Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 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.

1 comments

MapReduce, GFS and Bigtable are the foundations of big data today.
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.

Maybe Bell Labs was only foundational due to timing?
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.
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.