Live data from Hacker News

The Jeff Dean Facts

github.com

111–120 of 193 posts

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#111
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of the point. In a culture where names commonly have a lot of syllables, the length of the name is much less of an issue. That tiny discomfort of the extra effort to process more syllables disappears when it's not considered 'extra'

I’m not sure I agree. I expect that an Indian would similarly be more likely to coin the term “Krish Singh Facts” than they would “Sanjay Ghemawat Facts”, in exactly the same way we do. I’d be interested to hear from someone from a different culture to verify whether this is true or not.

I don't know how such things are considered in India either (and would also be interested to hear from someone). The salient point is that you do value fewer syllables in a comedy context. All it takes for someone to feel that it might be racist is to recognise that fewer syllables in comedy names may not be universal across cultures, and that taking an action that elevated one person and not another may have inadvertently selected someone of one race because of that preference.

It's not an absolute claim being made here. It's just a consideration that what we intuitively feel may not be an expression of a universally held value.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#112
post #89
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I also recall this fact about the protobuf DB after all these years Another Jeff Dean fact should be "Russ Cox was Jeff Dean's intern" This was either 2006 or 2007, whenever Russ started. I remember when Jeff and Sanjay wrote "gsearch", a distributed grep over google3 that ran on 40-80 machines [1]. There was a series of talks called "Nooglers and the PDB" I think, and I remember Jeff explained gsearch to maybe 2…

Side note: I used this query to test LLM recall: Do jeff dean and russ cox know each other? Interesting results: 1. Gemini pointed me back at MY OWN comment, above, an hour after I wrote it. So Google is crawling the web FAST. It also pointed to: https://learning.acm.org/bytecast/ep78-russ-cox This matches my recent experience -- Gemini is enhanced for many use cases by superior recall 2. Claude also knows this, poin…

Not just Google. I had ChatGPT regurgitate my HN comment (without linking to it) about 15 minutes after posting it. That was a year ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42649774

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#113
post #18

Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…

Hi Kenton! I was the recent grad you handed this web app off to after you built it, so I expanded Jeff Dean Facts so that anyone could create and rate facts about anyone at Google :). There were a ton of team in-jokes added before I stopped working on it - O(5k) IIRC! :) This web app was also how I learned the pain of maintaining a live web service with a lot of ever-changing dependencies. How I sighed when the AppEn…

I just searched Moma, and your note about it going down is the most recent update on this front. Interestingly though, it looks like Moma itself has a custom SERP renderer for Jeff Dean facts that came up when I searched. The example fact that came up was hilarious, but I guess I shouldn't share it on public HN.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases. But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases. I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. B…

> I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture an…

> that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism.

It’s not “racism.” There’s plenty of Indians with names that are easy for English speakers. Conversely, the same situations would’ve presented itself if the other person was any sort of white Eastern European.

In fact, calling this “racist” is itself racist. I have close friends with family names from Poland or Croatia where we don’t even try to pronounce their names correctly. Nobody feels bad about that. But for some reason if it’s a “brown person” we’re suddenly super sensitive about it. That is differential treatment based on race.

People get awkward about how to pronounce my name because I’m brown. But it’s hard to pronounce because it’s misspelled Germanic! They wouldn’t act that way if I was a white guy with the same name.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#116

Love it! > Jeff Dean compiles and runs his code before submitting, but only to check for compiler and CPU bugs. Sadly, I have encountered this, in many "Non-Jeff-Dean" developers.

What I’ve found is some really average developers thinking they’re Jeff Dean, or at least have that attitude.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#117
post #18

Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…

> Jeff & Sanjay did everything together,

my nonexpert impression is jeff keeps much more of a public profile. hence the natural celebrity goes to him. was this not true way back in the day?

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture an…

> that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism. It’s not “racism.” There’s plenty of Indians with names that are easy for English speakers. Conversely, the same situations would’ve presented itself if the other person was any sort of white Eastern European. In fact, calling this “racist” is itself racist. I have close friends with family names from Poland or Croatia where we don’t even try to pronounce their…

Are we... arguing about what happened in my head?

As the world's foremost expert about what happened in my head, do I get to, like, pick a winner here?

If so I pick tczMUFlmoNk, I think their description is accurate. (I think you might want to re-read it as it feels like you are responding to something else.)

If I don't get to pick, this is quite weird! "People on Hacker News tell me I'm wrong about my own thoughts." was not on my -- actually wait, that doesn't sound unexpected at all now that I write it out! OK, carry on.

Post reply on HN