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Comment by johnyzee | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of this guy writing a small web crawler in Java a couple of years ago:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...

I must admit: I had to Google "Lawrence Page". Didn't strike me that Larry is the diminutive for Lawrence :-)

edit: proof that he was successful, indeed, is that "to google" is a verb that comes more naturally to me when speaking English than common name diminutives.

"To google": English, meaning "to co-read with your personal security agent shadow. To add to your digital dossier."

>'"To google": English, meaning "to co-read with your personal security agent shadow. To add to your digital dossier."'

Can't we have one thread that doesn't get into this?

What other way to keep people thinking about it do we have?

Your entire post history is defending the NSA, snarky comments that add nothing such as '[citation needed]', and general negativity/patronizing 'well actually...' or 'I can't believe anyone...' type statements.

You haven't looked hard enough. I think you've ignored my recent comments about YAGNI and security, the follow-ups to those '[Citation Needed]' where I actually find a citation or ask for one, the one where I politely ask for direction about the entertainment industry, and the general plethora of material from a technical perspective.

Your reply also implies there's something wrong with NSA apology, which there shouldn't be intrinsically, as I'm posting an alternative perspective. Similarly, I don't subscribe to the idea that short comments or snarky comments are necessarily bad if they contain facts or point out a lack thereof - it's outright rudeness, willful stupidity/ignorance (reddit style humor), and meanness that I object to. Everything you've pointed out is stylistic.

Needless to say, this is all irrelevant, because my post history has nothing to do with my comment - that being, it'd be nice if we can talk about the early days of Google without demonizing it for its (alleged) privacy violations.

But, by all means, ignore my original point and look through my comment history for things to nitpick and argue over. I'm not going to debate it further with you.

Your reply also implies there's something wrong with NSA apology, which there shouldn't be intrinsically, as I'm posting an alternative perspective.

Holy carp.

I've always found it fascinating how language evolves with time.

Agreed that is off-topic, but I wrote this on Google and PRISM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124

If you think about it, it is like an infinite loop. Someone asking about creating Google in a Google forum.

comp.lang.java isn't a "Google forum"... It's a USENET newsgroup that is now carried/mirrored by Google Groups.

You surely know this, but for clarity: it's a Usenet group. Google inherited a huge Usenet archive when they acquired Deja News and used it as the core of what eventually became Google Groups. But it was never a corporate-maintained forum. Usenet was always distributed.

Yes, I knew it :)

It's the most nostalgic form of recursion I have ever experienced!

The thing about nostalgic recursion is that it's never what it used to be.

Ha! Hadn't ever seen that before. I wonder if they ended up working around it, ignored it until it was fixed, or threw their hands in the air and re-wrote the bot in C++.

Legend has it that Urs Hölzle sorted out their Java problems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle#cite_note-1

Well, sort of and sorta not.

Page ended up working with another grad student (Scott Hassan, who later ended up founding eGroups, which later became Yahoo!Groups), who rewrote the whole thing in Python. Google's crawler and webserver were in Python until the Netscape deal (summer 1999). When Urs was hired as Google's first VP, he started transitioning the system to C and C++ to solve Python's performance problems. Java was introduced when Google hired some very skilled Java programmers during the 2001-2003 recession.

So yes, Urs sorted out Google's Java problems by not using Java.

Is there any good book about the history of Google? All the tech stuff like this seem really interesting!

Steven Levy's "In the Plex" is probably the best one. A lot of the stuff in my comment is mentioned there, and the rest is cobbled together from various presentations, blog posts, and Quora answers on the net.

Thanks. I will check it.

We really need a Pirates of Silicon Valley 2. Unbeknownst to the film's creators, the movie ended just as things got interesting :)

"In the plex" and "I'm feeling lucky" - both are very good and offer very different angles. As you can guess by the name first is more formal history whereas second are memoirs of a their marketing guy who has got a very good sense of humour :)

Another detail I've stumbled on is that Sam Rushing, a talented Python programmer, had something to do with Python in Google's early history: http://www.nightmare.com/~rushing/ .

He also worked at eGroups. He wrote "medusa" which became asyncore in the Python standard library (http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/). This was long before Java had async I/O. Interesting that Guido is working on the new async I/O interface "tulip" in the Python core after all these years!

And Larry Page's brother apparently also worked at eGroups.

They found better programmers who rewrote the whole thing from scratch. At least, according to the "In the Plex" book.

I feel like I've just seen the bigbang ...

Imagine being Joseph Millar!

I first thought why this is important. Then the first name Lawrence made sense to me.

I feel bad that I had to look up "lawrence page" as it just didn't click.

It didn't click when you saw "Larry Page" at the bottom of his post?

Who reads signatures anyways?

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