Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

Glad you point out that Bell Labs' gifts to the public domain were involuntary (they distributed unix source code without giving away the rights, then took them back; UC Berkeley then created a free replacement so they could keep teaching OS courses and At&T tried to sue them to oblivion and lost).

If you want to make the argument that Google isn't Bell Labs, it's probably better to point out that Google isn't really tackling really fundamental research projects like inventing the transistor and the laser. Even producing Go isn't on par with C because C was amazing and unique for its time, whereas Go is just part of a flood of new languages.

Bell Labs:UNIX::Google:Linux distribution.

View on HN

I've always had the impression that MSR (Microsoft Research) was generally doing much more fundamental research than Google.

Google still has a ways to go to even be on par with HP Labs or PARC, let alone Bellabs.

Let's not forget all the research IBM Research Labs did over the years (less so now due to focusing on profit, but they still were doing more fundamental research than google even in recent memory).

Isn't Google doing fundamental research on AI?

No. They give prizes, maybe fund researchers, but they don't assign people to do fundamental research. Unless you call the youtube-cats and driver-less cars fundamental.

Google isn't doing basic research like measuring and discovering the background radiation from the origins of the universe.

But if they wanted to, its more than within their ability. I'm sure they have plenty of idle computing time to do so with the proper physical sensors providing data.

Computer power (or lack thereof) is definitely not the limiting reagent in science today.

I think this is only true if you don't consider trillion-fold cost reduction as an option.

A few years back I worked on data taking for the CMS detector at the LHC. We were Tier1 in the US; we took the data from Tier0 at the physical detector and distributed it to 800+ orgs around the work. We had 6000+ linux machines and a staff of 10.

To say computing power isn't the limiting factor is disingenuous. Yes, you can go spin up thousands of instances in Amazon and store PB of data. Show me your budget to do so though.

That was an accident that turned out to be pretty damned amazing

"chance favors the prepared mind"

Actually, Google has helped to discover planets, among other things

See, e.g., http://research.google.com/pubs/author37653.html

> they distributed unix source code without giving away the rights, then took them back

I always found it ironic (or perhaps subversive, not sure which) that the guys in the Unix room later based 8th Edition Research Unix on 4.1cBSD.

What do you think made C such an amazing language compared to say Pascal and Fortrant?

I like C and how it handles pointers and arrays but was it really such a departure from what was available then?

I'm not dissing Pascal or Fortran. But C was tied to UNIX (and a toolchain such as lex/yacc) in a way that allowed UNIX to be quickly and cheaply ported which made it revolutionary. Fortran and Pascal lacked similar infrastructure (eventually there was Oberon which was kind of like the Lisp or Smalltalk stacks but never took off).

Lisp and Smalltalk would be the comparables, but Lisp was not portable the way C is and Smalltalk was very slow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com