Earlier quoted context omitted.
By pushing this complexity up the stack and also having redundancy in storage. What's not correct can be an error and result in retries from the client that may be routed to good storage.
But how do you even tell something's not correct? For example in the article they had to manually examine the index and find out some words were missing. How do you detect that not on the hardware level but up on the software level?
The Friendship That Made Google Huge
81–90 of 104 posts
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#82Does anyone have a reference for "In 1966, researchers at the System Development Corporation discovered that the best programmers were more than ten times as effective as the worst." ? I'm seeing the year 1968 at http://thecomputerboys.com/?tag=black-art#fn-156-1 Is there a 1966 reference out there somewhere? Or perhaps the actual study was done in '66 and didn't make it into press until '68? I didn't pull the origin…
"Interesting to see the genesis of the myth of the 10x programmer." How could it be a myth? Ever see a professional sports player compete against a non professional player? Why wouldnt this dynamic exist in programming?
Maybe I'm unimaginative, but in sports where performance is objectively comparable, I can't think of any where professionals 10x amateurs.
Amateur marathons are about 4 hours, professional are about 2 hours. Amateur deadlifts are about 500lb, professional are about 1000lb. Amateur long jump might be 6m, professional almost 9m.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#83I wonder if more couldn't be done to encourage pair programming and collaboration in general? What are some other great partnerships?
Would highly recommend checking out `The Undoing Project` by Michael Lewis. It's a biography (of sorts) about Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that has excellent stories about their fruitful collaboration in behavioral economics.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Urs however does have one, he's listed as a Google fellow (L10) if you go looking. As a general comment, to compare, a director is L8 equivalent, and VP L9, (but on the management ladder) although at VP+ it gets tricky because there are subdivisions. Also worth noting that the management ladder goes up more. But the total number of people who are >L11 is probably <11, so it's not like there's any data on how exactly…
Director is L8, Sr Director is L9, VP is L10, SVP is L11.
Not exactly; there are 3 levels of VPs and 3 for SVPs (at least in 2015). It’s just not publicized.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#85Good stuff. Every sport has great partnerships (Jordon - Pippen, Brady - Gronk) and I always wondered if such a thing would even be possible in SE as I've felt overly self conscious and inefficient while pair programming. Though what really makes this my favorite long read of the year is how it follows their story over the course of Google's rise and the subtle juxtapositions between early Google of "doors across saw…
> long read of the year
Are books extra-long?
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Interesting to see the genesis of the myth of the 10x programmer." How could it be a myth? Ever see a professional sports player compete against a non professional player? Why wouldnt this dynamic exist in programming?
Maybe I'm unimaginative, but in sports where performance is objectively comparable, I can't think of any where professionals 10x amateurs. Amateur marathons are about 4 hours, professional are about 2 hours. Amateur deadlifts are about 500lb, professional are about 1000lb. Amateur long jump might be 6m, professional almost 9m.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi are extreme outliers in soccer/football, even compared to other greats. They're probably 10x. Trouble is amateurs don't play in the big leagues, so we don't have data on how a normal person would peform. There is an amusing Ronaldo vs Ronald video. I think it's called "Tested to the Limit."
Occasionally a 1st league team plays a 3rd league. I saw a video of Napoli vs Nowhere go 26-0. They scored about as fast as the game could be reset to kick-off. That's more than 10x.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#87> The world’s most robust computer systems... used special hardware that could tolerate single bit-flips. But Google... bought cheaper computers that lacked that feature. > Together, Jeff and Sanjay wrote code to compensate for the offending machines. I'm guessing the article is referring to Google buying servers with non-ECC RAM. How do you write code to compensate for non-ECC RAM?
> When a car goes around a turn, more ground must be covered by the outside wheels; likewise, the outer edge of a spinning hard disk moves faster than the inner one. Google had moved the most frequently accessed data to the outside, so that bits could flow faster under the read-head, but had left the inner half empty; Jeff and Sanjay used the space to store preprocessed data for common search queries So Google was a…
RAM is expensive. Disk is cheap.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#88Wow, this article is pretty amazing to me. I have a joke (err, kind of a joke) that I like to say, "It's never a cosmic ray." What I mean by that is that when you are debugging and getting incredibly frustrated, right when you feel that you want to give up because you can't find the bug, that you shouldn't blame "cosmic rays" because 99.999% of the time it's a logic problem. Here was a case where it actually was cosm…
It’s never a cosmic ray but it’s often bad ram. You don’t have to inspect the binary to diagnose bad ram. The system would be behaving erratically in other ways due to regular memory corruption.
It’s an amazing story but by no means the only way it could have played out.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm unimaginative, but in sports where performance is objectively comparable, I can't think of any where professionals 10x amateurs. Amateur marathons are about 4 hours, professional are about 2 hours. Amateur deadlifts are about 500lb, professional are about 1000lb. Amateur long jump might be 6m, professional almost 9m.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi are extreme outliers in soccer/football, even compared to other greats. They're probably 10x. Trouble is amateurs don't play in the big leagues, so we don't have data on how a normal person would peform. There is an amusing Ronaldo vs Ronald video. I think it's called "Tested to the Limit." Occasionally a 1st league team plays a 3rd league. I saw a video of Napoli vs Nowhere go 26-0. They…
You are confusing game scoring with some concept of "x times ability". In many games, someone who is only 10% better than opponents can win close to 100% of the games.
Re: The Friendship That Made Google Huge
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
There've been studies on the "more expensive" part, and IIRC it's about a 15% premium in terms of development time - there've been a few studies. Here's one I could turn up quickly: https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/XPSardinia.... Simultaneously, you get a bunch of benefits. (Most importantly, there's no bus factor of 1 for anything)
i'd think another benefit might be 'better code' overall. has there been any study about the quality of code from these setups? number of bugs or security issues, for example?
Also covered in that paper