Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010) | Hacker News Reader

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

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All: this thread is about predictions that HN users made 10 years ago. Note the year in the title above.

If you want to make a new prediction, a new thread has gotten started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278.

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 shootings

- the explosive growth of quantitative easing

- negative nominal interest rates on sovereign debt

- revelations of mass surveillance by the US government

- streaming video services would begin to produce content rivaling major studios in quality

- Amazon would become the everything company

- DNA testing would become a major recreational activity with numerous judicial and social implications

- the US would approach energy independence, driven largely by a boom in oil extraction technologies

Also interesting to consider how all of these ideas would have seemed more or less ludicrous in 2010.

Regarding escalation of school shootings, it seems plausible, but only because (here is an unpopular opinion that will get 20 downvotes) the rich want to disarm the poor and use school/kids/safety as an excuse. And that's understandable: if I was rich enough to afford private schools for my kids in a classy neighborhood, I'd want to keep weirdos with guns far from my family, while at the same time Id have 24/7 former-marines guards armed with full auto weapons.

> 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...

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.

"No Way To Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...

On that thought, is there any way to prevent shootings without making guns harder or impossible for citizens to own?

Seems many will not disarm in the US, so should we be exploring other options rather than repeatedly saying the US should be more like other countries?

They've moved the goalpost from this to "the deaths are statistically insignificant".

Despite the vail of Wikipedia, your source is The Onion.

Does the onion’s satirical joke take into account all the places there are no guns but this does still happens?

Paris France, and Norway, have both had worse mass and school shootings than any in the USA ever.

This one also surprised me. Are school shootings up? Or is the media peddling violent news more aggressively?

There's a weird thing that happens here with language: school shootings mean multiple things. So, if someone is shot at a school at an after-hours drug deal gone awry, that counts just as much as parkland, even though there is a very distinguishable difference between the two.

I don’t think this should be downvoted. The facts are the facts. It’s also the case that even 1 shooting is a tragedy and should give us pause for how we can fix it (whether that is gun control or something else).

"C'est la vie", say the old folks

It goes to show you never can tell

For those who don't recognize the reference, it's the chorus of a song made famous by Chuck Berry:

https://genius.com/Chuck-berry-you-never-can-tell-lyrics

Obligatory: https://youtu.be/WSLMN6g_Od4?t=85

people tend to make optimistic predictions. A lot of predictions were correct, and many of them were right on subject, but predicted the positive instead of the negative turn of things. Interesting views regardless, but i cant help to notice that tech progress was nothing like 2000->2010.

I feel like enormous cultural and technological hardware advancements were made between 1990-2010 that affected people on a national or global level. The advances were revolutionary. I have a hard time associating the last decade the same way. To me, the 2010-2020 decade has been stagnant.

My overall sentiments, more or less:

1990->2000 we went from very few people owning personal computers to wider adoption of PCs and broadband was gaining traction (I personally had @Home cable internet in 1998).

2000->2010 mass adoption of cell phones, starting with the flip phones to pocket PCs to the first iPhone in 2007. Social media (MySpace, The Facebook). Peer to peer networking, piracy (The Pirate Bay). Laptops. The first tablets.

2010->2020 mild improvements on the stuff from the previous two decades

EDIT: I'll give the last decade Uber (although I've only used it once) and AirBnb since that was a huge shift as well, but my overall feeling remains the same.

Copying my answer from another thread

I am surprised with no mention of Smartphone. Which is arguably the most important innovation in modern history. 2010s, Smartphone ( iPhone 3GS at the time ) went from niche to 4B users ( iOS, Androids and KaiOS ), that is nearly every person on earth above age 14 in developed countries. I dont think there has ever been a product or technology innovation as important that spread faster than Smartphone. And it changes everyone's life. The post mentioned of Google, Facebook and Amazon empire, all partly grows to this point because of Smartphones. Technology companies together now worth close to 10 Trillions. The whole manufacturing supply chain exists and became huge in Shenzhen because of Smartphone. It was the reason why TSMC managed to catch up to Intel in both capacity and leading edge node. It was the reason why we went from 3G to 5G in mere 10 years because of all the investment kept pouring it. It was the reason why everyone went on to the Internet and had Internet economy. It brought a handheld PC and Internet to a much wider audience. I would even argue it was the Smartphone innovation that saved us from the post 2008 Financial Crisis doom as it created so much wealth, innovation and opportunities.

There is a tendency to undervalue recent advancements because they haven't had the same amount of time to demonstrate an impact on the world.

I would point to the 2010's as the rise of two phenomena:

- Social networking and meme culture

- Explosive growth of software

These will prove to be just as important as the developments of the 2000's, but haven't had the time for other developments to build on them.

Electric cars really started gaining traction in the 2010s, with the Leaf, Model S, Zoe, etc.

One more to add: - Hong Kong's protests on scale that world has never seen

And the collapse (in a matter of weeks) of Chile as the most prosperous, richest, free/open society in Latin America.

Chile has massive income and wealth inequality. What good is being "rich" in terms of raw GDP if in practice that wealth goes to a small elite?

How does your list not include climate change as a thing of current importance? It wasn't mentioned much in the original either - though i saw one comment calling it "FUD" - but they were making forecasts ;)

> Hopefully network analysis/data mining laws/politics will be handled with a little less FUD, a little less grandstanding, and a little more efficiency than we're seeing with climate change politics...

They were clearly describing the handling and discourse (I suppose on a large public scale) of climate change as FUD, not climate change itself.

> - electric scooters would become a billion dollar business (Bird, Lime, etc.)

Valued at a billion dollars by venture capitalists. I'd be genuinely surprised if they are anywhere near a $B in revenue

Now just to predict what will be the big thing in 2030 so I can get rich :)

Honk-honk!

IsaacL nailed it the best

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093

And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

> - 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 static compiler inference will be the future of language design. Either for safety like in rust or for convenience like in swift.

And we can already see pitfalls in the interpreted world of python where the wrong implementation, like using a loop instead of numpy, can lead to devastating performance impacts. Looking forward, something like this seems as outdated as having to manage your 640k of executable space in DOS: an unreasonable design constraint caused by the legacy implications of the day.

My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap.

I'm actually pretty amazed at what the Javascript VM people have done in the past decade. It's way more than I ever expected.

As far as the carbon footprint, well, yeah, it depends. At Google I remember a friend talking about how he cringed whenever he added more code to the pipeline that ingests the entire internet. He said that he wondered how much extra carbon was release into the atmosphere just because of his stupid code.

As for numpy, we are seeing that loops are stupid and Iverson and APL were right. :-)

>My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap.

Funnily enough someone said that exact same thing 10 years ago in that thread:

>* Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.

Wrong then wrong now.

I mean, JavaScript and Python have definitely become much more popular for many more things than they were in 2010.

I doubt Swift replaced much besides other compiled languages, and Kotlin just compiles to Java anyway. Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still.

I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the emergence of Rust.

In my opinion, Electron is the fulfillment of that prediction.

Because it's not Moore's Law that matters here, but rather the subset that is the performance of single cores. And that subset stalled out pretty badly.

We're adding more and more cores, but more cores don't help you write a program in easy mode. Easy mode doesn't multithread.

It's also been quite a decade of growth for old stodgy languages. In 2010, it seemed like C++, Java, and Javascript were never going to change, but they've all significantly cleaned up their acts.

I think the prediction still had a kernel of truth to it though - every edge that chip manufacturers and JIT developers can give us has been burned away on slower and slower client-side rendering frameworks.

Rust and Dart hasn’t seen that much “uptake” by the broader market, it’s hyped by geeks but that’s about it. Swift is becoming popular because if you want to develop for iOS, you don’t have a choice. Kotlin is getting some uptake.

I was thinking that exact same thing. Rails was hitting its peak in 2010, and the idea that programmer time is more valuable than CPU time suggested dynamic languages were the future.

I mean, that’s not entirely wrong — Besides JS, Python is arguably the most dominant language across all domains. Python is also faster than Ruby, though, and 3.x added static-like features to the language. It doesn’t seem like there’s much appetite for languages any slower than what we have now.

> Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart

and golang (Go)

> - 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.

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).

Agree, particularly this bit describes the blockchain hype...

> "various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us all about it"

I suppose that partly depends on exactly how novel the blockchain part is, but broadly speaking the world of efforts to combine some of electronic money, cryptography, proof of work and decentralisation was not a new one in the late 2000s. For example Ecash had been hot once https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash , while later on Hashcash got a fair bit of attention as a possible solution to the spam crisis. In 2007 (early 2010 is another story) it was definitely more of a deep cut than AI or cloud, though.

definitely Bitcoin/Blockchain. I wouldn't say it will actually disrupt traditional banking empires, but it was the next big thing and 'experts' definitely came out of nowhere and its still pretty cool.

AI wasn't totally unknown: basically every coastal university during the 1970s and 1980s were filled with people working on AI, and it didn't die off, it just became embarrassing to work on.

Neither was user generated content (that's what the original web was) or social networking (irc, email, bulletin boards, etc). Making it useful and usable beyond an academic and techie niche was new.

And more, the AI hype-cycle was definitely on the upswing again already by the beginning of 2010. The Netflix Prize and the motor-vehicle DARPA Grand Challenges were all 2000s events, for instance.

Ummm, Uber?

Crowdsourcing / the ‘sharing’ or gig economy are huge.

Doesn’t really qualify as unknown and unpredictable. We’re in about the third AI bubble right now, and I doubt it’ll be the last.

I thought about virtual assistants and deep fakes

Regarding deep fakes, I don't think you're wrong, just early. I think we are just getting a glimpse of what is unfortunately possible as this decade closes out, they could introduce some real chaos as in this new decade.

Edit: spelling

Neither virtual assistants nor deep fakes can be considered "the next big thing". They're in their infancy.

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.)

neural networks are not new

> IE6 will hang around for a few years, but may die very rapidly in workplaces when some killer enterprise web application stops supporting it.

Turns out the “killer enterprise web application” was YouTube :)

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

In my experience (very large contact center multinational), what killed IE6 in the enterprise was PCI and other security compliance standards. Large companies do whatever it takes to stay compliant to a lot of these standards because having that "stamp of approval" is the only way to keep other equally large companies as clients.

Also jacquesm on Jan 1, 2010 [-] ...

> if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.

I thought ericb did very well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025787

"not [electronically] tracking your kids will be considered somewhat negligent"

we're not really quite there yet. Give another 10 years.

are you saying you have a child with a cell phone or tablet that has location services explicitly turned off ?

i dunno, seems negligent to me

The dynamic languages slower than ruby prediction didn't hold up either. The past ten years have just seen nibbling around the edges for dynamic languages, without any compelling ideas about how to make them fundamentally more expressive.

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.

Like others have said, major Javascript engines are much than Ruby implementations, owing to the huge effort Firefox, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have put into those engines. In principle, I'm not sure if there's reasons that make one intrinsically harder to optimize.

But even if Javascript were slower, it wouldn't mean the prediction was right. Javascript didn't do something super amazing that let you write beautiful code (the way Rubyists feel about Ruby, or Python folks feel about Python). It just ran the web so we used it. Over time, it's morphed into a language that's about as expressive as any other good dynamic language, also with some warts. But it's not a leap ahead, which is what the original post predicted.

The only language I've felt that way about was Prolog. When it works right, it's amazing. Too bad I can rarely make that happen.

JS is pretty much the fastest of the popular dynamic langs, if only because JS interpreters see highly-competitive investment from well-funded companies with armies of developers thanks to the web.

No, it's pretty fast [1].

Chrome and V8 were released in 2008, and Node.js (which leverages V8) in 2009. V8 was already considered fast back then. Mozilla and Apple also focused on optimizing their JS stack in the following years.

[1] I'm not a fan of linking to benchmarks, but that's the best I can do: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... / https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

Did anybody predict the slow death of jQuery or the rise of giant monster JavaScript frameworks? 2010 is when jQuery was a cult of personality. It was everywhere and any criticism of it was quickly met with desperate mob violence.

Did anybody predict a typical corporate web page would require 3gb of JavaScript code from frameworks and thousands of foreign packages just to write a couple of instructions to screen?

Applications written in JavaScript tend to be hideously slow (and getting worse) but this is more of a community problem; the language itself is now rather fast by dynamic language standards.

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.

Raku (formerly Perl 6) basically sits alone as the successor to the slower-and-more-expressive throne. It's a great language to study for the gee-whiz-they-thought-of-everything factor.

But, nobody is paying attention to it. Some of that is because of the Perl 6 baggage, but just as much is probably because this past decade was so heavily entrenched in proliferation of the web-cloud-mobile paradigm that new scripting systems weren't part of the hype cycle. If it didn't get the backing of the FAANGs, it didn't register.

I can imagine a day coming where scripting shines again, though. It might actually be closer than we think. There is always a need for glue code, and glue code benefits from being a kitchen sink of built-in functionality.

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).

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.

I would have agreed with you in 2013. Now it's just seems so fractured and all over the place, like it's had it's peak and is on the way back down.

python won't last, just like ruby / js / php

I sense a strong convergence between all of them (builtin DS, linguistic traits, bits of static typing)

> Now that Google is advertising Chrome on billboards here in the UK, all that can be safely predicted about the browser market is that it'll be extremely competitive.

It's rather interesting to see how the web went from IE dominating, to Chrome doing essentially the same. Looks like predicting such a growth was farfetched.

Funny to see that the prediction of IE sticking around was mostly right. I long for the day that IE11 will mostly be gone.

Internet Explorer 6 could have been the dominant browser essentially forever if Microsoft hadn’t zeroed its investment into it. Its incentives weren’t aligned with a robust web platform. Google’s incentives are definitely aligned for Chrome to dominate.

> - 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.

Civil liberty and rule of law are orthogonal mostly. China has used a decade to make most court cases publicly accessible through internet, all corporation and their holding/debt status similarly accessible, a host of other governmental information available. While there are still a significant amount of corruption, the law enforcement would have been at most transparent in history. Civil Liberty is on a different track however, with laws obstructing such being enforced.

According to the World Bank's metric, China's percentile ranking on rule of law improved somewhat from 2010 to 2018 (eyeballing the chart, looks like it moved from 40th to 48th). This is of course not quite the same thing as an absolute increase in rule of law; if rule of law is worsening everywhere, then the ranking change could still be a decrease (though globally worse rule of law isn't my impression).

https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/Home/Reports

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

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

My gut response to his thought of MS pivoting to consulting a la IBM was way off but after thinking about it for a minute you could kind of make a case that Azure is a form of "self-serve operationalized consulting", he was just off on it's impact and success by a factor of 50 or 100.

I heard someone recently describe the value proposition of enterprise cloud like IBM and Azure as “not having to talk to a sales guy as a service”.

Well then every SaaS is just consulting. That’s pretty pointless then.

There was one comment in the thread about what Steve Jobs will do at the end of the decade. As a ghost I suppose? (Another says he will step down due to his health, which is closer.)

My favorite is the joke that Zuck will buy Portugal.

Saying he'll step down due to his health isn't just closer. It's what happened. He resigned a bit over a month before his death.

Jobs was alive in 2010.

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 :-)

That was shockingly accurate, really. Thanks for linking it. Who is this IsaacL and which year did he come from? ;)

IsaacL, if you're still around, you should make predictions for stuff by 2030!

This is why I like to stick around HN and just read. The minds here seem to be much more brilliant compared to other parts of the web. That dude nailed it!

IsaacL is still around it seems:https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=IsaacL

It's interesting that it's so far down the page, too. Popularity and accuracy were inversely correlated from my reading of that thread.

- 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.

I dont think this happened?

The fact that in 2020 we still don't really have CPUs that are significantly faster than those released in the middle of the decade in terms of single threaded perf (which is still the paradigm that most programming languages today operate under for the most part) kind of put a nail in the coffin of that prediction.

I can totally picture new languages as described doing well today if we had exponentially more single threaded processing power/watt at our disposal than we actually do.

I think there is still opportunity for languages that offer huge leaps in expressiveness w.r.t handling concurrency even at the cost of raw single threaded performance. Though I would not label a language like that as "slower" as it'd allow us to actually make much better use of our computing resources than we reasonably could today without blowing through most of our complexity budget, resulting in faster programs in practice.

You could argue that it's JavaScript. JavaScript had terrible performance even in 2008, can't remember now what it was like by 2010, but I would guess V8 was still pretty lacklustre back then.

Maybe JavaScript libraries and frameworks? I haven't touched too many of the "batteries included" ones but I see them out of the corner of my eye at meetups and hackathons, they seem unwieldy enough to fit the bill.

Well Moore's Law had pretty much ended then, but it was less visible.

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 the next 10 years. It just goes to show how hard making predictions really is.

Below is how I calculated 6 out of 17 predictions correct

---

> Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years.

Correct

> Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.

Correct (profitable since last year)

> Microsoft will .. have shrunk and may have evolved into a consultancy company on the lines of IBM

Wrong

> Internet Explorer will shrink, but won't go away

Correct? (debatable, since software never completely goes away, but MS is no longer developing it and Edge doesn't use the same rendering engine)

> Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments. It will be most successful in places like cities that grant free municipial wifi access.

Wrong

> 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.

> 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.

> In addition, at least one of the 'big' startups of the second half of the decade will have been possible with 2009 technology. By this I mean that people will still be discovering new potential for browser-based web applications built with current client-side technologies, which will remain ubiquitous, although new alternatives will appear.

Correct, but the predication that there will be at least one new web-based startup is not very interesting.

> It will be an even better time to start a startup in 2020 than it is now. One of the key drivers of ease-of-starting-up-ness will not be new technology, but new platforms - like Facebook and viral marketing, but better; or that solve other problems like micropayments, customer development, retention, and so on.

Wrong.

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

Wrong.

> 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.

Wrong.

> Having said that, Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.

Wrong, IMO (transistors are still on the curve, but the performance impact of adding more transistors doesn't matter the same way it used to; but he cited Moore's Law specifically, so he's 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.

> Increasing fuel prices, and green taxes or incentives, will mean large shops will begin to replaced by warehouses, as traditional retail gives way to home delivery.

Wrong, but only because he cited a reason. Otherwise, the prediction that brick-and-mortar stores will continue to be replaced would have been correct.

> 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.

> Despite multiple new fads that purport to make software development ten times faster and error-free, it will remain a hard problem.

Correct, but trivial. Of course writing better software is hard.

> You still won't be able to talk to your fridge, and gesture-based HCI will remain a fun gimmick.

I'm counting this as wrong because of Alexa.

> Virtual worlds like Second Life will remain niche, but World of Warcraft will pass 20 million users and a Facebook game or similar will pass 200 million users.

Wrong.

> 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.

Wrong, but maybe I'm forgetting about some big tech thing in the 2010s. It seems that the biggest disprupters was a modernization of cab companies and hotel bookings. We may be on the dawn of several actually unpredicted new things, like driverless cars and the use of neural networks for some kind of cool new applications, but there's been no killer app. These are hopefuls on the horizon, not profitable products and industries.

> (ChromeOS will grow slowly, then rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments) Wrong.

I don't know about that. ChromeOS did grow slowly, and has gained significant share of the entire US education space (K-12). Yeah, it's a niche market. But I think that fits the for "certain market segments" qualifier.

> (Virtual worlds will remain niche, but WoW will pass 20 million users, a Facebook-like game or similar will pass 200 million users) Wrong.

This is technically wrong, but in-spirit correct. Virtual worlds / MMO games did get the traction claimed, just not WoW specifically. (The MMORPG FF14 Online has ~20 million users, MMO Warframe has 50 million registered users, 'facebook-game' Farmville has 73 million users, and 'or similar game' Fortnite has 250 million registered users). Minecraft holds similar numbers.

And while WoW itself never quite hit those numbers, a different game from the same studio did. Blizzard's Hearthstone has over 100 million registered users today.

How is it not easier to start something now than ten years ago? I would say he was correct on that one.

>> 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.

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.

And even more surprisingly, WoW in 2019 released an 2006 version :D

- You still won't be able to talk to your fridge

This is wrong too.

> IsaacL nailed it the best

Curious if the "wisdom of crowds" works with these future predictions or if only a few were on target.

Yes, pretty close... too bad we can't comment on old threads but at least I upvoted him =)

these time travelers are getting cocky

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.

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 popular ereader but more importantly, the Kindle platform is still dominant.

- Google still hasn’t managed to diversify from its ad business and YouTube is still dominant for video.

- Netflix is still the dominant streaming platform.

- Microsoft is doing better than ever.

I think Microsoft was the biggest surprise. In 2010 MacBooks were starting to become very popular, and it looked like Microsoft’s monopoly on consumer computing was coming to an end. It was common to think Microsoft was on a long decline in 2010.

It's interesting how none of the commenters envisioned Microsoft repositioning itself to adapt to technological and business trends. Everyone seems to have thought they would either fight them and lose, or contract to becoming an IBM-like consulting business.

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

> - 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.

You're badly misremembering or recontextualizing with hindsight bias. At the start of 2010, iOS had 32%, Android had 4.5%, and there were at least 5 other mobile OSs with >4% market share. Start of 2020 and we're looking at Android with 74%, iOS with 24%, and zero other OSs with >1% market share. These are very different situations!

Android was at 22.7% in 2010. It was growing like crazy.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2512940/android-smartp...

> - 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.

BlackBerry was already going downhill by 2010.

https://business.financialpost.com/technology/personal-tech/...

> 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...

The big announcement when the iPad was introduced in March 2010 was that Netflix would have an app for it. It had been streaming for at least three or four yesss by then.

they used to have discs for many platforms (e.g. PS3, Wii) where you could install Netflix and play online content before the app was released

I was streaming from Netflix in 2007.

At least this guy was wrong

> I predict lots of people will make predictions, but we'll never go back to check and see if they were right.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748

We would never know if he is right

> Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703

This poster saw it.

I was working on things adjacent to data journalism at the time, which helped!

If anything, this has come much more true than I anticipated. I hadn’t got as far as Cambridge Analytica.

> Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.

Who's scalp was it? I don't know any politician who has been taken to task over network analysis and data mining. Fore sure not Obama, whose staffers have quietly chortled that they did far worse than Cambridge Analytica ever did. Definitely not Trump, his numbers are as even as they haev ever been. Maybe Zuckerberg? But he's still CEO of his company.

Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign claims their data operation is how they won in the Rust Belt.

To me it seems obvious that Hillary Clinton was the one who pulled (or pushed) the victory in Trumps direction, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by some really interesting remarks about her core voters.

(Disclaimer: Not an American, don't like Hillary Clinton and definitely not Donald Trump.)

I believe the "taking the scalp" could also be a reference for its intended offensive power, not just the scandal of using it.

In that light, the answer is obvious: Hillary Clinton!

(And before someone complaints, which someone will definitely still do: Given the extremely close election, it is possible, even likely, that any single one of maybe a dozen issues had the potential to change the outcome: Just being a bit better as a candidate would have been enough. That e-mail "scandal" getting the same attention as the dozens of carbon copies of it since revealed in the Trump Cabinet, i. e. none, would have sufficed. Defences against Russian interference, or even just widespread knowledge of the attacks, could have been enough etc. etc.

The EU? David Cameron?

Is the politics of information a liberal issue? Other than their complaints about Russia, it doesn't seem like there's many speaking out against the inordinate political power wielded by information overlords like Facebook and Google

I would say is held up until 2016. After the election of Trump and the ensuing Russophobia, mainstream liberals became allied with the security state (CIA, NSA, FBI), and quickly turned on former liberal heroes like Snowden, Assange, Manning etc.

What a fun read! The one that ended up being the most off in the thread:

> I predict (and hope for) a major turn back to simplicity in technologies. Multimillion-line software will go extinct like dinosaurs. Existing programming languages and platforms will gradually be replaced with ones so simple and elegant that one software component will be written and maintained by one to three developers and art designers and not a whole software company packed with managers and other unnecessary staff. Oh, and managers along with poeple who "understand" "software business" but not software will hopefully go extinct too.

If I can predict anything for 2030 based on this, it will be software being even more complex, with even more frameworks and abstractions.

I'd say that this prediction is describing current developments quite well. Newer programming languages (Go, Rust) and development tools are making the "software as lean independent components" vision more relevant than it ever was.

Someone really needs to crack simple generic type systems with native levels of performance to get all of this to work.

Performance comes from optimizing the usage of state against hardware, modularity comes from code satisfying the properties of composition which is best left stateless (and high levels of modularity must come from abstraction and conventional practice, incurring further debts on the programmer and machine.)

It's a tension that I haven't seen fully resolved but I'm very very very open to being wrong. Many languages seem to be experimenting in this space with some preference for one side of the equation for another.

> Someone really needs to crack simple generic type systems with native levels of performance to get all of this to work.

We know how this works, at least in broad theoretical terms. Zero-cost abstractions are quite feasible within a self-contained module/component, but their scope is ultimately limited by ease of building and deployment. Nevertheless the performance impact of having to support high levels of abstraction across modules/components is quite reasonable, even if not literally "zero" cost.

He is quoting from 2010 and predicts the very opposite and I fully support the claim. Reasons:

  * industry has either no interest or capacity in quality
  * software flaws may cause severe harm but will play no role for the majority of the industry. it is a gamble just like vc business.
  * pace of change/inonnovation will actually add even more harm
  * excellence in the field will decrease because the baseline compexity is already too high, people will specialize probably in ML/AI/fin.

One chance I see is that the industry runs into a major HR crisis and some smart players understand that the complexity cannot be maintained by "developers" or "software engineers" anymore and come up with solutions other than opening up more positions.

I think inherent complexity can only be fixed by better monitoring. Visual tools, monitoring, real time feedback are all things humans can use to get a better grasp of the innards of things.

We could use a lot more of it in software.

Nothing can fix unnecessary complexity. It will continue to affect every tool used to maintain it.

I don't know where you come from, but all I see in my bubble is immense growth in Java and massive Apache projects / ecosystems. Exactly the opposite.

Ditto for Javascript. When I first used React in 2015 I thought it might be a harbinger for unix philosophy tools in the web space. A lib with a simple API that solves a single hard problem with a good implementation under the hood.

What I never predicted was the sheer enormity of the useless cruft the community would build around it. I used to contribute to some of the React community places (particularly irc), and in the early days the discussion there was super interesting. Now it's just endless waves of "I'm building X and having Y problem with dependency Z" where Z is something I've never used because it looks shit, Y is something I haven't encountered in 3 years, and X is something I could build in my sleep with just plain old React.

I've always wondered if Java devs feel the same, or if they're happy drowning in whatever crap is in their ecosystem? Like, do they all love Java but hate every single code base they have to work on? Or is that a uniquely JS problem?

Framework and language complexity is just a cycle thing. Someone makes a new language/framework that's minimal, clean, and suited to what people need. Needs change, or people miss certain things, it gets bloated, and the cycle repeats.

Except for C and C++. C just gets better, C++ just keeps growing.

> Even more framework and abstractions.

npm and is_odd comes to mind.

There surely is a lot of frameworks, it almost make more sense to have less.

> if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how. -- jacquesm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025811

The Roadster got delivered on 2008, right but not a crazy prediction based on those times.

Roadster was an extremely niche car for millionaires. Spacex had yet to have a successful launch I believe. So while not a crazy prediction, still impressive that I doubt many people who have bet on

> Google will be the Microsoft of 1990-2000: scary, dominant, and increasingly hated (by nerds at least).

That one strikes a certain chord..

Some of those are really funny, but the one by adw nailed it.

>adw on Jan 1, 2010 [-]

>Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.

>That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.

Thank you! There are still lessons to be learned from the early data journalism community, which is what got me thinking about this at the time; Craigslist eating classified advertising and Facebook eating display created this kind of apocalyptic burst of desperate creativity which didn’t save news but pointed in a bunch of important directions which haven’t been fully followed up.

wow crazy you found this comment.

> * Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade). > * Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.

Unfortunately, both of these were spot-on.

A lot of doom and gloom for Microsoft in that thread. But Microsoft has fared much better than anyone expected.

> But Microsoft has fared much better than anyone expected.

Its probably because they picked the right guy to lead after Ballmer.

Thinking back to Satya Nadella's book, I still think its incredible that he was selected, and even after it was incredible that he the impact that he had. I guess where I'm getting with this is that to have been able to see and recognize that he had the potential to take Microsoft in the right direction and that he actually was able to take them there is pretty awesome. They could have hired someone from outside, or someone who might fit the look / character of a mega corp CEO but they took a risk with him and I'm glad that it paid off.

for what its worth, Ballmer was apparently a massive, massive sponsor of Satya all the way to the top. Satya wouldnt have happened without Ballmer. for all his flaws as CEO, he did one thing right.

betcha if there were prediction thread for another decade, people will post how Google will be turned into former bell labs and eventually seize to exist.

Guessing you meant cease to exist here, but also seizing the intellectual property of Bell Labs seemed to work out in the 1956 consent decree:

The Bell System was obligated to license all its patents royalty free, and it was barred from entering any industry other than telecommunications.

...

Although the 1956 consent decree was not effective in ending market foreclosure, it permanently increased the scale of US innovation.

https://voxeu.org/article/how-antitrust-enforcement-can-spur...

I can see that happening in the second half of this decade as Google continues to grow and absorb more and more of the Internet.

I disagree, I think anyone the put in charge would have done well. Satya came in during one of the biggest bull runs in history and just surfed the wave. Even Ballmer would have had a hard time to stop that.

Surface, Azure, Minecraft, Github, VSCode and the whole renewed developer focus... those seem like pretty strong shifts and not just 'surfing the wave'.

You don't become a $1.2T company by surfing a wave. Its stock price has more than quintupled. IBM's stock price is almost flat over 10 years. GE is down over the decade. Changing direction for a ship that large is very, very hard--a seemingly intractable problem but not for the model Microsoft has provided.

Nobody saw Bitcoin coming. (The first block had already been mined at the start of 2009, but there was no real exchange trading until later in 2010.)

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).

You forget how hard it is to look after it.

Bitcoin is like fairy dust , nearly impossible to grasp.

and no one really knew about it until it made slashdot on 7-11-2010. Mtgox started trading in 7/2010 and I think I bought my first bitcoin around 5/2011 for $10/each or around there.

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.

> 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.

That read to me like someone who views programming paradigms as simply fashion choices, rather than having actual pros and cons to them.

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.

Elixir is off chortling somewhere...

The majority of programming today is not functional at all. I think Functional programming became sort of a tertiary elitist buzzword similar to drunken style kung fu. The effectiveness of the style is well known among practitioners and those that don't practice it look upon it as if it was a foreign and strange art.

What people don't realize is that functional programming is mixed martial arts. The art of combat brought down to the science of combat. I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream. MMA didn't become popular because it was the most effective art, it became popular because it was packaged up into entertainment.

> The majority of programming today is not functional at all.

That's probably true.

> I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream

That's demonstrably not, as React has basically gone full FP. I would argue that the majority of bootcamp students are now taught functional programming.

HN will split.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025709

Didn't happen! Kudos to @dang and the HN staff for keeping the site going for a decade !!

Well, there is lobste.rs

Yep, but my guess is that Lobsters is probably around 1/100th the size of HN on any dimension you care to measure (some recent stats: https://lobste.rs/s/8yumgi/killed_by_google#c_ugdtol). We explicitly have a narrower scope and are not interested in trying to dethrone/replace/etc HN. But ultimately, "split" is too vague a prediction to be judged as accurate or inaccurate.

(Context: I am the admin of Lobsters.)

lobste.rs is invite only which makes it hard for people like me to sign up

Feel free to provide me an email at @gerikson on Twitter (DM) and I will send you an invite!

> The world falls into war, inclusive of even the most pacifist, post-military states. On the upside, a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter moves anthropogenic global warming to the back burner and spawns a generation of Mad Max-style entrepreneurs among the ten-million or so human survivors. Surviving software engineers relish the opportunity to rebuild lost infrastructure "the right way this time"---including a transactional, secure, well-formed, rule-based, semantic world-wide-web---while the less-gifted turn to secondary issues like clean water, shelter, food, energy, medicine, and transportation.

> Internecine fighting erupts amongst the software clans over whether certain symbols are separating or terminating and whether or not the name of the god of modification is spelled with two letters or five. The dehumanized masses turn on the dithering software clans and their IT crowd supporters, demanding to have their souls restored from failed exchange, facebook, gmail, and twitter servers. A small nomadic clan clad in denim and mock turtlenecks seeks the legendary Cupertino Stone in the wasteland of New Gorgoroth (mostly between the 85 and the 280), but finds only the unpublished "Objectivist-C Manifesto" and shiny discs inscribed "Dylan DR1".

Jacquesm's comment on Musk is quite accurate

Edit: if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.

"Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else."

yeah

by DrJokepu: > Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.

Sad, but accurate.

before anyone makes some new ones for 2020 - 2029, i urge you to read this great article:

http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-futurism-has-a-...

it has something special somehow, I always come back to it

To me the interesting question is: What cool things were predicted and still don't exist, but could if someone from that thread had spent the past 10 years trying to make it happen?

If something can be predicted, or if many people agree with you, then it's not that revolutionary.

ctrl+f "bitcoin" returns 0 results.

Disruptive ideas take humanity by a storm few people believe it's coming, the rest can only connect the dots looking backwards.

To be fair, when I ctrl+f Bitcoin in my actual life there’s also 0 results.

I feel that overall much didn't change in the past decade in the tech world. Bitcoin is a great example of that, there was a big bubble where you could raise money just by mentioning Blockchain, and then just as quickly it faded away. AI isn't much different at the moment, it feels much more like a marketing buzzword than something that has changed my life.

Compare this to developments happening outside the computing-tech world (like Musk is doing) and the rise of green building tech. Today it is more than feasible to build a house that generates more energy than it consumes over the course of a year, even in cold climates like Northern Europe. The only thing preventing this from being more common is knowledge (builders keep building what they know) and it costs a little more upfront.

Not sure what sort of disruption btc and the like have caused thus far. Just another speculator's market.

Over priced an entire generation of computer gaming culture. Probably didn’t help getting to 4k content either.

> motters on Jan 1, 2010 [-]

> Also, this decade sees the beginning of the "pension bomb" - the demographic bulge of post-war baby boomers crossing the threshold into retirement. It's fairly easy to predict that there will be pensions scandals, with some pensions companies going bust or paying out far less to recipients than had been originally advertised. Also I predict the beginning of large supermarket scale retirement homes/complexes/compounds, where economies of scale can reduce costs of elder care.

Both predictions were 100% correct. Many pensions were cut dramatically or eliminated. AMR is one that comes to mind immediately, but the pension benefit corp could only do so much for many others. Also, this problem now seems like an imminent problem for many companies and public entities. This is only going to get worse.

The Villages in Ocala, FL fit the second point, and I'm confident other places exist like it.

Yeah basically the entire state of Florida. The Villages is pretty exceptional though.

Predictions are a fun mental exercise, but they read an awful lot like horoscopes. They're just too subjective to be truly interesting. It's not really all that different than predicting the weather ten years out. It'll be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Things will be pretty much the same but different.

"Tech is changing faster than ever."

What changed in tech from 2010 to 2020? My take below.

Hardware:

Phones got way better and changed the face of modern human life. 3D TVs fizzled. VR has fizzled so far. AR fizzled. CPUs improved, but more slowly. HDDs improved, but more slowly. SSDs got cheap. Displays got way cheaper. Cars got better infotainment systems and other features, but never drove themselves. Wireless power didn't happen. Mesh networks didn't happen. Ultra cheap RFID didn't happen. Robots didn't happen. Telerobots didn't happen. T Dynamic pricing didn't really happen. Drone delivery didn't happen. Flexible electronics didn't happen. Nanotechnology didn't really happen. Graphene didn't happen. Ubiquitious computing didn't happen. Non-silicon based solar didn't happen. Silicon solar costs plummeted and installations went gangbusters. Wearable electronics didn't happen, except for smart watches. eReaders grew. FPGAs never took off. Chips are still mostly silicon. The top CPU makers are still Intel and AMD. The top GPU makers are still NVIDIA and AMD. The top video game console makers are still Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft. Home internet remained mostly cable, not fiber. Computers remained x86, phones remained ARM.

Software:

The dominant search engine is still Google. The dominant computer operating systems are still Windows and Mac OS. The dominant phone operating systems are still Android and iOS. The top video streaming site is still YouTube. The top map site is still Google Maps. The dominant office software is still Microsoft Office. The dominant social network is still Facebook. The top online retailer is still Amazon. The top cloud provider is still AWS. Internet Explorer died, and Chrome grew in share. Websites are lot better and slicker. Phone apps got way, way better. Cryptocurrencies didn't take off. MMOs didn't take off. Web anonymization didn't happen. Web identity didn't happen. Malware still exists. Spam still exists. Lag still exists. Functional programming didn't take off. Telepresence didn't take off. Remote work didn't take off. Mass outsourcing of software jobs didn't happen. Linux didn't take off. Prediction markets didn't happen. Video calls didn't really take off, but they happen. Most of what was growing in 2010 continued to grow, most of what was shrinking in 2010 continued to shrink.

What else happened? What narratives do you construct?

Good writeup!

But for my situation and requirements, SSDs still didn't get cheap.

Interesting to see that many of the predictions weren't far off.

But one recurring prediction that was notably wrong was of Microsoft's declining prospects. It would have been difficult at the time to argue otherwise, but WOW did things turn out differently.

I'm glad we proved this guy wrong today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748

> -People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made.

Not an image search engine as much as whole governments but this rings eerily true.

The sad part is that I don't think this has caused people, on average, to become all that much more privacy-aware. Or, if they are, they still don't really care.

I think it's more like learned helplessness.

People don't have alternatives to using the internet, to their smartphones, and to electronic money, that let them still participate in interesting modern society.

I think deep down, anyone who thinks about it knows everything they do with their devices may be tracked, is probably being tracked and analysed, but the tools are too essential to life, so they can't afford to worry.

That said, I mentioned to someone recently that web servers keep a log of every request and the person was shocked! (Imagine if they could see the details kept by modern analytics and observability tracing!)

Privacy awareness is certainly not mainstream, if you see someone not using any Google service or so they'll probably be assumed paranoid and labelled a cypherpunk.

Funnily enough, my Dad asked me about what happens with data in the cloud the other day so that was interesting.

Reading this made me a bit sad. So many people were optimistic, and many predicted exciting things... but few if any of that happened.

I think everyone likes to predict contrarian things which are actually unlikely to happen, in the hopes that they will be the only one who predicted it... just like investing/gambling

Hey, it wasn’t a terrible decade. We got the iPad!

10 years before that one commenter guessed!

Where is the thread for this decade?

Someone just started one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

> the end of 32 bit computing.

By itself hardly a bold prediction, but the top reply makes a caveat about mobile devices, which gets some nods about mobile taking much longer to transition to 64-bit.

Few might have imagined Apple would ship its first 64-bit phone only three years later, and a version of iOS before the decade was over that ended support for 32-bit phones!

32bit died on phones much quicker than on the desktop, in fact (though of course it died on servers first). Arguably, this should have been predictable; legacy software was a much smaller problem on phones.

I find that a little surprising, because one of the side effects of 64-bit address spaces is a lot of redundancy in pointer representations stored in RAM. 64-bit pointer-based data structures have more redundant zeros.

Much of the energy in a computer goes on communication between chips, so increased memory use means increased energy use. As well as more going on inside the CPU transferring all those redundant pointer bits around

And phones are notably sensitive to energy use.

> Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods, with close to 100% coverage across the civilized world. A significant fraction of ordinary consumer goods simply won't work in "dark" zones.

I'm glad that this remains mostly false (as well as "all high street bookstores go bust"). Sure, you can get a wi-fi enabled toaster or coffeepot, but the basic versions are still available for sale.

I chose to live without wi-fi at home, and with no smartphone, for the past four months -- just to see how my life went without the distraction. Now the experiment has run its course, and I plan to order wifi again. But basically life went on as normal, and I feel I could do another four months if I chose.

I wonder for how long into the future such a choice will remain realistic.

The next decade will be the decade of survelliance. Nearly dust size receivers will cost nothing and will be generously used everywhere: from concrete blocks to clothes. The US will come up with a clever use case so people will buy this themselves (finding a matching pair of socks will finally become a trackable problem, thanks to receivers in all socks), while authoritarian countries will implant these chips in lieu of passports and credit cards. Paired with 5G, this will be a perfect always online monitoring system.

I don't think there will be any notable advancements in science: we won't create AI, we won't cure cancer and we won't switch to electric cars.

Oh man this is fun. So many prediction we blew past and so many have had 0 progress.

Somebody hit up tlrobinson on Twitter and let him know https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748

Quick listing some top predictions & my take on right/wrong

Iran will Change : I’ll call it NO

RFID-Everything : Basically NO… not in consumer-land, at least

Cheap Flat Panel Displays : YES

Ubiquitous & Wireless/Mobile: YES

Ebooks Take Over & Pirates Win: NO. Surprisingly, the opposite happened. monolithic legal markets did really well.

Electric Cars Event Horizon: ALMOST

Driverless Cars Go Live: NO.

Still No Fusion Power: CORRECT

MSFT Declines: NO

Chinese Bubble Burst: NO

Lady Gaga is New Madonna: Yes. Good call!

Google will Change for Worst: CORRECT on the moral point. INCORRECT on the financial one

Pension Bomb Problems: No

Habitable Planet Found: PROBABLY, but we don’t know which one it was.

Data Mining Political Watershed: YES.

> RFID-Everything : Basically NO… not in consumer-land, at least

Contactless payment systems grew out of RFID, I would categorize that as a YES.

Ok, I'll call it a yes. Payments didn't come to mind.

I guess contactless payment just didn't seem important to me, so I forget about it. Nifty, sure but blink and you miss it.

The first thing that comes to mind when I look back at these kinds of predictions is what is being said today (or during the last few years) about how AI is going to enslave and destroy humanity. The other one is how robotics (+ AI) will lay waste to human employment.

Some of the people championing doomsday scenarios ought to be humbled by the reality of not being able to predict almost anything ten years out.

Until someone invents a real crystal ball...

Kinda weird how no one saw Cannabis liberalization coming.

Wow! The quality of hacker news back then was amazing. So much concentration on technology! So much positive energy. And the predictions were nailed.

Funny how many independent comments predict a Microsoft demise in one form or another.

In the context of 2009, Microsoft was obviously in disarray and most would just accelerate a current trend to make a prediction.

Turns out many important changes in the decade were not predictable that way (although it applies for the success of the smartphone in several comments too).

2020's 2030 prediction thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

So many predictions about driverless cars. All wrong :(

My guess is full self driving on high ways by 2030 with some semi-autonomous trucks. Removing a driver won’t happen until 2040-50.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say 2035 at the earliest for full self-driving partly because A) software engineers never feeling quite done, B) the underlying software, firmware, and hardware won't be proveably safe enough and C) because something political will make self-driving EV's much more difficult.

RMS owes someone money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025795

I don't think it's the RMS

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

My takeaway from reading the top voted 2010 predictions is that people are terrible about predicting what's going to happen 10 years later.

A few of them are correct (cheapish high density displays, commercially successful ebook readers, self-driving cars) but most are terribly inaccurate.

Left the same comment but with some fun, probably wrong predictions, over on the other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941512.

Lots of demographics problems in the western world and hopefully we get ahead of it, unlike our track record with climate change.

Wow reading all those predictions sound so foolish! Most were way off, goes to say why long term predictions is so hard.

2010 was not the beginning of a new decade. It was the last year of its decade. Ditto 2020.

There was no year zero.

A decade is a span of ten years. Every year is the beginning of a new decade.

Africa... starvation and primitivity

There are some African countries richer than Eastern European countries.

This sucks...

>Facebook will be gone in 5 years

>>Probably the best prediction I've read on this thread.

It's common to own a laptop, iPad, a Kindle, and sometimes even a drawing tablet. They are have a tablet form factor, so these devices will probably converge into a single one.

Once the tech becomes good enough, it'll no longer make sense to own all these devices.

Fun read but humans are not very good at making predictions.

I beg to differ, humans are the best at making predictions. There is nothing better than a human.

We’re the best, but we’re still not good.

- You still won't be able to talk to your fridge

funny they didn't seem to talk a lot about the cloud in these predictions, or did i miss anything?

> Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.

Wow. Nailed it.

Still no Duke Nukem Forever.

Edit: I meant that they got that wrong, but it wasn't an unreasonable prediction.

The first year was year 1, not 0. So the new decade begins next year in 2021

well after today's news I'm going with war

I fear you may be right.

The death of C# and Java. It’s more of a wish than a prediction...

Fully immersive VR tech will become the future of gaming.

TikTok is gonna go down in flames by dec 2023

It's fun to see how some of these in general accurate, but others were very far off. For example:

> Facebook will be gone in 5 years, just like MySpace. Half a dozen companies will rise and fall in replacing it. The web will churn even faster than it did before. [1]

Love the reply to this one. "Probably the best prediction I've read on this thread." [2]

There's also [3]:

> * During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.

> * Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.

> * Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.

To be honest I don't know about pop to know if this is true, but it sounds to me like Katy Perry might've out-Madonna'd Gaga.

Even the original post has some that didn't turn out as expected:

> - Major changes will happen in Iran, one way or the other. The current trajectory they are on does not seem sustainable for a decade.

Little did they know, yes? Kind of, after the election of Hassan Rouhani and an eventual nuclear deal, although that particular milestone would be scrapped after a big change in government happened in the USA.

> - Ubiquitous computing will finally arrive, with smart cards/RFID on our bodies seamlessly interacting with computers in our environment. As you walk up to your refrigerator, for instance, you're logged in and presented with a customized display. Same goes for the car or the entertainment surface at the Dentist's.

Little did they know at the end of the decade this would be DOA after a series of scandals made people realize maybe privacy is way more important than logging into your refrigerator with a customized display. Also, as it turns out, dentist equipment churn, at least where I'm from, is incredibly slow and still lacking an "entertainment surface" beyond maybe a TV if you're lucky.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027153

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027260

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025770

> Facebook will be the Google of the decade. > Google will be the Microsoft of the decade. > Microsoft will be the IBM of the decade.

The "decade" timeline doesn't quite fit but to be honest this wasn't a bad prediction [1].

> Facebook will be the Google of the decade.

This feels very accurate, down to the people. There's plenty of ex-Googlers at Facebook, including Sheryl Sandberg, who essentially built Facebook from "a really cool site" to the profitable ad business it is now.

Google bought YouTube in 2006, and now it's a huge economy of content creators. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, and it's now a growing economy of influencers. There's plenty of differences of course, but in the ad-tech space it's Google then Facebook, in Machine Learning it's Google and Facebook. What big companies are releasing cool open source software, adopted by millions of developers? Google and Facebook.

Miss-information, hate speech, political controversy and issues with publishers? Facebook and Google/YouTube. In terms of data-tracking only Google is comparable to Facebook— or rather only Facebook is comparable to Google? Virtually complete dominance of a key-part of the web? Google and Facebook. Number of users? I could argue only Android and Facebook are at point where they have to provide free internet to people to gain more users. Diversification into hardware? First Google, then Facebook.

The list goes on. Facebook is (perhaps too ruthlessly, and "breaking too many things") largely another "Google" in many ways. Not sure if this is what the prediction was getting at, but it's interesting to think about.

> Google will be the Microsoft of the decade.

Right now it feels like this is happening. Right now, Google is ubiquitous and feels unbeatable like Microsoft. It also has (1) platform dominance in web and OS and key services, (2) an incredibly diverse set of products and (3) anti-competitive behavior stemming from this dominance. It also has (4) a thick layer of middle-management fighting for relevance leading to (5) lots of product churn, worsened by (6) lack of focus due a "vision" vacuum in upper-management.

I'd suspect the next few years without Page or Brin will be interesting. It'll also be interesting to see if Google 1. Can pull of hardware (Pixel was a good start, but the latest iteration has a lot of reviewers disappointed) 2. Can focus (Android, Chrome OS or Fuchsia? Will they commit to a messaging service?) and 3. Can deliver new products that stick.

> Microsoft will be the IBM of the decade.

Up until Satya Nadella took over in 2014 and his changes started materializing later in the decade this largely sounded like it was the case— old stagnant company, held mostly by slow-to-change enterprise customers, and little in the way of new products.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026088

> JulianMorrison on Jan 1, 2010: Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods, with close to 100% coverage across the civilized world. A significant fraction of ordinary consumer goods simply won't work in "dark" zones. The gap between 1st and 3rd world countries will widen as a result - take a modern computer into backwoods Africa and it's a paperweight.

It's not wrong. But I guess he didn't foresee the Internet of Useless Shit. It matters if you tablet doesn't work without Internet, but doesn't matter if it's your refrigerator, or so we hope.

> Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel: lower demand, lower profit, vendors go bust, less availability, monopoly prices, lower desirability. The gasoline economy is brittle because it has high fixed costs, a complex supply chain, and its power source isn't fungible. As with film versus digital cameras, the result is an exponential crash in the desirability of gasoline cars

Exponential crash? Didn't see it yet.

> Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads.

Not yet.

> DrJokepu on Jan 1, 2010: Still no fusion power.

Haha!

> During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.

The unsustainable early economic growth has came to an end and there was an economic crisis, but there was never a major "burst". And the power was not assumed by a younger group, but a more conservative group. Not sure if's populist or not though.

> Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela.

Still not completely fulfilled, but probably soon.

> Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade).

Accurate?

> Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.

Accurate!

> adw on Jan 1, 2010: Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.

Accurate.

> jacquesm on Jan 1, 2010: [...] the end of 32 bit computing for consumer pcs and server platforms. So all mainstream machines not being mobile or embedded devices will be 64 bits by the end of the decade (and plenty of those will be too, but you are right, not all of them).

Accurate.

> artagnon on Jan 1, 2010: [...] 3. By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer becomes insignificant.

It's wrong, it's more like Chrome has 66% and Firefox has 33% (just an example, the "real" number shows Firefox's market share is even less than that). While the death of Internet Explorer was certain, it was hard to imagine that Google Chrome would be a monopoly.

I ranked all of these, and gave the rate of correct predictions. I might have missed one or two, though.

----- Winners:

'icefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026549

ChromeOS. Based on Linux kernel. Entirely different security system/deployment/upgrades, no legacy applications.

3/3 percentage correct: 100%

'jaquesm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025696

Pretty sure all are correct, though can't find statistics for the first on hand.

5/5 percentage correct: 100%

'jacquesm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025709

laarc, though laarc failed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'adw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703

No explanation needed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'slashed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025702

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

No explanation necessary.

'jeromec https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026044

Correct. Would have been incorrect if U.S. didn't come back into Iran to start another war. Details a bit blurry.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'jsz0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026022

No explanation needed.

2/2 percentage correct: 100%

'antirez https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025765

No explanation needed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'rms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025758

This happened, despite being far away.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'slvrspoon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025943

Progress with cancer happened, wasn't a big thing. Growth of a Chinese middle class with a voice and independence didn't happen. Nuclear detonation didn't happen. Achievements in energy tech happened. Wi-fi data collection on everything happened, though not main change. Internet and software a snore; happened. Privacy did become an issue for the common user.

4/7 percentage correct: 57%

'IsaacL https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093

Facebook successful.

Facebook IPO happened in time allotted.

Twitter became profitable.

Microsoft didn't go anywhere.

Microsoft grew, claim of shrinking denied.

Desktop market shrunk.

Internet Explorer went away. Point denied.

Mobile phones have more or less replaced computers for most average users. Point denied.

Mobile phones did cause most of the big changes during this decade.

More successful startups.

Startups with Facebook/YouTube proportions didn't happen. Point denied.

Huge startups built on phones and web tech did happen.

Startup ecosystem has gotten worse. Point denied.

"Startup instead of college" has gotten more intense.

Languages slower than Ruby caught on. Was not because of Moore's Law but because developers have the attention span of small rodents. Point denied.

Moore's Law is dead.

Deal to limit warming did happen, though it was in six years, not five, and far less than what is claimed here. Point denied.

Traditional retail gave way to delivery; large shops weren't impacted as much as small, and the incentives were wrong. Point denied.

China made no attempt to become democratic.

Rule of law in China got stronger, though civil liberties did not increase. Point denied.

Internet crackdowns have continued and increased in China.

12/21 percentage correct: 57%

'iamwil https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025885

Eugenics dating service from Harvard students was announced just a few days ago.

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'DaniFong https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026260

Solar and wind are now cheaper than alternatives. Is not sold to customers "when they want it, how they want it."

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'bioweek https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026279

Ubiquitous free internet did happen, wasn't a meshnet.

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'borism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025861

Web did not cease to be the delivery platform of choice for applications, it's gotten worse. Point denied.

Internet has become more restricted.

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'zitterbewegung https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025906

PMCs have gotten more prevalent. Have not gotten more popular.

1/2 percentage correct: 50%

'brfox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025855

Gene-therapy did become slightly more commonplace. Genome sequencing for chronic conditions is now commonplace (wouldn't have counted this if 'brfox didn't elaborate on the prediction in same thread).

2/5 percentage correct: 40%

'tommorris https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025771

GNU/Linux on the desktop didn't really happen, but Linux on the desktop did (ChromeOS).

Widespread adoption of LISP by developers sort of happened (Clojure), despite much adoption, still limited reach.

Cheaper hardware happened, and is the only thing I'm giving a full point for.

The rest didn't really happen.

1/6 percentage correct: 16.7%

----- Losers:

'varjag https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025740

Didn't happen.

0/1 percentage correct: 0%

'10ren https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026574

Nothing right, though first two slightly mirror events that happened ("you inside" = VR; mobile devices have specialized processors like "organs in the body," though multi-core is far from dead).

0/4 percentage correct: 0%

'erikstarck https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026088

Nothing accurate barring possibly the Google example, though not even it is really right.

0/3 percentage correct: 0%

'mojuba https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025706

Entirely wrong, unfortunately.

0/a-bunch percentage correct: 0%

'lallysingh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025783

No substantial change in political bases, slight left-swing for demographic mentioned.

0/1 percentage correct: 0%

'artagon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025790

Entirely wrong.

0/6 percentage correct: 0%

'andrewcooke https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025727

None of this was correct, though AMD did make steps in that direction, and so did IBM/Sony.

0/2 percentage correct: 0%

'samuel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025853

It hasn't yet.

0/1 percentage correct: 0%

----- Honorable mentions:

'paraschopra https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025736

Half-point given because tablets rose to prominence and serve as partial e-Book readers, though they also killed dedicated ones.

.5/1 percentage correct: N/A

'Scott_MacGregor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026255

1. His company failed.

2. Didn't happen.

3. Half-point given; free for everyone, usually privately-funded.

4. It's gotten worse.

5. No explanation necessary.

6. Didn't happen.

7. It's gotten worse.

.5/7 percentage correct: N/A

'zacharypinter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025867

All claims basically correct, though flawed. Not taking into final % calculation or ranking for that reason.

4/5 percentage correct: N/A

'motters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025738

Both predictions correct with large picture, both wrong on most details. Half-point awarded for each.

1/2 percentage correct: N/A

'motters https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025817

Problems with pensions happened, were not as bad as claimed.

.5/1 percentage correct: N/A

No one saw Trump coming.

Scott Adams did, but not quite 10 years in advance. Check out his blog about a year before the election.

Edit: here's just one example. It goes earlier than this. https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/09/23/the-reason-for-tru...

It is going to be expected that most of these predictions were going to be wrong, that is OK. What surprises me is how almost ALL of them were. This is not better than how the average Joe in the street or the proverbial monkey with the typewriter would have fared. Well, perhaps they would have done it a little bit better.

Prediction: in 10 years we _still_ won't have self-driving cars on common roads nationwide. Tesla will refund the money charged for "full self driving capability" that was supposed to arrive "later this year" in 2019.

My favorite from 2010 : "President-Elect Graham to Appoint Sam Altman to Cabinet"... Not too far off.

I checked and nobody predicted a Trump presidency in 2010. So no time travelers amongst us sadly.

He will win 2020 unfortunately.

- The JVM running on a unikernal is the most ubiquitous backend deployment. Kotlin is the most popular backend language.

- Server-side rendering is ubiquitous. Previously, motivations for client side rendering were to minimise network bandwidth requirements and to avoid server-side statefulness, reducing RAM and CPU requirements. By 2030, memory and compute resources are so cheap that the inherent advantages of server side rendering make it a no brainer for the most part.

- Discovery of extraterrestrial life will occur in mid to late 2020s, most likely in the form of Martian microbes. The James Webb Space Telescope will likely acquire strong evidence of organic lifeforms on multiple exoplanets. Even more surprising discoveries may be made in this area.

- Anti aging therapies become mainstream. By 2030, people in developed countries can expect to live an additional 10-15 years in good health. Reaching 'actuarial escape velocity' becomes a serious possibility for many people alive now. Governments realise the time will come when they will have to step in and bail out pension funds who have unwittingly sold annuities. There will be a group of people who were old enough to get an annuity before they became prohibitively expensive/unavailable and who were young enough to reach actuarial escape velocity. They will be labelled 'the luckiest generation ever'. This may not become totally apparent until 2030s or 2040s.

- Real time ray tracing becomes standard by late 2020s. Games are indistinguishable from reality. A murder case where defendant claims 'they thought they were ingame' makes the news headlines.

- Spacex's Starlink constellation is a massive commercial success. Partly due to this, and partly due to ubiquitous aerial drone-based delivery, it becomes not only possible, but increasingly desirable for many people to live in remote areas.

- Development of space based industry is slower than people hoped. Full exploitation of cheap launch capabilities provided by SpaceX won't be seen until 2030s. Blue Origin will catch up with Spacex's capabilities by mid 2020s. Private space launch industry will no longer be a one horse race.

- Electric cars overtake ICEs in developed nations. Several incumbents who don't react in time will go bankrupt and be acquired by electric car manufacturers. As such, the brands won't disappear, the executive boards however will be out of a job.

- Cryptocurrency will remain off the radar for most of 2020 until, due to major war involving a wealthy, developed country, millions of people will rush to buy Bitcoin to save what they can of their wealth. Price of one Bitcoin will quickly exceed $100,000 during this period.

- People will become increasingly afraid to post their physical likeness (appearance and voice in particular) on the internet due to a surge in deep-fake powered identity theft.

- North Korea will not collapse. The West will reluctantly accept it as a nuclear armed state. It will gradually normalise relations with the outside world and may even follow the same path China took, becoming a prosperous country in the process.

I think the country is going to become very, very divided.

I wish we’d have a moment where the extremity forces people to snap back and cooperate with one another.

I figured climate change would be that moment but we have an entire side of the political aisle essentially denying it's even happening.

Like some kind of justified war?

I predict by 2029 Hacker News will be overrun with AI bots and nobody will be to identify them.

Are you sure it hasn't happened already?

I suppose an army of inept bots could throw me off.

Rise of Dependent Types in general purpose programming: eg. Idris, later something like dependent js/ts.

I hope I will get a girlfriend who is in CS major and is better than what I did

I predict that people will continue to incorrectly think the new decade starts with the X0 year rather than the X1 year.

Moore’s law will peter out and everyone will be forced to squeeze out more performance out of existing hardware.

The tide will turn hard against “the cloud” when companies figure out their cloud spend is many times worse than their own data centres cost them. There may be a new wave of “lean” cloud systems.

Fast programming languages will be in vogue again once the wastefulness of things like Ruby/Erlang is finally understood.

People will start moving en masse to EV's.

There will be a spectacular fire because of an improper electrical install that will become a huge news media event with people asking whether or not EV's are actually safe (despite ICE vehicles having gas tanks)

There will be a major continent-wide power outage either because of a natural disaster or a highly sophisticated and coordinated attack against the poorly secured power stations that at least span NA.

Valve will beat the ever-living daylights out of everyone else in the cloud gaming space.

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