 binarytrees-1 176.208 binarytrees-1 149.078 fannkuchredux-1 1702.734 fannkuchredux-1 1738.016…

Ruby pulled ahead of Python in speed in version 1.9 and has stayed ahead (most of the time, in most tests) since.

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

#418

Post by mlyle » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:23 AM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #376

jonny_eh wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it so bad to make guns as hard to own as a car? Simple licensing would go a long way to reduce the risk of guns. https://www.vox.com/2019/9/11/20861019/gun-solution-backgrou...

Last I checked, cars do not require any licensing to own. They require special licensing and often times yearly taxes to operate on public roads (but merely possessing them on public roads does not).

> and often times yearly taxes to operate on public roads (but merely possessing them on public roads does not).

In my jurisdiction one may not "move" or "leave standing" upon a public road an unregistered vehicle, in addition to not being permitted to "drive" it.

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

#419

Post by kortilla » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

badrequest wrote: post #371

dash2 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently quite a lot. Poverty has gone down six-fold in a generation: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?end=2017&lo...

I wonder how much more it would have gone down if Chile had a more equitable economic system.

Not much. The thing about inequality is that it makes the top more powerful politically. The amount of money held by the top 0.1 percent is irrelevant to moving the income/wealth needle for the rest of the population.

There is a reason those who don’t like inequality had to come up with new measurements to highlight it. There is little impact on the mean, median, and mode if the rich get richer.

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

#420

Post by kortilla » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:54 AM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #390

SkyBelow wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, cars do not require any licensing to own. They require special licensing and often times yearly taxes to operate on public roads (but merely possessing them on public roads does not).

You need to register the car, and that often requires proof of insurance, which requires a driver's license. Either way, my point still stands. You're quibbling over semantics. So few people want to buy a car just to not drive it, that we don't even consider it a problem.

No, you don’t need to register the car if you don’t intend to drive it on public roads. See farms.