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Comment by bbqmaster999 | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

name some foundational advances Google has made.

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

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

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.

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?

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