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

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421–430 of 462 posts

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

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it so bad to make guns as hard to own as a car? The ONLY people that say this are the ones that would be (fucking) horrified if we treated guns like cars. Ok. You are proposing I should be able to buy any gun I want whenever I want regardless of size or capacity, automatic, or loud or silenced for cash without any checks or regulations at all? That the only requirement to use it in public is that I need a licens…

> Ok. You are proposing I should be able to buy any gun I want whenever I want regardless of size or capacity, automatic, or loud or silenced for cash without any checks or regulations at all? What? No.

Well that’s how purchasing a car works, so...

Maybe you’re confusing purchasing a car with licensing a car?

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

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly what the lists of “4375 school shootings this year!” are actually made of. Someone in New Jersey shot a rat 2 blocks from a school - school shooting. Drive by between rival gangs near a college - school shooting. Resource officer discharges his gun in his car - school shooting.

Well, they're comprised of that, and, y'know, children being murdered in mass.

So don’t you think it’s disingenuous to group them together? Or is it just too convenient to pass up for those looking for anti-gun talking points?

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

#423
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-perf…

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

That's true relative to the work they had done on, for example, Gopher support, but it's not true relative to the work they did after Chrome was released. As I said, JS performance from 1995 to 2008 hadn't increased by even a factor of 4; then Chrome was released in 2008 and it immediately increased by a factor of 4, more than it had increased in the entire previous 13-year history of JS. It's true that there existed other optimization efforts. But they weren't successful, probably because not nearly enough effort was devoted to them. Tamarin Tracing/TraceMonkey was eventually discarded and is not part of SpiderMonkey today, although a different JIT strategy is. (LuaJIT uses the tracing-JIT strategy very successfully, though.)

> 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

I mentioned nbody and fannkuch because they are in SunSpider, so it seems that you are contradicting yourself in addition to, as demonstrated previously, mixing up the historical sequence of how things happened.

I had just written a parser generator and an experimental functional language that compiled to JS when Chrome came out, and the performance improvements I saw were in line with the Chrome benchmarks. My experience is not part of Google's marketing.

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

#424
post #414

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…

> before Chrome was released on 2007-09-02

This should read, "before Chrome was released on 2008-09-02".

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

#426
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-perf…

> The point is Mozilla, Apple and Adobe did enormous work on JS before Chrome was released. That's true relative to the work they had done on, for example, Gopher support, but it's not true relative to the work they did after Chrome was released. As I said, JS performance from 1995 to 2008 hadn't increased by even a factor of 4; then Chrome was released in 2008 and it immediately increased by a factor of 4, more than…

Safari perf had already improved more than 4x with the move from AST Interpretation to a register based bytecode VM with SquirrelFish. This happened before Chrome.

I’m working on a tracing JIT for Ruby at the moment partially inspired by LuaJIT. Fingers crossed it’ll be published research this year!

Right, but the Sunspider benchmark also tested strings, regex and date manipulation. V8s original benchmarks didn’t. Performance on stuff like a parser generator was way up, but it didn’t run jQuery based Ajax sites any faster.

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

#427
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is Mozilla, Apple and Adobe did enormous work on JS before Chrome was released. That's true relative to the work they had done on, for example, Gopher support, but it's not true relative to the work they did after Chrome was released. As I said, JS performance from 1995 to 2008 hadn't increased by even a factor of 4; then Chrome was released in 2008 and it immediately increased by a factor of 4, more than…

Safari perf had already improved more than 4x with the move from AST Interpretation to a register based bytecode VM with SquirrelFish. This happened before Chrome. I’m working on a tracing JIT for Ruby at the moment partially inspired by LuaJIT. Fingers crossed it’ll be published research this year! Right, but the Sunspider benchmark also tested strings, regex and date manipulation. V8s original benchmarks didn’t. Pe…

Best of luck with that! I look forward to seeing it.

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

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paris was the mass shooting I was referencing. 184 dead irrc. Norway, School summer camp in 2011. I suppose it’s not exactly what you think of when you think of skin shooting inside a school building, but the people killed were almost exclusively children. Perpetrator use a rifle that has not been legal in Norway for civilians.

It wasn't a school summer camp - it was organized by a left-wing political party - and most of the people killed were adults. He used a Ruger Mini-14 and a Glock pistol for which he had a legal license as a civilian (for hunting and sport shooting respectively), purchased in Norway - the country with the second highest legal gun ownership rate in the EU - after he failed to illegally acquire guns in Prague.

> He used a Ruger Mini-14 and a Glock pistol for which he had a legal license as a civilian

You have a source for that?

I understood neither of those guns are to be civilian legal.

Also... to the topic. If Norway’s extremely strict (draconian) gun laws didn’t prevent this shooting which was worse than any in US history; why would US benefit from them?

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

#429
post #82
post #5

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

If 6 out of 17 predictions correct with the only unambiguously correct predictions being trivial or vague is "nailing it," then I probably won't be taking stock advice from you any time soon. On the other hand, predicting the future is kind of hard. IsaacL made some really conservative predictions, sticking to things that seemed obvious. In fact, most of the wrong ones would be perfectly reasonable predictions for th…

>> Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.

> This was already true in 2010, so it doesn't even count.

This definitely wasn't true in 2010. On June 1, 2010, Steve Jobs proclaimed that the post-PC era had arrived, and was promptly ridiculed for it by the industry and media. Massive social changes caused by mobile phones have only occurred this decade, as the gig economy has exploded and places like India have 10x'd the number of citizens with internet access.

>> For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.

> Wrong.

Huh? Of those 4, Facebook in 2009 was the most valuable at $10 billion. Now there are 20+ private unicorns with that valuation, as well as dozens more that have IPOd in the last few years. How is that prediction wrong in any way, shape, or form?

>> Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".

> Wrong.

>> An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.

> Wrong.

Again, this is correct. The US did enter the Paris Agreement, and has not actually formally withdrawn yet as it is not legally eligible to do so until November 2020. "Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action." is an especially cogent prediction.

>> 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. Internet crackdowns will continue, and may increase in severity, and will still be rationalized by porn.

> I want to say the civil liberties situation in China is the same, but I don't know enough about China to comment on it.

Civil liberties have likely gotten worse, but the rule of law has indeed strengthened. Internet crackdowns being rationalized by porn is also correct, as seen in the UK and elsewhere.

As far as ChromeOS and video games go, maxsilver covered those pretty well already.

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

#430

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…

The sad thing about Python is that it shouldn't need to be interpreted. People don't use it for that reason. Remove one or two obscure meta-programming features that nobody uses (or shouldn't be using) and you could in principle remove GIL and make it JIT just as good as Javascript.

JS really shows what's possible in this field with some benchmarks even outperforming c++. This space of expressive yet fast languages is a gap that remains to be filled and will probably be by 2030, sadly it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation because you don't only need a good syntax to become popular, also a healthy ecosystem around it. What we will see is probably not any new language but rather that existing languages from both sides of the spectrum converge more towards the middle ground.

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