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by AlexandrB 2072 days ago
Bell also forced you to rent their telephones if you wanted phone service. The old Bell was a disaster for consumers and Bell Labs does not excuse their monopolistic practices. As a counterpoint consider Xerox PARC, which brought us the GUI and Ethernet without Xerox fucking over their customers (too much).

Edit: I find it funny that someone posting on "Hacker" News is defending a monopoly that extracts an ad tax from every startup and kills many innovative new companies by acquihire.
1 comments
bbqmaster999 2072 days ago
You really find it funny that someone on HN is defending the company whose resources and internal innovation culture lead to advances that are foundational to all the technology we work on today? So maybe they charged too much for their phone service, big deal. I’d argue that their contributions to science and engineering outweigh that.
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AlexandrB 2072 days ago
Somehow, it's much rarer to see someone on HN defending the government, whose resources and internal innovation culture lead to advances that are foundational to all the technology that we work on today. So maybe they charged too much taxes, bid deal. I’d argue that their contributions to science and engineering outweigh that.
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throwaway2048 2072 days ago
name some foundational advances Google has made.

Throwing 100x more resources at AI ideas from the 70s isn't an foundational advance.

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throwaways885 2072 days ago
MapReduce, GFS and Bigtable are the foundations of big data today.
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throwaway2048 2071 days ago
Those are good engineering efforts, but its like building a bridge vs understanding the theory of gravity.

They are definitely not foundational in anywhere near the sense that bell labs was.

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read_if_gay_ 2071 days ago
Maybe Bell Labs was only foundational due to timing?
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konjin 2072 days ago
None of those things are new or interesting. Maps were used in the 70s and you can find a chapter about them being parrapalized in Kthuths original Art of Computer Programming.
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tylerhou 2071 days ago
The original TOACP makes no mention of map parallelization.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_Pro...

Nor the second one:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Art_of_Computer_Program...

Nor the third one:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_Pro...

I also searched for "parallel" and couldn't find any relevant passages to map parallelization.

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