The Jeff Dean Facts • Hacker News Board

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#191

Post by ikejix » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 12:42 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #49

scottlamb wrote: post #13

> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. ... It's not clear whether this fact is really true, or whether this line is simply part of the joke, so I've omitted the usual (TRUE) identifier here. Interpret this as you see fit :) I think this one's true-ish. Back in the day when Google didn't have good cron services for the co…

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…

I participated in an internship in the summer of 2007. One of the things I found particularly interesting was gsearch. At the time, there were search engines for source code, but I was not aware of any that supported regular expressions. My internship host encouraged me by saying, “Try digging through repositories and look for the source code.”

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#192

Post by istjohn » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 2:54 AM UTC

jrowen wrote: post #188

istjohn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point. Does it? I would argue that recognizing that we all swim in a soup of cultural biases and familiarities that advantage some people and disadvantage others is a noteworthy insight, an insight with practical implications. After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. What if we mad…

> After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. Are we not? The free will debate aside, I think what you said makes a lot of sense, and comes across as empathetic, and you didn't need to use that word. I just think it's too loaded, aggressive, and broad to be very useful as a shorthand for the more complex thought you expressed.

I understand where you're coming from. It doesn't feel like such a heavy word to me because I know it's ubiquitous. It's like germs. I don't like germs, but I know they're everywhere, so I'm not scandalized at the implication that germs might be on my hands or food. At the same time, I am repulsed by reckless disregard for sanitation.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#193

Post by bhickey » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 5:20 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #80

acoster wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME Sanjay responds to CLs way faster than I expected.

I've never had in for a review at google, I think it only happens if you change something very top level. I did an internship under him the summer before he joined Google at Dec/Compaq SRC though. I learned a lot of tricks from him then (like using graphviz to print out compiler graphs to do debugging).

I was messing around with one of the old RNGs, trying to kill off a few thousand tests that depended on its exact output sequence.