Bletchley Park – Google Search | Hacker News Reader

Bletchley Park – Google Search

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Good to see Alan Turing getting his due. There's a great book about what was happening during WWII there called Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It's about a lot more than that, but a good chunk is about Bletchley Park. It's a fictionalized account, but I'd highly recommend it to the HN crowd that is interested in Turing, encryption, WWII, etc.

Worth noting for the HN crowd that Cryptonomicon is split between action in WW2 and the present day (OK ~2000) - with the latter mostly involving a start-up working on a cryptocurrency.

The template start-up business plan from Cryptonomicon is available online:

http://avsport.org/microcomm/admin/busplan.pdf

NB The entire Baroque Cycle is utterly fantastic - particularly in the audio book version.

I tried getting into the Baroque Cycle, but I just couldn't quite do it. I think it's the one thing he's written that I'll never finish reading.

I tried about 3 times to read the Baroque Cycle - couldn't finish Quicksilver. But the unabridged audio books on Audible are a delight - I've listened to the entire set at least twice now.

Jack Shaftoe (AKA King of the Vagabonds, L'Emmerdeur, Half-Cocked Jack, Quicksilver, Ali Zaybak, Sword of Divine Fire, and Jack the Coiner) is probably my all time favourite fictional character.

I recommend reading some nonfiction too. Cryptonomicon is one of my all-time favourite books, but I feel by focusing on it alone it's a little bit of a disservice to the reality of Bletchley.

The Secret Lives of Codebreakers and The Secret Life of Bletchley Park are both great reads, both by Sinclair MacKay, and Hodges' Turing biography is fascinating and, as we all know, heartbreaking in the end.

Bletchley wasn't just about Turing, though he certainly deserves his due, and then some. Tommy Flowers, for example, who built Colossus -- or Mavis Batey, who broke a coded message that led to reverse engineering the Enigma.

I highly recommend visiting if you can. Really drove home to me the people aspect of the whole thing, and the somewhat frightening (and yet a tiny bit wistful!) realization that had we all been born a few decades earlier, and taken similar paths through life, Bletchley may well be where many if us spent a good chunk of our years.

This area doesn't get called spook county for nothing. Half my college course at bedford was working on military aerospace. And those who have read the laundry files have heard of the FO's site at Hanslope Park

Cryptonomicon does get some of the locations at BP slightly wrong location of the Bombes vs Colossus

What is the image they used as a profile photo? https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-jryH6Qdpu1o/UnJciwUAH8I/A...

For this easter egg, it looks a little better to use the "encrypted" Google domain:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Bletchley%20Park

Nice touch!

No easter egg for me :(

"Searching for "Bletchley Park" will cause the title of the info card to appear as if it was being deciphered by Google."

A compound Easter Egg [0], goooooogle 'tilt' || 'askew', then search 'dogengineer'. Wow.

[0] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=askew&oq=askew&aqs=chrome....

I know it's silly, but I'm leading a huge purchase of google equity right now because of these things. Maybe I'm naive but I believe this is the trademark of a top engineering company and I have faith that they will deliver on some of their moonshots.

I would heavily caution you against basing a stock purchase on this. Not because you're necessarily wrong about it being a sign, but because that's not what moves the stock.

It's true, but this sort of "engineering wit" caused me to look into Google to begin with.

I personally don't think this is silly. The only way we as retail investors can beat the market is through our own understanding of the engineering and engineers. The market can't understand this kind of subtle indicators of the engineering power Google has, but we, as engineers ourselves, can.

Oh, I'm not a retail investor :)

I wonder how Google builds in countless number of Easter eggs across its searches and still manage to meet it's performance requirements. It seems like Google has a lot of Easter eggs.

They also have a lot of employees

The idea of "Easter Eggs Manager" seems delightful.

Under them would be the "Easter Egg Evangelist" which has awesome assonance.

Now there's a good tech interview wheat chaff test! Pass on applicants that don't shout out "hash table" perhaps?

If you used a hash table you'd be doing a lookup for every single search in addition to the search itself. It'd be better to have nodes in the index include an 'extra stuff' pointer that linked to an object containing whatever else is displayed in addition to the results - the sidebar, alternative search suggestions, etc. Any easter egg info would go in there.

(That said, I don't write software to anywhere near Google scale, so there's probably a much better way.)

That's what I was thinking, but imagining maintaining an index of Google's scale just boggles my mind.

The cost of a lookup on the term is O(1) with one perhaps two main memory accesses and measured in nanoseconds. The search index is likely a tree, and will be taking a main memory stall every node traversal.

There are hundreds of easter eggs. There a trillions of search entries. The cost of even a byte per entry would be massive.

For those interested there's a new movie coming out on the topic called Imitation Game.

Trailer: http://youtu.be/nuPZUUED5uk

If anyone hasn't read Cryptonomicon, I'm sorry

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