Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago. | Hacker News Reader

Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

longbets.org

Esther Dyson's bet "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect."

http://www.longbets.org/5

The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology.

But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While the Russians did achieve significant technological advances in the 20th century, and implemented an impressive education system with regard to mathematics and computer science there are so many other factors which play into this. Namely Russia obtaining a score of 2.7/10 for corruption in 2002 from the Corruption Perceptions Index and sliding down to 2.1/10 in the most recent ranking putting them in 158th place. Further they are ranked 143rd on the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom. India with 87th on corruption and 124th on economic freedom, not great, has plenty of English speakers and a more impressive computer science educational infrastructure, as well as being cheaper. The stories of people dying in Russian prisons after resisting corrupt government shakedowns are just horrific and I am not aware of any Indian equivalent. But I suppose if you invest there as she does, you need to talk it up.

Does malware count?

Just goes to show, even in a broken, corrupt system, it's possible to grow/create world class software.

It's a stronger bet than it first sounds, although probably not in the way the author intended. Russia doesn't actually have to be the world leader in software development, they just have to be referred to as such by a news organization. Considering the linkbait trends in modern journalism, the following headline wouldn't surprise me, regardless of what the ground truth is: "Russia: The World's New Leader in Software Development?"

You know, Nginx did come out of a Russian web conglomerate that owns a newspaper over there…

These bets are adjudicated by humans, not computers doing a string matching algorithm. If that article's headline was just a lead up to an answer of "No, not even close" or was even a reference to the bet itself followed by "no, not even close", I don't think anyone is going to argue that as a win. It has to be serious, and barring catastrophe at this point, that's not going to happen. "World leaders in botnet development" won't cut it, either.

Keep in mind that in 2002, Russia seemed to be hand-in-hand with India when it came to outsourcing software dev. It might be a weak bet now, but was stronger when it was made. Wrong, but still stronger.

Many Russian programmers are algorithmically brilliant. New compression algorithms in the last few years are largely Russian. A Russian guy figured out a couple of years back that using two pivots instead of one in quicksort reduced the number of swaps by 20%, which improvement is now in JDK 7. Quicksort! He found a jewel of performance improvement hiding in the world's best-known optimal algorithm, a jewel nobody had noticed since 1961. Russians routinely win on TopCoder.

It turns out that great software developers are not enough to be the world leader in software development. But it's easy to imagine why someone might think they could be, especially by 2012.

This is very different from software development, which involves a hugely broad diversity of skillsets—only one of which is programming—and the ability to have them all work together without clawing each other's eyes out. Project management, technical writing, graphic design, operations, support, quality assurance all must be cohesively brought to bear in order to claim leadership in software development.

Maciej Ceglowski had a similar, if less grandiose, site called Wrong Tomorrow, but it looks like it's down:

http://wrongtomorrow.com/

I don't know if the site is only temporarily down, or if it's been abandoned, but it's a shame if the latter. The idea behind Wrong Tomorrow was chiefly to hold pundits accountable for their frequently bad predictions. You can read his site announcement, where he explicitly mentions sites like Long Bets and how Wrong Tomorrow differs from them:

http://idlewords.com/2009/04/wrong_tomorrow.htm

It was a brilliant idea, but waiting five years just to prove pundits wrong depletes my strategic reserves of spite.

I believe the right URL had a prefixed www. (During some downtime, but not this one apparently, http://wrongtomorrow.com didn't work but http://www.wrongtomorrow.com did.)

Back in July, Maciej told me

> It's not abandoned, but I had to take it down since a sister site on that server was getting high traffic, and needed the resources.

I began copying over predictions from Wrong Tomorrow and Long Bets to http://predictionbook.com/ and I found that a bunch of Wrong Tomorrow predictions were corrupted/unavailable, and told Maciej about them; no reply. So I think it's safe to say that Wrong Tomorrow has been pretty much abandoned.

David Peterson nailed it in the comments in 2003:

  NetFlix claims to have more than 13,500 titles and more   
  than one million members. You order the movie on the 
  Internet, you just can't watch it until all of the bits 
  of the movie arrive. They just happen to be delivered 
  to your mailbox and you have to put the bits into your 
  computer or dvd player.
 
  -- Posted by David B. Peterson on May 16, 02003 at 12:32AM PDT

"By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks."

Vint Cerf challenges with, "At some point, laptop or smaller devices with high quality displays and suitable access controls for intellectual property will make the sale and consumption of books, sound and movies through these devices practical." He goes on to cite the "iPOD" as an example.

http://www.longbets.org/6

Wow good find. I especially like this bet, Warren Buffett v. Protege Partners, LLC.

  “Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on
  December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds
  of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees,
  costs and expenses.”

http://www.longbets.org/362

Reading the comments (I love that the years are written as 02002) this one particularly strikes me..

"...The net works differently than that... and Content owners have missed (and will continue to miss) it for 3 reasons: 1) Technophobia coupled with crippling ego (too cool to look dumb they fear the pipe) 2) Misguided content protectionism (go back and watch 'The Power of Myth'... again! It's the 'story' damnit!) ..."

This is 8 years old (and proven somewhat wrong), and we're still saying it, in some form today.

Check out the comments on bet 2:

    Will Google be around?
    POSTED BY [redacted] ON AUG 28, 02002 AT 07:03PM PDT
    I think it will be more interesting to see if Google 
    will be around in five years? Or better yet will we 
    still be searching for information using search engines 
    and keywords?

Very interesting.

Well, they are still here and thriving, and we still search for information, Mainly on search engines (Wikipedia is one, right?) and keywords.

Service Temporarily Unavailable

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cyGf1Tn...

I would love to see (or not see) how the predictor wins this bet,long bet making a decision and awards the stake.

“Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth.”

http://www.longbets.org/382

I guess it's just an interesting way to give to "Save the Children".

And a way to say "I'll give to the NRA only after the world's destroyed."

"Detailed terms" for that bet, where they define what "destroy Earth" means are a good read.

I like the RESTful urls, check out bet #1: http://www.longbets.org/1

We've got a while, but it feels like an appropriate bet.

Those urls have nothing whatsoever to do with REST.

Yes, I'm aware, but the feature is often called "RESTful" urls in frameworks. I actually thought the url was '/bets/1' until I went back and re-read it... my brain inserted it in there, since it's so common.

Like 'HTML5' or 'hacker,' 'REST' is a totally destroyed, meaningless term. I'm attempting to be pragmatic about it. Better to effectively communicate than hold onto intellectual purity.

If the term is totally destroyed and meaningless, with different people having different ideas, you'd be better off avoiding it altogether. Don't beat a dead buzzword!

In the general case, I agree with you. However, everyone knows what 'RESTful urls' and 'RESTful apis' mean, it's just that it's not the original recipe REST. For better or worse, the definition has changed.

It's still effective communication, because you know I'm contrasting '/bets/1' with 'index.aspx?action=displayBet&bet_id=1&' (which still could be quite RESTful, actually...), and a form that POSTs to '/bets' vs. a form with method=GET request to 'index.aspx?action=addAnotherBet&=SomeValue=1&something_else=2'. And yes, there's more to it than that, but you get the idea.

Just because it makes puritains die inside doesn't make it wrong.

In this case I'd opt for "clean" as a better word for what you're trying to describe.

I'd have thought everyone understands what a clean URL is without bringing across all the extra baggage/meaning of calling it RESTful.

In this case, you're probably right.

I'm usually discussing this more fully, as in "RESTful API vs. SOAP" or the actual nitty-gritty of POST vs PUT requests and such. "clean" works much better in this context, though, thanks. I'll file that one away...

I'm one of those puritans who cries a bit inside myself.

I would say that a RESTful URL is simply one that multiple verbs can be applied to. That is, e.g. GETing and POSTing against the URL do different things, thus making the URL the "noun" and the HTTP method the "verb." Completely orthogonal to whether the URL is human-readable.

What happens if the organization the money is going to be donated is not still around then?

IIRC, the Long Bets terms include language like 'or similar charitable organization chosen by bettor or the Long Now Foundation if bettor is unavailable'.

Is it just me or did this seem completely inevitable and kind of on the cusp by 2002? We were building fileserver-based VOD services just to save our Internet connection from the torrenting masses in shared housing situations around this time.

This seems like a risky one to bet against, at least from a technical perspective.

I suppose it is true that it was still a pretty open question whether anyone would manage to negotiate licenses with the media producers to do VOD, but Bell doesn't even touch on that issue.

Technically do-able, but:

It could have easily been derailed the studios wanting to try and run the business themselves, ISPs who are also cable companies throttling it, national broadcasters lobbying to block it legally.

It also said profitable - I thought even Amazon wasn't profitable yet?

Amazon has been profitable since 2001.

A quick google says that Netflix is profitable. I don't know if Netflix Instant would be if analyzed separately, though.

Even most of the original commentators, back in 02002, thought it was easily doable.

It's amusing that Eric Schmidt is the challenger on http://www.longbets.org/4 in light of Google's autonomous cars.

Amusing - but a car with 2 passengers going at a conservative 30MPH is very different to a plane flying 9KM over the ground at 567MPH.

I'm just hoping that in 80 years I won't be alive to see my comment becoming horribly wrong, with people laughing at it while a processor flies them across the world.

I guess the biggest problems will be the legal framework and the power of unions. Technically flying a plane should be easier for a computer than driving a car.

Where a computer fails is when judgment is required. For example, you have an in-air emergency, and are going to have to crash land. What do you pick to crash land on to?

Consider Captain Sully's recent decisions in just such an emergency.

Being a private pilot with a lapsed license, I can't possibly see that emergency landing area selection is a problem worse than navigating a street vehicle in an urban environment. Taking all the GIS databases around, I can't imagine emergency landing site selection would be a huge roadblock.

And for lots of emergencies you can probably do remote flying from some call centre in India.

Amusing - but a car with 2 passengers going at a conservative 30MPH is very different to a plane flying 9KM over the ground at 567MPH.

You're right: building an automatic car is much harder. It's counterintuitive, but speed or altitude are irrelevant if the problem space is sufficiently simple. Additionally, risk doesn't scale linearly. If a plane crashes at 800km/h, all people on board will die; if a car crashes at 130km/h, you'll see a very similar result.

That's true for the occupants of the vehicle but the dangers of those outside are greatly different. I'm not saying that planes will never be flown autonomously however there are a lot of hurdles including convincing the public.

If a car when parking is out by 1% it's maybe sticking out of the space and causes other people to have to park badly too, if a plane rounds incorrectly or a sensor plays up and is 1degree out (so even less than 1%) it lands onto of a terminal filled with tourists.

Even as a professional programmer I tend to trust unknown programmers less and less, bugs get uncovered too late, shortcuts taken... online e-commerce fine, cars and busses - maybe but scaling up the trust and risk involved is difficult.

Planes were capable of being flown autonomously in the 1980s. In particular, the Soviet's space shuttle, Buran, performed unmanned orbital maneuvers and landing during its 1988 test flight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_%28spacecraft%29

So, the technology to do these kinds of things has already been done before (though unfortunately neglected!). I think the main challenge is just convincing people that it's safe enough that they will be willing to buy tickets.

Schmidt says "No licensed air carrier (commercial or private) will be able to use it without at least one pilot supervising the whole process in the pilot seat, even though the technology to take off, cruise and land automatically already exists.". This is, in fact, the case with Google's autonomous cars.

For a foundation thinking ultra longterm, they have a flaky server.

"Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. Apache/2.2.11 (Ubuntu) Server at www.longbets.org Port 80"

Thinking long term isn't the same as scaling a site up for occasional increased traffic. The vast majority of the time, the traffic is extremely light on this site and the server (and its network) is more than adequate.

Flakey server > deny links from HN

Another proof that you may look like a fool when trying to predict the future (Bell's argument).

Also interesting in this context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887215

Cool site. My prediction is that by 2025 electric vehicle sales will overtake ICE vehicle sales. I don't want to spend 50 bucks to put it up there though!

now this is an interesting site!

I wonder what the contribution to the bet has been from Xbox.

Connecting the Internet to the television is one of its great accomplishments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com