Review of “Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?” | Hacker News Reader

Review of “Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?”

38 pointsak_11134 comments

The original predictions link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068

Only one mention of climate change. Which was the biggest problem of the world before covid. Here's a tweet (in Malay) back in 2019, warning that parts of the country would be underwater in 2050: https://twitter.com/CentGPS/status/1191913321391247360

Floods hit hard a few weeks ago, really hard. Cars were underwater, homes completely wrecked. A lot of the damage were in line with the chart above. They're working on drainage but I don't really think that'll help for rising sea levels.

This isn't directed at you. Why are we still using phrases like "I think" when we talk about climate change?

Data manipulation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8455KEDitpU

I’m from Germany and we were hit really hard by the flood.

People died, lost their homes - but after a few months most of it is already forgotten.

There is little to no action taken to prevent this from happening again - at least in the village my parents live.

A friend of mine lost everything. It makes me freaking angry. We all have to adjust our behavior or we are really fucked sooner than most people think.

Climate change is already here.

when last flood was in your area ? I heard about it, cos Im from Poland and we have plenty of areas that are probe to flooding but people still try to build homes in floading prone areas coz of X ( dunno why )

Striking that the major stories that occurred this year weren't mentioned anywhere in any of the top voted comments, or where mentioned in exactly the wrong way:

ordered by my subjective level of importance:

- Increased spread of covid variants right until the end of 2021 (along with prolonging of lockdown measures).

- Official recognition by the Fed that inflation is no longer transitory

- State Capitol attack.

- Increased confrontation with Russia.

- Taliban taking over Afghanistan in a blink of an eye.

- Stock market smashing all time high after all time high.

- Evergrande collapse.

- Lira collapse

- The Great Resignation

- web3, nft and metaverse dominating tech discussion.

tbf some of these are quite contradictory no way anyone could have predicted them and not look like a fool, which is a sign of the crazy time we live in.

Evergrand and Lira collapsing with the markets barely reacting for example.

Actually I think that's a property of most significant predictions that came true - and it's nothing new.

Reality is and always was much crazier than our imagination and sense of what is normal/possible.

This is an excellent list though I think the last two have little impact outside of tech-heavy fora like this (tbf you specifically mention "tech discussion").

Most of the others actually mean something in the real world.

No one cares about the capitol attack

My community cares deeply about it, but action is taken pretty much only via donations and the ballot box

Inflation was pretty well predicted. Good job hackernews

My favourite prediction of all time (username checks out): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25601917

> Software Bill of Material (SBOM) will become more of a thing

Not sure if it's become more of a thing but it is pretty dang relevant these last few weeks.

Somewhat of an outsider here.

What’re you referring to?

Log4j

There was log4j the last few weeks, the malicious packages in PyPI and the ua-parser-js that was taken over. At least that's what I remember from this year.

my pick for 2022 remains crypto crash.

my second pick is that quantum supremacy will not happen in 2022

my third pick is that 2022 will be the year of linux desktop

I am willing to bet that quantum supremacy for some actually useful computation is not going to happen in this decade.

I have doubts it will ever be "Supreme" but I can genuinely believe it will help locate solutions, subsequently confirmed by traditional methods, which are then optimised to be as quick or quicker.

Run enough times, find the statistically satisfying minima or maxima or point of interest. Mainly it's about coherence and noise. Stable qbits are like Noah's cubits: hard to find.

ubiquitous RSA factoring in nanoseconds? Don't personally think so. Specific key finding for post-hoc analysis? Dunno, but not in 2022 or by 2030 (to agree with you)

> my third pick is that 2022 will be the year of linux desktop

Don't do that, don't give me hope. /j

In all seriousness though, I don't know if we'll ever see it. That being said, if the Steam Deck materializes, is popular, and people don't go straight to booting Windows... It could actually happen!

Linux will have a functional desktop environment before OSX has a tiling window manager which doesn't need you to "root" your installation :-(

What’s the best “root-required” tiling WM solution for MacOS right now?

Yabai. System integrity permissions changes required.

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

Honestly, my personal Year of the Linux Desktop was 2018ish, I prefer Linux's current state to Win/Mac.

Is there really no way to do that on Mac?

At this point I don't think that the year of linux desktop is even a thing to root for. What could there be to gain?

Put pressure on Microsoft and Apple to stop being so awful.

> my pick for 2022 remains crypto crash.

Everything is crashing, but it seems crypto less so than national currencies.

Define "everything". SP500 closed at an all time high in the most recent trading session (Dec 23).

> my pick for 2022 remains crypto crash.

You know what?

Maybe this time, you could be right.

Let's come back to this in a years time and tell everyone about it.

Well, number 55 was not factored using Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer, so I'm a happy camper.

The next incoming trend of startups is Buy Now, Pay later. A series of companies will offer you to keep your standard of living and assume you can pay it off at a later date.

Many will abuse these services assuming they can have their pre-Covid lifestyles and just “wait out” whatever recession.

isn't that called installments/credit?

The process of drug approval is so slow that I can’t predict a one year revolution, but given a few years, I do expect to see mRNA vaccines/treatments to emerge as a broad category treating dozens of medical conditions.

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