Q&A highlight
Posted17 days ago
Key Takeaways
- 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490343
- 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777115
- 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628
- 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236
- 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068
- 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596
- 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859
- 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988
- 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767
- 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723
- 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370
- 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201
(Hope you didn't stake your retirement on bitcoin hitting $200,000!)
I dont recall if the Australia ban was on the cards then.
Additionally, that it'll eventually prove to be a wild success, with significant benefit to kids.
On the darker side, the same technologies and restrictions will be applied in various ways to adults (similar to the porn verification laws), which will have significantly more negative effects.
(source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490517)
There are some correct predictions it seems, a lot of this is happening around the world so it would be interesting to see how this pans out in 2026, thoughts?
I saw my neighbour here watching shorts about fat americans abusing all you can eat restaurants, generated by AI, for 7 days in a row now, whenever he is awake. He is 45 years old and wants to show me the funniest ones.
Flock and other government tools for watching and controlling you will expand.
Big companies will expand their regulatory capture, especially in medical care. Fingers will continue to be pointed at health insurance as the problem while the real problem of an artificially limited supply of doctors goes unaddressed.
Government agencies will continue their slow bloat as no mechanism exists for government like bankruptcy in the private sector.
Patent trolls will expand their lawsuits and extort more legitimate businesses.
The far left will assassinate more Republican leaders.
While 'substantive' would mean major progress within the current framework, I’m predicting a shift that subverts the current foundational assumptions of robotics.
Right now, we treat time as a secondary sequence—an 'add-on' to 3D space. Moving to a unified spacetime architecture isn't just a big improvement; it fundamentally undermines the discrete-frame logic that almost all current CV and RL models are built upon. It’s 'subversive' because it requires us to unlearn the way we’ve been processing motion for the last decade.
AI bubble will start to pop (even though the adoption continues to improve slowly).
US / Europe separation will accelerate.
EDIT. For the first 2 - it's the 3rd year I'm thinking it will be 'the' year...
They're called bubbles because they don't "start to pop". It's sudden and sharp.
- AI will innovate towards visuals, personality, and tool use. AI tool use will start to innovate past just reading docs, maybe into more things like gaming and robotics.
- Some AI products (not necessarily LLMs) will start competing on latency. Notably on voice/calls, but also things like drones, robotics, etc.
https://moto.pl/MotoPL/7,178770,32479760,minister-bije-na-al...
Raw materials and cost is a big part of the Chinese dominance on EVs and it'll continue to be on that side of the political sphere.
Having to tariff China also emphasizes that they're gaining ground too quickly. They process about (over?) 80% of the major parts, so you can't fully tariff them either, only assembled cars or some parts.
- US goes on the offensive on tokenization moving bonds, stocks, transfers, etc. to the blockchain. China opens up its eCNY to the grand public.
- AI bubble pops. Companies decide that LLM-coding is not worth it after accounting for the downsides. LLMs for generating photos and videos are still not good enough. OpenAI goes the way of pipedpiper.
- The war in Ukraine remains unresolved. Russia advances but only marginally. Europe still shaking its head about what to do. US lower its involvement.
- The US world cup goes very badly. Like embarrassingly bad. Goes okay in Canada and kinda okay in Mexico though.
- China invades Taiwan in the last month of 2026.
It’s more likely that legal shenanigans happen like VRA section 2 going away and deepening gerrymandering wars or looking for excuses to disqualify people from voting for “election integrity” and other creative democratic backsliding that would pass muster at SCOTUS.
For this principle to become widely known, it needs to be communicated in a more succinct way. 400 pages is too much to ask people to invest.
Even so, as far as I understand the gist of what the paper says, the principle helps make explicit some intuition I’ve had about design for a long time.
Commonality and Variability in Software Engineering by James Coplien et al. pdf at - https://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/PDF/Commonality_Vari...
How ominous
- Multiple interest rate cuts instead 1
- Software will become increasingly commoditized and the authors’ “taste” will become its primary differentiator.
- Fiserv will increase 50% or more in market cap (I said the same thing last year about PayPal, and I was wrong, probably wrong here too.)
- Warren Buffett will pass away. (I hope I’m wrong) :-(
- Google will drop the price of Gemini Ultra to $125 a month or less, Anthropic and OpenAI will follow suit.
- Logitech will start making a dedicated vibe-coding microphone-whatever that is.
I'm keeping that prediction for 2026 from a late 2024 thread:
My original prediction for 2026 (not 2025, mind you) made in 2024 was based on a few factors, if I recall correctly, 1) the Russia-Ucraine war and related sanctions; 2) the open discussion in BRICS about trade in direct currencies; and 3) the then-promised isolatonist policies of Trump's second mandate.
What we've seen in 2025 makes all of those stronger I guess.
1) I don't know the status of the Russia-Ucraine war; all I know is it is a glaring sign of the end of Pax Americana (as is the Israel-Palestine genocide/war, by the way, which the US would -not- have allowed given the strong internal opposition and negative popularity among the American public). So sanctions of Russia notwistanding, that status quo, which strongly related to dollar as reserve currency, is either agonizing or dead.
2) Trump and the US attempted a very strong response to the (first ever?) trades in local currency between Brazil and China, mostly in the form of targeted tariffs (all discourse about Bolsonaro and whatever being the motivation for tariffing Brazilian imports being, in my opinion, political smoke and mirrors). I don't think it worked. I think BRICS might press on this. If the mercosur/EU trade deal goes through it will also be a strong force towards trade in Euros/Reais/Pesos directly I believe.
3) I don't think I need to clarify; tariffs and other issues brought on by the current US government were severely negative to the placement of the US as a preferred trade partner. This is to beyond economic choice; active anti-american sentiment are at all times high in countries like Canada, Denmark, and Mexico, all historically aligned with the US. This may not seem that relevant but come election cycles in those and other countries we might see platforms/candidates that openly propose to "secede" from the US hegemony international order. If that happens, removing US military bases is a first go. Alternatives to the US "petrodollar" a close second.
Later, LLMs will be portrayed as something evil, yet everyone will still use them. Parents will use them, while telling their kinds not to do so.
Leetcode is already standard for SWE interviews, but other industries will need to adopt similar tests to verify that an applicant's brain is functioning correctly and that they're capable of doing the job. Maybe a formal confirmation from a psychologist specializing in 'fried brains' will be required.
Society has made tremendous progress since the invention of TV.
I'm not sure myself.
I do know that television feels about as deep as a puddle for me. Literature a bit less so. I suspect there is something to this.
My knowledge and engineering has only gone up over time. I read significantly more and higher quality technical information and need to debug problems significantly harder.
I think AI will in general make everyone a lot smarter. Maybe the people who use AI as a companion will melt? I'm sure there's some kind of repetitive addiction loop that could melt your brain just like anythibg else though.
The human has to have enough understanding of the problem to know which math to apply and calculate in the first place. That requires understanding and discernment. This works the brain. This mental work strengthens our problem solving ability.
Whereas with AI, you just tell it the problem and it gives an easy answer. Thus involving no further work from the human brain which causes it to atrophy just like any other underused muscle.
You give a calculator a problem and it gives an easy answer thus involving no further work from the human brain which causes it to atrophy just like any other underused muscle.
Just like a calculator can easily solve some problems so can AI. Sure the set of problems it can solve is bigger than a calculator. AI just enables you to work on bigger problems because you’re not spending so much time “calculating by hand”.
If you delegate all your thinking to AI or you use AI when the point of the activity is to do the activity (ie homework at school) then I think you’ll see problems. Just like using a calculator when you’re supposed to be learning how to add will stunt your growth.
The way you describe AI - tell it the problem and get an easy answer sounds identical to anecdotal complaints I've heard like Google search providing an answer to everything means no one has to learn anything, or everyone copying code from stack overflow articles. At the end of the day it's still another tool with pros and cons, tradeoffs, etc., and will be used and misused and abused by different people in different ways.
And it's like that for many things. Complicated Git commands that I rarely need. I used to remember them at least 50% of the time, and if not, I looked them up. Now I just describe what I need to Copilot. But also APIs that I don't need daily. All that stuff that I used to know is gone, because I don't need to look it up anymore, I just tell Copilot or Claude what to do.
Humanity has adopted and then discarded skills many times in its history. There were once many master archers, nobody outside of one crazy Danish guy has mastered archery for hundreds of years. That isn't bad, nobody cares, nothing of value was lost.
Writing for example is proven to be better done by hand with a pen and paper, people who take typed notes don’t retain as much.
AI has accelerated the most simple and obvious answers to easy questions.
For more difficult things deep thinking and writing, partly with pen and paper notes and diagrams are still the most effective tools.
I wasted so much time on dumbass pandas documentation search when I should have been building. AI is literally the internet all you are doing is querying the internet 2.0.
I often kept vast ugly text documents filled with random commands because I always forgot them.
Socrates said the same thing about writing.
Like I am starting to use etherpad a lot recently and although I have proton docs and similar, I just love etherpad for creating quick pads for information
Or to be honest, I search it on the internet and ddg's AI feature does give me a short answer (mostly to the point) but I think that there are definitely ways to get our own knowledge base if any outage happens basically.
The only thing that matters is if YOU care. Do you like software? Do you want to learn and make something that was unatainable to you a year ago?
There's also a major difference between college and work so you shouldn't sweat it so much.
The chasm between proactive vs lazy people is growing exponentially. I predict it will bring a lot of drama.
Just people like you.
There are other types.
AI stays the top story but in a boring way as novelty wears off and models get cheaper and faster (maybe even more embedded). No AGI moment. LLMs start feeling like databases or cloud compute.
No SpaceX or OpenAI IPO moment. Capital markets quietly reward the boring winners instead. S&P 500 grinds out another double digit year, mostly because earnings keep up and alternatives still look worse. Tech discourse stays apocalyptic, but balance sheets don't.
If you mute politics and social media noise, 2026 probably looks like one of those years that we later remember as "stable" in retrospect.
Bonus: Bitcoin sees both 50k and 150k.
I love this, we focus way too much on the apparent chaos of daily life. Any news seems like a big wave that announces something bigger and we spend our time (especially here!) imagining the tsunami to come. Then later, we realize that most events are just unimportant to the point we forgot about them.
* Oral GLP-1s hit the market and the market shares doubles
* Both OpenAI and SpaceX IPO
* Charlie Kirk's shooter will be executed after being on death row for less than a year. 50/50 chance that it's televised.
* Luigi is also executed
* Seattle causes an international incident with Egypt and Iran when they don't reschedule the Pride Parade to not be on the same day as the world cup game. Trump sends in the troops.
This happened, it was called the Chevy Volt. Nobody bought it.
Chevy made it about as fuckin’ unattractive as they could manage,
AND THEY WERE STILL GREAT CARS.
You can buy them at the right price even today, and people have been adding range to them.
US improves relations with China.
Climate problems are shown to be less serious than previously thought.
The rich get richer, but nobody cares because quality of life is improved for everybody.
AI brings additional leisure time, which results in a worldwide resurgence in bluegrass music as millions take up the guitar, mandolin and violin. The biggest surge is in banjo, though. Billy Strings leaps ahead of Taylor Swift in concert sales.
2026 is really looking up! Happy New year, Hacker News!
I do feel like 2026 would be like 2025 but just a little better maybe or little worse.
E.g. if a company just stops hiring juniors outright, one of the main responsibilities of a senior goes out the window. So now that senior is essentially a junior because they aren't giving direction to anyone.
It's started with companies just not hiring juniors anymore. Then the lagging indicator of fewer CS undergrads will catch up and they suddenly won't be able to even if they wanted to
I'd expect org structures to follow this pattern of flattening with title inflation, then re-compressing into a more ideal pyramid shape with layoffs
fortran in 1955, cobol in 1965, visual basic in 1993, delphi in 1995, visualage in 1998(?), Power Automate in 2022, vibe coding in 2025...
Would there be any changes because I feel like a lot of junior talent isnt picked because of AI but I feel like given a long enough timescope, AI bubble will burst and so taking that into account, what would you say about the job market?
I don't think companies will suddenly turn over a new leaf and start hiring juniors like they were in 2020.
They'll probably keep this same stance for another couple years, blink, and realize that the pipeline of leetcoding junior talent that was once flowing in has now dried up and is no longer there.
I think that this is going to continue and although AI can be good for proto-typing ideas and similar (which is mainly what I use it for), in my opinion, I feel like AI is still black magic where everyone is winging it but I feel like the way AI is right now (generate all code sort of) would lead to more bugs and issues and just frustration by seniors overall
There have been studies where companies who use AI lose money Companies who generate AI lose money in training costs/others There are studies where people who use AI actually lose productivity There are many anecdotal evidences that seniors dont like to waste time on ai generated slop code to code review
So in a sense, this would be a tool which can have vast productivity differences, people might want to get the speed but I feel like that when these bubble bursts and these companies give the real prices of their tooling which can be a lot in my opinion. I feel like a lot of companies will see even more losses/ its not that good overall
As I have said within the 2020's the interest rate was down so people hired more and there was already a hiring freeze of sorts when interest rates were raised
I feel like 4-5 years down the line, interest rates can go down again and with all the other AI things seeping into reality/market corrections overall, I feel like there can be cases where using AI can panic the market and lose stock prices and so with all the other factors, I feel like employment will go up again
To be honest, I dont know too much about employment, I feel like its similar to mathematics in a sense but I read books on finance and so my honest opinion is that the goal of being financially independent is to do the work that you like and I genuinely enjoy doing this work for the most part and so no matter how much it pays (which I assume to be honest would be good enough for me considering I live in third world country and I am frugal anyways) plus with all the other factors, i am pretty optimistic. I am also optimistic that I can create my own businesses much rather easily by prototyping multiple ideas with LLM generated code and then locking in on those which have a market fit to gain a sustainable cash cow. I will do these things when I get into university and then 4 years down the line, I do think that I can find something which can hopefully click but I still might do a job just for stability perhaps I am not sure.
All the current crop of AI does is it makes the job of some people easier and allows some others to level up faster in terms output. If managements are going to be stupid enough to destroy the human side of the business, then they are only setting themselves up to spend much much more hiring the right people in the future.
1. Bazel is still not widely used outside of massive monorepos. (because its such a pain to use)
2. Solar power will surpass wind power in the US to become the 4th largest source of electricity. https://eia.languagelatte.com/
3. Starship begins launching real payloads, achieves reusability of the upper stage, and successfully does a ship to ship fuel transfer.
4. Tesla stock has a major correction (>20%) as it becomes increasingly clear that Waymo, Zoox, AVRide, and various Chinese companies are significantly ahead in AV technology. And as it becomes clear that Optimus is a sham.
Fsd is fantastic and works everywhere
Chinese will always be irrelevant to the US car market as both political parties will block chinese vehicle sales on (valid) national security grounds.
Uber and Lyft stocks crash as markets realise the game is up - nobody can compete with Tesla who can afford to burn excess spare factory capacity driving cars directly off the line to start picking up passengers. Waymo might have good AI but can't possibly compete with Teslas unit economics.
- Unabated push towards 'Snow Crash' level of extremely localized power structures at the expense of federal government ( think K shaped economy, but for governmental structures ) - Actual further descent into K shaped economy -- that.. I fear.. is a very safe prediction to make now - Midterms will see some localized polically motivated violence ( likely across the spectrum bar some pressura valve release ) - Shadow wars will continue - Bitcoin will crash; monero will replace it as dollar falls - Companies and government will desperately work together to contains severely distributed ASI level entity that exists as hidden braille invisible characters across all known fora - I manage to to move to full WFH - Valve releases HL3 on Frame - Fusion power will get closer by two kiloseconds
Also, headlines claim 11% down is crashing - what’s crashing?
Western world will face a new generational war to uphold democracies.
Ai bubble pops and causes turmoil in the economy, software jobs will be back.
I get swole. In bank account and muscles.
LLM progress will platoue.
- Current LLMs being seen more and more like commodities
- We'll start see a LOT more companies making their own LLM
- Capital stops pretending everything is fine & we finally see the stock market reflect what's been slowly bubbling up socially (people 'feeling poorer', trust declining, consumption becoming more cynical)
Elon Musk gets richer
Europe anti-woke grows
Its already happening but I believe it will accelerate in 2026 especially with the Fed turning the money-printers back on. Inflation is sure to increase :-/
Grow a garden everyone. Just do it.
Lots of new subreddits have been popping up this year, in different languages, that are flooded with AI generated rage and engagement bait parts. We will see repercussions of this on society.
My 2026 prediction is that people will continue running websites and buiding web apps that need monitoring, more than ever before.
- inflation will ramp up
- precious metals will keep breaking all time highs as trust in fiat collapses
- brics pay and unit become normal
- us, eu, uk, jp bond markets will collapse(it already begun)
- china will become leader in AI models
- china will catch up to AI chips
- harmony os will get more attention, maybe it will start to penetrate the "west"
- conflict in ukraine will conclude, political aftermath will have significant effect on some european countries
- trump will be humiliated with whatever he is doing with venezuela
- republicans in usa will lose midterm elections
- europe will experience islamist at azovite terrorist attacks with modern weapons smuggled from ukraine which might trigger remigration mood in the population
- cambodia-thailand situation will calm down
- israel will collapse economically
- new high-capacity batteries that use silver instead of lithium will enter mass production
- legacy usa mainstream media will start collapsing as their viewership is plummeting already by 10s of % and their average viewer age group is in mid 60s(boomers)
- digital ids in europe will cause trouble, people will reject it(unless it will be done nonintrusively)
- EU will start slowly falling apart when the bill for ukraine will come due
- USA pulls out of NATO(or becomes somewhat inactive member)
But let's just say you have to prepare for 2030. The future of jobs report 2025 by the WEF is also reporting that 40% of employers are planning to reduce their workforce because of AI by 2030. [1]
Someone is busted falsifying a race horse’s pedigree to hide use of a cloned sire.
Entropy increases
Putin dies, significant palace intrigue follows, but the war in Ukraine continues on unfortunately.
- New major armed conflict starts.
Space
- Artemis II succeeds.
- Starship makes first fully reusable orbital flight.
Other tech
- One of the fusion startups demonstrates net energy.
- AI bubble pops, OpenAI gets acquired by Microsoft.
The Supreme Court rules against Trump in several important cases (tariffs and birthright citizenship, and a couple of others).
Trump threatens to arrest at least one big tech executive.
LLMs continue to improve, but the rate becomes slow enough that most people realize that AGI is not just around the corner.
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