Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681 <comment><USER2> 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278).

</comment><comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER4> > 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...](https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-one-of- the-safest-places-for-children-researcher-says/)

<comment><USER5> "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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens)

<comment><USER6> 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?

<comment><USER7> Is it so bad to make guns as hard to own as a car? Simple licensing would go a long way to reduce the risk of guns.

[https://www.vox.com/2019/9/11/20861019/gun-solution- backgrou...](https://www.vox.com/2019/9/11/20861019/gun-solution-background- check-licensing)

<comment><USER4> > Is it so bad to make guns as hard to own as a car?

The ONLY people that say this are the ones that would be (fucking) horrified if we treated guns like cars.

Ok. You are proposing I should be able to buy any gun I want whenever I want regardless of size or capacity, automatic, or loud or silenced for cash without any checks or regulations at all? That the only requirement to use it in public is that I need a license - BUT - that carry license is good in all 50 states?

... that sounds good to me! Let's do it.

Yours is an argument based entirely in ignorance of gun laws. And maybe car laws too.

<comment><USER7> > Ok. You are proposing I should be able to buy any gun I want whenever I want > regardless of size or capacity, automatic, or loud or silenced for cash > without any checks or regulations at all?

What? No.

<comment><USER8> But that's how loosely cars are regulated, and you said you wanted guns regulated like cars. I think what you meant to say is to regulate guns much more strictly than cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> IsaacL nailed it the best

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093)

And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

<comment><USER10> > \- 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.

<comment><USER11> 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.

<comment><USER12> 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. :-)

<comment><USER13> > 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.

I wish companies were under more financial pressure to actually track and mitigate this. (hint hint, carbon taxes)

<comment><USER14> If you run your data centers where electricity is cheap, you're using electricity but not emitting very much carbon dioxide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 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.

<comment><USER16> > 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.

<comment> chalupa-man Netflix was a streaming platform in 2007.

[https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/01/8627/](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...](https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-compatible-video-devices- compared/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748)

<comment> real-hacker We would never know if he is right

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703)

This poster saw it.

<comment><USER19> > 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.

<comment><USER20> Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign claims their data operation is how they won in the Rust Belt.

<comment><USER21> 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.)

<comment><USER20> I can see how one would get that impression based on our media, but it would be an oversimplification to say the least. The history of Hillary Clinton is too complex and long to get into for the purposes of this discussion.

Suffice to say the Trump campaign made a concerted effort to use data to target ads at specific groups in the Rust Belt with the intention of de- legitimizing her as a Presidential candidate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025811)

<comment><USER23> The Roadster got delivered on 2008, right but not a crazy prediction based on those times.

<comment><USER24> 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

<comment><USER23> Model S got unveiled on 2009, the Gov invested/lent in them in 2009 and I remember the whole buzz of having a Tesla. Seems like a lot of people betted on them (pre-orders, government, investors, etc).

Quick search result in that time frame [https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1...](https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2009%2Ccd_max%3A1%2F1%2F2010&tbm=)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 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.

<comment><USER26> 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.

<comment><USER27> 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.

<comment><USER26> > 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.

<comment><USER27> I'm thinking supercompilation might be another part of the equation as long as we're talking extended composition of modules and types whose behavior is totally closed. Having a pipeline that can supercompile when systems are pushed in production even if some compilation time is traded for performance at development (maybe "local" supercompilation for subsystems relevant to a development team?) would be an interesting thing. But I don't know.

<comment><USER28> Fwiw, I agree about supercompilation.

Some have noted that JIT systems perform many of the same things as supercompilation, and it seems reasonable to consider that JIT is part of the equation for optimising performance when systems are pushed to production. We've been doing that for decades now, with increasing sophistication in the details. Profile driven, multiple stages of specialisation and optimisation.

Not quite to the levels of proof systems (and therefore supercompilation as envisioned) yet - there's plenty of room to get better at it - and we need to go there if we want those "zero cost abstractions" across modules that aren't designed for it, often with significant impedance mismatches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Google will be the Microsoft of 1990-2000: scary, dominant, and increasingly > hated (by nerds at least).

That one strikes a certain chord..

</comment><comment><USER30> 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.

<comment><USER31> 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.

<comment><USER32> wow crazy you found this comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > * 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.

</comment><comment><USER34> A lot of doom and gloom for Microsoft in that thread. But Microsoft has fared much better than anyone expected.

<comment><USER35> 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.

<comment><USER36> Surface, Azure, Minecraft, Github, VSCode and the whole renewed developer focus... those seem like pretty strong shifts and not just 'surfing the wave'.

<comment><USER37> They are. Microsoft, especially under Ballmer, was notoriously anti-OSS (open- source). Not only did Satya make the decision to shift the company to be cloud focused, he represented a change of guard when it was critically important to make peace with the open-source community.

Ballmer: Called Linux "Cancer". Literally.

Satya: "We are all in on open-source"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> 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.)

<comment><USER39> If someone saw it coming in 2010 they are extremely rich now :)

<comment><USER40> 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).

<comment><USER41> Or, like me, literally deleted my wallet with 100 ish coins in 'cos I couldn't be bothered finding a USB key.

I though 'oh I'll just mine a few more next week' when I get my new laptop (!!! mining on cpu).

Narrator: He forgot about it.

<comment><USER39> If you still have the old machine, it's not impossible that the deleted wallet is still on the disk and could be recovered using some sort of undelete tool.

<comment><USER28> Good thinking. I'll be happy to supply expertise recovering data from old disk images if this is the case :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > 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.

<comment><USER43> 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.

<comment> chalupa-man It was already a thing, Node launched earlier in 2009 and there had been quite a bit of talk about it on HN already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > 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".

</comment><comment><USER45> 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026022)

<comment><USER46> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> _HN will split._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025709](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 !!

<comment><USER48> Well, there is lobste.rs

<comment><USER49> lobste.rs is invite only which makes it hard for people like me to sign up

<comment><USER50> Feel free to provide me an email at @gerikson on Twitter (DM) and I will send you an invite!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> 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.

"

</comment><comment><USER52> "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

</comment><comment><USER53> 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.

</comment><comment><USER54> 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-...](http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-futurism-has-a- cultural-blindspot-rp)

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

</comment><comment><USER55> 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.

</comment><comment><USER56> 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?

</comment><comment><USER57> 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.

<comment><USER58> To be fair, when I ctrl+f Bitcoin in my actual life there's also 0 results.

<comment><USER59> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> > 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.

<comment><USER61> Yeah basically the entire state of Florida. The Villages is pretty exceptional though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> 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.

</comment><comment><USER63> "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?

<comment><USER64> Good writeup!

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> 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.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm glad we proved this guy wrong today [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748)

</comment><comment><USER66> > -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.

<comment><USER67> 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.

<comment><USER28> 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!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Reading this made me a bit sad. So many people were optimistic, and many predicted exciting things... but few if any of that happened.

<comment><USER69> Hey, it wasn't a terrible decade. We got the iPad!

<comment><USER70> 10 years before that one commenter guessed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Where is the thread for this decade?

<comment><USER72> Someone just started one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> _> 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!

<comment><USER74> 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.

<comment><USER28> 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.

<comment><USER26> You don't _have_ to use full 64-bit pointers for your "pointer-based data structures". You can store indexes into an arena allocation. This is common in languages such as C++ and Rust, and will become increasingly so as 32-bit is less and less used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> > 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.

</comment><comment><USER76> 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.

</comment><comment><USER77> Oh man this is fun. So many prediction we blew past and so many have had 0 progress.

</comment><comment><USER78> Somebody hit up tlrobinson on Twitter and let him know [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025748)

</comment><comment><USER79> 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.

<comment><USER80> > RFID-Everything : Basically NO… not in consumer-land, at least

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

<comment><USER79> 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.

<comment><USER80> I'm guessing that you don't live in Europe.

<comment><USER79> Actually do. Ireland. I do use it every day, and tapping _is_ better than chip-n-pin. I barely remember scanning. But ultimately, it's not a huge change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> 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...

</comment><comment><USER82> Kinda weird how no one saw Cannabis liberalization coming.

</comment><comment><USER83> Wow! The quality of hacker news back then was amazing. So much concentration on technology! So much positive energy. And the predictions were nailed.

</comment><comment><USER84> 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).

</comment><comment><USER85> 2020's 2030 prediction thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278)

</comment><comment><USER86> 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.

<comment><USER87> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> RMS owes someone money.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025795)

<comment><USER89> I don't think it's _the_ RMS

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> 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

</comment><comment><USER91> 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941512).

</comment><comment><USER92> Lots of demographics problems in the western world and hopefully we get ahead of it, unlike our track record with climate change.

</comment><comment><USER93> Wow reading all those predictions sound so foolish! Most were way off, goes to say why long term predictions is so hard.

</comment><comment><USER94> 2010 was not the beginning of a new decade. It was the last year of its decade. Ditto 2020.

There was no year zero.

<comment><USER95> A decade is a span of ten years. Every year is the beginning of a new decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Africa... starvation and primitivity

There are some African countries richer than Eastern European countries.

This sucks...

</comment><comment><USER97> >Facebook will be gone in 5 years

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

</comment><comment><USER98> 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.

</comment><comment><USER99> 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.

</comment><comment><USER100> Fun read but humans are not very good at making predictions.

<comment><USER101> I beg to differ, humans are the best at making predictions. There is nothing better than a human.

<comment><USER102> We're the best, but we're still not good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> \- You still won't be able to talk to your fridge

</comment><comment><USER104> funny they didn't seem to talk a lot about the cloud in these predictions, or did i miss anything?

</comment><comment><USER105> > Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.

Wow. Nailed it.

</comment><comment><USER106> Still no Duke Nukem Forever.

<comment><USER106> Edit: I meant that they got that wrong, but it wasn't an unreasonable prediction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> The first year was year 1, not 0. So the new decade begins next year in 2021

</comment><comment><USER108> well after today's news I'm going with war

<comment><USER109> I fear you may be right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> The death of C# and Java. It's more of a wish than a prediction...

</comment><comment><USER111> Fully immersive VR tech will become the future of gaming.

</comment><comment><USER112> TikTok is gonna go down in flames by dec 2023

</comment><comment><USER113> 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027153)

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

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

</comment><comment><USER113> > 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026088)

</comment><comment><USER114> > 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.

</comment><comment><USER115> 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](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](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025709)

laarc, though laarc failed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'adw [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703)

No explanation needed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'slashed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025702)

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

No explanation necessary.

'jeromec [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026044](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026022)

No explanation needed.

2/2 percentage correct: 100%

'antirez [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025765)

No explanation needed.

1/1 percentage correct: 100%

'rms [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025758](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](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](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](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](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](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](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](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](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](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025740)

Didn't happen.

0/1 percentage correct: 0%

'10ren [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026574](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](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025706)

Entirely wrong, unfortunately.

0/a-bunch percentage correct: 0%

'lallysingh [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025783](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025790)

Entirely wrong.

0/6 percentage correct: 0%

'andrewcooke [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025727](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](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](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](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](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](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025817)

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

.5/1 percentage correct: N/A

</comment><comment><USER116> No one saw Trump coming.

<comment> mark-r 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...](https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/09/23/the-reason-for-trumps- success/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> 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.

<comment><USER118> He will win 2020 unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> \- 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.

</comment><comment><USER120> I think the country is going to become very, very divided.

<comment><USER109> I wish we'd have a moment where the extremity forces people to snap back and cooperate with one another.

<comment><USER121> I figured climate change would be that moment but we have an entire side of the political aisle essentially denying it's even happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> I predict by 2029 Hacker News will be overrun with AI bots and nobody will be to identify them.

<comment> mark-r Are you sure it hasn't happened already?

<comment><USER122> I suppose an army of inept bots could throw me off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> Rise of Dependent Types in general purpose programming: eg. Idris, later something like dependent js/ts.

</comment><comment><USER124> I hope I will get a girlfriend who is in CS major and is better than what I did

</comment><comment><USER125> I predict that people will continue to incorrectly think the new decade starts with the X0 year rather than the X1 year.

</comment><comment><USER126> 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.

</comment><comment><USER87> 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.</comment>


What happened to LendInk? The owner responds. - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-lendink-owner-explains.html

<comment><USER2> Author of the featured blog post here, and a long-time HN member.

I would like to share a few observations about the nature of the independent author community, based on the Internet discussions that preceded the suspension of LendInk (see <https://www.facebook.com/pages/LendInk/124974504234948> and check out the threads and comments from August 2), as well as my own experience as an ebook author:

* Even though indie authors are using the Kindle platform to publish their work, many are not aware of the "fine print" governing their participation in the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program or KDP Select.

* Technology skills are very focused in this community. Authors are generally very good at using Internet discussion boards and other Web channels to promote their work. But not everyone understands the differences between reading devices (which are significant) or how secondary software features work.

* On the production side, many authors are turning to services like Smashwords or freelancers to handle the conversion of Word files to the formats that Amazon/Sony/BN/etc. accept for upload.

* There is a lot of sensitivity around price (see the comment thread starting here: [http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/03/barry-joe-scott-turow....](http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/03/barry-joe-scott-turow.html?showComment=1331421267759#c8276460451533121089) ) and free giveaways (like KDP Select, <http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/KDPSelect> ). This translates to intense worry about whether authors are losing out or getting cheated in some way.

In my opinion, the factors listed above as well as the general reluctance of people to read through EULAs and long FAQs disassociates authors from the processes and policies that govern how their work is distributed, marketed, and sold. This, in turn, can lead to serious misunderstandings.

I am not excusing the witch hunt that took place, but am simply trying to identify the factors that led to LendInk being suspended.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been reading the comments on Twitter and Facebook by book authors that wanted this site shut down. What's surprising is that even if they're convinced the site wasn't hosting their books and was sending people to Amazon, they're still against it -- they feel they agreed to allow people to lend their ebooks to friends and family, but not to people they met through a lending club website.

<comment><USER4> > they feel they agreed to allow people to lend their ebooks to friends and > family, but not to people they met through a lending club website.

They're probably just going by what they feel is 'normal' with "real books", which isn't an entirely unfair starting point.

<comment><USER5> Spirit vs. letter.

It's no surprise this sort of thing would pop up. It's not unlike the problems that arise due to things like car sharing and airbnb, when insurance companies and landlords get involved.

Insurance companies are probably willing to let it slide if you let someone else who's insured drive your car, and landlords generally allow you to have guests. But lending your car to complete strangers, for money, and letting complete strangers stay at your apartment, essentially short-term sublets, are not really what they are prepared to tolerate, at least not without altering the terms and rates they charge for coverage or rent.

<comment><USER6> > _Insurance companies are probably willing to let it slide if you let someone > else who's insured drive your car_

In the UK insurance companies will go out of their way to deny claims.

<comment><USER5> Probably makes sense, since it's relatively easier for the car to be spirited off to mainland Europe and beyond.

<comment><USER7> That's not the case. The difference in driving laws (right vs left lane) makes it fairly difficult to move cars between GB and mainland Europe, because cars have to be physically modified.

Insurance companies are just out to make as much money as possible; in Europe their life is hard because they don't enjoy the ridiculous margins from crazy markets like US healthcare, they have to obey stricter regulation, and suffer from heavy rates of fraud in many countries.

<comment><USER5> Eh? It's easy to move cars between GB and Europe, because there are car- carrying Chunnel trains and ferries that help you do so.

EBay Germany has plenty of RHD cars listed from German sellers.

And what side the steering is on doesn't really matter if you're just going to chop it up for parts.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but this is not comparable to cars being "spirited off" across the continent, which don't need to be split up or modified: I can move a car from Prague to Paris and get full whack for it. This is not the case for the UK market, which enjoys a little bit of a barrier compared to the rest of the EU. Proof of this is that the secondhand market is still very much alive, because car prices are higher than elsewhere, since there is less pressure to align to cross-European prices. That is not the case in, say, France or Italy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No surprise here. I made a site last year that did almost the same thing as LendInk, but I decided to shut it down after Amazon made it very clear that they didn't want me doing that.

From what I understand, there were a half dozen or so other sites that would facilitate ebook lending, and we were all pressured by Amazon similarly. Most of those sites are no longer around.

<comment><USER9> If you read the article you'd see that this site was not shut down because of Amazon at all.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I know that Amazon didn't shut them down, a bunch of C&D letters from authors did.

My only point was that Amazon does not support people who run these ebook lending sites, and I don't think there's much of a future in it.

<comment><USER10> Of course Amazon doesn't support it-- they, like the C&Ding authors, subscribe to the kool-aid of "everyone that was lending these books would have been a sale".

<comment><USER11> Not only do they support it, they actually pay a higher royalty rate to authors who enable lending (making the book lendable is one of the requirements for the 70% royalty tier). If you make the book an Amazon exclusive, you even get paid something when the book is lent (at least for the period of exclusivity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The difference is a matter of scale. I believe the loaning of books is allowed the same way you could loan out a physical book to a friend, etc. Loaning out a digital book to n people is just not the same. Likewise, libraries, which do loan out physical books to n people (but still less than is possible with a digital loan), pay more for their books for this very reason. If you want to loan out your digital book to n people, then you are going to have to pay a lot more for it (and that is just not part of the current equation).

<comment><USER13> IIRC, you can only loan a Kindle book exactly once and to one person.

They're being unreasonable and pushing people who cared enough to to jump through that to just buy or pirate it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, each buyer can only loan each book 1 time. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200549320) And only on books where the author explicitly allows, which makes this takedown even sillier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some guy made a compilation of the author comments he could find on FB.

[http://www.2abd.com/politics/copyright/lendink-taken-down- by...](http://www.2abd.com/politics/copyright/lendink-taken-down-by-asshole- indie-authors/)

<comment><USER15> How can these two clueless authors be informed? Should we form a similar mob and boycott them? Send an explanatory email to each? How?

<comment><USER16> Seeing as a number of the authors have since deleted FB posts / Tweets related to this, I would assume they know that maybe they were wrong and are trying to distance themselves (rather than do the honorable thing and admit that they were idiots that reveled feeling righteous while in joining in on a witch hunt).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I must admit the biggest thing I took away from this is how disappointed I was at the sheer refusal from some authors to fact check, read up or even visit the site. One apologised on Facebook as they joined the angry mass without understanding the site at all, and now they do they retracted their previous complaint.

EULAs are long unwieldily things, but if you're publishing digitally understand what terms you agreed too before raging out at some slight.

<comment><USER18> The fact is that authors just don't understand that they are needed less. There is a transformation from printing on dead trees to the freedom that the Internet gives people without copy restrictions. Its cheaper to build a computer network than it is too print a book in many places!

<comment><USER17> I must admit I'm a big fan of autogenerated novellas. But I'm going to guess you actually mean publishers not authors, which is at the moment still not true for several reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Let's see what we can do to address these issues, 1) get a hosting company outside the US, and that is hardened and resilient enough to shrug off frivolous C&D letters. 2) get a PO BOX address, or just use a mail forwarding service outside California so you can make money on the affiliate program again. Just look at the grey area sites (Torrents) to see how it is done.

<comment><USER6> I see grey area sites that have had years of harsh and aggressive treatment. See, for examples, pirate bay (prison sentences etc); oink (years of legal stuff ([http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-found-not-guilty-walks- fr...](http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-found-not-guilty-walks- free-100115/\))); demonoid shut down; and MegaUpload. (Whether these sites needed legal action is another discussion. I mention them here merely as evidence that it's not as easy as hosting something outside the US.)

Being outside the US does nothing to make a person immune to US laws and law enforcement.

<comment><USER16> The issue isn't law enforcement though. He wasn't breaking any laws. He was just being harassed. It costs money to defend against a million lawsuits, even if they all get thrown out of court. The site was basically DDoS'd via the legal system. He wasn't even riding a grey area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It never would have lasted anyways. The author kept the site running in the hopes that he would eventually be able to collect Amazon affiliate revenue. I imagine that Amazon would have cut the site off very quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like he used to make Amazon affiliate revenue, right up until they cut off all affiliates in California over a sales tax collection dispute.

<comment><USER20> But I bet Amazon was not aware of what he was doing at the time. Amazon has made it quite clear that they do not support sites such as LendInk.

<comment><USER16>
      > Amazon has made it quite clear

A link would be useful to this discussion, because

      > they do not support sites such as LendInk

does not make it clear whether this just means they don't actively support them, or if it means that they would _actively_ reject them from the affiliate program over it.

Amazon doesn't 'support' blogs on various topics, but many of them may be on the affiliate program.

<comment><USER8> FWIW, I ran a site last year very similar to LendInk, and was told by Amazon to make changes that they wanted within 48 hours or they would close my Associates account and Product Advertising API access. They do keep the Kindle lending club sites on a tight leash.

It is possible to run a site like this and stay on Amazon's good side, but not easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Isn't it just called LendInk? Like, ink that you put on paper?

And yeah, it's a shame. Obviously the authors didn't realize what they agreed to (or at least the implications of that). They should have some action taken against them for false DMCA notices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, fixed, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, am I to understand that these "artists" and "publishers", who seem to not know much about their own terms of business, are the type of people that Kim Dotcom was raided like a major terror suspect on behalf of?

If so, something is insanely wrong here. Very wrong. Sounds very much like this was a very legit business taken down by pure paranoid ignorance.

<comment><AUTHOR> LendInk was taken down by an ignorant mob of authors (some of the participants have since apologized). The MAFIAA is a calculating, organized group of distributors. I don't think it's the same thing. Either way it's pretty clear that the law, copyright holders' expectations, and users' expectations are nowhere near lining up.

<comment><USER22> Of course its not exactly the same thing. I was looking at it in a global context. And globally people refer to it as "piracy". I think there has to be parity across the board. If not, every one ends up looking silly. In mass media terms, these subtilties are not noticed, it all gets wrapped up as the same thing. In some ways it weakens the anti piracy arguments when yet again they, as a mass, get it so badly wrong. See where I'm coming from? People will point to this case and say, "see, these idiots are acting irrationally". Tar, brush and all that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nobody is pointing out Twitter's and Facebook's role in this affair. Sure, they are just tools (pun intended), but their very nature (short statuses broadcast directly to social network) makes rumors and heresay take on more sinister proportions. Everyone praises the services when they enable Tunisian or Iranian protestors or supporters of the Oatmeal, but there must be thousands of these "minor" witch hunts going on in schools and other small communities such as that of indie writers.

ilamont's top comment sums up the set of circumstances (I would be less generous and call it a "mentality") that led to all these knee-jerk reactions. Heck, it didn't use to be called a "vanity press" for nothin'.

</comment><comment><USER24> I bet that author that's featured in the article didn't even try and see what's actually happening with LendLink.

I wonder if next they're gonna go for Amazon because they're posting reviews.

<comment><USER25> There has been a stack of kerfluffles over at goodreads, specifically featuring authors and reviewers.

[http://cuddlebuggery.com/2012/01/the-first-five-days-on- good...](http://cuddlebuggery.com/2012/01/the-first-five-days-on-goodreads/)

[http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by- topic/childrens/childr...](http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by- topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/50268-should-authors-and- agents-weigh-in-on-citizen-reviews-.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it possible to sue all of those people for defamation? Even if they believe that LendLink is a pirate site, they have a plethora of evidence to the contrary. The law should punish them for attempting to destroy someone over their refusal to either: 1) do 2 seconds of basic research or 2) accept the truth that presents itself to them.

<comment><USER3> Not unless you can prove they were lying and acting in bad faith. It's not illegal to defame someone based on a falsely held but reasonable belief.

<comment><USER26> Unless they are in the UK. The libel laws in the UK are pretty crazy where you need to prove that the statements are true.

<comment><USER27> Strictly speaking I believe that if the defamation is published in the UK (including available on the internet and one person in the UK reading it) then the UK courts might still have a go even where neither the author or the defamed are UK based.

It is however an expensive path to bring a case (and defend one) and damages aren't always massive so it isn't really worthwhile unless you have money to burn scaring people away from telling stories (true or not) about you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Olivia Bland's Web Applications UK Interview 'humiliating' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-47071423 <comment><AUTHOR> The antagonist's non-apology apology is masterful: [https://twitter.com/UncleThargy/status/1090498634809049093/p...](https://twitter.com/UncleThargy/status/1090498634809049093/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1090498634809049093&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fuk- england-manchester-47071423)

Pretty much a case study in how not to apologise.</comment>


Meet the Next Billionaires - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18628572/site/newsweek <comment><USER2> Wasn't this submitted long ago on on ycnews ?

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Wasn't this submitted long ago on on ycnews ? ..."_

Might have been (same article with different url), show me? Now if hackernews.yc had a search function I'd look for it and not bother but as it is I have to go to google, then search something like _[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fycombinat...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fycombinator.com+Meet+the+Next+Billionaires) _ Maybe I should add this submission check to my sub-que software before I submit. It would scale much easier if this or similiar searches could be provided at submission. But even then there is no guarantee that this will work, so I don't bother.</comment></comment>


Video filmed at four trillion frames per second captures light in a flash - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01625-5 <comment><USER2> This is more impressive than previous claims of trillion FPS cameras, because it captures it all sequentially from a single event. Other such claims were based on capturing one frame at a time of a repeating event with different time delays.

<comment><USER3> You could use an array of cameras and capture the same event at different times

<comment><USER4> You see that light pulse that they captured?

Your camera synchronization signal in the wire is traveling about 2/3 of that speed. Can you imagine all the cameras in your array receiving and interpreting that signal at the same time?

<comment><USER5> You pretrigger the cameras while accounting for the delay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm confused how you could film a light pulse this way. It seems that the light pulse would itself have to be emitting light somehow. I'll assume it was travelling through a gas that scattered it.

<comment><USER7> "The imaging system captures a light pulse (in a slowed video) as it passes through a material, exits the material (at the dashed yellow line) and bounces off a mirror (solid yellow line) back into the material."

<comment><USER8> Is this trying to imply that it is capturing the scattering off of the Frenel diffraction? I don't understand at first glance how this paper is capturing the light without having a sensor in the path of propagation.

<comment><USER7> The light is being put through a translucent medium, like shining a laser through milk or smoke or something, so you can see the scattered light. Conventional/non-QM-based light physics can handle this situation.

If you mean, how are they seeing the non-scattered light, you are correct that they are not.

<comment><USER9> > light is being put through a translucent medium

at certain points, the light pulse seems to "leap ahead" in fits and starts on its journey. is that because of the way the medium scatters the light or something?

<comment><USER10> I think that it's because the speed of light inside the translucent medium (left side) is lower than in air (right side).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd be curious to see the dual-slit experiment done using this camera as the "observer".

I'm not sure it'd yield anything we don't already "know" \- but it might be worth trying just because.

<comment><USER12> I wondered exactly the same thing (see my other comment). However, I am not sure if they can actually film single photons. My school physics are a bit rusty, but iirc, quantum effects will not be relevant if you actually fire a light "impulse" consisting of many, many photons. However, as I have asked in my previous comment, it would be interesting if you could actually see the light impulse being "split up" and interfering with itself.

<comment><USER13> You can detect single photons. There are off the shelf detectors for available for experimenting with photon entanglement and parametric down conversion. We had one at my university.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_counting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_counting)

<comment><USER14> You can't make movies with them though... It would make an expensive camera. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _The imaging system captures a light pulse (in a slowed video)_

I like that they remind us that the video is slowed down and that time doesn't actually move at 10 picoseconds per second.

<comment><USER16> If it did move at 10 picoseconds per second, how would we know?

Whoa. _Stares at hand_

<comment><USER17> Makes me think of those videos of house plants, which we normally think of as still objects. But with a time-lapse video, you can see them moving around a bunch during 24 hours.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0I3174S8Xg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0I3174S8Xg)

<comment><USER18> Heck, with the right plants you can see them grow over the course of minutes: [https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2018/03/29/seeing-plants- mo...](https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2018/03/29/seeing-plants-move/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article caused me to remember something I heard on a Youtube video and wanted to follow up on. Essentially, is there (and if so what is) the framerate of the universe? It makes logical sense to have a minimum bundle of time based on Planck's constant, so I did some googling and found the answer (I have not checked this math)[1]:

> _The Planck time is 5.39 × 10-44 seconds. No measurable time can be shorter > than that according to quantum physics._

Converting to FPS, that gives us:

> _One thousand eight hundred and fifty-five billion billion billion billion > frames per second. 18.55 septillion FPS!_

So if like me you wondered if a trillion FPS is close to the maximum possible frame rate in the universe, the answer is nope!

[1]: [http://www.librador.com/2009/01/16/The-frame-rate-of-the- uni...](http://www.librador.com/2009/01/16/The-frame-rate-of-the-universe/)

<comment><USER20> Don't confuse "our math breaks down at this point" with "it can't physically happen".

Planck time is the time at which, if you want to do physics, you have to take into account quantum mechanics and gravity (i.e. understand quantum gravity). Something we don't know how to do. But it doesn't necessarily mean time is discrete. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time#Physical_significa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time#Physical_significance)

<comment><USER21> Does the same reasoning apply to the Plank length or is that one discreet?

<comment><USER22> As I understand it, currently everything points to space and time (really, spacetime) not being discrete. I'm copying and pasting a previous reply I made the last time this came up.

\---

I'm no physicist, but the layman explanation I've heard is that the concepts of Planck length and Planck time do not imply that spacetime is discretized into little "voxels"; instead these quantities are just limits on the uncertainty of any possible measurement.

As I understand it there are two contributing facts:

a) the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that there's a tradeoff between certainty in position vs momentum, so if you're more certain in a particle's position you're less certain of its momentum. (For photons, momentum is proportional to frequency, i.e. wavelength, and frequency is proportional to energy.)

b) By mass-energy equivalence, anything with energy has mass, therefore higher frequency photons are more "massive". A single photon of sufficiently high frequency would form a black hole.

Putting those two together, to measure distances accurately you need higher and higher frequency photons with shorter and shorter wavelengths. For example, radar creates blurry images at ~5cm wavelengths, while ordinary photographs can be razor sharp with wavelengths of only ~500nm. The Planck length is just the wavelength at which the photon would have so much energy that it would collapse into a black hole and break our current mathematical models. That's why it's nonsensical--with current models--to talk about lengths smaller than a Planck length, but it doesn't mean that space itself is quantized. Similar argument for time.

(Also, the same logic applies to other particles like electrons, protons, and even up to macroscopic items like baseballs; everything has a wavelength...)

<comment><USER23> Semi-related question: if photons can have various frequencies, does that mean protons can have various frequencies?

<comment><USER24> AKA temperatures?

<comment><USER23> I think temperature is a property based on the average kinetic energy of particles in a system. The frequency of a proton, I imagine, would be an intrinsic property.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> CalTech films light at the speed of 10 trillion frames a second! The "Slow Mo Guys" went to caltech to take a look: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ)

<comment><USER26> I used to work on HP way back in 1991 on equipment that measure timing of signal to 7.9 pico second resolution. This is very cool.

Love to see an ifixit tear down video on that CalTech camera. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm blown away by this. If I'm understanding this correctly, this picture[1] is light traveling for a distance of about 3/8ths of an inch.

[1] [https://media.nature.com/w800/magazine- assets/d41586-019-016...](https://media.nature.com/w800/magazine- assets/d41586-019-01625-5/d41586-019-01625-5_16737810.gif)

<comment><USER28> Wait, the light is all incoherent before it passes the dotted line, then coherent until it bounces and passes back through? What's going on?

<comment><USER29> I believe the area between the dotted and solid lines is a mirror. The blob of light is visible because it's passing through some medium that scatters it, then when it disappears it has been absorbed by the mirror, then we see it reemitted shortly after.

<comment><USER30> The solid line is the mirror, the dotted line is the edge of the scattering medium. I assume there is air or vacuum in between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how the authors feel that their work is so good that the website for Nature has a piece on it but not good enough to be published in a Nature journal.

<comment><USER32> Maybe the authors didn't want to submit to Nature?

Also, not a physicist, but my understanding is that PRL is prestigious in its own right.

<comment><USER33> When I worked in a physics lab a PRL publication was seen as a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, looking at the video, I am curious: is there a video where they fire a light impulse against a double-slit experiment setup? Would it be possible to see the light being "split up" and interfering with itself?

<comment><USER34> You can't see the light not going into the camera (obviously) so what you see is some light from the beam being reflected into the sensor. You can't take a picture of a photon, if that makes sense.

So in the double slit experiment you could see the path the light took only if you allowed for a portion of that light to be reflected towards the camera. But then if you did that you wouldn't end up with anything particularly new or interesting as far as I can imagine.

<comment><USER12> Of course, you are right! I intuitively thought of the light impulse emitting further photons in the direction of the camera, which makes no sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can anybody comment on what is meant by a "frame" here?

My intuition tells me that what we consider a "frame" in our daily experience (24 up through maybe 144) would be pretty different from what this "frame" would be, in terms of how it is captured and how it is subsequently rendered.

Any ideas?

<comment><USER7> We do not usually consider a frame duration to measure a length, because for most of the durations we use the frame's size is absurdly large in practical terms, ranging from thousands of miles to larger than the diameter of the earth. So we can take a shortcut of identifying a frame as some area from the camera's point of view identifying an infinite, instantaneous volume in front of us, and don't consider the fact that light isn't instantaneous and in fact has a transmission time.

Frames this short mean that there is a sort of volumetric aspect to what is being catured. From the point of the camera, when light collection begins an area sweeps out in front of the camera and back in time at the speed of light, and when the light collection stops, the end of the area sweeps out from the camera lens in the same direction. The result of this is a spherical shell volume travelling backwards in time that represents the spacetime locations that can emit light and appear in the frame [1]. The resulting picture is an integration of the photons emitted in this 4D spacetime volume, in the direction of the camera, projected onto a 2D image.

(That's assuming a point-like camera and instantaneously turning the camera on and off; in reality it'll be fuzzier but the principle holds.)

The difference is that at these incredible fast speeds, the resulting 4D spacetime volume is of human size in most directions in the places we care about [2], measured in human-sized measuring units like "centimeters" rather than "light-seconds". Normally we can neglect thinking about this volume because we simply spray so "much" out that we don't have to think much about capture exactly what we want, in much the same way that in normal day-to-day life we tend to act as if lightspeed is simply infinite. In this case, we actually have to think about it to get what we want.

A similar effect can be seen in network equipment, for what it's worth; at the highest network speeds, we've now significantly passed the point where a given bit being transmitted is now a human-sized fraction of a wire. If you could "snapshot" a 100Gb network cable, you could see bits on the wire. If I'm getting my math right, each bit is on the order of 2-3 centimeters, give or take the medium not being fully light-speed.

[1]: It may be more intuitive for a moment to instead imagine that the camera is starting to emit the shell at the time that it is turned on, and stops when turned off, _forward_ in time, as that creates a more intuitive initial image of what-seems-to-be-cause _preceding_ what-seems-to-be-effect. Imagine the camera emitting light instead of collecting it. It may be easier to then imagine this shell going out farther and farther, getting larger as it goes (and the light inside dimming as it has to fill that volume with the same amount of energy it started with), indefinitely out into the universe. But since the camera is _receiving_ instead af _transmitting_ photons, the reality is the same image, just with time reversed; as the time goes farther back, the shell is farther away from the camera and larger.

[2]: Technically it extends all the way in the direction the camera is all the way out in space back to the Big Bang or the CMB or something, but unless you're deliberately photographing space, and why you'd do that with this camera I have no idea, you don't have to worry about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This technology could give us the opportunity to verify a ton of our physical and chemical models with direct observation. The demo may not be exciting but if they can scale it down you can expect a lot of exciting discoveries. I can't wait to see what we're wrong about.

</comment><comment><USER37> > _The imaging system captures a light pulse (in a slowed video)_

Good to know that's not the actual speed of light!

Anyway, it looks like the photons are "crawling" by their patterns of speed, rather than traveling at a fixed speed.

<comment><USER38> I would think that effect is due to impurities or lack of uniformity in the material which causes some spots to light up more than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is there any explanation for why it is so jerky?

<comment><USER27> Sampling rate isn't high enough is what I'd imagine, even at 4 trillion FPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Looks like a matplotlib chart turned into an animation.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've had conversations with a guy who works at one of the companies that makes high-speed cameras. One of the interesting thing to come out of those conversations is that below a certain threshold of frame duration (which is related to, but not necessarily the recriprocal of the frame rate) a camera with that capability becomes subject to ITAR, because supposedly said camera could be used to develop nuclear weapons.

My intuition is that the camera described in this article would be subject to ITAR were it developed in a western nation. But, I doubt China gives any fucks about that.</comment>