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I think he's being overly harsh on himself. As he said in the original rant "the predictions themselves don't matter! Most of them are probably wrong. The point

by pbiggar 11y ago

I think he's being overly harsh on himself. As he said in the original rant "the predictions themselves don't matter! Most of them are probably wrong. The point of the exercise is the exercise itself, not in what results" Imagine someone in 1850 making the prediction that "by 1950, everyone will have a horse". Though they say "horse", they really mean "everyone will be able to afford their own personal transport", as a reflection on the changing socioeconmic something something. And they would be right. Sure the horse is mechanical, isn't shaped like a horse, and consumes petrol, but your prediction is correct, even though you didn't know exactly how it would play out. The same is the of Yegge's XML DB prediction. If he was saying that XML is going to be amazing, then he's wrong. If he's saying the RDBMSes have problems, then he's right. And actually he's saying "RDBMSes suck, so something will replace them, and XML is big enough that it will be XML". So that looks like a 50% score to me. With Apple, he's basically saying "apple is shiny, and shiny will win". That prediction has been 100% correct. The fact that iPads disrupted the laptop model means he's more correct than if they had just sold more Macbooks. 100% score here, IMO.

tinco 11y ago
XML databases actually got to be amazing, if that was his prediction he would have been totally right. The fact is that they just got amazing a little bit too late. No one is going to consider an XML database because XML got a bad reputation (and rightly so). But XML database technology actually has nothing to do with XML. The idea is that you store nested data nodes. Imagine you have a mongodb collection, and in it you have documents, and each of those documents would also be a mongodb collection in which you could insert more documents. You can build full graphs like that, and if you allow references to nodes those graphs can be cyclic too. Pretty powerful right? Now you might say yeah of course, but that's got to be crazy slow! And at the time Yegge made his prediction you would have been right. But then academics came into the scene, they developed data structures and algorithms that allow you to store these recursively nested documents in column stores (think SQL table with 2 columns, a primary key and a piece of data) in such a genius way that you can make whatever query you can think of (recursive, joins, whatever) and execute them almost as fast as any indexed search query. That magic happens, and is implemented for example in MonetDB/XQuery which sadly got abandoned a few years ago. I still think if a crazy person sets off to go build a database company (crazy people like that seem to be quite popular in SV these days) they could make a lot of money forking MonetDB/XQuery, and search-replaceing every instance of X with J and every instance of XML with JSON. Crazier still, you can even let MonetDB/XQuery results be formatted as json, even before MongoDB became popular I think.
- andrewflnr 11y ago
  Could you go into a bit more detail about the data structures and algorithms used in doing recursive queries on nested data in a column store? Pointers to relevant papers/documentation would be great.
  - tinco 11y ago
    This paper summarises the MonetDB/XQuery work, I'm on my phone and couldn't find a free PDF but I bet there's one somewhere. I read this paper while I was an undergraduate, it's very accessible. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142527 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142527
- DougN7 11y ago
  Isn't that just the Object databases from 15 years ago? I remember using one from Versant that seems to be what you're describing.
- fsiefken 11y ago
  OpenLink Virtuoso implements a lot of this functionality (xml storage, column store, graphs, rdf, json), optimized for speed and open source. I know because I was lucky enough to have had conversations about it with the guy responsible for it, Orri Erling http://sites.computer.org/debull/A12mar/p3.pdf http://sites.computer.org/debull/A12mar/p3.pdf
Tloewald 11y ago
Not everyone has a "horse" today. You're thinking of the developed world! (I remember a WIRED article back in 1999 where a panel discussed which technologies would have the biggest impact in the 21st century, and someone suggested the telephone, only then penetrating third world markets; the same person pointed out that the most impactful technology of the 20th century was probably the bicycle.)
- wolf550e 11y ago
  I get your point, but the nuclear bomb by preventing major countries from going to war with each other is a good contender for most impactful technology of the 20th century.
  - Tloewald 11y ago
    Oh for sure (on the nuclear bomb) -- it's really impossible to compare these things meaningfully. Nuclear bomb? Modern agriculture? Penicillin? Vaccines? It's really impossible to judge.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Which countries did the nuclear bomb prevent going to war? There was never any serious prospect of the US invading the USSR or vice versa but MUAD certainly didn't stop them from involving themselves in more wars (generally supporting opposing sides) in the late twentieth century than in the previous four, India and Pakistan haven't exactly softened their stances on Kashmir since acquiring deadly weapons, and the UK even had part of its territory briefly annexed by a foreign power.
    - ufmace 11y ago
      Tell that to the NATO and Warsaw Pact armies and all of the plans, materials, and infrastructure they built around fighting the Next Big European/Asian war. Huge amounts of money and piles of weapon systems were developed by both sides with an eye towards fighting that war. It's easy to say that in hindsight, but given all of the tension around the Iron Curtain and all of the times the US and USSR came very close indeed to going to war despite how likely total nuclear destruction was, it seems short-sighted to just brush off the idea of that war actually happening if neither side had any nuclear weapons.
3pt14159 11y ago
I consider him much less correct with his mobile phone prediction. "At least 5 years out" is completely, totally wrong. If you made a business decision with that prediction you'd have felt a severe sting. I agree with you about the Apple and XML ones though.
- adevine 11y ago
  Not really. Did you see Dan Luu's original post at http://danluu.com/yegge-predictions/ http://danluu.com/yegge-predictions/ ? Even though the iPhone was released in 2007, smartphone adoption didn't really start exploding until 2009.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Sure, but Yegge's original post wasn't cautioning about speed of adoption being slow, it was ridiculing the notion that companies were even close to knowing what consumers wanted and suggesting there were huge collaboration and content problems, as well as technical issues, questioning the idea of a $500 price point for ordinary consumers and suggesting that smartphones and tablets people actually wanted to buy weren't going to happen for a "long time". In practice, the ultimate form of today's smartphone was starting to take shape in secret in Cupertino pretty much as he wrote his article, the now ubiquitous design went on sale within 2 and a half years, the App store came the following year and Apple alone had already shipped 30M units before the "at least" 5 years were up. The release of the iPad also took less than six years. Yegge didn't see significant enough innovations taking place within 5 or so years to make an impact. In fact, all the innovations that lead to over a billion people owning smartphones today took place in that time frame, with only incremental improvements since then. I think it's pretty generous of Steve to give himself more than half marks for that!
    - ma2rten 11y ago
      The first iphone didn't have apps.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
barkingcat 11y ago
Hindsight is 20/20. You don't get to reinterpret statements made earlier just because he got the general gist. Like he said, his specificity screwed him (laptops, xml, etc) - He's totally not being too hard on himself. He's being fair and honest in his evaluation. It would be super easy to predict trends if you are nonspecific: I predict new and shiny will win in 10 years. Bleh that's a non-statement.
- jandrese 11y ago
  > It would be super easy to predict trends if you are nonspecific Otherwise known as the Nostradamus principle.
- jack9 11y ago
  > You don't get to reinterpret statements made earlier just because he got the general gist. Of course someone can. You can do whatever you want too. Predictions are hard and any correlation in 11 years is impressive, as are these. The question raised is not "is this fair or accurate according to my standards" but moreso, "who cares?"
- mgalka 11y ago
  Agree. It's an interesting post, and I don't mean any criticism toward him (the thought process was good), but in practice I'm not sure he truly got any of them right. "a new internet community hangout will appear" is not really a prediction. People have been "hanging out" online since BBS's and AOL. Would anyone bet against the same prediction looking from today forward? The only other one where he gave himself full marks is "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications." It's true of course, but PaaS is not specific to open source applications. If you take away the open source part, what he got right was that someone would make money by hosting webapps. And that's been happening in some form since at least the early 2000's when AWS launched. That probably sounds more critical than I meant it. My hats off to him hitting a lot of them pretty well. But I wouldn't say he is going easy on himself with the scoring.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
jayvanguard 11y ago
He is being perfectly fair and accurate, which is probably a first for anyone making futurist predictions, so kudos to him. This is exactly why all futurists are full of shit (see Kurzweil) and predicting the future is impossible. Getting some aspects of your prediction right is virtually guaranteed if you generalize when you re-interpret later. You'd have to make spectacularly bad predictions that are overly detailed and specific NOT to do half decently if we're going to allow post-hoc retrofitting of which broad trends kind of fit the original prediction.
bad_user 11y ago
How did iPads "disrupt" the laptop model? That's just the bubble you're living in talking, as in most of the world, iPad sales have been declining, with the Mac revenue surpassing them again. And besides the iPad, the industry for tablets is basically non-existent. Really, our world is weirder and weirder.

by pbiggar 11y ago

tinco 11y ago

XML databases actually got to be amazing, if that was his prediction he would have been totally right. The fact is that they just got amazing a little bit too late. No one is going to consider an XML database because XML got a bad reputation (and rightly so). But XML database technology actually has nothing to do with XML. The idea is that you store nested data nodes. Imagine you have a mongodb collection, and in it you have documents, and each of those documents would also be a mongodb collection in which you could insert more documents. You can build full graphs like that, and if you allow references to nodes those graphs can be cyclic too. Pretty powerful right? Now you might say yeah of course, but that's got to be crazy slow! And at the time Yegge made his prediction you would have been right. But then academics came into the scene, they developed data structures and algorithms that allow you to store these recursively nested documents in column stores (think SQL table with 2 columns, a primary key and a piece of data) in such a genius way that you can make whatever query you can think of (recursive, joins, whatever) and execute them almost as fast as any indexed search query. That magic happens, and is implemented for example in MonetDB/XQuery which sadly got abandoned a few years ago. I still think if a crazy person sets off to go build a database company (crazy people like that seem to be quite popular in SV these days) they could make a lot of money forking MonetDB/XQuery, and search-replaceing every instance of X with J and every instance of XML with JSON. Crazier still, you can even let MonetDB/XQuery results be formatted as json, even before MongoDB became popular I think.

andrewflnr 11y ago
Could you go into a bit more detail about the data structures and algorithms used in doing recursive queries on nested data in a column store? Pointers to relevant papers/documentation would be great.
- tinco 11y ago
  This paper summarises the MonetDB/XQuery work, I'm on my phone and couldn't find a free PDF but I bet there's one somewhere. I read this paper while I was an undergraduate, it's very accessible. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142527 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142527
DougN7 11y ago
Isn't that just the Object databases from 15 years ago? I remember using one from Versant that seems to be what you're describing.
fsiefken 11y ago
OpenLink Virtuoso implements a lot of this functionality (xml storage, column store, graphs, rdf, json), optimized for speed and open source. I know because I was lucky enough to have had conversations about it with the guy responsible for it, Orri Erling http://sites.computer.org/debull/A12mar/p3.pdf http://sites.computer.org/debull/A12mar/p3.pdf

Tloewald 11y ago

Not everyone has a "horse" today. You're thinking of the developed world! (I remember a WIRED article back in 1999 where a panel discussed which technologies would have the biggest impact in the 21st century, and someone suggested the telephone, only then penetrating third world markets; the same person pointed out that the most impactful technology of the 20th century was probably the bicycle.)

wolf550e 11y ago
I get your point, but the nuclear bomb by preventing major countries from going to war with each other is a good contender for most impactful technology of the 20th century.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  Oh for sure (on the nuclear bomb) -- it's really impossible to compare these things meaningfully. Nuclear bomb? Modern agriculture? Penicillin? Vaccines? It's really impossible to judge.
- notahacker 11y ago
  Which countries did the nuclear bomb prevent going to war? There was never any serious prospect of the US invading the USSR or vice versa but MUAD certainly didn't stop them from involving themselves in more wars (generally supporting opposing sides) in the late twentieth century than in the previous four, India and Pakistan haven't exactly softened their stances on Kashmir since acquiring deadly weapons, and the UK even had part of its territory briefly annexed by a foreign power.
  - ufmace 11y ago
    Tell that to the NATO and Warsaw Pact armies and all of the plans, materials, and infrastructure they built around fighting the Next Big European/Asian war. Huge amounts of money and piles of weapon systems were developed by both sides with an eye towards fighting that war. It's easy to say that in hindsight, but given all of the tension around the Iron Curtain and all of the times the US and USSR came very close indeed to going to war despite how likely total nuclear destruction was, it seems short-sighted to just brush off the idea of that war actually happening if neither side had any nuclear weapons.

3pt14159 11y ago

I consider him much less correct with his mobile phone prediction. "At least 5 years out" is completely, totally wrong. If you made a business decision with that prediction you'd have felt a severe sting. I agree with you about the Apple and XML ones though.

adevine 11y ago
Not really. Did you see Dan Luu's original post at http://danluu.com/yegge-predictions/ http://danluu.com/yegge-predictions/ ? Even though the iPhone was released in 2007, smartphone adoption didn't really start exploding until 2009.
- notahacker 11y ago
  Sure, but Yegge's original post wasn't cautioning about speed of adoption being slow, it was ridiculing the notion that companies were even close to knowing what consumers wanted and suggesting there were huge collaboration and content problems, as well as technical issues, questioning the idea of a $500 price point for ordinary consumers and suggesting that smartphones and tablets people actually wanted to buy weren't going to happen for a "long time". In practice, the ultimate form of today's smartphone was starting to take shape in secret in Cupertino pretty much as he wrote his article, the now ubiquitous design went on sale within 2 and a half years, the App store came the following year and Apple alone had already shipped 30M units before the "at least" 5 years were up. The release of the iPad also took less than six years. Yegge didn't see significant enough innovations taking place within 5 or so years to make an impact. In fact, all the innovations that lead to over a billion people owning smartphones today took place in that time frame, with only incremental improvements since then. I think it's pretty generous of Steve to give himself more than half marks for that!
  - ma2rten 11y ago
    The first iphone didn't have apps.
thaumasiotes 11y ago

barkingcat 11y ago

Hindsight is 20/20. You don't get to reinterpret statements made earlier just because he got the general gist. Like he said, his specificity screwed him (laptops, xml, etc) - He's totally not being too hard on himself. He's being fair and honest in his evaluation. It would be super easy to predict trends if you are nonspecific: I predict new and shiny will win in 10 years. Bleh that's a non-statement.

jandrese 11y ago
> It would be super easy to predict trends if you are nonspecific Otherwise known as the Nostradamus principle.
jack9 11y ago
> You don't get to reinterpret statements made earlier just because he got the general gist. Of course someone can. You can do whatever you want too. Predictions are hard and any correlation in 11 years is impressive, as are these. The question raised is not "is this fair or accurate according to my standards" but moreso, "who cares?"
mgalka 11y ago
Agree. It's an interesting post, and I don't mean any criticism toward him (the thought process was good), but in practice I'm not sure he truly got any of them right. "a new internet community hangout will appear" is not really a prediction. People have been "hanging out" online since BBS's and AOL. Would anyone bet against the same prediction looking from today forward? The only other one where he gave himself full marks is "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications." It's true of course, but PaaS is not specific to open source applications. If you take away the open source part, what he got right was that someone would make money by hosting webapps. And that's been happening in some form since at least the early 2000's when AWS launched. That probably sounds more critical than I meant it. My hats off to him hitting a lot of them pretty well. But I wouldn't say he is going easy on himself with the scoring.
- nostrademons 11y ago

jayvanguard 11y ago

He is being perfectly fair and accurate, which is probably a first for anyone making futurist predictions, so kudos to him. This is exactly why all futurists are full of shit (see Kurzweil) and predicting the future is impossible. Getting some aspects of your prediction right is virtually guaranteed if you generalize when you re-interpret later. You'd have to make spectacularly bad predictions that are overly detailed and specific NOT to do half decently if we're going to allow post-hoc retrofitting of which broad trends kind of fit the original prediction.

bad_user 11y ago

How did iPads "disrupt" the laptop model? That's just the bubble you're living in talking, as in most of the world, iPad sales have been declining, with the Mac revenue surpassing them again. And besides the iPad, the industry for tablets is basically non-existent. Really, our world is weirder and weirder.