skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lot's of good stuff here, but I'll admit I can't remember a single "prediction" of my own. I just thought everything would keep going in the same direction, faster CPUs, faster network, cheaper disk and RAM, more e-commerce and more information exchange were the expectations I can recall.

While we're reminiscing, the thing I remember the most from the late 90's is that it seemed no one knew what they were doing (or perhaps it was just me). The Internet opened up such a frontier in computing, for effectively hobbyists, as I guess we'll never see again. Perhaps that's why I don't recall thinking about what computing would look like in the 21st century--there was too much to be done right in front of my face!

EDIT: There's a mention or two of thin clients. I think only Sun thought that would work :).

Oh ok, I can think of one that actually worked out: Linux on commodity hardware in data centers. It became clear by 98 or so that the combination of Apache (httpd) on a bunch of cheap Linux boxen behind an expensive LB would tear down the Sun/IBM scale up model fairly easily due to both cost reduction and an improved resiliency. Of course there were MySQL bottlenecks to work through, but then memcache landed and pushed that off a cycle. Then there were the 64-bit AMD chips and a large bump in RAM density that pushed it back another. And then I guess true distributed computing landed.
There is a lot of that on HN whenever Tesla is the subject.
I don't disagree, but the point is to make catching the easy stuff easy(it's not currently), and raise the alarm faster for the hard stuff(which is sometimes not even possible now).
> > one needs the freedom of doing research, free access to information, Internet, thus exposure to "western"/civilized values, human rights, etc

> What are you even talking about?

Charitably, I assume they're talking about something like [0], although calling that ""western"/civilized values" is giving western civilization more credit than it deserves if recent sociopolitics (Facebook included) is any indication.

0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...
LiDAR is not better in worse weather conditions. LiDAR performance degrades in rain and snow. That’s where something like radar is better. The Tesla get is that humans drive with vision so they should be able to as well. Also every other self driving solution must solve the vision problem also in order to be successful. LiDAR doesn’t tell you that it’s a bag on the road vs a raccoon. So the question is that once you solve the vision problem, do you still need LiDAR for any meaningful impact?
> Computer perf was doubling from transistors getting smaller. But transistors can't get smaller than an atom. What did y'all expect would save you and keep things going?

We are nowhere near an atom well into 2005 at least, but things were getting pipelined and there was a ton of SRAM on each die, there were improvements to fetch pipelines (well, SPECTRE and friends really), everything was happening as fast as it could with out-of-order pipelines, with prefetch and every other speedup out there including auto-vec.

The "how big is an atom?" is sort of post-2010 thinking, at least the way I saw it happen.

Modems was one place where this sort of thing I saw personally happen - 9600 baud modems to 56kbps happened so fast and it almost looked it would keep going that way (Edge was 115kbps, now I can't even do a page load over it) with DSL suddenly dropping in to keep the same copper moving even faster again.
I check threads first, got a few pages deep to keep up on the slower conversations that happen.

Then I check the main page, and go to item 300

Then I check "new"

Somewhere in there I check the price of bitcoin, even though I have none, and check email, etc.

Then I go check other places in a loop... it's been a boring year, and my physical activity tolerance is near zero, so I have a lot of time to waste.
> It’s already about 10x.

It is not from your data alone. It maybe, but the data is not from a controlled experiment.

Because:

1. Autopilot disengages in dangerous/ambiguous situations.
2. The set of users with autopilot is different from those without.
Technically. It just comes down to federal enforcement.
Does your email get delivered? If it does, then they do monitor their logs.
You're right that those engineers would jump ship: their primary reason to stay (pay) evaporates into thin air. But more importantly, if Amazon wants to keep them, they have to do one of two things: issue more stock, or compensate with better cash salaries.

Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issuing more stock dilutes ownership. Both solutions will push downward on stock price.

And of course, if the stock price drops, that completes the feedback loop...pushing more engineers out, with even more costly retention measures.

Amazon has successfully grown in mind boggling ways, and they might continue growing for the foreseeable future. But the way they have structured incentives, it seems to me that if Amazon has a negative shock to the stock price, it could quickly death spiral into a threat to the whole company, with a simple feedback loop that causes all of their engineering talent to jump ship.
Man I see some really neat concepts in operating systems that were created in the 80s and 90s and somehow we got stuck with a handful of Unix-likes and Windows with small parts of operating systems of the past frankensteined in occasionally.
Most applications would be distributed as bytecode (e.g. compiled Java or similar) and not as native code, commodifying hardware. You could swap your stuff over to a totally different CPU architecture and barely notice.

The Internet would be a lot less centralized than it has become with a lot more peer-to-peer traffic.

The Internet would be very disruptive to political systems and large corporations, promoting a lot more small scale DIY and anarchistic type stuff. (Standard issue 90s techno-libertarianism... we did not understand network effects.)

I thought the Internet would decentralize us physically too, making it possible to do the same work from some 'holler in West Virginia as the middle of Manhattan. (I still don't count this one out. COVID pushed us a little further in this direction. This is more a cultural thing than a technical thing, and culture changes slowly.)

C and C++ would be dead. Nobody would write in memory-unsafe languages anymore and garbage collection would be ubiquitous. We'd probably have type systems that caught a lot of bugs too. Rust is finally delivering on the latter, so this may eventually come to pass.

CPU frequencies would continue increasing, or would at least level off at a higher frequency than they have. I would have guessed 10ghz or so since beyond that the speed of light vs the size of the die becomes an issue.

AI would remain very far off. I did not imagine self-driving cars until ~2050 or so. The 90s was still the "AI winter."

Apple would be dead by now.

X86 would be dead by now. I never would have imagined it would have been possible to get this kind of performance out of that hairball of an instruction set.

Spinning disk would be dead. (It is on PCs and mobile devices, but I mean everywhere.)

I didn't predict mobile at all. I would have said such devices are too small to have good UIs. How would you use something with a tiny screen like that for anything but maybe texting?

I thought we'd all have at least a gigabit (full duplex) at home by now.

I was really pessimistic on space, at least in the near-mid term future. I didn't expect to see humans still in space by 2010-2020, let alone something like SpaceX.

I was really pessimistic on energy. By now I would have predicted we'd be well into a global depression brought on by fossil fuel exhaustion. We'd be deploying nuclear fission as fast as possible to keep the grid up, but cars and airplanes would become extremely expensive to operate (thinking ~$20/gal gas). We would have reduced mobility but we'd all be connected.

I wasn't concerned about climate change because of course we would run out of cheap fossil fuels before that would become a really big issue.

... can probably think of more.
> Living in Europe and traveling by train for 7/8 hours every two months for work. What kind of shitty train does only 50mph?

There are legs of the train that go above 100mph. But all-in-all, once freight traffic and other issues are considered, you're averaging no better than 50mph on US trains.

As a sibling-comment says: US freight gets priority in our country. The US doesn't really have a passenger rail system, we have a freight rail system that happens to sometimes have passenger rail as a 2nd citizen.
You actually nailed all the ones everyone missed, just missed the brand name.

What's your prediction for the next 20 years?
> multiple accounts with different passwords for the same email address

Amazon (retail) does this too. My wife's email address can log into two different accounts depending on what password you use.
> I think each employer would need to make their own decision.

I agree. But the decision should be based on reliable information. What's more, I would say it should be based on reliable information that is related to the person's job performance.

> I think your critique really points away from 'cancel culture' and towards a more robust set of employment protections.

To the extent that "cancel culture" has an impact on people's employment, the two are related. Of course a company isn't going to come right out and say "we fired this person because we were afraid of being shamed on social media". That doesn't mean there isn't causation involved. Would Bradley have been fired if there hadn't been a social media firestorm? If someone had just privately informed Wizards of the Coast (or any other company he was doing artwork for) about what Bradley had done in the past? That's the key question, and I'm not sure it's addressable by more robust employment protections, since there's no way to prove causation even if it's there.
This is purely speculation and observation but I had to disable all the anti-telemetry hacks on my (aging) W10 gaming desktop and I noticed a marked increase in latency in everything from opening a folder to launching simple applications. Once I re-enabled all the patches the latency seem to vanish.

I have no data or hard evidence to back any of this up so take it with a large grain of salt.
To some, Apple Daily represents democratic values such as a free press. Others view it as tabloid trash. I see it as an important tool of innovation in media. Lai pushed the envelope for Chinese language media, taking newsgathering and publishing far further than peer publications in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Some of his innovations - such as 3D news event simulations that Lai's Next Media began publishing in the 2000s - made an impact far beyond Hong Kong and Taiwan (https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTOE6AS04Q20101129)

It's sad to see this entrepreneurial news venture come to an end like this. It's criminal that Lai and his top editors have been thrown in jail.
> Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application.

I’ve seen this with tools like Zapier. I know many non-technical people that put together amazing workflows just piecing things together with webhooks and similar tools.
my @result = map { blah blah blah with $_ } @data;

I became a Perl developer at the tail end of the 90's. I learned a lot of functional development and Lisp before I had any idea what they were.
Youtube is awesome for that kind of stuff. You can learn almost anything (that doesn't offend the censors).
was it a talking staple?
It seems as if the people gobbling up the "Tesla has the data! Autopilot will keep getting better!" line have never trained a neural network in their life. Models converge. Loss stops decreasing, regardless of more incoming data. Extreme manual data cleaning effort becomes required to prevent overfitting. Model architecture has to change and hyper parameters have to be tweaked. Then you're back at square one as far as testing goes if you change any of those things.

The notion that Tesla's model HAS to keep improving simply because they will be able to pile on more (unlabeled!) data is laughably false. And, in fact, quite insulting to the intelligence of even the most casual ML engineers.
While I agree that it can easily be "strings all the way down", as often the way folks make spark testable is only slightly more advanced than using views in a sql world. Add in an understanding of windowing functions, and some trivial assertions on expected query results go a long way.
Microsoft Photos also loads noticeably faster than Excel for me. Mail (the default Windows app) also loads faster than Excel. Edge loads faster than Excel.

Your statement was:

> I always like to remind folks that it takes longer to open calculator - or windows terminal - than to open excel.

but anecdotally this does not hold out for me. Not even close.
Last bastion of anti-establishment (CCP) press.
There is so much ignorance about apartments in Australia as well. I moved in to one recently after living in the suburbs my whole life and knowing no one in an apartment. Basically everyone tried to tell me it was a horrible idea and it would be super noisy, annoying neighbors, "shoebox", etc.

I did it anyway and I can't believe how everything I was told was wrong. With the high quality construction and double glazed windows, I have never heard such a level of silence. I keep the windows open because its so quiet you would go insane. It was a month before I even worked out the neighboring apartment was even occupied when I saw them exit at the same time as me. I have never heard a single sound from them.

And the best part is how liberating it is to live without needing a car. I have just walked everywhere and only use the car to visit my parents but I will likely get rid of it soon and have them come here instead.
Yeah that was super interesting and when I listened to the recording the first thing I thought of was the high frequency (well, relatively speaking of course) clicking sounds dolphins and some other cetaceans make. Always wondered if there was a connection there when brain information is translated “in the raw”.
I live in Quebec and can speak French and English fluently.

The people of Quebec are wonderful and very friendly (seriously); especially in the Montreal area where I live..

However, there is a difference in being a proud of your culture and shoving it down other people's throats.

These things piss off the majority of us in Quebec because the government is wasting taxes of hard working people. They should spend it instead on infrastructure, education and healthcare..

Frankly such moves don't even help give expand the culture. The government hardly support the authors, musicians and other artists.

They don't attempt to make Quebec a welcoming place for all, they double down and add even more roadblocks for outsiders to get more insights on its great culture..
I always expected/hoped for more diversity in the CPU space. Instead, the alternatives sorta died one by one. (After learning how hard semiconductor factories are to build/revamp this was maybe foreseeable.)

Did anybody have 5 Ghz as the "max" cpu frequency on their bingo cards?

Actually, I remember touring an Intel fab. around 99/00. The guide (an engineer) was pretty sold they were "going to soon max out silicon for CPUs and have to move to germanium" based chips. (Apparently it's too expensive to this day.)

Older, I seem to remember Feynman being pretty optimistic about quantum computers? But that might just have been my takeaway.
Exactly, I believe the term comes from Aristotele's work "τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά", literally "the after the physics", which may have just had a very practical meaning: writings that come after the physics writings.
The idea of WSL would have been laughable back then. I'm really curious what other unthinkable things will happen in the next 30 years.
Ah, I see now. Sorry I didn't understand that when I replied. On re-reading your comment, that is on me. You were clear.

Sorry if that term offends I didn't realize it did.

Here we don't have "Free Speech." As such, we have freedom of expression in our bill of rights. "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form." So to use the term "Free Speech" in New Zealand can be seen as an attempt to advocate for an American version of free speech. Many are actively against that.

That said, I'm sure many simply want to place new boundaries on speech and feel the result still maintains free speech. To them, I can see how it would be offensive to be accused of being against free speech.

Also, thank you for your willingness to get to the bottom of this. You have opened my eyes to how my comment could have been read. HN is a much better environment.
Long term, the fix is to push wages up so single earners can support a family and a stay at home partner. Short term, don’t have kids if you can’t afford expensive daycare and need both incomes to break even.
Which bank account would you like your ¥0.50 sent to?
Notwithstanding the popular stereotype of the profligate American credit card user, personal debt is much higher in many European countries than in the US.

Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Portugal, Finland, Spain, Greece, Belgium, and the UK all run higher household debt than Americans -- much higher in the case of the ones earlier on the list.

Source: https://www.oecd.org/sdd/fin-stats/statisticalinsightswhatdo...
> That first one sounds like throwing away security. Unlock my computer because my watch is nearby? No thanks. Why even have a password or TouchID at that point especially when the watch has none of that...

Well the Watch has to be on your wrist, unlocked, authenticated with your iCloud account and close enough to trigger NFC.

It's actually one of the best non-fitness related things about the Watch imo.

Point taken on some of the features not always being seamless but I've had much more success than not and I really appreciate all the ways the ecosystem works together - I can't imagine not having some of these features.
China is what it is. The last couple years have shown that to HK and the rest of the world. There’s no need or reason to maintain some token iconoclast news outlet as a fig leaf to pretend otherwise. Everyone, everyone knows the deal.
> one BIG BATTERY

> The power plant, rated at 451 MW

That's a damn big battery. I love pumped storage, too bad it's not used more.
CNN is still here.

That's the worst of both worlds: you lose free local press but you still get CNN.
To this day Eastman’s legacy keeps Rochester punching well above its weight for cities of its size. The Eastman School of Music is arguably one of the top two of music schools in the country.

The Rochester International Jazz festival is fantastic too.
I think you have just described something like a traditional or plug-in hybrid that recovers energy that would be wasted under braking or puts the ICE under additional load to keep the specific fuel consumption as low as possible
I used to work in the telecom world back then. I would have thought that by 2021 the meticulously-architected ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) standard would have replaced the ancient TCP/IP protocol. Nope.

Then I would be wrong again, because I would have thought IPv6 would be everywhere...
> E.g. adolescents can eat all kinds of bad food. It will have little real impact until roughly late 30s.

20% of teens in America are obese. I think you underestimate how much of a problem it is. Here's a source https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
Also without losing votes from the people with property equity (i.e. the majority of the electorate).
I disagree. If a social media website is a business and it killing its main attraction harms its business prospects , it’s products have not improved. How much a product is worth is a major factor into what makes a product better or worse. By removing porn and thus it’s traffic , Tumblr has become a third grade social media site to advertisers.
Tesla does not have self driving. Production Autopilot is not self driving. It's advanced cruise control with lane keeping, nothing that any other manufacturer doesn't offer on their cars. Full self driving doesn't even work, and is acknowledged by Tesla themselves, calling FSD a beta. And FSD can barely even do basic tasks like making an unprotected left turn.
Unrelated to this particular article, by my favorite portal into the mind of a killer is Elliott Rodger's manifesto "My Twisted World".
How do you define a neighborhood characteristic? Usually it's nothing but an arbitrary snapshot in time that some folks decided is ideal and should be frozen. Curiously it tends to correlate with the date they moved in to the said neighborhood.
As someone who was raised in Rochester and moved back 4 years ago I can say that Rochester is full of hope and is an amazing city.
I thought it was anything north of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Edit: yes it’s a joke.
Been toying with the idea of getting back to IC. Been engineering Manager for four years now, but really miss development and getting hands dirty. However, I recently assigned a small feature to myself and was amazed at a few things: how much I had to look up to remind meself about language specific syntax, how much has changed (good ole Javascript), and how FAST time flies by when I get in the zone. I struggle with making the leap back because I'm slightly worried about what others would think. The company I work for doesn't have IC track neither, very up or out. So it's either jump ship to another company as IC and go through interview process, leetcode bs and probably lower paying position OR stick it out in Management and get my kicks through the team. Decisions, decisions.
It's because half the population has their retirement based on housing values so if you crush that, you have a generation of boomers with no retirement money.
I guess I count as a 90s programmer? I did technically write programs in the 90s.

I thought Java applets (those things you'd embed in a webpage) were hot stuff that would completely reshape the Web someday, but they managed to effectively die before the proprietary Flash. I thought Java as a server language was doomed for performance reasons, but that turned out to be just fine. Basically I completely misunderstood where Java was going.

The expectations around smart home stuff were way off too. E.g. expectations were more along the lines of your house reminding you to go buy toilet paper. What we got was the ability to ask a hockey puck to buy some more when we notice ourselves running low, if you can get past the privacy concerns.
This sounds like an idea that I can implement in 9front's native git reimplementation pretty easily. May be my next weekend project.
> Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them.

They don't, really. The Windows NT kernel has a unified namespace — it's just not one with a filesystem at its root, but rather an object namespace, so users (and even developers) are almost never exposed to it.

C:\ is just win32.dll-wrapper-ese for the NT object path \\?\Volume{some-guid}\, where \\? is the NT object (local) namespace root. You can find the GUID of your filesystem in diskmgmt.msc and navigate Explorer to \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ just fine. Look ma, no drive letters!

Perhaps surprisingly, despite \\?\Volume{some-guid} being the name of a Volume object, what you find under \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ is a regular filesystem of Directory and File objects.

It's as if Linux was set up such that / was a hybrid of procfs+sysfs+devfs, and all the filesystems were accessed by going to /dev/disk/by-uuid/... and navigating "into" one of the block-device nodes there.
wolf right in the ID huh?
I would say to the majority of HK Apple Daily represents freedom and democracy, few refers it as “trash”