189 comments were posted in the thread. Their predictions included:
- Ubiquitous mobile internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods
- Ebooks defeating real books
- Rampant piracy
- Common electric cars
- Driverless cars
- China bubble will burst
- Google will go downhill
- Microsoft will become like IBM and have to sell off parts of the business
- Smartphones & cloud computing will make PCs redundant for most people
Of all these 9 predictions, I'd say first 8 were mostly false and the 9th was correct in spirit but still iffy in fact - Statista says that 3/4 of American adults own a computer.
In general, there seems to be a severe bias toward change. Either people were very optimistic about the changes we’d see by 2020 or they were quite pessimistic about the present trends & companies, calling them bubbles or unsustainable. In both cases, a prediction of "trends will stay the same" would have been more accurate than a prediction of "things will change drastically off-trend".
That said, it's a bit unfair to say that stasis/current trends continue is a better prediction, as it has the advantage of entropy. There is only one way for things to stay the same, but many ways for them to change. So even if things are likely to change, predicting stasis can still outperform any specific prediction of change, even if a prediction of any change would be best.
Here’s what actually changed over the 2010s, as I see it.
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.
- Drone delivery didn’t happen.
- Flexible electronics didn’t happen.
- Nanotechnology didn’t really happen.
- Graphene didn’t happen.
- Ubiquitous 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.
- Mass outsourcing of software jobs didn’t happen.
- Linux didn’t take off.
- Prediction markets didn’t happen
- Dynamic pricing didn’t really happen.
- Micropayments didn’t really happen.
- Most of what was growing in 2010 continued to grow, most of what was shrinking in 2010 continued to shrink.
Some things changed, but most stayed on trend.
- subscription model almost completely replaced one-time purchase model for software.
They still exist, they're nice, but instead of supplanting anything, they're mainly just tertiary devices owned by a relatively small number of people.
Surely, surely this has to be among the predictions which came true, or largely so. Even toothbrushes have Wi-Fi!
-DannoHung (2010)
I'm so sorry Danno. We're still waiting.
> I predict within 2 years no one will even hear about an Nvidia GPU in an Intel-based laptop (unless we're talking $2000+ machines - maybe).
-higherpurpose (2015)
(this is probably about AMD CPUs?) Looks like it's going to be wrong for many more years.
> I predict the sun will run out of steam and we are all gonna die.
-the-dude (2020)
I dunno about that, sun looks fine to me!
footnote: sorry for adding dupes to your data
How long is the transition phase for Apple until EU users will be allowed to install any software on iOS?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163704
Edit:
> After being signed by the President of the European Parliament and the President of the Council, it will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union and will start to apply six months later.
It appears this has come to pass. https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=3625
> -the-dude (2020)
> I dunno about that, sun looks fine to me!
I'd call that one half-right. The sun is almost certainly devoid of all gas-phase H2O. Well, maybe a quarter-right, because it didn't "run out" of something it didn't have.
> I predict we will still be using SMS in 10 years.
-malandrew (2012)
Yep. But mostly in the US when cross-OS or automated.
To be fair, all of us are indeed going to live a normalish distribution of lifespans and the sun is too.
Yeah? I thought this exists:
Just click the commenter
Edit: I was thinking of news.ycombinator/from?site=X, but I realize I'm not even sure it can search comments.
It's impossible to verify or score accuracy without that. Nobody predicts anything at 100 % certainty (otherwise it wouldn't be a prediction, it would just be stating inevitable facts), so there's always an implicit level of confidence.
It's just that when people don't say what it is, their predictions become meaningless to anyone but themselves.
A prediction without a probability is also not open to critique, because the way we settle differences in beliefs about uncertainties is through betting against each other. But a bet requires odds to price it with.
If I predict with 99.99% odds something will happen and it doesn't, my prediction could still have been correct as that fits in the remaining .01%. Whereas if I predict something will or won't happen after some time, you can confirm if it did or didn't happen after that time.
Even if someone says "there will be an ice cream shortage in France in the summer of 2025" they don't mean they are 100 % certain of it. They mean they find it somewhat likely -- but exactly how likely? That's what they have to tell us, because we don't know.
For an individual prediction, you can never tell whether it's true or not, because individual predictions always come with some level of uncertainty.
What you can do, if you know at what confidence level it was made, is
- Score individual predictions. One made at 99.9 % certainty that doesn't come true gets a heavy negative score, while if it would have been made at 60 % it gets penalised much less.
- Verify the accuracy of a collection of predictions. If I predict five things at confidence levels of 0.8 0.7 0.9 0.5 0.5 then I should get roughly 3--4 of them right. If I don't, my predictions aren't very accurate.
I mean, I get that just saying the above seems to confirm your "too much machine learning" hypothesis, but I guarantee you that's not the case. At my own peril, I'm too old fashioned to have read much about machine learning.
What I can say is that when making strategic and tactical decisions that affect a lot of people, I have found it incredible to know things like "I am 85 % sure we will not make the next release in time" (an actionable prediction) compared to "there's no way we'll make the next release in time" (when in fact there's still a 15 % chance we will, if we take proper action now.)
- The cost in case the event turns out bad,
- The upside in case the event turns out good, and
- The probability that the event turns out good.
We can summarise the two first ones as "the payoff function of the event" and simplify the situation into requiring knowledge about the payoff and the probability.
But without the probability we cannot take informed action.
(Unless the payoff is structured such that the probability doesn't matter -- but then it's also not much of a difficult decision.)
>I predict that the ready supply of instant gratification will be as or more harmful than fast food and the obesity epidemic.
Yet to be widely acknowledged and acted on, but sure seems lsd5you was ahead of the curve on this in 2010.
I know it's a fear as old as books, but it's hard to ignore the different paradigm that the Internet brought to the table.
https://hnpredictions.github.io/wtf.html
SELECT * FROM bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full WHERE text LIKE "%I predict%" on the Hacker News BigQuery dataset, plus some mild preparation.
I don't even need context. Always applicable.
https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=3337
EDIT: this is a fun one: I predict lots of people will make predictions, but we'll never go back to check and see if they were right. — the reckoning has come, tlrobinson!
https://hnpredictions.github.io/
Beautiful really:>
I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.
The rest I’ve seen are useless since they’re from 2020 or further
> I predict we'll be hearing more and more about bitcoins over the next year or so as the process accelerates. --hugh3, 2010
-RickJWagner (2020)[0,1]
- -jarrett (2011)[0,1]
-tempsy (2019)[0,1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jostmey&next=2229115...
I am typing all this as I recall that I saw 'eat the rich' meme on Imgur the past few months semi-consitently ( to be fair though; Imgur has become oddly politicized as a platform ).
> I predict that touch interfaces in cars like this is a fad that will pass and people will look back on it as an embarrassment
Hilarous.
I got the radio controls on my steering wheel. I would be dead or I won't be using the radio if they were on a touchscreen. Closing a phone call is on the touchscreen and I'd like to be able to do it from the steering wheel. The less the eyes leave the road the better.
https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=4346
I guess it's hard to predict, especially about the future.
Politics across the globe seems more insane than ever. Maybe I wasn't paying attention 10 years ago.
Any chance you could add links to the original comment? I'd like to see what I was talking about in 2017. From the quote:
"I predict it's abandoned within the year"
I was almost certainly talking about a Google product, but I can't remember what. I thought it was Stadia, but apparently that was announced the year after.
Anyone else surprised by the caliber of the legal disclaimer on the site? I can't decide if that's part of the joke or if this is a serious result of the author consulting a lawyer and coming up with this. Maybe I should be more concerned that someone might take some random sentence I wrote out of context and use it as investment advice*
* This comment is not an investment advice
I would love to see how the predictions trade on prediction markets like https://manifold.markets/. Could you automatically create an entry for every prediction?
And a not-so-secret endpoint where you can use URL params to prepopulate the question field, eg https://manifold.markets/create?q=Rust%20will%20also%20begin...
It's a fun quote out of context: "I predict gravity will disappear in five minutes for thirty seconds".
'If I was president I would'
'You're not wrong, but'
'My point is that'
'The thing is'
'Google should'
'Basically what I'm saying is'
'The only caveat is'
'Buyer beware'
'Without sounding like'
'The truth is'
'In all honesty'
'As a matter of fact'
-kevando (2017)
https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=1047
Winner winner chicken dinner
Already plenty of comments throughout 2017 of people searching reddit for more "human" recommendations because of Google getting overrun with corporate spam.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1513209600&dateRange=custom&...
Arguably the difference between then and now is that astroturfing Reddit has become more profitable and hence more common as people adopt that mindset, so searching reddit is less valuable now than in 2017.
> I predict that some cities will eventually desire persistent aerial surveillance systems like http://www.
The full sentence from HN is:
> I predict that some cities will eventually desire persistent aerial surveillance systems like http://www.baesystems.com/product/BAES_162772/ARGUS-IS for many reasons, this being one.
> The tendency to prognosticate without any real evidence will increase in the future. — whatshisface (2019), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567417
Found this one from 2007: https://hnpredictions.github.io/?p=2849 "I predict because all major businesses will be interacting through Facebook, a new form of currency will begin to emerge." --jimream. Sounds like a popular prediction at the time, given wechat. Although, were wechat payments a thing then already?
Original: "The place where I predict we'll disagree is whether to evacuate the machine's workloads prior to servicing."
What was shown: "I predict we'll disagree is whether to evacuate the machine's workloads prior to servicing."
Which is gibberish if you omit the beginning.
Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322241
Also try, "in x years"
Nothing too remarkable. [This thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68111) envisions the rise of music streaming, but the prevailing attitude is that it'd enable p2p sharing and piracy, not forestall it (also see comments on the article itself).
Talking about HN to jacquesm.
I laughed.
"I predict this will turn into a debacle for Apple."
What will? I pushed the button about 10 times and only saw one that was even partially understandable without context.
I predict Amazon's rank in the top500 is about to improve.
-rbanffy (2010)
BTW: p=1191
E.g.:
I predict blah
-- foobar in 2022- Filter by "before year", so I can see predictions from earlier years which are more likely to be resolved. Most of the random results I got are in the 2020s.
- Make the url contain a seed, so you can copy/paste the URL and get the same prediction (EDIT: my bad, looks like there is already a "share link" button)
Couldn't have it any other way for HN!
I predict that this HN thread will lead hundreds of folks to tell stories of confirmation bias.
Also, typical narcissistic me wants to see any predictions that I might have made.
Very cool and fun project.
for instance, i had been saying (since at least 5 years ago) that full self-driving was at least 15 years away. looking at the state of the tech, i was probably too optimistic, but i'd love to know the mean prediction of the population to see how far offbase i was.
[0]: this is the central thesis of the book wisdom of crowds, and of the many prediction markets it spawned.
Your sentence regex should look for a period followed by whitespace or end-of-input.
You actually underestimated how far it could fall. It was down 89% one year later.
haha
(By the way is there a way to block any custom font/use the system default in safari for iOS)
Truth