Is It Pokemon or Big Data? | Hacker News Reader

Is It Pokemon or Big Data?

pixelastic.github.io

387 pointssandebert67 comments

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"Tokutek claims to improve MongoDB performance 20x. It is unclear if this also means losing 20x as many documents."

ROFL.

The Software AG comment is funny to: “We’re not sure what we do either”

It’s write only performance: it writes to /dev/null.

https://devnull-as-a-service.com/

I'm a big fan of "Hadoop is a distributed system for counting words."

The Atlassian bit is in equal parts true and depressing.

— It says on your CV you are very quick at maths. 2746 x 8463 ?

— 82736!

— Not even close.

— Yes, but very quick! (same for Big Data)

Unexpected factorial!

Unexpected base 26 factorial!

How do you know it's base 26?

"t" "o" "r" "i" "l" would've exceeded hexadecimal. There were no capitals or numbers, so I just assumed base 26.

I'm sad I only have one upvote to give. Please have it.

“Atlassian has somehow duped several software companies into thinking they need JIRA to be agile; if only we all had the agility move in real life.”

Such a good laugh.

I got 81%, all my errors were from misidentifying big data services as Pokémon. If I had known that the set of Pokémon was limited to the 386 from first three generations, I probably would have gotten 100%.

...and if the quiz had included Pokémon from the full set of 898 in the last generation of games, I would have fared a lot worse.

Got 74% and thought exactly the same. It’s unfair it should be stated in the frontpage! But it would become a Pokémon quiz and not a satirical piece.

I mean you could easily weight it to ensure Pokémon and Big Data come up the same amount even with 800 Pokémon

Shameless plug here: https://cheeaun.github.io/repokemon/

Added some repos related to some private projects just to help you out. Gotta list ‘em all. (Poliwrath, sandslash, farfetchd... seriously how is farfetch’d not used!)

that's exactly what I was looking for! then I saw your comment.

It’s like it was meant to be a daemon service

Farfetchd is another weird one... the Japanese name is kamonegi which is just a portmanteau of “duck” and “green onion”. Which is almost a literal description of the pokémon. Not sure where they were going with the translation though...

Yeah, the translation is quite farfetched.

Maybe because it travels far to fetch that onion stick it brandished? I'm guessing at straws here.

Hey thanks, not sure how you add those repos, currently I have to manually run a script to get and update the repos list. Now I'm actually working on automating it (with GitHub Actions).

And now that you mention farfetch'd, I realised it's a bug on my script... https://github.com/search?q=farfetch%27d vs https://github.com/search?q=farfetchd

I probably have to remove non-alphanumeric characters before hitting GitHub's search API...

I would be honored to be included in such an amazing compilation of repos. You can’t used the ‘ character in repository names on GitHub, only alphanumeric and -. I went with ‘farfetchd’ instead of ‘farfetch-d’ as it’s kinda like etcd, fluentd... not that I aim to be as awesome as those.

There's already some startup called Farfetch'd

Somewhat related: I did a similar thing with a periodic table: https://josh-perry.github.io/periodic-table-of-projects/

This is hilarious. Would be great as the first round of technical interviews.

Pokemon trivia: Ekans and Arbok are reversed Snake and Kobra.

How would this be a good test in a technical interview? Even if you are hiring “Big Data” folks most of them wouldn’t and shouldn’t know half of these products and companies.

Not to mention that it doesn’t tell you if the person knows the products or if they are just a huge Pokémon fan...

If anyone uses this as candidate assessment tool I would expect anyone with any shred of dignity to walk out.

I think it would be a great interview question to weed out companies I wouldn't want to work for.

Hey, I was just kidding. It might be useful to screen recruiters not candidates. I think the posted app was inspired by this image:

https://i.imgur.com/r0SEEoh.jpg

These days it’s hard to tell.

As for filtering recruiters I think it’s a very SV centric problem and also quite a privileged problem to have. It’s funny as long as you don’t actually need a job because your rent is due.

But it's still a problem and if the recruitment landscape improves it will also help those who have their rent due.

It maybe a problem but from my experience most people who take the piss out of recruitment at least here in the U.K. tend to be the ones who think they are top 0.1% talent but in reality are far from it.

True top talent has the luxury of usually not having to deal with recruiters in the first place and for the rest of us in the middle we know it sucks but it’s something most of us learn to deal with rather easily.

The best tech recruiters I worked with were also the ones who didn’t know anything and didn’t care, and it’s fine. I want a recruiter to be able to understand what kind of a role I want to have at a high level and what would the next challenge I want to take on, tech lead, people’s manager, building something from the ground up at a startup etc rather than try to pattern much my CV to some job posting.

The technobabble only detracts from the recruitment process I don’t care if they understand the difference between React and React Native or don’t.

I don't care if a recruiter knows the difference between React and React Native, but I do care that they know the difference between Java and JavaScript.

At the bottom it says it was inspired by a google form, but I like this explanation way more.

Can confirm. Did well at the quiz due entirely to wasting too much time on Pokemon.

The questions Seahorse followed by Horsea got a laugh out of me

It would only be slightly less ridiculous than what really happens in technical interviews.

Yeah, but what confuses me about these two is that in the original Japanese the evolution is still Arbok but the base version is... Arbo. Huh? Makes you wonder what the original naming idea was.

The original name is written as "アーボ" - "Ābo" - reverse the character order and you get "ボア" - "Boa" (the horizontal line is known as the long vowel mark, so it can be omitted).

But then the Japanese for Arbok is "アーボック" according to [1], but reversing the character order doesn't quite result in cobra. Does this have a different hidden meaning, or are people supposed to insert the r sound and reverse it like it's in English?

[1] https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Arbok_(Pok%C3%A9mon)

Right, that's my point--Arbok seems to be a phoneticization of the reversed English word, but interpreting Arbo as Boa is reversing the phoneticized word i.e. the operations are applied in reverse. Maybe they were just playing fast and loose with the naming patterns XD

It’s possible - though maybe a stretch? - that the “ku” is supposed to allude to “-kun”, a Japanese suffix kind of akin to “Jr.” in English. Which would make this whole thing a pretty intricate and impressive multilingual pun.

for the longest time I confused Pokemon names with Harry Potter names...

Erised? Diagon? Draco? Malfoy? Nagini? Idk I always got confused haha

Same naming principle. Erised is desire backwards, DiagonAll[e]y, etc.

something, kind of related... I saw in one of those snowden documents the CIA likes to name their programs after pokemon so it would be hard to search for. Like pikachu etc.

lol :D

Unrelated, but I was only able to complete the Tiberian Sun missions a few years back thanks to a walk through guide archived on the CIA website, which they in turn got from the Osama bin Laden operation.

I think I first saw this when Hadoop had a lot of hype. For a short period of time I actually had 'big data' in my job title despite only working with small data. Anyone still in the big data space who knows if Hadoop is still widely used?

Discussion on the original form that inspired this, in 2014:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7683428

I got 78%. It's harder than it should be

I got 74%. I never knew name from those 2 category can be very similar like horsesea/seahorse

I mean seahorse is actually easy. I knew it can't be Pokemon because it's a real animal.

89%! But I did get my 13yr old to help me with the Pokémon...

That was very funny. There are a lot of big data services out there with very odd names.

There are also a lot of Pokémon out there with very odd names, probably for the same reason - trying to pick an unique name.

In big data's defence, after first 150 episodes pokemons became ridiculous.

I love this when introducing 'Big Data' to students - helps get the point across that no-one can know every tool out there and it's OK if everything sounds like Pokémon at first :)

(2016)

Some discussion from before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17660883

I did professional research on DBMS technology and still only got 67% right :-( Maybe it's because I've only ever watched 2 Pokemon episodes.

Well...I got 100%, but that's mostly just because I know too much about Pokémon, so I don't know if I'm supposed to be proud of it.

I wonder if knowing too much about Pokemon counts as Big Data.

Great tool. Thank you for the laughs.

How did the author know the words used in pokemon and big data are quite similar?

Pokemon Red came out in 1996. If you were 10 back then, you’re now 34-35. Plenty of senior engineers out there who played pokemon in their youth (and potentially kept playing after that)

I’m thinking maybe something like the Jirachi pokemon got the ball rolling, though I’m not sure I’d call Jira/Atlassian “Big Data”.

I think it grew from https://xkcd.com/178/ originally.

I dont know. However, you can see from the following:-

Publishers: "Nintendo, Game Freak, The Pokémon Company", American_Publisher: "Pokémon", Japanese_Publisher: "Pocket Monster", Chinese_Whisper: "big data". Sources: memory, Wikipedia entry.

Something is incorrect here.

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