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by theli0nheart 3543 days ago
>> We're talking about two different things here

> No we are not.

> Pagerank at its mathematical core was not that novel, basic undergrad stuff.

Whatever you say, Mr. Page. :)

> You dont get that just by tweaking CSS or for example knowing your Java platform well or by delegating. These kind of problems are not one off. You have to keep ahead of the competition constantly, innovate constantly, have to do stuff that your competition has not yet figured out how to do.

More false analogies here. The skills involved in solving technical problems are easily translatable from one technical domain to another. You make it seem like implementing an algorithm to scale servers is necessarily more complex than implementing an algorithm to stack shapes on a webpage in a space-efficient way. It's not.

> Their manager's ability to delegate did not seem to have helped them much there.

You're completely misunderstanding me. I'm not using the term "delegation" here as a managerial term. I would bet you that the team that scaled PageRank relied on countless open-source and freely available tools and tech that others wrote. This doesn't lessen their ingenuity at all, but it should be clear that even the most complex tech is built on the shoulders of others.

1 comments

Lol do you know PageRank? At its core it's just a random walk on a graph; this stuff is taught in intro linear algebra courses. Of course, modelling the web this way and tweaking the middle to produce optimum results was a big deal. You'd be a fool to believe that PageRank hasn't evolved in 20 yrs.
> Lol do you know PageRank?

Oh, please. This back-and-forth and condescending attitude is getting so tiring for me. Yes, I've read the paper multiple times.

> this stuff is taught in intro linear algebra courses

I graduated with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Yale. I'm familiar with this stuff, thanks.

> At its core it's just a random walk on a graph;

I'm tired of making this point. There is a big difference between understanding a ground-breaking discovery and making the discovery itself.

> Of course, modelling the web this way and tweaking the middle to produce optimum results was a big deal. You'd be a fool to believe that PageRank hasn't evolved in 20 yrs.

I never once said this. I said that after PageRank was developed, most of Google's engineering resources went into scaling and monetization.

Scaling has its own set of algorithmic challenges; at the small scale there's not much to be gained from asymptotic complexity improvements, but at the scales Google operates at it definitely is the case; I'd wager that a lot of work Google does on its distributed computing platforms involves algorithmic challenges.