8 ms·

Norvig's Law (2002)

121 points by saikatsg 4y ago

jsmith99 4y ago
Another way of putting it: once it's obviously a huge success you're too late.
- sva_ 4y ago
  Did not seem to be true for Bitcoin in the distant past.
Nokinside 4y ago
There is probably some discussion inside Google that prompted this. "We should aim to double our market share!"
tgflynn 4y ago
> Less familiar are the more pessimistic laws, such as Proebsting's law, which states that compiler research has led to a doubling in computing power every 18 years. If that were true it would actually be quite extraordinary, but in fact it's still hard to beat C and Fortran.
- atty 4y ago
  That’s because C and Fortran also continue to benefit from all the compiler research?
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    It's (mostly) because C and Fortran continue to benefit from all the hardware research.
  - tgflynn 4y ago
    So if you ran benchmarks compiled using the best C compiler from 2004 compared against the best current C compiler on 2004 era hardware you'd see a factor of 2 performance gain ? That's possible, I suppose, but I doubt it.
    - yakubin 4y ago
      Current compiler optimisations are written with current hardware in mind, while I doubt that older optimisations would become pessimisations on newer hardware, so I'd compare the performance of the best C compiler from 2004 against the performance of the current best C compiler on today's hardware instead.
    - kragen 4y ago
      I have seen that kind of thing happen, yeah. I used to use dumb Fibonacci as an easy microbenchmark for getting a rough idea of language implementation efficiency: __attribute__((fastcall)) int fib(int n) { return n < 2 ? 1 : fib(n-1) + fib(n-2); } main(int c, char **v) { printf("%d\n", fib(atoi(v[1]))); } This gives a crude idea of the performance of some basic functionality: arithmetic, (recursive) function calls, conditionals, comparison. But on recent versions of GCC it totally stopped working because GCC unrolls the recursive loop several levels deep, doing constant propagation through the near-leaves, yielding more than an order of magnitude speedup. It still prints the same number, but it's no longer a useful microbenchmark; its speed is just determined by how deeply the unrolling happens. It's unusual to see such big improvements on real programs, and more recent research has shown that Proebsting's flippant "law" was too optimistic.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      Turn off optimizations and find out.
      - tgflynn 4y ago
        Compiler optimizations existed 18 years ago.
cranium 4y ago
You can double again if you go below 50%.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Or if you redefine the technology. That's the way it usually happens: "Android Gingerbread has 1% market share. 2%. 4%. 8%. 16%, better introduce Android KitKat. 32%. 64%, but look KitKat is now at 4% and climbing exponentially! Gingerbread is now deprecated, KitKat is on a majority of devices, time to introduce Lollipop." Come to think of it, this applies to a lot of Google's (and Microsoft's, and Apple's, and most tech companies') product strategy.
- hirundo 4y ago
  If it was unbreakable it would be inconsistent with "laws" like Moore's and Gilder's.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
kjhughes 4y ago
Those who insist on using percentages greater than 100% hyperbolically when wishing to indicate "even more" would disagree with Norvig's Law. Maybe if they gave it 150%, they could see Norvig's reasoning. It may take more than that, though -- maybe exponentially more.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > Maybe if they gave it 150%, they could see Norvig's reasoning. It may take more than that, though -- maybe exponentially more. I hope you'll permit me explicitly to single out your mocking invocation of my bête noire. I think that most non-technical authors just confuse 'exponential' with 'super-linear' (if they think even that quantitatively) … but I sometimes worry that even the somewhat more technically minded think that 'exponential' just means 'has an exponent', and so think that quadratic growth is exponential, y'know, because there's an exponent of 2.
  - lupire 4y ago
    For those who don't know: time*n is linear in time and n, but ther symmetry stops there. time^n is *geometric* (or polynomial) growth over time. n^time is exponential in time. time! (factorial) doesn't have a common name that I know. It is (in the long run) faster than any exponential growth.
    - andreareina 4y ago
      I just call it factorial time, or super-exponential if I'm being imprecise.
yakubin 4y ago
That Proebsting's law link is of course dead, and redirects to the main page of Microsoft Research. In my experience, it's the natural state of links to Microsoft Research pages. What's up with that?
- float4 4y ago
  Can't answer your question, but here's the law (I was curious myself): > I claim the following simple experiment supports this depressing claim. Run your favorite set of benchmarks with your favorite state-of-the-art optimizing compiler. Run the benchmarks both with and without optimizations enabled. The ratio of of those numbers represents the entirety of the contribution of compiler optimizations to speeding up those benchmarks. Let's assume that this ratio is about 4X for typical real-world applications, and let's further assume that compiler optimization work has been going on for about 36 years. These assumptions lead to the conclusion that compiler optimization advances double computing power every 18 years. QED. > This means that while hardware computing horsepower increases at roughly 60%/year, compiler optimizations contribute only 4%. Basically, compiler optimization work makes only marginal contributions. > Perhaps this means Programming Language Research should be concentrating on something other than optimizations. Perhaps programmer productivity is a more fruitful arena. https://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html https://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I find that code performance optimization is not worthwhile a lot of the time. But developer performance optimization is almost always worthwhile. One might argue that cheap overseas development labour makes it a commodity, but I care more for being humane towards humans than CPUs.
    - yakubin 4y ago
      A lot of times code compiled with no optimisations (-O0) is unusable. Specifically, in video some software compiled without optimisations won't push frames on time and instead will just keep dropping frames. There was a post a couple days ago about it being problematic in the games industry where a game compiled without optimisations is unplayable, while higher optimisation levels are hard to inspect in a debugger, due to the myth of "zero-cost-abstractions" in C++. Also to put it on its head a bit, when a compiler isn't fast enough (read not enough work was put into performance of the compiler itself, mostly on the design level, not on the microoptimisation level really), the feedback loop is so long, that developers stop testing out hypotheses and instead try to do as much as possible in their heads, without verifying, only to avoid the cost of recompiling a project. Another instance: when a photo-editing application can't quickly give me a preview of the photo I'm editing, I'm going to test fewer possible edits and probably get a worse photo as a result. With websites, if an action doesn't happen within a couple seconds of me clicking I often assume the website doesn't work and just close it, even though I know there are a lot of crappy websites out there that are just this slow. Doesn't matter. The waiting usually isn't worth my time and frustration.
smcin 4y ago
Nonsense. This observation is unworthy of a genius like Norvig and anyway it's not even generally true: it's all a matter of perspective, and the associated revenue model (purchase vs. subscription model). Whether the glass is half-full or empty depends entirely on perspective: whether I'm looking at this as a seller of a device (e.g. smartphone/PC/laptop/tablet) then maybe I only think of once-off purchases. But if I'm Microsoft (software suite/subscription) or Adobe or Netflix or Apple iTunes, then high penetration of my target market is great, it gives me recurring sales/subscriptions(/users on a social network, to serve ads to). If I'm an independent app developer, I love that Android has high penetration, or else that iOS has market segment of users with high propensity to spend on both app and IAP; but whatever I do, in the 2020s I don't target Microsoft Phone/ Nokia/ Blackberry/ PalmOS (RIP). Maybe HarmonyOS. (Also, high penetration and market share have a tertiary effect of squashing potential competition by siphoning revenues that might go to competitors. Anyone remember last.fm [0]? remember how Microsoft destroyed RealNetworks's business model [1] by giving away streaming-media server software for free? ("According to some accounts, in 2000 more than 85% of streaming content on the Internet was in the Real format.") We will see the rebuttal of Norvig's Law when Netflix launches its ad-supported tiers. Or we saw it during 2020-2021/Covid, when Amazon aggressively pushed its discounted Prime to fixed-/low-income EBT/Medicaid/other government assistance recipients (at least in the US) [2,3] With all due respect to Norvig (and if you've read his AI book or ever seen him speak in person, he's undilutedly brilliant, and also humble), he should get out there and try to sell a subscription-based device/service. Lemonade-Stand-for-web3.0, if you will... "customer acquisition" is not a dirty phrase. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks#History [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G54BETR9USUZFZW5 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/1604211/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/1604211/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisoverzero 4y ago
  I’m running a subscription-based service, but I’ve stalled at 57% market penetration. Can you give me some advice on how I can double my market penetration from this point? Remember, what I’m looking for is 114% market penetration. Any help you can provide will be gratefully appreciated.
_8j50 4y ago
This sounds like a bell curve.
system2 4y ago
Is this meant to be a joke or I am missing something here?
- lupire 4y ago
  What don't you understand?
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    If something has more than 50% market share, then it obviously can’t double because then it would exceed 100%. So this “law” appears tongue in the cheek and not some novel insight.
theGnuMe 4y ago
Well, one use to have a family computer, now we have 4... 7 if you count ipads. same with phones.
- lupire 4y ago
  This is covered in the OP.
svat 4y ago
(2002), or maybe (2001) or (2000) or (1999): The Wayback Machine's earliest archive of this page is from June 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.com/norvigs-law.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.co... and the page itself mentions July 1999, so this page is from some time in 1999–2002.
- jwilk 4y ago
  According to the archived response headers, it was modified in April 2002: $ curl -s -I 'https://web.archive.org/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.com/norvigs-law.html' | grep -E '^x-archive-orig-.* [0-9]{4} ' x-archive-orig-date: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 07:18:15 GMT x-archive-orig-last-modified: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 07:27:36 GMT
  - dang 4y ago
    Ok, we'll put 2002 above. Thanks!
greenbit 4y ago
Well, maybe you can't double what you've got, but one way to measure past the 50% mark would be to try to halve what remains on the table.
mynegation 4y ago
Mynegation’s corollary: anything that can be allocated at maximum 1 unit per person, can experience at most 33 contiguous periods of doubling.
- gweinberg 4y ago
  Sure it can, but not until the population exceeds 16 billion. Same as with Norvig: the penetration percent will never double again, but the number of users can still keep going up. As the the song says, "population keeps on breeding..."
  - mynegation 4y ago
    Fair enough. I probably should have added a condition that the doubling period is significantly shorter than population doubling period.
leoh 4y ago
Link to Proebsting’s law https://web.archive.org/web/20000824013718/http://www.research.microsoft.com/~toddpro/papers/law.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20000824013718/http://www.resear...
dang 4y ago
Related: Norvig's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491767 - March 2014 (13 comments) Norvig's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317170 - Sept 2008 (14 comments) Norvig's Law: Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36047 - July 2007 (4 comments)
jfdi 4y ago
I’m sure I’m missing something deeper here: isn’t it tautological that something that is at >50% can’t double again?
- fdr 4y ago
  It's a joke. Even someone as well known as Peter Norvig is unlikely to be so gauche as to name a "law" after himself except tongue in cheek.
- lupire 4y ago
  Everything true is tautological in some context.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  It seems to be intended just as a common-sense reminder that fast growth has to eventually slow/stop due to market saturation. It's not strictly true though since the market itself can grow so your sales could still double or more from a level that had represented 50% of the market at some time in the past.
togaen 4y ago
Cute
markoutso 4y ago
Does anyone find this interesting? I respect Peter Norvig as a programmer and a problem solver. I've taken a course taught by him in the early mooc days that I really enjoyed. What I don't understand how does something like that makes it to the top of Hacker News. I used to visit HN to get smarter, lately I feel that I am getting dumber.
- rvba 4y ago
  Probably people from Google want to make some positive spin after the company killed another product.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > I've taken a course taught by him in the early mooc days that I really enjoyed. I think I took the same one, but I remember Sebastian Thrun being the better instructor.
- wasabi991011 4y ago
  I just thought it was an amusing little break between more in-depth HN articles.
- cbsmith 4y ago
  I find it mildly amusing as a reminder about some of the irrational exuberance floating around the ether.
- myuzio 4y ago
  I have the same feeling, that's why I decided to filter out all that noise for myself, and created this blog: https://rubberduck.so https://rubberduck.so I read the posts every day and filter out "amusing" topics and keep the ones that I actually come back to read again later. It is published on Mondays and updated every day with the articles from the day before https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front
DonHopkins 4y ago
Just because your cryptocurrency lost 90% of its value today, doesn't mean it can't lose 90% of its value tomorrow.
SilverBirch 4y ago
I attended a talk at the Royal Geographical Society where someone explained that given current trends, the super rich would own X00% of the planet if current trends continued for fifty years. And I never understood it. It's like, yeah, ok, if your model of wealth is that there are literally 100 gold bars somewhere then yes, that would be a contradiction. But firstly, lots of things are S-curves, not exponents, and secondly, we can just change what we measure. It looks to me that this comment is talking about something like this article: >http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/11/50pc.idg/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/11/50pc.idg/index... Ok. Well, the US is a few hundred million people in a world of 6-7 billion. So yes, doubling would have been impossible. But it happened. According to some source that i just googled[2] there are 6 billion smartphones right now. So this schmuck thought that computers were hitting the wall coming up to 150million. That's an order magnitude of wrongness, and I bet you, the average person in the US today has multiple computers more powerful than a 1999 computer. One in their phone, one in their iPad, one in their laptop, one in their fridge, one in their coffee machine, one in the doorbell, one in their robot hoover, one in their thermostat. I mean.. it's a mad lack of imagination. [2]: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...
sgustard 4y ago
Conversely, you can lose 50% market share per year indefinitely. Just ask Blackberry.

Norvig's Law (2002)

121 points by saikatsg 4y ago

jsmith99 4y ago

Another way of putting it: once it's obviously a huge success you're too late.

sva_ 4y ago
Did not seem to be true for Bitcoin in the distant past.

Nokinside 4y ago

There is probably some discussion inside Google that prompted this. "We should aim to double our market share!"

tgflynn 4y ago

> Less familiar are the more pessimistic laws, such as Proebsting's law, which states that compiler research has led to a doubling in computing power every 18 years. If that were true it would actually be quite extraordinary, but in fact it's still hard to beat C and Fortran.

atty 4y ago
That’s because C and Fortran also continue to benefit from all the compiler research?
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  It's (mostly) because C and Fortran continue to benefit from all the hardware research.
- tgflynn 4y ago
  So if you ran benchmarks compiled using the best C compiler from 2004 compared against the best current C compiler on 2004 era hardware you'd see a factor of 2 performance gain ? That's possible, I suppose, but I doubt it.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    Current compiler optimisations are written with current hardware in mind, while I doubt that older optimisations would become pessimisations on newer hardware, so I'd compare the performance of the best C compiler from 2004 against the performance of the current best C compiler on today's hardware instead.
  - kragen 4y ago
    I have seen that kind of thing happen, yeah. I used to use dumb Fibonacci as an easy microbenchmark for getting a rough idea of language implementation efficiency: __attribute__((fastcall)) int fib(int n) { return n < 2 ? 1 : fib(n-1) + fib(n-2); } main(int c, char **v) { printf("%d\n", fib(atoi(v[1]))); } This gives a crude idea of the performance of some basic functionality: arithmetic, (recursive) function calls, conditionals, comparison. But on recent versions of GCC it totally stopped working because GCC unrolls the recursive loop several levels deep, doing constant propagation through the near-leaves, yielding more than an order of magnitude speedup. It still prints the same number, but it's no longer a useful microbenchmark; its speed is just determined by how deeply the unrolling happens. It's unusual to see such big improvements on real programs, and more recent research has shown that Proebsting's flippant "law" was too optimistic.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Turn off optimizations and find out.
    - tgflynn 4y ago
      Compiler optimizations existed 18 years ago.

cranium 4y ago

You can double again if you go below 50%.

nostrademons 4y ago
Or if you redefine the technology. That's the way it usually happens: "Android Gingerbread has 1% market share. 2%. 4%. 8%. 16%, better introduce Android KitKat. 32%. 64%, but look KitKat is now at 4% and climbing exponentially! Gingerbread is now deprecated, KitKat is on a majority of devices, time to introduce Lollipop." Come to think of it, this applies to a lot of Google's (and Microsoft's, and Apple's, and most tech companies') product strategy.
hirundo 4y ago
If it was unbreakable it would be inconsistent with "laws" like Moore's and Gilder's.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

kjhughes 4y ago

Those who insist on using percentages greater than 100% hyperbolically when wishing to indicate "even more" would disagree with Norvig's Law. Maybe if they gave it 150%, they could see Norvig's reasoning. It may take more than that, though -- maybe exponentially more.

JadeNB 4y ago
> Maybe if they gave it 150%, they could see Norvig's reasoning. It may take more than that, though -- maybe exponentially more. I hope you'll permit me explicitly to single out your mocking invocation of my bête noire. I think that most non-technical authors just confuse 'exponential' with 'super-linear' (if they think even that quantitatively) … but I sometimes worry that even the somewhat more technically minded think that 'exponential' just means 'has an exponent', and so think that quadratic growth is exponential, y'know, because there's an exponent of 2.
- lupire 4y ago
  For those who don't know: time*n is linear in time and n, but ther symmetry stops there. time^n is *geometric* (or polynomial) growth over time. n^time is exponential in time. time! (factorial) doesn't have a common name that I know. It is (in the long run) faster than any exponential growth.
  - andreareina 4y ago
    I just call it factorial time, or super-exponential if I'm being imprecise.

yakubin 4y ago

That Proebsting's law link is of course dead, and redirects to the main page of Microsoft Research. In my experience, it's the natural state of links to Microsoft Research pages. What's up with that?

float4 4y ago
Can't answer your question, but here's the law (I was curious myself): > I claim the following simple experiment supports this depressing claim. Run your favorite set of benchmarks with your favorite state-of-the-art optimizing compiler. Run the benchmarks both with and without optimizations enabled. The ratio of of those numbers represents the entirety of the contribution of compiler optimizations to speeding up those benchmarks. Let's assume that this ratio is about 4X for typical real-world applications, and let's further assume that compiler optimization work has been going on for about 36 years. These assumptions lead to the conclusion that compiler optimization advances double computing power every 18 years. QED. > This means that while hardware computing horsepower increases at roughly 60%/year, compiler optimizations contribute only 4%. Basically, compiler optimization work makes only marginal contributions. > Perhaps this means Programming Language Research should be concentrating on something other than optimizations. Perhaps programmer productivity is a more fruitful arena. https://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html https://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I find that code performance optimization is not worthwhile a lot of the time. But developer performance optimization is almost always worthwhile. One might argue that cheap overseas development labour makes it a commodity, but I care more for being humane towards humans than CPUs.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    A lot of times code compiled with no optimisations (-O0) is unusable. Specifically, in video some software compiled without optimisations won't push frames on time and instead will just keep dropping frames. There was a post a couple days ago about it being problematic in the games industry where a game compiled without optimisations is unplayable, while higher optimisation levels are hard to inspect in a debugger, due to the myth of "zero-cost-abstractions" in C++. Also to put it on its head a bit, when a compiler isn't fast enough (read not enough work was put into performance of the compiler itself, mostly on the design level, not on the microoptimisation level really), the feedback loop is so long, that developers stop testing out hypotheses and instead try to do as much as possible in their heads, without verifying, only to avoid the cost of recompiling a project. Another instance: when a photo-editing application can't quickly give me a preview of the photo I'm editing, I'm going to test fewer possible edits and probably get a worse photo as a result. With websites, if an action doesn't happen within a couple seconds of me clicking I often assume the website doesn't work and just close it, even though I know there are a lot of crappy websites out there that are just this slow. Doesn't matter. The waiting usually isn't worth my time and frustration.

smcin 4y ago

Nonsense. This observation is unworthy of a genius like Norvig and anyway it's not even generally true: it's all a matter of perspective, and the associated revenue model (purchase vs. subscription model). Whether the glass is half-full or empty depends entirely on perspective: whether I'm looking at this as a seller of a device (e.g. smartphone/PC/laptop/tablet) then maybe I only think of once-off purchases. But if I'm Microsoft (software suite/subscription) or Adobe or Netflix or Apple iTunes, then high penetration of my target market is great, it gives me recurring sales/subscriptions(/users on a social network, to serve ads to). If I'm an independent app developer, I love that Android has high penetration, or else that iOS has market segment of users with high propensity to spend on both app and IAP; but whatever I do, in the 2020s I don't target Microsoft Phone/ Nokia/ Blackberry/ PalmOS (RIP). Maybe HarmonyOS. (Also, high penetration and market share have a tertiary effect of squashing potential competition by siphoning revenues that might go to competitors. Anyone remember last.fm [0]? remember how Microsoft destroyed RealNetworks's business model [1] by giving away streaming-media server software for free? ("According to some accounts, in 2000 more than 85% of streaming content on the Internet was in the Real format.") We will see the rebuttal of Norvig's Law when Netflix launches its ad-supported tiers. Or we saw it during 2020-2021/Covid, when Amazon aggressively pushed its discounted Prime to fixed-/low-income EBT/Medicaid/other government assistance recipients (at least in the US) [2,3] With all due respect to Norvig (and if you've read his AI book or ever seen him speak in person, he's undilutedly brilliant, and also humble), he should get out there and try to sell a subscription-based device/service. Lemonade-Stand-for-web3.0, if you will... "customer acquisition" is not a dirty phrase. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks#History [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G54BETR9USUZFZW5 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/1604211/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/1604211/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chrisoverzero 4y ago
I’m running a subscription-based service, but I’ve stalled at 57% market penetration. Can you give me some advice on how I can double my market penetration from this point? Remember, what I’m looking for is 114% market penetration. Any help you can provide will be gratefully appreciated.

_8j50 4y ago

This sounds like a bell curve.

system2 4y ago

Is this meant to be a joke or I am missing something here?

lupire 4y ago
What don't you understand?
- andsoitis 4y ago
  If something has more than 50% market share, then it obviously can’t double because then it would exceed 100%. So this “law” appears tongue in the cheek and not some novel insight.

theGnuMe 4y ago

Well, one use to have a family computer, now we have 4... 7 if you count ipads. same with phones.

lupire 4y ago
This is covered in the OP.

svat 4y ago

(2002), or maybe (2001) or (2000) or (1999): The Wayback Machine's earliest archive of this page is from June 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.com/norvigs-law.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.co... and the page itself mentions July 1999, so this page is from some time in 1999–2002.

jwilk 4y ago
According to the archived response headers, it was modified in April 2002: $ curl -s -I 'https://web.archive.org/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.com/norvigs-law.html' | grep -E '^x-archive-orig-.* [0-9]{4} ' x-archive-orig-date: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 07:18:15 GMT x-archive-orig-last-modified: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 07:27:36 GMT
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, we'll put 2002 above. Thanks!

greenbit 4y ago

Well, maybe you can't double what you've got, but one way to measure past the 50% mark would be to try to halve what remains on the table.

mynegation 4y ago

Mynegation’s corollary: anything that can be allocated at maximum 1 unit per person, can experience at most 33 contiguous periods of doubling.

gweinberg 4y ago
Sure it can, but not until the population exceeds 16 billion. Same as with Norvig: the penetration percent will never double again, but the number of users can still keep going up. As the the song says, "population keeps on breeding..."
- mynegation 4y ago
  Fair enough. I probably should have added a condition that the doubling period is significantly shorter than population doubling period.

leoh 4y ago

Link to Proebsting’s law https://web.archive.org/web/20000824013718/http://www.research.microsoft.com/~toddpro/papers/law.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20000824013718/http://www.resear...

dang 4y ago

Related: Norvig's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491767 - March 2014 (13 comments) Norvig's Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317170 - Sept 2008 (14 comments) Norvig's Law: Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36047 - July 2007 (4 comments)

jfdi 4y ago

I’m sure I’m missing something deeper here: isn’t it tautological that something that is at >50% can’t double again?

fdr 4y ago
It's a joke. Even someone as well known as Peter Norvig is unlikely to be so gauche as to name a "law" after himself except tongue in cheek.
lupire 4y ago
Everything true is tautological in some context.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
It seems to be intended just as a common-sense reminder that fast growth has to eventually slow/stop due to market saturation. It's not strictly true though since the market itself can grow so your sales could still double or more from a level that had represented 50% of the market at some time in the past.

togaen 4y ago

Cute

markoutso 4y ago

Does anyone find this interesting? I respect Peter Norvig as a programmer and a problem solver. I've taken a course taught by him in the early mooc days that I really enjoyed. What I don't understand how does something like that makes it to the top of Hacker News. I used to visit HN to get smarter, lately I feel that I am getting dumber.

rvba 4y ago
Probably people from Google want to make some positive spin after the company killed another product.
dehrmann 4y ago
> I've taken a course taught by him in the early mooc days that I really enjoyed. I think I took the same one, but I remember Sebastian Thrun being the better instructor.
wasabi991011 4y ago
I just thought it was an amusing little break between more in-depth HN articles.
cbsmith 4y ago
I find it mildly amusing as a reminder about some of the irrational exuberance floating around the ether.
myuzio 4y ago
I have the same feeling, that's why I decided to filter out all that noise for myself, and created this blog: https://rubberduck.so https://rubberduck.so I read the posts every day and filter out "amusing" topics and keep the ones that I actually come back to read again later. It is published on Mondays and updated every day with the articles from the day before https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front

DonHopkins 4y ago

Just because your cryptocurrency lost 90% of its value today, doesn't mean it can't lose 90% of its value tomorrow.

SilverBirch 4y ago

I attended a talk at the Royal Geographical Society where someone explained that given current trends, the super rich would own X00% of the planet if current trends continued for fifty years. And I never understood it. It's like, yeah, ok, if your model of wealth is that there are literally 100 gold bars somewhere then yes, that would be a contradiction. But firstly, lots of things are S-curves, not exponents, and secondly, we can just change what we measure. It looks to me that this comment is talking about something like this article: >http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/11/50pc.idg/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/11/50pc.idg/index... Ok. Well, the US is a few hundred million people in a world of 6-7 billion. So yes, doubling would have been impossible. But it happened. According to some source that i just googled[2] there are 6 billion smartphones right now. So this schmuck thought that computers were hitting the wall coming up to 150million. That's an order magnitude of wrongness, and I bet you, the average person in the US today has multiple computers more powerful than a 1999 computer. One in their phone, one in their iPad, one in their laptop, one in their fridge, one in their coffee machine, one in the doorbell, one in their robot hoover, one in their thermostat. I mean.. it's a mad lack of imagination. [2]: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...

sgustard 4y ago

Conversely, you can lose 50% market share per year indefinitely. Just ask Blackberry.